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Floor Speech

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Mr. President, I rise today because of what is going on in Minneapolis. As we have all seen in realtime with our own eyes, Alex Pretti, 37 years old, nurse at the VA, shot multiple times and killed by Border Patrol while he was exercising his right to peacefully assemble.

The video shows us what happened. He was disarmed at the time that he was shot, defenseless, not a threat when he was shot and killed. Before him was Renee Good, shot and killed by ICE agents in her car on January 7.

Separate from those 2, we have 32 people who have died in ICE custody in 2025, including one in Baldwin, MI--more fatalities in 1 year than in more than two decades.

These folks shouldn't be going through this, but the deaths that we saw in Minneapolis are the culmination of something much bigger. We are experiencing a cultural moment in the United States of America that cuts to the heart of who we are as Americans, and it relates to the behavior of Federal forces in our streets. It strikes to the heart of who we are as Americans.

Now, this isn't about any one thing, but I do think that it is important for Americans to understand that despite some of the rolling back that the President has done over the last few days, ICE agents are still in Minnesota, still acting 3,000 strong in ways that I believe run against the American consciousness.

So I am going to list out some of the things that I have heard and we have seen, and I want Americans to think about how they would feel if these very things were going on in their own towns, in their own States, in their own communities.

Imagine being pulled over and asked for your papers as you pull into the parking lot at Target. Imagine Federal agents waiting at the top of off-ramps from the highway where you have to stop, determining by looking at you if you might be an illegal alien and asking you to pull over and show your papers.

Imagine you are at the airport trying to depart on a flight to go overseas and ICE agents are at the boarding area asking to see your papers, and when you ask them: Are you just indiscriminately pulling us aside and checking our status, they threaten you with a $10,000 fine for obstructing Federal agents.

Imagine, in your kid's elementary school on the playground, agents are shooting tear gas. Imagine being held at gunpoint in your own home, taken to a police precinct in your underwear in subfreezing temperatures and then released without an apology when they realize: Oops. You actually are an American citizen.

Imagine agents with full kit on, no identifying information, masks, breaking your car window when your 2-year-old is in the backseat. Imagine peacefully protesting and having rubber bullets shot at you.

Imagine masked men detaining a 5-year-old who is coming home from preschool. Imagine being pepper-sprayed as clergy while you are praying out loud. Imagine tear gas filling your car on your way home from a basketball game with your children in the backseat and doing CPR on a 6-month-old who stopped breathing.

Imagine being the family watching on video as your loved one is beaten and shot repeatedly and killed because they were exercising their Second Amendment right and being present in their First Amendment right with freedom of speech.

And then imagine being grabbed off the street and taken to a detention facility without your family or a lawyer knowing where you are.

Every one of these things has happened in Minneapolis in the past 30 days. If you have a problem with any of those things happening to you, you should have a problem with those things happening in Minneapolis.

It doesn't matter if you are a Democrat or Republican. This is not about political party.

In my State, we have seen political protests over the last 5 years for all kinds of political persuasions. And I want people to imagine that if they will do this in Minneapolis, there is no stopping them--or some future administration--from doing this to you for what you care about.

Now, I think it is lucky that we grew up in this country, and we are taught over and over about the values of freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful protest. I think that it is important that young people are taught these things and that they come to live in a place very deep in all Americans that I know.

And because of that, I think Americans have kind of an internal redline for authoritarian behavior; there are just some things that look and smell and feel wrong, given our history and given our values.

I think what is most abhorrent about what is going on in Minneapolis is that it runs against the fundamental freedoms of who we are as Americans.

Now, the President, who ran, in many ways, on the issue of immigration, has managed to piss off everybody--left, right, and center. Whether you are Joe Rogan or Zach Bryan or everyone in-between, the tide has turned, and the President knows it. That is why he is slinking Bovino and other people out of town. That is why he is changing his tune.

But what he says publicly is still fundamentally different from what is going on today in Minneapolis. You still have 3,000 agents doing the same list of things that I am talking about. It has not changed. So until the actions change, words don't matter.

Now, Michiganders have been clear with me that there need to be consequences for this kind of anti-American behavior, and that starts with leadership. We have a cast of characters who are in charge of policy related to immigration.

Let's start with Secretary Kristi Noem. She should resign. If she doesn't resign, the President should do what he has done in the past and fire her. And if she doesn't get fired, she should be impeached, because while she is not the only one who is the brains behind these operations, she was the one who got the big job. She was the one who sat in front of many of us for Senate confirmation. And she has done nothing to defend the values that she claimed when she held her hand up and swore to protect them.

