Washington, D.C. (September 15, 2026)—Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, led Subcommittee Democrats in highlighting how the Trump Administration is diverting federal law enforcement resources from fighting serious crime to immigration enforcement—while Judiciary Republicans held yet another hearing blaming states and localities rather than scrutinizing how DHS is using its record resources. The hearing included testimony from: Naureen Shah, Director of Government Affairs, Equality Division, ACLU; Elizabeth Carter, mother of William Micah Carter; Anatoly Varfolomeev, father of Anya Varfolomeev, and Frederick Akshar II, Sheriff, Broome County, New York. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are failing to live up to their promise to go after the “worst of the worst.” - Ranking Member Jayapal said: “For the first time this summer, the majority of people that DHS arrested were people who pose absolutely no threat to public safety, and the number of people with criminal convictions who are arrested by ICE actually decreased—decreased, not increased. That’s because when DHS expends all of its energy to go after parents, longtime friends, neighbors, when [Homeland Security Investigations] agents who are supposed to investigate serious crime and human trafficking are instead being moved to street sweeps and riding along with local police for random traffic stops, we are less safe, not more safe.”
- Ms. Shah said: “Homeland Security Investigations is supposed to be investigating crime. They’ve diverted more than 90% of them to doing civil immigration arrests. Instead, they’re going after grandmothers and children and parents of small children instead of going after human traffickers, people who are bringing drugs into our community.”
- Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon said: “The Administration is picking up au pairs and construction workers, spending our tax dollars to invade cities and terrorize our communities, using camera crews to make themselves look tough or like comic book heroes and posting AI slop and disinformation to tell lies about our immigrant neighbors and about the victims of rogue federal agents.”
- Rep. Deborah Ross said: “ICE is going after farm workers, factory workers, children, grandmothers, spouses of U.S. citizens who show up for their immigration check-in appointments and, frequently, immigrants with legal status and work authorizations. […] ICE should be going after exactly the people who killed your children. That is what they should be doing.”
Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, but DHS and ICE are pushing states and localities to divert their own limited law enforcement resources to federal immigration enforcement. - Rep. Summer Lee said: “Republicans are obsessed with forcing our cities and our states to get in line with their cruel immigration agenda.”
- Ranking Member Jayapal said: “ICE has enormous amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars now that’s been given to ICE, and yet they won’t do the work to actually go pick up the people that are there. They want the local law enforcement to sometimes violate constitutional rights—violate the Constitution—and notify them.”
- Ms. Shah said: “When we’re talking about cooperating in criminal investigations, there’s nothing that stops local police from cooperating with ICE for a criminal investigation.” Shah added that requiring local police to work for ICE “diverts limited local resources” from their communities.
- Rep. Lee said: “When ICE is detaining pregnant women and failing to give basic medical care, it makes sense why some local governments don’t want to spend their time and their resources helping ICE detain vulnerable people.”
Judiciary Republicans have repeatedly focused their immigration oversight on states and localities while the Trump Administration carries out a massive expansion of federal immigration enforcement. Republicans’ own bill targeting state and local policies has sat without a House vote for months. - Ranking Member Jayapal said: “The Majority has not passed their bill because they can’t, because people know it’s not a good idea, because it doesn’t solve the problem. So they can keep talking about their bill, but their own party has refused to pass it on the floor.”
- Rep. Jerrold Nadler highlighted how congressional Republicans have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda without adequate oversight. Ms. Shah responded: “Congress has injected $240 billion into our immigration agencies, making their budgets bigger than most militaries in the entire world.”
- Ms. Shah said: “What this Administration is doing is not the hard work to make our communities safer. They’re not making our communities more safe because they’re not trying to make crimes like the one your children experienced not happen again. They’re simply running up their deportation numbers, arresting as many people as possible.”
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