RM Jayapal Exposes How Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Undermining Public Safety

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, and I welcome all of our witnesses to the committee. Today, we are here to talk about the tragic consequences of policy decisions. Unfortunately, the erratic, disturbing policy decisions of the Trump administration have left countless tragedies in their wake. Right now, in Donald Trump's America, people are dying from a disease that we declared eliminated in 2000 because his Secretary of Health and Human Services cannot stop spreading lies about vaccines. Eighteen service members have died, and over 700 were injured as a result of Trump's illegal war of choice against Iran that has no strategy, no exit plan, and has driven up gas and grocery prices for Americans at a time when too many are already struggling. Service members have had to fend off attacks from foreign governments as well as our own government. After enduring nine months of the horrifying conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln that drove another sailor to attempt suicide, Joshua Aviles, who is risking his life to serve our country, learned that Trump's ICE had detained his father. Donald Trump's out-of-control ICE has also deported seven spouses of active-duty service members. Meanwhile, federal agents have killed people who are simply driving home after celebrating their birthdays. People like Ruben Rey Martinez, or driving to work like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Yohan Sebastian Guerrero, or exercising their constitutional rights like Rene Good and Alex Pretty. Not a single ICE or CBP officer has been held accountable for any of these fatal shootings. In fact, it took almost six months for the Department of Justice to turn over key evidence to the Hennepin County Attorney's Office to even allow local investigations around the murders of Rene Good and Alex Pretty to proceed. The extent of disregard for the American people from this president and his cabinet is stunning. Trump has called affordability a hoax. He got the Attorney General, who still serves as his personal attorney, to approve a deal that gives him and his family immunity from tax fraud, even as he has enriched himself with unconstitutional crypto and business deals that have now made his family $2.2 billion in the past year alone. But the distraction, the corruption, and the cruelty are backfiring. 70% of Americans disapprove of Trump's performance overall, even on immigration, where Trump claimed that he was going after the worst of the worst and got some people to believe that that is what he would do. What the American people have seen instead is kidnapping, disappearing, and incarceration of all people of all statuses, including U.S. citizens, kids, parents, and spouses of U.S. citizens and people with legal status that he took away. ICE's own data show that the majority of people that they arrest have zero criminal charges or convictions. Arrests of immigrants without a single criminal conviction have surged by 770%. In their recent operation targeting people in the D.C. suburbs, ICE actually bragged that 70% of the immigrants that they arrested lacked any criminal charges or convictions. Perhaps even more disturbingly, Trump is releasing people with criminal charges and convictions from immigration detention to make room for folks without any criminal history. In fact, in stark contrast to Republican talking points, DHS's own data shows that under Donald Trump, ICE is releasing 23% more people with criminal convictions from immigration detention than it did during the Biden administration. Republicans want you to think that they care about public safety, but none of this does anything to improve public safety. They pulled agents off of fentanyl investigations to roam the streets searching for people who look undocumented. And as a result, according to the Trump-appointed DHS inspector general, federal agents are spending 30% less time working on fentanyl cases, leading to a 40% drop in fentanyl seizures. DHS goes into federal prisons to pick up immigrants in the middle of their criminal sentences to put them in deportation proceedings, letting people with criminal convictions out early so that you can boost your detention and deportation numbers does not make America safer. Perhaps even worse are the many instances where DHS has picked up people with criminal charges before their trials and deported them or allowed them to self-deport long before a judge is able to hand down a sentence. Not only does this grant them a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it also deprives their victims of justice and restitution. The administration lets these people go free so that they can fill up their immigration detention centers with people who have never harmed anyone—nones and pastors, care workers, moms, dads, children. Last month, I visited the Stewart Detention Center in rural Georgia, and what I saw was absolutely unacceptable—a private, for-profit detention center that incarcerates over 1,900 people every single night with unsanitary conditions, substandard medical care, and severe overcrowding. One 24-year-old man with absolutely no criminal history who came to escape the war in Yemen has spent 24 months in detention and was even bleeding from the mouth during our visit because ICE pulled his tooth instead of trying to fix it. A 72-year-old man who has lived in the United States for more than 30 years—no criminal record—married to a U.S. citizen who is in final stages of renal failure, went in for his green card interview after he had applied through the legal process, and instead was arrested by ICE for actually trying to obey the law and follow a legal pathway that was there for him. And a woman who can no longer conceive children because the last time she was in ICE detention, under Trump, a doctor conducted an unnecessary medical procedure without her consent. She was weeping over her U.S. citizen daughter who is suffering severe mental health problems because her mother is in immigration detention, even though she has multiple legal pathways in process. The stories we will hear today deserve our attention, as do all of the ones that I have mentioned. I would hope that this committee would treat the issues that I mentioned—those individuals, those U.S. citizens—with the seriousness that they deserve. Until then, I thank our witnesses for being here today, and I give my sincere condolences for the horrific injuries that your daughters have suffered. I yield back.