State Senator Kerry Roberts (R-Springfield) said a bill that would prohibit individuals from transporting illegal aliens into the Volunteer State failed in committee because its language was not “exact.”
The bill, SB 2802, would increase the penalty fine for transporting an illegal alien from $1,000 to $5,000.
The bill, sponsored by State Senator Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald), failed to pass the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Roberts, who chairs the Government Operations Committee and serves as a member of the Judiciary Committee, said that even though he agreed with the bill’s idea, he voted against it on Tuesday because its language was left “open to be interpreted by a liberal judge.”
“The bill is absolutely well-intentioned,” Roberts said on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show. “There’s a problem with it…if you don’t get these bills exactly right, then you leave them open to be interpreted by a liberal judge. I want to stress to every conservative listening: We’ve got to get the language of this exact, otherwise we leave ourselves open to being interpreted by a liberal judge who doesn’t do it the way we want him to do it.”
Roberts said the reason the bill failed to pass the Judiciary Committee was due to lawmakers failing to amend the language surrounding the definition of illegal aliens.
“The problem is its federal code because immigration is the job of Congress. So all of these terms are defined by the federal government. You can get all the definitions, but what you can’t say in a bill is ‘someone who illegally entered or remained in the United States’ because someone who illegally remains in the United States could be an H-2A agriculture worker and you could be fining a farmer with people who are allowed to be here at their field, but they don’t have legal status,” Roberts explained.
“I voted against it. I didn’t want to vote against it, I wanted to vote for it, but we didn’t have it right,” Roberts added, noting how the bill can be introduced and worked on again next legislative session.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Background Photo “Tennesse State Senate Chamber” by Antony-22. CC BY-SA 4.0.
