Liberty and Justice for All
Floor Speech
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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because we have all witnessed the brutality of ICE on the streets of America, and Members of Congress have witnessed that brutality behind the closed walls of detention centers across our Nation.
ICE has become a rogue, abusive agency that should be disbanded. ICE agents are roving across our communities with impunity, killing people in cold blood, including U.S. citizens, while Donald Trump's cronies profit.
These ICE agents have not gone rogue alone. The entire agency has gone rogue under the direction of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. Masked ICE agents in unmarked cars are working with Trump allies, like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, to meet quotas that fuel the President's mass deportation campaign.
Every single day they are stopping, profiling hardworking Brown men on their way to construction jobs in the early morning, families on their way to school, going to pick up their kids, and H-E-B workers, grocery store workers in Texas getting off their shifts at warehouses and stores at night.
Let us remember the names of those whom ICE has murdered. The first one was a San Antonian, Ruben Ray Martinez. There was another Texan, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo of Houston. Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero--these folks were victims of the ICE murders.
In Texas alone, over a dozen people have died in ICE detention. These deaths are not accidents of an overwhelmed system. They are the results of this administration engineering a rogue agency to profit at the expense of vulnerable people. We must shut down places like the Dilley detention center, a trailer prison, where children as young as 2 months old are in prison.
For each child who is thrown in there, for each pregnant woman thrown into Dilley, there is an American company, CoreCivic, with American investors who make more money for each child, each woman, and each person who is in prison.
We have allowed for the commodification of child imprisonment in our United States of America under President Donald Trump. This must change. ICE should be disbanded. It has gone rogue, and we must shut down the Dilley detention center.
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