Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Hearing with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem

Washington, D.C. (March 4, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the full committee hearing examining Kristi Noem’s failed leadership of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s hearing.

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WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin

House Judiciary Committee

“Oversight of the Department of Homeland Security” 

March 4, 2026

Thank you, Chairman Jordan. 

Welcome, Secretary Noem, we’re glad to meet you, even though it’s been 13 months since you took office and 5 weeks since your federal agents shot and killed two American citizens in the streets of Minneapolis. 

Renée Good was a 37-year-old poet, about 20 years younger than you are now, and like you, both a devout Christian and a mother of three. She was on her way home from school drop-off when she encountered an ICE operation and one of your agents shot her three times. She bled out in the driver’s seat of her car after your agents refused to let a doctor or EMTs get anywhere near her. 

You expressed no sympathy for her family and no regret for her killing by an ICE agent. No, you ran a smear campaign against Renée Good, calling her a “domestic terrorist.” 

Alex Pretti was also 37, and like you a federal worker. He was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital, outstanding at his job, providing comfort to many vets in their final hours. He was standing on a street corner filming your agents as they roughed up peaceful protesters. Americans have a First Amendment right to record government agents in the discharge of their duties in a public place, as eight different federal circuit courts have unanimously found. But your agents pepper-sprayed Alex Pretti for helping a woman they had pushed to the ground. Then they threw him to the ground, beat him up, stripped him of a lawful firearm he never touched and then, after confiscating it, shot him ten times dead. Before his body was even cold, you launched a smear campaign against him, asserting without evidence that Alex Pretti had committed an “act of domestic terrorism” and intended “to kill law enforcement.”

This disturbing video tells the true facts you tried to cover up with propaganda, and we can play it only because other brave Americans used their phones to capture the reality of this horror. 

You’ve provided no evidence to contradict what America has seen. 

There have been three homicides in Minneapolis in 2026 and your agents committed two of them. Rather than work with state and local authorities to solve these homicides, you barred Minnesota’s investigators from the crime scenes. You're denying them access to all the evidence you have about the deaths of their own citizens. It smells like a coverup and it makes me wonder who the real domestic terrorists are.   

But you didn’t just lie about Renée Good and Alex Pretti. In dozens of cases, federal judges have found that your officials lied in court. A Reagan-appointed judge rejected the testimony of your Acting ICE Director as “disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable.” Another judge called the affidavit of a top ICE official “the sorriest statement I’ve ever seen,” adding she was “shocked when [she] saw it” and that “[if] you were asking to get a warrant issued on this, I’d throw you out of my chambers.”  And here are just a few more examples out of scores we could examine. 

Yesterday, you testified under oath to the Senate that you are following court orders. But that’s a lie too. Just last month, your lawyers were forced to admit that you had violated immigration court orders more than 50 times in 10 weeks — and that was just in the District of New Jersey, one of 94 judicial districts in America. In Minnesota, Judge Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee, found that “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” 

And while you make a daily mockery of our courts and our Constitution, you’re treating the billions of dollars our GOP colleagues gave your Department like a personal slush fund.

You budgeted an astonishing $220 million for media consultant contracts so you can star in self-promoting photo shoots and lavish ad campaigns featuring the Lifestyles of Rich and Famous Cabinet Secretaries, like this one of you on horseback at Mount Rushmore, which was shot during last year’s government shutdown. 

You’re living rent-free in the official waterfront residence reserved for the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard. You spent $172 million to buy not one, but two different private jets for your travel. And now you’re using taxpayer funds to lease a third jet, a $70 million luxury 737 Max with a queen-size bedroom in the back, a deluxe serving bar, and four flat screen TVs. A big, beautiful jet paid for by the Big Beautiful Bill. 

Yesterday under questioning in the Senate, you said you plan to refurbish this jet to turn it into this kind of airplane, which is what’s now being used for deportations, in order to save the taxpayers money. But wouldn’t it be cheaper just to buy one of those in the first place? What’s next, will you buy a Rolls-Royce and turn it into a Metrobus?

I was almost prepared to buy the story about how this luxury jet was purchased both for executive travel and also for mass deportation of immigrants and that it is just awaiting a retrofit. But then I heard about an airborne episode of extreme entitlement, arrogance, snobbery and contempt of working people that brought me back to earth.   

Apparently when your special blankie was left on one of government jets and not transported over to the new one, your “special government employee” Corey Lewandowski chivalrously stepped forward to fire the pilot—although he had to be rehired immediately because there was no one else who could fly the two of you back home. This story is full of meaning.   

Secretary Noem, you may be flying high now, maybe even a little too close to the sun, but with all these free planes and pilots and houses, you’ve travelled a long distance from your actual job and the things you should be doing as Head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Your massive agency is charged with protecting the homeland. It includes FEMA, TSA, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as ICE and CBP.

Yet you’ve hollowed out its core national security mission. You redeployed thousands of people responsible for tracking terror financing and fighting cyber threats to go work on your mass immigration roundup. 

You reassigned to the immigration roundup agents working a key national-security probe into Iran’s terror-financing, paralyzing that investigation. 

To run what’s left of DHS’s ruined terrorism prevention office, you actually installed a 22-year-old intern whose chief listed qualification for the job was that he had participated in a Model UN club his junior year in college.

Through FEMA, you’re supposed to provide disaster relief to States and communities. Yet last summer, as floods devastated central Texas and killed 135 people, including 25 girls and 2 counselors at a Christian summer camp, you withheld crucial support, including search and rescue teams, for 72 hours. Why? These were three crucial days during which people drowned and died waiting for your approval. 

You promised to use ICE and CBP to expel “the worst of the worst,” undocumented immigrants guilty of committing violent crimes, like the ones responsible for murdering the children of the angel moms here with us today. Instead, your masked agents have been indiscriminately rounding up any and all immigrants — and citizens who your agents think look like they might be immigrants. They have arrested kindergarteners, daycare teachers, and parents dropping off kids at school. They drag grandparents out of their homes in their underwear in sub-zero temperatures and rip children from their beds in the middle of the night, or use them as bait to arrest their parents. 

Just last month, your agents picked up Nurul Shah Alam, a severely disabled and nearly blind Rohingya refugee, lawfully in this country, who didn’t speak English. You claimed they dropped him at a safe, warm location. You lied — they dropped him off miles from his home, in the dark, at a closed coffee shop, in freezing temperatures. Now, because of this cruelty, this man is dead.

You have a quarter of a million employees and a budget larger than that of 150 countries. You command over 80,000 sworn law enforcement officers — more than the number of police officers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, and Dallas, combined. On top of that, my Republican colleagues have handed ICE an additional $75 billion by slashing funds for Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance, and rural hospitals. 

Secretary Noem, your job is to protect the homeland. But the most precious possession we have in our homeland is our freedom and the Constitution and Bill of Rights that protect it. You seem to have forgotten that.

The billions of dollars showered on your Department have paid for violence and chaos in the American heartland and a sweeping assault on the basic rights and freedoms of the people. But the heroic people of Minneapolis have shown America how to fight this reign of terror and win: with the truth, with unbreakable solidarity, with mutual self-help, with creative joy and humor and music, with mass nonviolent protest, and with irrepressible love of children and kindness towards animals and all living things.   

You’ve turned our government against our people and our people against our government.  But the people, I must say, are winning today, although we know we must wake up every day like Minneapolis and go and fight for our democratic freedom. We are in the fight of our lives. 

And so we have serious questions for you today.  I yield back.

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