Ranking Member Jayapal’s Opening Statement at Hearing on Trump’s Immigration Dragnet and Republican Threats to Defund Local Police

Washington, D.C. (September 1, 2026)-Today, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, delivered opening remarks at a hearing on Republicans' efforts to force state and local police to carry out the Trump Administration's chaotic mass deportation agenda, diverting limited resources from fighting crime and making communities less safe.

Below are Ranking Member Jayapal's remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today's hearing.

WATCH Ranking Member Jayapal's opening statement.

Ranking Member Pramila Jayapal

Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement

Hearing on "Sanctuary Policies: Tragic Consequences"

September 1, 2026

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 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 we declared eliminated in 2000, because his Secretary of Health and Human Services cannot stop spreading lies about vaccines. 18 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, like Ruben Ray Martinez, or driving to work, like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Guerrero, or exercising their constitutional rights, like Renée Good and Alex Pretti. 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 Good and Pretti to proceed.

The extent of disregard for the American people from this President and his Cabinet is stunning. Trump has called affordability a hoax, 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 him and his family $2.2 billion dollars in the past year.

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 he was going after the "worst of the worst," what the American people have seen instead is the kidnapping, disappearing, and incarceration of 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 shows that the majority of people 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 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 data shows that under 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 they care about public safety, but none of this does anything to improve public safety. They have pulled agents off of fentanyl investigations to roam the streets searching for people who "look undocumented." 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 into deportation proceedings. Letting people with criminal convictions out early so you can boost your detention and deportation numbers doesn't 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 they can fill immigration detention centers with people who have never harmed anyone. Nuns and pastors, care-workers, moms, dads, and children. Last month, I visited the Stewart Detention Center in rural Georgia. What I saw was absolutely unacceptable: a private for-profit detention center that incarcerates over 1,900 people every single night in 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 after 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 with no criminal record, and is married to a U.S. citizen who is in final stages of renal failure, went in for a green card interview and instead was arrested by ICE. And a woman who can longer conceive children because the last time she was in ICE detention under Trump, a doctor conducted an unnecessary medical procedure without her consent, 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 the ones I mentioned. I would hope this Committee would treat the issues I mentioned with the seriousness they deserve. Until then, I thank our witnesses for being here today and give my sincere condolences for the horrific injuries your daughters have suffered.

I yield back.

Issues: Immigration, Public Safety & Criminal Justice