Senator Schmitt Defends ICE, Trump’s Deportation Efforts from the Senate Floor

The Choice Is Between Enforcement and Chaos - and the American People Already Decided

WASHINGTON - Amid agitators trying to sow chaos in Minnesota, today, U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) spoke on the Senate floor to defend the Trump administration's deportation efforts and condemn Democrats' inflammatory rhetoric, which is fueling an unprecedented rise in violence against ICE.

In his speech, Senator Schmitt argued that the unrest in Minneapolis was the predictable consequence of years of deliberate policy choices under Biden that undermined border enforcement, encouraged mass migration, and the political left's normalization of political violence against law enforcement. Finally, the Senator praised President Trump for fulfilling his mandate to carry out mass deportations, secure the border, and restore the rule of law.

Watch Senator Schmitt's full speech HERE.

Read key excerpts of Senator Schmitt's speech, as prepared for delivery:

"We are at an inflection point in this country. What happens over the next few months will ring onwards far into the future.

We've all seen the scenes in Minneapolis. The riots. The violence. The bitter chaos. We've seen the headlines, the TV monologues, the nightly news reports, the pundit spin.

If you weren't paying close attention, it might seem like all of this noise just exploded out of nowhere a month or two ago.

But the story of what's happening in Minneapolis didn't begin last month. It didn't even begin last year, when President Trump took office.

It began on January 20, 2021 - the day Joe Biden became president.

The Biden administration did something that has no precedent in American history. They intentionally opened our border to a full-scale invasion, and actively sought to block any and every attempt to fight it."

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"Trump ran and won on fixing this. It wasn't some minor footnote in his platform. It was one of the fundamental, defining policies of his 2024 campaign.

If you went out on the street and grabbed 10 Americans at random in November 2024, and asked them what Donald Trump was running on, just about every single one of them would give you the same answer: The economy and illegal immigration.

And here's the thing: He won. Donald Trump won. He won the Electoral College, sweeping the battleground states, and the popular vote, running on the promise to end the invasion and send the illegal immigrants back home. That promise was one of the key reasons the American people sent him back to the White House."

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"But the other side never had any intention of letting that happen. They were never going to let us enforce our immigration laws against those who had broken them.

Why is that?

Well, because mass immigration is not just one policy preference among many for today's Democratic Party. It is the policy priority - the fundamental organizing principle of their entire agenda. It is the foundation of their platform, and the final end of their worldview."

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"But whether or not they believe what they're saying, many of the people who are listening to them do. And now, many of those people are taking these ideas to their final, logical conclusion.

And that's exactly what the people in power on the Left want.

They want the confrontations. They want the chaos. This is their conscious political strategy.

They have decided that leaning in and ratcheting this up as far as it can go serves their political and ideological interests. So, they're all-in."

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"My colleagues on the left - are currently threating to shut down our government - shutdown the Department of Homeland Security if they do not get their way.

What is their way? They demand we defund law enforcement agencies, like ICE and CBP. They demand we force ICE agents to dox themselves so that their families can be harassed and threatened at home. They demand that we cripple federal law enforcement's ability to enforce our immigration laws.

This is not about oversight. It is about paralysis. And the objective is mass amnesty - rewarding those who broke the law and punishing the men and women sworn to enforce it."

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"Nobody wants to see American citizens being shot and killed. On a basic human level, it is a tragedy. Every time a life is lost - it's a tragedy. The lives lost in Minesota have been tragic.

But what we are seeing in the streets of Minnesota is not on ICE. It is not on Border Patrol. And it is certainly not on President Trump.

If it were, we would be seeing the same chaos in every city where ICE and Border Patrol carried out these operations. But we aren't.

There have been large-scale deportation operations in red states all across the country. Most Americans probably never heard about them. Because they went off without a hitch."

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"The ICE and Border Patrol agents are risking death every day. But the small men who sneer and bark at them from the sidelines are not men of virtue, but men who defy our rule of law.

The deportations must continue. Sanctuary cities must end.

The era of fake deals is over. There will be no fake "comprehensive immigration reform," because a nation does not need new laws to enforce the ones it already has. President Trump demonstrated a basic truth of self-government: law without enforcement is not law at all.

Congress criminalized illegal entry. The executive branch is obligated to enforce it. And that is exactly what will happen - the systematic removal of those who violated federal law by entering this country illegally. No theatrics. No apologies. No amnesty. Just enforcement.

So, protest all you want - but let law enforcement do their jobs: Enforcing the immigration laws that Republicans and Democrats passed.

And let our men and women in law enforcement get home safe to their families.

The only way out is through."

During his speech, Senator Schmitt read on-the-ground testimony from a DHS agent in Minneapolis. You can hear that testimony HERE.

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