After a bruising election, Democrats fear appearing weak on illegal immigration and soft on crime.

So some Democratic senators have thrown their support behind the exploitatively titled Laken Riley Act, which takes its name from a young nursing student murdered by an undocumented immigrant. But this is a terrible, demagogic bill. It would not have prevented its namesake’s tragic death. Worse, it would complicate law enforcement’s ability to prioritize public safety threats and give cranks in state government the ability to shut down legal immigration, nationwide.

Riley’s murderer had been arrested for shoplifting, so this bill would require immigrants accused of shoplifting or petty theft to be detained indefinitely, without even the ability to apply for bail.

This includes people whose charges were dropped or who were ultimately found innocent in court. In other words, the Department of Homeland Security would be required to jail even falsely accused people indefinitely, at taxpayer expense.

This would be a wild departure from, oh, the Constitution’s basic due process protections.

The provision applies to immigrants considered “inadmissible” — or more colloquially, undocumented — for lacking an up-to-date visa or entering the country unlawfully.

To some laypeople, an “undocumented immigrant” might conjure images of a hardened thug on the run from the fuzz. You know, like Riley’s killer. In reality, the category also applies to normal, law-abiding people whom the government already knows about and (critically) has granted permission to stay.

For example, it includes “dreamers,” the young undocumented people brought here as children. Dreamers can get work permits and are shielded from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but they lack a path to green cards or citizenship and exist in a sort of legal limbo. So, they’re technically among the undocumented, vulnerable to this dragnet.

They — among other peaceful community members — would have to be jailed indefinitely should a vengeful boss, racist neighbor or abusive ex persuade police to arrest them for a petty offense.

The bill would also allow states to sue the federal government to overturn individual detention decisions they disagreed with.

For example, Texas’s virulently anti-immigrant attorney general, Ken Paxton, could seek an injunction to force Immigration and Customs Enforcement to lock up tens of thousands of asylum seekers, even those who have been diligently following the rules of the process and haven’t broken any law while in the United States.

To be clear, the federal government already has broad authority to lock up undocumented immigrants and subject them to deportation proceedings if ICE agents and judges decide they’re a danger to their communities (or a flight risk). In fact, even without this new bill, the feds could have detained Riley’s killer, Jose Antonio Ibarra, before he committed murder.

Instead, Ibarra was released after crossing the border in September 2022 and not deported. Why?

First, because there aren’t enough government resources to lock up every unauthorized immigrant in America, even if we wanted to. ICE has funding for only 40,000 detention beds, whereas the population of undocumented immigrants is about 11 million.

So this bill could require orders of magnitude more people to get thrown into detention, but it doesn’t give ICE another penny to do so. How would the agency prioritize? Unclear. It’s not hard to imagine detention beds being filled with asylum seekers falsely accused of swiping candy bars while actual dangerous people are allowed to roam free. (Incidentally, a version of this problem happened in the first Trump administration.)

Even if Biden wanted to deport Ibarra, his home country of Venezuela would have refused to take him — as it has for other deportees. The solution to problems like this is better diplomacy, which Biden worked toward. (Not long after Ibarra crossed into the United States, Biden struck a deal with Mexico to take expelled Venezuelans.)

What does any of this have to do with the wrenching loss of Laken Riley, or really any problem in our dysfunctional immigration system? It doesn’t. It just creates more problems — humanitarian, economic and constitutional. Democratic lawmakers (and any fair-minded Republicans still out there) should learn what they’re voting for before they get manipulated into doing so.

Email: crampell@washpost.com.