Disapproving the Action of the District of Columbia Council in Approving the D.C. Income and Franchise Tax Conformity and Revision Temporary Amendment Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, we are 1 year into President Donald Trump's second term and 1 year into Secretary Kristi Noem's tenure as head of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. It is time for us to assess and state with clarity what that 1 year has brought us.

First of all, the deportation policy is not now about border security--not now. The border is secure, and that is a good thing. Migrant crossings into the United States from Mexico are at their lowest level since 1970.

In August of 2024, during President Biden's administration, there were 107,000 encounters at the southern border, but in August of 2025, there were only 9,000. The border is much more secure. I support that. We must maintain it, and we will.

So is the deportation policy now about deporting criminals--something we support? There is evidence, and the evidence of what the policy is about comes from a Department of Homeland Security report itself. What it says is that 14 percent--only 14 percent--of the people who have been deported are dangerous criminals.

And the Trump administration is as good as its word. From day one, with Stephen Miller, it has announced its intention to conduct mass deportation in the United States. It set quotas. It has moved away from focusing on people with serious criminal convictions, and instead, it is focused on getting the highest number of arrests and deportations as possible, up to 3,000 a day.

Homeland Security got $75 billion from Congress--not from votes on our side. But it was really what allowed for this mass roundup of people from workplaces, from farms, from schools--all in service of a political agenda that is not about protecting Americans but is serving the political interests of the President and the fiendish design of Stephen Miller, with the implementation of a reckless Kristi Noem.

So if only 14 percent of those people deported are dangerous criminals, what are the others? It is about detaining and attempting to deport students who are here legally but said things that the President and the administration didn't like on a campus, folks who spoke out about the war in Gaza: Mohsen Mahdawi from Vermont, Mahmoud Khalil from Columbia in New York City.

It is about deporting a student who wrote an article in a student newspaper criticizing the Israeli Government. It is about ripping a preschooler--preschooler--1,300 miles away from his home to sit in a detention facility, and it is about using him as bait to get to his family. That is happening.

It is about detaining a U.S. citizen at gunpoint, on that person's front porch, without any warrant to go there and then forcing him to go outside in subfreezing weather wearing nothing but his underwear.

It is about detaining a churchgoer delivering groceries to his neighbors in freezing temperatures, and it is about denying him the necessary medication he needed after he had a kidney transplant, while he was in custody.

It is about a legal permanent resident, Donna Hughes-Brown. She was locked up for 143 days, threatened with deportation, because she did do something wrong: She bounced two checks that totaled 75 bucks over 10 years ago.

It is about Steven Tendo from Vermont, an asylum seeker and a pastor. He was arrested and detained outside the medical center in Shelburne where he works, and he said it was done brutally and it was done at gunpoint. This is not a threatening man. He is currently now being denied medication for his diabetes.

ICE is in such a rush to meet its quotas set by Secretary Noem and Mr. Miller that they are literally grabbing anyone and everyone they set their eyes on. What is their accent? What is their color? Where are they located? And ICE does not care who gets hurt in the process.

Wilmer Chavarria is a U.S. citizen, and he is the superintendent in the Winooski School District in Vermont. He was detained and questioned for hours by agents in Texas. His technology was seized and searched. He described this as ``the definition of psychological terror.''

A 21-year-old man protesting in California was blinded in his left eye. He told the AP after this he was ``just glad'' to be ``alive to tell my story.''

A pastor in Chicago, a reverend, was praying out loud at a protest, and an agent shot multiple rounds of pepper balls in his face, and he was sprayed by more pepper spray. It was indiscriminate and really vicious.

So far in 2026, ICE agents have shot eight people. These shootings happened in Minnesota and across the United States: Arizona, California, Oregon, Maryland, and Illinois. Officers fired on at least nine people who were in their cars, much like the horrible case of Renee Good. Ms. Good, as America all knows, was a 37-year-old mother, and Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old VA nurse. They were killed in Minnesota. We all saw it. No justification whatsoever.

We have seen massive ICE deployments in Minnesota and elsewhere: Washington, DC; Illinois; California. These ICE expeditions, with massive numbers of people coming in, are interfering with local law enforcement and creating real terror in the communities.

ICE has raided schools and farms and workplaces, including in my State of Vermont, that sow fear and chaos on farms like the Pleasant Valley Farm in Berkshire and construction sites in Hardwick, VT.

DHS is also rounding up so many people, they literally don't have places to put them. For the first time in our history, more than 70,000 people are in ICE detention. That is an increase of 75 percent from the previous year. Not surprisingly, the conditions are deplorable. There was no preplanning of how to accommodate the people that the government was taking into custody. Detainees are fed food laced with worms. These are all documented facts. It is not a political argument. This is what is happening. Many places have toilets that don't flush.

In a detention center in El Paso, a man named Geraldo Lunas Campos was choked by an officer, and he died. A teen was beat up by officers and now has hearing loss. Just this week, NBC reported that an 18- month-old baby who was detained in south Texas was rushed to a hospital and treated for pneumonia, COVID-19, and RSV in serious and severe respiratory distress. She was described as being at the brink of dying.

Thirty-five people died in custody last year, and at least 6 died in detention centers in January of this year alone.

ICE is in such a hurry that many of the officers don't get adequate training. Their identities are concealed. Most disturbingly, ICE and Kristi Noem accept no responsibility for the actions of their officers.

We are discussing reforms now in Congress, and the basic reforms that should be made are that any Federal Agency, including ICE, should have to abide by the standards that apply in Alabama or in Vermont to our local law enforcement agencies, where there is training, where there is accountability, where there are body cameras, where there are mechanisms in place for training, supervision, and accountability.

But the real question, in my view, is this: Do we want to support a policy of mass roundups? That is the policy of the administration right now. When it comes to the question of border security, yes. When it comes to the question of deporting criminals, yes. But mass roundups with untrained people that are meeting quotas and where we have seen the violent overreactions in many cases; where we are seeing suffering inflicted on people who are in detention because there is no capacity to provide humane treatment to the people taken into custody by the government; where we have seen the havoc in communities where there are raids on our farms that need the migrant labor and there are raids in our construction sites; where, when there is an influx of thousands of agents from ICE, it totally disrupts local law enforcement; and where so many of these people who are being rounded up are not a threat to our safety--are not a threat to our safety--what is the benefit to the American people? What is the price that our communities are paying? And what is our responsibility as a U.S. Senate to open our eyes and candidly assess what is the impact of a mass deportation policy?

My view is that we have an opportunity to move beyond what has been incredibly partisan rhetoric about the immigration issue. The reason we have the opportunity is because there is now bipartisan agreement about a secure border. There is now bipartisan agreement about deporting criminals.

Isn't it time for us to have the discussion about legal ways to have an immigration policy that is safe and secure and benefits the American people, as immigration has benefited us from the onset of our history?

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