A Pennsylvania state lawmaker is urging colleagues to back emerging legislation ensuring illegal aliens who try to get firearms are reported to federal and state authorities.
State Representative Ryan Mackenzie’s (R-Macungie) measure would direct the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) to inform the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) and the Pennsylvania Attorney General of all such purchase attempts.
Licensed gun sellers run information on would-be buyers through the Pennsylvania Instant Check System (PICS) to verify legal residency and the absence of criminal history. It is a felony to lie to a dealer gathering details for a PICS check, and federal law bars illegals from possessing guns or ammunition. Though PSP runs PICS, no commonwealth law yet stipulates that the police must conduct an investigation or tell ICE when an unauthorized person tries to acquire a firearm.
“I think we all recognize the cost and burden of illegal immigration in our country and so this is a check that would actually pick up on individuals that have already broken the law and are here in the country unlawfully…,” he told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “The proper authorities should be notified when an individual is here in the country illegally. We know that the system is already overburdened, but if there are various checkpoints throughout, individuals could be detected and then actually identified and have the proper immigration officials pick it up from there on the case; I think that’s a positive thing.”
Republicans have tried to pass similar legislation at the congressional level. U.S. Representative Greg Steube’s (R-FL-17) bill would mandate that the Department of Justice notify ICE and local law enforcers when the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) discovers an unlawful resident trying to obtain a gun. When the measure came up in recent sessions, some House Democrats voted with Republicans to get it through the chamber, though it didn’t pass the Senate.
Steube reintroduced his Illegal Aliens NICS Alert Act this year, though Gun Owners of America (GOA) came out against it in January. GOA stated that NICS initially denied 44,223 potential gun buyers between November 1998 and December 2022 but the group asserted that over 90 percent of those denials were “false positives” wherein a would-be purchaser turned out to be likely eligible to procure a gun.
Andrew Arthur, a former York, Pennsylvania Immigration Court judge who is now a fellow at the nonprofit Center for Immigration Studies, cautioned against reading too much into that figure.
“If it’s 10 percent of 44,000, that’s 4,400 individuals,” he said. “Even if it was one tenth [of that], that would be 440 aliens unlawfully present in the United States who were attempting to obtain a firearm…. Even if the sample size is small, it’s still significant.”
Mackenzie said that Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee Republican staffers examined concerns about whether PICS produces errors with the frequency that GOA says NICS does, and they found no comparable problem. As a gun-rights advocate, he said, he would only propose legislation he felt would prevent firearm ownership among those who run afoul of the law.
“I’ve obviously been a supporter of the Second Amendment and I think that we want to make sure that everybody who is lawful and eligible here in the United States to own a gun can do so if they choose,” he said. “But at the same time, [for] individuals who are not eligible and should not be owning guns, we want to make sure that they are kept out of their hands and this is one way that we could do it in the area surrounding illegal immigration.”
This is the third immigration-related measure Mackenzie proposed this year. A few months ago, he introduced legislation requiring all public contractors and subcontractors to utilize the federal E-Verify system to guarantee their hires reside in America legally. The policy builds on a bipartisan measure he ushered into law in 2019 to mandate E-Verify’s use in the construction industry.
The representative said he would like to see the employment-check mechanism expanded even further.
“Particularly when it’s taxpayer dollars, I think we need to be doing everything we can to ensure that those individuals receiving those contracts and working on those jobs are legally here in the United States and eligible to work,” he said.
Mackenzie also hopes to gain support for a proposal to cross-reference the voter rolls with records of people claiming ineligibility for jury duty based on noncitizen status. The representative cited election officials’ discovery in 2017 that 317 people in Philadelphia alone took action to cancel their own voter registrations because they were noncitizens. The officials determined that a glitch in the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s “motor-voter” registration effort led to the errors.
While Mackenzie said it remains to be seen whether some Democrats, who enjoy a majority in the State House of Representatives, would back his new proposals, he expressed moderate optimism, given the bipartisanship he saw on E-Verify.
“My hope is that, on these things that are commonsense approaches to address illegal immigration, you would get that bipartisan support but you don’t know until you actually introduce something and have it up for a vote,” he said.
Arthur said Democratic lawmakers who demand action against gun violence but object to what they consider excesses of immigration enforcement are faced with an important choice when it comes to legislation like Mackenzie’s newest bill.
“This really sort of sets up a dilemma between those factions in the Democratic Party who want firearms restrictions and those who want to promote sanctuary policies,” he said.
The former immigration judge said background checks of this kind are a useful means toward what should be a key law enforcement priority.
“If [people are] unlawfully present, they shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Local and state government shouldn’t do anything to shield them from the consequences of their actions.”
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
