The Laken Riley Act must be modified and Senate Democrats and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have made clear that was their intent in advancing the measure with a overwhelming vote Thursday. As currently written, the legislation, named after a young Georgia woman horribly murdered by an undocumented immigrant last year, would do little to prevent acts of violence like that awful crime and much to unnecessarily terrorize millions of peaceful undocumented immigrants around the country, while setting our immigration policy on a course for chaos. The original bill passed the House, but it needs 60 votes for approval in the Senate, where the ruling Republicans hold 53 seats. So Democrats will have the leverage to temper the bill. And it must be tempered. But the Dems need to know what needs tempering. Take Democratic freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego who reportedly said the bill, which would mandate the detention of immigrants who committed certain theft-related crimes including shoplifting, was “very clear” that it would not target DACA recipients, and that’s simply not true. The broad language would direct ICE to detain people who entered or were present in the country unlawfully regardless of whether they fell under programs like DACA, TPS or parole, and before they were convicted of anything. We are all for law and order, but punishment before conviction is fundamentally unfair. Accusations do not equal guilt and in situations like shoplifting, we are talking about nonviolent crimes at that. Let’s not forget the saga of the migrants arrested in Arizona for last year’s Times Square brawl with the cops, who turned out to have had nothing to do with the fight and had not even been there. This sort of thing happens all the time; people are arrested and then have their cases dismissed, or are acquitted, or never have charges filed at all. We already have laws and regulations in place that direct the immigration authorities to detain people who have been convicted of certain types of violent crimes under the same public safety rationale that is being deployed here. It also makes little sense to hand state officials who have proven themselves to be political bomb-throwers — like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s made a habit of using the powers of his office to harass nonprofits for their protected speech — new powers over what should be federal immigration policy. Under the bill, state attorneys general could sue to, among other things, force the feds to halt visa issuance to entire countries in an unprecedented manner. For well more than a century, regulating immigration has been purely a federal prerogative. That separation has already been chipped away by activist federal judges like Trump appointee Drew Tipton, a Texas federal judge who wrested away policy-making ability from the Department of Homeland Security to impose his own preferences. That disorder will only get far worse if officials like Paxton are able to run to Tipton and ask that he rewrite immigration laws on the fly. We understand that a lot of Democrats feel, with validity, that concerns over immigration helped drive Republican gains and a Donald Trump reelection. The solution is in part to calmly insist on consistency in the rule of law and point out immigration’s obvious benefits, not to capitulate to the extreme position in ways that won’t pan out politically anyway.