HB376, entitled the Laken Riley Act, will not make it for a final vote this legislative session due to time constraints, according to State Rep. Ernie Yarbrough.

Yarbrough (R-Trinity) filed the bill earlier this year in response to February abduction and murder of Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant. Riley was an undergraduate student at the Augusta University nursing school.

The legislation would allow local law enforcement to partner with federal immigration agencies to enforce federal immigration and customs laws.

Yarbrough talked about the future of the bill Tuesday on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”

“Obviously we have a situation in hand where we our country is not safe,” Yarbrough said. “And it’s because our federal government has largely abdicated their responsibilities at the top to enforce already existing laws on the books. In America, we’re about immigration, right. We’re about people coming to this country for freedom and liberty and opportunity and the freedom to worship God and all of those things that and a lot of countries across the world are oppressed and shut down. So, we want to do that, but we have to do it in a legal way.”

Yarborough also discussed the specifics of how local law enforcement will be able to help the federal government in the effort.

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“So the idea is here, we’re going to enable the boots on the ground to have an MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding agreement, with the federal government to help enforce already existing immigration laws on the books,” he explained. “And so the idea there is that if you have an illegal immigrant that engages in criminal activity, local law enforcement is able to pick them up within a 48 hour window to correspond with ICE, with Homeland Security, wherever they need to, to check the status of the individual, get with NCIC to coordinate if this person is wanted in another state, what their immigration status is. And if they’re here illegally, and they’re committing crimes, they need to be deported.”

He said the sponsors of the bill worked with Democratic members of the Alabama Legislature to make it a more tangible,  bipartisan effort.

“So we worked with we worked with both sides of the aisle,” he said. “We added an amendment that said  this bill doesn’t this bill in no way affects those changes anybody’s constitutional rights… the goal of law enforcement is not to mitigate against the American dream, but to help it operate in a safe and lawful way, but also to remove those who are involved in crime.”

Yarbrough said he wasn’t happy they won’t be able to get it through this session, but is hopeful they will take it up in the future.

“I was disappointed that it didn’t get through,” he said, “but we’re gonna push hard to get this done next session.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee