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Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, today, the Senate will vote to confirm Nicholas Jon Ganjei to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
I will vote in opposition to Mr. Ganjei's confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the Federal bench.
As the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Mr. Ganjei has not been shy about his support for the Trump administration's aggressive immigration enforcement agenda. In a speech to the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association earlier this year, Mr. Ganjei rebuffed those who view these policies as ``rooted in a lack of compassion.'' But look at what happened in Chicago last year and more recently in Minnesota just this last month. American citizens, legal residents of the United States, and immigrants who have built their lives and raised their families here and pose no threat to public safety have been targeted.
Rafael Veraza and his 1-year-old daughter Arianna, both citizens of the United States, were enjoying a shopping day at Sam's Club. What was supposed to be a normal father-daughter outing ended in a trip to the hospital after they were pepper sprayed by Federal agents. Masked, armed agents have aggressively arrested U.S. citizens; pushed them into unmarked vehicles; tazed, punched, and fired pepper balls at them; and, in some cases, wrongly detained them in immigration detention facilities for weeks. This was not an isolated incident. In the last month, two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were both needlessly and unjustifiably killed in immigration officer-involved shootings.
There is no doubt that this administration's immigration policies are rooted in a lack of compassion. Mr. Ganjei cheering them on is disqualifying. Earlier this year, he reposted a DHS tweet comparing the strategy of capturing undocumented immigrants to the Pokemon slogan ``gotta catch `em all''--as if all of this were a game.
Mr. Ganjei's record makes clear where he stands on immigration enforcement, and I have serious doubts about his ability to fairly and impartially render decisions in the immigration cases that make up a substantial part of the docket in the Southern District of Texas.
For these reasons, I will be opposing Mr. Ganjei's nomination.
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