-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we all swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and that means that we have an obligation to fund the government--but only a government that is complying with the Constitution, that is obeying and being restrained by the Bill of Rights, that is upholding the laws of the land.

Right now, the Department of Homeland Security is out of control. They are not upholding the Constitution. They are not complying with the law. They are not respecting Americans' rights.

They are tear-gassing schools. They are murdering American citizens. They are disappearing legal immigrants to this country.

Right now, we are not funding the Department of Homeland Security because Democrats have made it clear that we would be violating our oath of office if we funded a Department that is using taxpayer dollars to violate the Constitution and the law.

I wanted to come down to the floor this evening to remind my colleagues about what is happening all over the country, because now that we are trading legislative texts, now that we are deep in the weeds of immigration policy, the real life experience of people in this country, of communities that are being terrorized by an out-of-control ICE, risks getting lost in the discussion.

So I want to spend just a few minutes reminding my colleagues on both sides of the aisle what the stakes are here, what the real world looks like out there if you are on the receiving end of a Department of Homeland Security that doesn't care about your rights as an American citizen or as a resident of this country.

And so I want to go through some of the most egregious, out-of- control, illegal, unconstitutional practices that ICE has been utilizing all across the country over the course of the last year. I want to get specific with you so that you know why we believe this moment is so serious, why American citizens believe this moment is so serious, because this isn't just an opinion held by Democrats, who are simply saying: If we are going to fund ICE, it has got to be an ICE that is obeying the law.

This is what the American people think, who have watched images like this and others that I will show you and have said from both sides of the aisle--Republicans, Democrats, Independents--that we don't want this ICE; we don't want this Department of Homeland Security. We want the immigration laws of this country to be upheld but not through the abuse of people's rights, not through violence.

This is a screenshot of a video that went viral all across the country about a month ago. The man in this video's name is Ramon Menera. He was stopped by a Border Patrol agent outside his home in a Minneapolis suburb.

First of all, you may ask: Why is a Border Patrol agent outside a Minneapolis suburb? That is not on the border.

Well, that is the first thing that has gone wrong here. CBP, HSI, and all sorts of Agencies that we fund in order to do very specific jobs are now doing an entirely different job--interior immigration enforcement. That is violative of the appropriations law. We don't fund CBP to be wandering suburbs in Minneapolis, looking for people who they want to detain.

This should be a prerogative that matters to both Republicans and Democrats. Our spending power and the spending power in the Constitution is vested in the legislative branch. Our spending power is mute, is pointless--we are powerless--if we tell the administration we are giving you this amount of money to spend on protecting the border, and they just say: Screw it. We are not going to use that money to protect the border. We are going to take those people, and we are going to put them on a different job that they are not trained for.

Well, when you have CBP agents who are not trained to wander apartment complexes, searching for people they want to detain, things like this happen every single day.

Ramon Menera was stopped and cuffed because of his accent. This is actually what the agent tells him in this video. If you go online and watch this video, you will hear the agent tell Ramon Menera that he is being detained because he has an accent.

Ramon Menera is a U.S. citizen. Guess what. There are a lot of U.S. citizens who have accents. Frankly, most of us have forefathers that, when they came to the United States, had an accent. That is not a justification for you to be detained.

He was even carrying his ID on him. All the agent had to do was check his ID to confirm that he was a U.S. citizen. But the agent did not check his ID. Instead, that agent arrested him, put his wrists in zip ties, and took him away from his property. He was forcibly detained by Border Patrol even though he was a U.S. citizen.

This didn't happen just once. This has happened thousands of times all across the country. It is still happening today--that individuals who are legally in this country are being detained, zip-tied, and arrested because they have an accent, because they look like they might be from Mexico or from Central or South America.

It gets worse, though. Ramon's 5-year-old daughter was inside and watched this entire incident through the window--5 years old. To this day, she has refused to go outside since because she fears for the masked men that arrested, zip-tied, and detained her U.S. citizen father.

The reason that we are demanding that these indiscriminate roving patrols--these ``show your papers,'' ``arrest you if you have an accent'' patrols--end is because they are fundamentally un-American, and they are illegal. And yet they continue. So unless we restrain them in law, unless we stop ICE and CBP and HSI from wandering through suburban neighborhoods, listening for people who may have accents and zip-tying them until they can prove that they are an American citizen, then they will continue.

