Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Hearing on Trump’s Immigration Dragnet and Republican Threats to Defund Local Police
Washington, D.C. (September 1, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing on Republicans’ efforts to force state and local police to carry out the Trump Administration’s chaotic mass deportation agenda, diverting limited resources from fighting crime and making communities less safe.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Pramila Jayapal
Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement
Hearing on “Sanctuary Policies: Tragic Consequences”
September 1, 2026
Thank you, Chairman McClintock. Greetings to all of our witnesses. And greetings to all of the sheriffs who’ve come from the Free State today.
President Trump, whose approval rating has now fallen below 33%, promised us that they were going to repair the broken immigration system and make us safer by pursuing “the worst of the worst.” But his masked paramilitary squads, bloated with tens of billions of dollars in tax money, are attacking and killing ordinary people, American citizens, lawful permanent residents and undocumented people who have no criminal record or arrests. Rogue agents are terrorizing communities across the country, shooting down even U.S. citizens at point-blank range in broad daylight just for exercising their First Amendment and Second Amendment rights. Since Donald Trump returned to office, immigration officers have shot at least 22 people, killing six of them, including three U.S. citizens, Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Ruben Ray Martinez.
I was visited by a former detective in Maryland who retired after more than 20 years in office, who told me that he drew his firearm once and made a warning shot in his entire career. But you have people getting trained for a few weeks by ICE who get out and start pulling their guns on people and shooting within several weeks of being on the street.
Instead of targeting criminals, ICE has pounced on parents in the school pickup lane, arrested people at daycare centers and in churches, thrown tear gas outside elementary schools and under cars with children seated inside, smashed the windows of cars and dragged the passengers out, arrested students for writing op-eds, and held U.S. citizens against their will in immigration detention without bothering for days or weeks to verify their citizenship status. And that happened to one of my constituents. Just last month, in Texas, a five-year-old child was detained with his father while on their way to a soccer game. They’re beating people up. They’re no longer going after “the worst of the worst”—they are acting like the worst of the worst.
They’ve taken a further step into the darkness even as our country is at war. As American servicemembers fight and die in Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional, aimless, and endless war of choice in Iran, ICE has decided to deport the spouses of U.S. soldiers and indeed whole American military families. Last month, the wife of an active-duty U.S. citizen Army sergeant, the mother of a six-year-old daughter, was deported, after she was detained outside of a Walmart in front of her terrified daughter. In another heart-breaking story, the immigrant father of a sailor serving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln was detained. His son has been deployed under stifling and miserable conditions in the Middle East for nine months and his father was anxiously waiting for him to come home when immigration authorities detained him. Only after a massive community outcry was the elderly father released. Under the Trump Administration, more than 50 parents and spouses of active-duty servicemembers have been detained.
As the National Debt soars over $40 trillion, one quarter of it coming from the wild spending of one president—Donald Trump, our MAGA colleagues have provided the DHS with more than $240 billion for immigration enforcement in this Congress alone. The agency has hundreds of thousands of employees and 80,000 sworn law enforcement officers—more than the number of police officers in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Dallas, combined. Yet because ICE refuses to focus on the “worst of the worst,” despite these unprecedented and staggering resources taken from the taxpayers, ICE is failing at its duty to keep us safe.
In June of this year, a Republican witness—a county sheriff—testified that his office notified ICE on eight occasions that individuals were in its custody and available for pickup. Despite its gargantuan budget, ICE completely failed to respond in two of those cases or 25%, resulting in two felony offenders being released into the community. That was testimony in this committee. But that’s actually much better than Loudoun County, Virginia. In Loudoun County, generally, ICE issued detainers for 419 people, but ICE only picked up 253. That means 166 of them were never even picked up by ICE. 40% of them weren’t picked up by ICE. And that’s the crux of their whole complaint here.
Instead of trying to conduct oversight of DHS and demand accountability for this catastrophic and colossal waste of public resources, the Trump Administration and my Republican colleagues keep throwing more money at the problem. For example, the Trump Administration has diverted over 28,000 officers from their critical criminal law enforcement roles to work on civil immigration enforcement instead. Just a few weeks ago, the DHS Inspector General—a Trump appointee—released a report detailing how badly this monomaniacal focus on immigration was harming our fight against opioids. Federal agents are spending 30% less time working fentanyl cases and, as a result, fentanyl seizures have dropped by 40%. That means more opioids getting into our country, onto our streets and into our bodies so they can have ICE agents picking people up in the kindergarten drop-off lane.
Judiciary Republicans’ solution this week is to rededicate themselves to this failing strategy. They have passed a bill to force underfunded state and local jurisdictions to use more of their own funds and resources to do the bloated federal government’s job of immigration enforcement. That means cities and localities would have fewer cops, less money, and fewer resources toprotect their communities from violent crime, guns, drugs, or drunk driving. What’s worse, my Republican colleagues have proposed defunding police departments across the country in any jurisdiction that decides state and local governments and not ICE should get to decide how state and local police departments are run.
Even the Speaker and the rest of the Republican majority are refusing to endorse and advance this Defund the Police anti-Sanctuary City bill. Here in the Judiciary Committee, we have already debated and voted on this Defund the Police bill. Republicans passed it out of the Committee in March of this year, six months ago. Yet for the past six months, the Speaker has refused to put it to a vote on the House floor.
It seems even he realizes that, after Trump’s poll numbers have sunk like a stone and the majority of Americans have rejected their authoritarian police-state tactics, it is just bad politics and terrible policy to bring this bill out. Republicans on this Committee have voted to strip protections for military families with pending green card applications. They have voted against requiring ICE officers to wear body-worn cameras. They have voted to strip children, including toddlers who are in the U.S. without a parent, of their right to have an attorney represent them in immigration proceedings. And they have refused to conduct any investigation into the hundreds of millions of dollars DHS has squandered on luxury private jets—complete with bedrooms and bars—and glamorous horseback photoshoots for Kristi Noem, the prior secretary
My Republican colleagues keep holding these hearings because they want the American public to believe they have policies backstage that they haven’t unveiled in this Congress that they will reveal in the next Congress to make us safer. But they don’t. Their policies are so bad—so divisive, so toxic, so symbolic and so off-point—that even Speaker Johnson won’t put them on the floor. It is not fair to keep bringing the same witnesses back for legislation the Committee already passed which the Leadership refuses to bring to the floor. In the ordinary legislative process, you have hearings so you can pass legislation out and advance it in the process. Here, our colleagues have totally turned it upside down. They’ve introduced a bill just so they can keep having hearings, but they’re not doing anything with their bill.
I want to thank our witnesses for being here. I would especially like to thank Ms. Fox and Mr. Coleman. Your stories absolutely need to be heard by America, and you deserve a national nonpartisan audience for your story, and you deserve justice. I’m terribly sorry for what you and your families have been through and continue to go through every day. I hope that your daughters, Dalilah and Carissa, draw strength from your fierce and passionate advocacy on their behalf. You, and the American people, deserve better than today’s hearing. You deserve more than empty promises. We all deserve an America where our children are safe and where law enforcement officials around the country are focused on protecting communities, not meeting quotas imposed by Stephen Miller or some other ideologue. You deserve—we deserve—a Congress that will finally repair a broken and cruel immigration system.
I yield back.