Leader Schumer Floor Remarks Urging Republicans To Work With Democrats To Rein In ICE

Washington, D.C. - Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) today spoke on the Senate floor slamming Republicans for their continued support of ICE despite clear missteps, and urging Republicans to work with Democrats to pass legislation to rein them in. Below are Senator Schumer's remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem-who for some reason still has a job, she should have been fired long ago-announced that all federal immigration agents in Minneapolis are going to begin wearing body cameras. I want to be very clear about something: Kristi Noem does not get participation points by saying agents are going to start doing something they should have done all along.

And why just Minneapolis? This policy, which is the right policy, should be nationwide. There's no reason to delay that.

Most importantly executive actions alone will never be enough for the American people. We need to pass legislation. We know how whimsical Donald Trump is. He'll say one thing one day and retract it the next. Same with Secretary Noem. So, we don't trust some executive order, some pronouncement from some cabinet secretary. We need it enshrined into law.

And what Democrats want is exceedingly commonsense.

We need to end the roving patrols. This means we need arrest warrants and an end to racial profiling.

Second, we need accountability. ICE needs to abide by the same rules as local police, including independent investigations, and there has to be real accountability forcing them to do so when they don't.

And third, masks need to come off and cameras need to stay on. Every ICE officer should do what every police officer, or just about every police officer in America, does: have an ID. Every citizen knows when they need a police officer or sheriff, their ID is clear on them. That's always been the accountability that we've had for decades and decades. And Noem thinks-and some people think, like Speaker Johnson-we shouldn't do it.

Why is Speaker Johnson pro-secret police? It is absurd for the Speaker and others like him to argue that masked ICE agents should get special treatment and be held to a different standard from just about every other law enforcement agency in the country. Sheriffs, local police, traffics cops-you don't see them with masks do you? No.

Defending ICE agents wearing masks and giving them special treatment, especially when they are so brutal and thuggy, is totally against the views of most Americans who want basic accountability. Anyone defending ICE agents keeping their masks on is not seriously trying to solve this huge problem of chaos we have seen in Minneapolis and so many of our other cities, when ICE is sent in there.

And it begs the question, why are some Republicans speaking so loudly trying to defend masked secret police? Is it that these new ICE hires weren't qualified as police officers at other departments? Could it be that some of them were kicked out of police departments and then they signed up to snatch people off the streets and to beat protesters up with impunity, because that's what they wanted to do? The American people have a right to know, and the first step is identifying who they are.

And finally, I want to make another very important point: since the death of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, nothing meaningful has changed about ICE's abuses. Nothing meaningful has changed about ICE's abuses, even since the deaths of Pretti and Good.

Last week in Portland, Oregon, federal agents fired tear gas at a crowd of demonstrators that included children. There's a video circulating online of an agent in Colorado stealing a woman's phone. When she tried to get it back, the agent shoved her to the ground, yanked her by the hair, and then battered her. And Greg Bovino, the disgraced chief thug, former head of Border Patrol, is seen in another video trying to motivate agents by saying, this is what Bovino said: "arrest as many people who touch you as you want. Those are the general orders all the way from the top."

This is absolutely not, not, not what the American people signed up for. Republicans in Congress need to see the chaos and realize it's finally time for ICE to be reined in.

###

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Tweet