When President Donald Trump won the White House last year for the second time, many Democrats concluded they would need to moderate on a cluster of issues on which they were on the wrong side of public opinion. Chief among them was immigration, after nearly four years of willful neglect at the border had left the party’s reputation in tatters. On the day Trump returned to office in January, the Senate voted 64 to 35 to pass the Laken Riley Act. Named after a 22-year-old woman who was murdered by an illegal immigrant while she was jogging at the University of Georgia, the legislation stiffened penalties on illegal immigrants who commit crimes in the United States and mandated detention for more offenses. Twelve Democratic senators voted in the affirmative. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) all represented battleground states Trump carried. (Ossoff and Warnock also hail from the state where Laken Riley was slain.) Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) came from states where Trump cut the Democrats’ margin of victory to single digits.  (Illustration by Thomas Fluharty for the Washington Examiner) Forty-six House Democrats also voted for the bill. “Most Democrats waved the bill off as a political messaging effort last year when Republicans first...