Now, I will tell you, back a year ago, I was one of those people who voted for Kristi Noem. I voted yes on her nomination. I come from the State of Michigan. We have major border crossings, some of the biggest border crossings in America, and we are about to open one of the largest new border bridges in the world, the Gordie Howe Bridge to Canada. We need her. We needed her to staff that new bridge, to pay attention when we had issues with CBP or Border Patrol, when we needed more resources. She sat in my office. I invited her in. And she told me how she was a former Governor. She had received Federal support through FEMA. She knew what it was like, and she was going to uphold those same things that she depended on as a Governor, when it came to being the Secretary of Homeland Security.

So I don't regret that I tried to have a relationship with her. I tried to say: Hey, as someone from a border State, we have got to make this work. I have got to have a relationship with this person.

But she has proved, over and over again, up until this weekend, that she does not deserve the title of Cabinet Secretary. This week, when Alex Pretti was killed on the ground, shot 10 times, she didn't say: We need an independent investigation.

She didn't say: We need to cool down and relax.

She didn't say: We need to put the DHS officers on administrative leave and have some sort of accountability.

She said: He was a domestic terrorist. A nurse who worked at the ICU for the Veterans' Administration was a domestic terrorist.

If you are a Cabinet-level Secretary and you jump to that, you don't understand our system. And, certainly, the one time she has come in front of our committee--one time since she was confirmed--she didn't seem to understand basic concepts, like habeas corpus.

Now, she is not the only one who is the mastermind of the President's border and immigration policy. If you want to understand the through line between Trump's first administration, where he literally put children in cages and purposely separated them from their parents as an immigration policy, and what you are seeing in Minneapolis today, that through line is Stephen Miller and his dark vision of America.

I do not understand this person. I do not understand how he could be educated in this country and then spew these dark visions of who we are as a people. You know, I think the thing that he said right after Alex Pretti was killed was that not only was he a domestic terrorist, but he was an assassin.

These people don't understand who we are, and they certainly don't understand that the American public does not tolerate this kind of authoritarianism.

So what do we need to do? We need accountability. We need the people who are the masterminds of these policies to leave their jobs. Either, again, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem resign--that would be the respectful thing--are fired by the President--they are boat anchors around your neck--or impeach them, in the case of Kristi Noem.

But, certainly, for what this body needs to do this week, it seems abundantly clear that we need to separate out the budgets for a bunch of other Departments and Agencies from the Department of Homeland Security. We cannot trust this administration to handle the deployment of Federal forces in our streets without making some fundamental reforms of the Department of Homeland Security.

And I am glad to see that, like dominoes, my Republican colleagues are now saying: Yes, we should separate this out. Yes, I don't want to defend DHS and ICE and have the government shut down because I will just salute the President.

They understand, and I give them credit. I will take any millimeters of bravery that I can get from the other side of the aisle to say: This is not America.

And you better believe that my colleagues would be losing their ever- loving minds if a Democratic President were doing this in some Republican-run city--losing their minds.

So we need accountability for the people who are behind this. We also need fundamental reforms of ICE. We can't leave the administration to do it themselves.

So you separate the bill out, and then we can have a real conversation. And all we are asking for--it is not the moon--is that Federal agents who show up in these cities cannot play by different rules than police who live and work in our communities.

You need to wear a body camera. You should not be masked, unless it is for your health. You need to have insignia that shows you are actually real law enforcement. You need to have a judicial warrant to come into someone's house, not a warrant signed by some person at the Department of Homeland Security, who may or may not just have political dependencies on Kristi Noem and the President.

We are asking for the same things that the Michigan State Police or the Nevada police have to do on every single day. We want our Federal agents to abide by those same laws and rules because they fundamentally lost the trust of the American people. They don't have it.

So we don't trust that the President is just going to learn his lesson, slink out of Minneapolis, and not do this to another city. So we need prevention. We need reform. We need to separate out the DHS budget from the others so we can get to work and not shut down the government because the President won't admit fault in Minneapolis.

And we need to fundamentally remember who we are as Americans. We need to remember those values that literally we learned in the first grade. We have fundamental freedoms that make us different than almost every other country of the world, and we need to defend them vigorously.

And, in fact, those people who are standing up and exercising those rights are doing the most patriotic thing they can do right now. Standing up and calling out authoritarianism when we see it is the most patriotic thing that we can do as Americans.

I urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join us in calling a spade a spade when you see it.

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