“Families Are Being Torn Apart!” Robert Garcia Targets ICE And Dhs With Threat Of House Probe

I want to just start out by saying that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and what they have done to ICE and DHS through their brutalization and terror of communities is not acceptable to anyone in our state and in our greater city. ICE and DHS are completely out of control. They are terrorizing communities. They are, in some cases, killing people on the streets of American cities they are kidnapping folks who are just here trying to do their jobs they are separating families they are deporting people to other countries some of which they've never been to and they have created a pipeline of deportation and detention where you have a small number of large corporations and billionaires who are benefiting from every single deportation and every single human being that gets sent to one of these horrific facilities across the country and across our state. Now, just this last Friday, I visited along with a group of oversight Democrats in the Adelanto Detention Center. And we know that Adelanto has a long history of inhumane abuses of people. I was shocked to hear from Adelanto leadership when we when we arrived unannounced that they declared to us that a majority of the folks there, most of the people that were at Adelanto had criminal histories and were criminals. When we know that is actually not true. We know that a vast majority of people that are being picked up, that are being terrorized by ICE, actually have no criminal history. And we're talking about the vast majority of people. And then in the cases where folks have something on their record, it is usually a minor infraction and so what is happening with the deportation and detention of people into places like Adelanto and other places across the country is inhumane we have heard horrific stories people not getting their medicine food that is not able to be consumed and the list goes on and on our committee on the on the oversight and government reform committee we have documented over 1,000 instances of credible verifiable abuse by federal immigration agents And that documentation is going to lead our work moving forward. I want to make it very clear that in these upcoming elections, the stakes are high. And one issue is whether we're going to have checks and balances in our government. We're announcing today that when Democrats take control of the majority, and we believe that we will, we've got a lot of work to do, but we believe we will, One of the key investigative priorities of the Committee on Oversight will be the abuses of ICE and DHS. We're going to focus clearly on the corruption of the administration and the Trump family. We're going to focus on issues around the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and on corporate corruption. But our fourth major investigative area is going to be of the abuses of ICE and DHS. And that includes the serious allegations of pay to play by people like Corey Lewandowski and Kristi Noem, where we know that human beings are being used to line the pockets of the wealthiest corporations, private companies, where they make a profit off every person that is being picked up off of our streets. What is happening right now is horrific. And I want to share, over the last 45 days, there's been an announcement by this administration about a surge of immigration enforcement. Quite frankly, it's been terrorizing communities, which has been happening. They've been detaining folks ongoing, not just on the streets, but at places like airports, places like immigration centers, where people are coming in to do their check-in for their immigration center, for their appointments, given to them by our own government. They're being picked up. In the last week alone, our organizations have told us at this roundtable that calls have tripled in just the last few weeks from folks that are struggling for just dignity and being here to work. I want to thank our organizations like CHIRLA, like ODELE, like CENTROCHA, like the Immigrant Rights Defenders for being on the ground and doing this incredible work. I also just want to say that the immigration actions, the terror that happened in North Long Beach over the weekend, is not welcome in our city or our community. These masked cowards are not welcome in the city of Long Beach. And we should be very clear, ICE is an organization that cannot be reformed. ICE must be abolished as an organization because that kind of terror should not exist in the United States. They have terrorized an entire community who at this very moment is scared to leave their homes, to go to work, to take their kids to school and we saw what happened to that man to ricardo on thrown to the street treated with no humanity it's disgusting and every single person should condemn it and there should be a full investigation as to what happened there and those are demands that we have made it certainly it certainly demands that we have had in conversations when i called our chief of police yesterday we need to understand what happened why ice was there and most importantly we all need to be very clear that ICE is not welcome in our community.