This should upset Republicans just as much as it upsets Democrats-- the idea that this man, a U.S. citizen, was zip-tied, detained, and arrested while his 5-year-old daughter watched, even though he had ID on him proving he was an American citizen. This has to end, and we shouldn't fund ICE until it does end.

In another quiet Minnesota suburb--this one called St. Peter--a woman sat alone in her car, observing and recording ICE officers as they patrolled her community. This should go without saying, but it clearly needs to be said anyway: What this woman was doing is fully protected by the Constitution. Observing and recording Federal agents and local law enforcement is a First Amendment right. You get that right by being born in the United States of America, being a resident of the United States of America. It is not suspicious. It is not a crime. But ICE doesn't like that people are watching them, tracking their illegality.

So what happened next should alarm every American citizen. Three unmarked ICE vehicles began chasing this woman down a rural road. When she didn't pull over, they boxed her in. As soon as she stopped, these three masked agents jumped out of their vehicles immediately with guns drawn, screaming at her to get out of her car.

Again, she has committed no crime, no traffic violation. She refused. She calmly asserted her rights. The agents then forced her door open, dragged this woman onto the road and handcuffed her. This is an unarmed woman who had committed no crime. She is alone on a country road, and an unmarked car boxes her in, and out jump masked men with guns and drag her out of her car.

That is not the United States of America. That is Stalinist Russia. That is Maduro's Venezuela. We don't allow, in this country, masked men to pull over law-abiding citizens, in unmarked cars, and drag them out onto the road.

They put her in her vehicle. They began driving her in this car to Minneapolis. About 20 minutes later, the agents received a call from their supervisor. The woman's husband had contacted the St. Peter Police Department and reached the police chief, and the chief called the ICE officers and told them they were violating the law and to let this woman out.

The only reason we know this story is because, when her husband arrived, he started recording it and we have these frightening images.

For every incident that we see like this, there are hundreds of others that we don't, and it won't end until we decide as a body to require that ICE officers stop wearing masks, identify themselves, and record what they are doing.

This should alarm anybody who believes in the rule of law. This photo was taken--I want to get this one right. It is outside of Roosevelt High School, and on a Wednesday afternoon in Minneapolis while students and faculty were gathered outside of the high school for early dismissal, armed, masked Border Patrol officers, some from the elite special forces team, crossed over onto school property and began tackling people.

They handcuffed two members of the faculty. They released chemical irritants into the crowd of students and teachers, and in videos taken by witnesses, you can see the agents firing tear gas. This is at a school. Just when the kids are all congregated after school outside the school, they are firing tear gas into these students.

Chaos erupts. Dozens of kids run. They take shelter at a nearby library. Let me say that again. Children are running from Federal agents who are tear-gassing them to find shelter in a nearby library. One school official told a reporter that the agents ``didn't care. They're just animals. I've never seen people behave like this.''

The school was forced to close for the rest of the week. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, before the Trump administration, there was a policy that ICE did not operate in sensitive locations, in schools, in hospitals, in churches, and daycares, places where there were lots of little kids, sacred places.

These aren't supposed to be battlegrounds. These are places where children and other vulnerable populations are known to be. But this continues. Schools are under assault.

And so what are we saying? Not another dime for DHS if they are going to use taxpayer dollars to turn schools into scenes of terror. The use of Federal funds to conduct immigration enforcement at sensitive locations should be prohibited, full stop.

You probably recognize this car. That is the blood of Renee Good. This photo was taken after an ICE agent shot and killed her, an unarmed American citizen, a mother of three. But here is the story I want to tell--not the story of the incident, the story of what happened after the incident.

After the incident, career Federal prosecutors did exactly what they were supposed to do, they moved quickly to preserve evidence. They began coordinating with State authorities to investigate a potential use of excessive force. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension-- these are the experts when it comes to police shootings--were prepared to work alongside the FBI to determine the facts.

But they never got to determine the facts. The career Federal prosecutors never got to do their job because the Trump administration intervened.

Senior officials at the Department of Justice shut down the investigation. The Trump administration shut down the investigation of the murder of Renee Good.

