Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Hearing on Republicans’ Failed Distraction from Trump and Noem’s Assault on Free Speech
Washington, D.C. (February 4, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a full committee hearing examining Republicans’ failed attempt to distract from the Trump Administration’s violation of constitutional rights in the United States, fixating instead on European laws.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
“Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation: Part II”
February 4, 2026
Thank you, Chairman Jordan, and thanks to the witnesses.
Our Colleagues want to have a hearing about our First Amendment under attack. So let’s have it.
Our freedom of speech, our freedom of assembly, our right to petition government for a redress of grievances, and our freedom of press are under siege today by the Trump Administration and its out-of-control masked agents at ICE who operate like a lawless private paramilitary force occupying American communities across the country.
In the last several weeks, ICE agents have:
Killed Renée Good, a U.S. citizen and 37-year old mother of three, gunning her down in cold blood for exercising her First Amendment rights.
They’ve killed Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and ICU nurse treating military veterans, for exercising his right to record government officials in action and to speak to, and render aid and comfort to, another U.S. citizen, a woman violently shoved to the ground by an ICE agent. This small act of kindness, solidarity and dare I say chivalry then brought the hellfire of a gang of masked ICE agents down on Alex Pretti. As they pummeled and punched him, one agent discovered Pretti’s firearm, which Pretti had never drawn or brandished despite the instantaneous lies and propaganda the Trump administration spewed out about Pretti after he was killed. The agent confiscated his lawful weapon, which he carried lawfully under the Second Amendment and Minnesota state’s conceal and open carry law, and then the ICE agents proceeded to shoot him ten times, murdering him in cold blood simply for exercising his First and Second Amendment rights.
In case you were trying to mentally quarantine this nightmare as a Minneapolis-specific phenomenon, in Chicago Border Patrol police shot five times U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez, a Montessori schoolteacher when she was on her way from her home to her church to deliver clothes she had collected for the poor. When she saw the now-familiar aggressive violent raid taking place against people in her neighborhood, she honked her horn to warn people to get away from the danger. This prompted an agent to swerve his car into hers at which point he began shooting into her car. She could feel “bullets continue to pierce her body.” “I saw my life flash before me and slowly began to think, “This is the end of me,” she told a Democratic shadow hearing yesterday. In a now predictable pattern, phony charges against her for ramming the police car were filed and promptly dropped by prosecutors when they were clearly contradicted by the recorded facts on the ground. Miraculously she has lived to tell the story, traumatized by her own government but undaunted in standing up for American freedom.
I could recite equally gruesome and shocking cases to you for the next two hours if we had the time, but one you should check out on your own is the sickening case of Aliya Rahmin, a 43-year old citizen with autism in Minneapolis who was violently accosted and assaulted by ICE agents as she tried to make her way to a medical appointment and repeatedly shouted that she was disabled and begged to be left alone. You must look at the footage of her violent abuse at the hands of these masked ICE goons smashing her car window and pulling her to the ground to believe that something like this could happen in America. Of course, the Department of Homeland Security lied about her, immediately calling the helpless autistic woman an “agitator” the way they originally tried to defame Renée Good and Alex Pretti as “domestic terrorists.”
If there are domestic terrorists on the loose in Minneapolis, it is not the unmasked people exercising their First Amendment rights. It is the masked agents who believe they operate with absolute immunity, impunity and violent domination over the lowly citizens of America.
So, yeah, we need a hearing today. It’s been more than one month since 3,000 federal agents descended on Minneapolis, outnumbering the entire local police force 3-1. It’s been four weeks since they shot and killed Renée Good. It’s been ten days since Alex Pretti was executed in broad daylight by ICE agents whose salaries we pay and who got a $50,000 sign-on bonus and were promised ample overtime pay and whose ranks almost certainly include pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who now may have gone from beating the daylights out of our police officers to beating the daylights out of our citizens.
But in all that time, how many Administration witnesses has the Majority called to address these gross violations of our Bill of Rights? Not one.
A few days ago, Mr. Chairman, every Democratic Member of this Committee wrote to you and asked that you call Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem before us without delay. We wrote, “[t]his Committee has devoted years of oversight to alleged First Amendment violations by social media companies and has subpoenaed foreign companies over censorship abroad. Mr. Chairman: look what’s happening right here in front of our own eyes. Federal agents have shot dead two Americans in the past two weeks for doing no more than exercising their fully protected rights to protest, observe, and record law enforcement in public.”
We are glad you have heeded our calls and called Secretary Noem in. But instead of demanding Secretary Noem appear immediately, her hearing is set for a month from now. But this is a national constitutional emergency today. The government is destroying the social contract by attacking the people and our rights on a daily basis. Where is the urgency, Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Chairman, it may be that giant Republican donor and Jeffrey Epstein pal Elon Musk is upset that his company is on the hook for violating the law in Europe or that the public is angry about his platform Grok creating nudes on demand for profit. But after refusing to comply with the law, repeatedly, he was fined. We can look at all of that stuff.
In normal times, I might appreciate a vigorous scholarly discussion comparing Europe’s proactive approach to America’s laissez-faire attitude when it comes to regulating on-line evils like child pornography, cyber-bullying and the epidemic of cyber-scams taking place on-line. It would be interesting to have yet one more Committee seminar exploring whether Europe’s laws dealing with AI engines that generate revenge porn, draft suicide notes for teenagers, and promote racist conspiracy theories strike the right balance between rooting out criminal conduct and respecting freedom of expression. But we’ve got time for all of that.
This is an emergency today, what’s taking place in our own country. These are not normal times, Mr. Chairman, and there are far more sweeping, blatant and violent attacks on the freedom of expression taking place right now right here in America—not in Brussels, not in Geneva, not in a seminar room at Oxford or Cambridge. Wherever you come down on child pornography, whether you agree with the aggressive European approach or you like the Elon Musk-Jeffrey Epstein allegedly libertarian approach to child sexual materials on-line, the truth is that the European Commission’s more heavy-handed approach to such matters simply does not pose a threat—much less an existential threat—to our essential freedoms and constitutional rights. The threat to our liberty and our people today comes from the authoritarian violence unleashed by the Trump Administration and the lawmakers who stand by and let this reign of political terror and lawlessness continue against our people.
As the Chief Federal Judge of Minnesota wrote last week: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence…. ICE is not a law unto itself.”
Mr. Mayell, you are the executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. We’re grateful you’ve come to tell us what’s happening in your state—and to help us make sense of the idea that a European statute no one in America ever heard of poses a greater threat to our liberty and democracy than roving gangs of masked ICE agents gunning down American citizens in broad daylight.
Mr. Chairman, let's bring in Secretary Noem without any further delay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.