While Congress and the president laud a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that ostensibly gives federal inmates a second chance, the fact that this bill intentionally excludes most immigrants from the benefits of these second chances seems forgotten.

Criminal justice reform is desperately needed to address the epidemic of mass incarceration and criminalization. The irony of excluding immigrants from federal criminal justice reform is that migration-related cases make up more than half of all federal criminal prosecutions in the U.S.

Rather than compounding laws that create this unjust system, including those that criminalize transnational families driven to migrate to be together, lawmakers should be repealing them.

Daisy Aviles, a Texas high schooler, joined the Immigrant Justice Center during an advocacy day on Capitol Hill and spoke to Congress about how federal prosecutions of migrants devastated her family when it ripped her father, a mechanic, away from her mother and three siblings.