Why? Because they worried that the investigation would actually come to a factual conclusion because the Trump administration had decided within hours that Renee Good was a terrorist and they were only interested in an investigation that confirmed their political judgment.

The career prosecutors refused to go along, and instead, they resigned. When political pressure overrides independent investigation, justice fails, and democracy dies. This is exactly why we are demanding that if we are going to send our taxpayer dollars to fund ICE, we have to be able to protect the authority of States and localities to investigate potential crimes, including excessive force by Federal officers.

Evidence has got to be preserved and shared, and investigations have to be impartial. That is not a wild demand. Just investigate murders. Investigate the killing of American citizens, like we have always done. Under no circumstances should we be funding a Department of Homeland Security that believes, as the Vice President said, that they have complete immunity for killing American citizens.

Independent investigations, a pretty reasonable demand.

Finally, this is a letter. You are not going to be able to read this 14-year-old's actually pretty legible handwriting, but her name is Ariana. And Ariana and her mom Stephanie were in the country legally. They were immigrants in this country, but they were playing by the rules. Her mom had gotten a work permit. They were doing their regular check-ins with ICE, and then everything changed.

One day, they walked in to do their regular check-in, again, complying with the law, applying for asylum, had gone and gotten a work permit, not working under the table. They went to do their check-in, and they were swept away and detained.

You have this image that the Trump administration tries to proffer that they are going after violent criminals or maybe they are going after only the people who snuck into the country.

No, no. Ariana and her mom Stephanie came to the United States legally, applied for asylum legally, got a work permit legally, were showing up to their check-ins, and they were sucked into the detention system--14 years old.

The law says you are supposed to keep kids in detention for only 25 days. Ariana was there for 45 days. Again, ICE violated the law. She was sent to a detention center called Dilley. I went down to Dilley, tried to do an inspection of Dilley. I am the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Appropriations. I was denied entry to Dilley.

I met, later that night, two younger boys, younger than Ariana, who had been in Dilley for over a month, month and a half through Christmas.

I sat and looked at these boys. I sat across the table from them for about an hour. They were alive on the outside, but they were dead on the inside. They were dead on the inside.

They spent Christmas in a detention center. They call it the baby jail in Texas because there are literally hundreds of kids, most of them under 5 years old, who are being detained in prison cells.

Ariana wrote this letter to try to tell the world what the conditions were like inside: Since I got to this center, all you feel is sadness and depression. People have their courts, but they only last 15 minutes. Our rights are not being provided. We don't have schools, doctors. All they have here are nurses. If you need medical attention, the longest you have to wait is 3 hours, but to get any medicine, pill or anything, it takes a while. There are viruses here all the time getting people sick. Serious situations happen, and the officers can't take them serious enough. There are no consequences. They don't care.

Limited or no access to medical care, no access to legal representation, apathetic guards, traumatized kids, that is the reality of what is happening inside of these detention centers.

In a center down the road from Dilley called Pearsall, there is--I don't know--1,500, 2,000 people in that facility. That facility is just for adults. Do you know how many rooms there are for legal consultations? Four. It is all rigged. It is all rigged. They sweep up legal immigrants like Stephanie and Ariana. They throw them into detention. They don't let them see their lawyers, and they disappear them back to their home country.

This isn't America. The Bill of Rights still matters here. The Constitution still matters here. In this country, we don't have unidentified masked men ripping American citizens out of their cars. We don't allow Federal law enforcement officers to shoot and kill American citizens with impunity.

We allow people to apply for legal status. We don't choose to intentionally traumatize children. We don't let officials wander around communities listening for accents and zip-tying people who don't speak the way that they think Americans should speak.

We are demanding that ICE follow the law. We are asking our Republican colleagues to join us in strengthening the law to make sure that these roving patrols, these murders with impunity, this traumatizing of children, the tear-gassing of schools ends.

We would still enforce American immigration laws, but we would do it in a humane, legal way. So I appreciate the time of my colleagues today.

I wanted to walk you through what is happening. This is all still happening. Just because all the TV cameras aren't in Minneapolis any longer doesn't mean that these practices aren't still real. And until ICE decides to act in a legal manner, we shouldn't give them one more dime.

That is our constitutional--that is our constitutional-- responsibility.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source