Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Trump’s Assault on Legal Immigration

Washington, D.C. (June 25, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing on how President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are restricting legal immigration.

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
Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement
Hearing on “Restoring Integrity and Security to the Visa Process”
June 25, 2025

Thank you, Chairman McClintock, and thanks to the witnesses for being with us. 

There’s more to immigration than border enforcement, and it’s a good thing our friends are waking up to that. Trump and Stephen Miller’s ambition to deport 12 million people from the country has been a terrible failure on its own terms but even in failure it has turned our society upside down, terrorized both citizens and noncitizens, destabilized and divided our communities, wrecked small businesses and trashed our Constitution.

It’s gotten so bad Donald Trump even seems to have recognized his policies don’t fit reality. Two weeks ago he gave the game away by acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens working on the farms and in the fields are “good, longtime workers” and that he had been lobbied both by his Agriculture Secretary and by large agricultural interests to stop the raids on farms as they are spreading panic and keeping a majority of the work force from showing up at work. So he decided he would stop enforcing the mass dragnet ICE raids there and invoked the same logic for the restaurant sector, also heavily dependent on undocumented people. Of course, it would apply equally then to the construction sector, landscaping and gardening, nursing, you name it. The vast majority of immigrants, even those here illegally, are not rapists and criminals but hard-working people essential to our economy just looking to make a better life for themselves. Think of the Dreamers.

So it’s good for us to be having the first immigration hearing in memory not on enforcement tactics at the border or in our communities. This one is about visas. 

Alas, the President’s record on visas is riddled with the same extremism, dogmatism and fanaticism that have made his enforcement measures so unpopular. He and his administration have tortured our laws and trampled our Constitution to kick out permanent resident green card holders and students and target universities who voice opinions he disapproves of. As part of its effort to undertake a hostile takeover of colleges and universities, the Trump Administration interrupted interviews for student and exchange visitor visas. The result?

Approximately 15 percent of the foreign doctors slated to begin their work at teaching hospitals around the country were unable to get their visas in time to start the medical year next month. All at a time when we have a serious doctor shortage that threatens access to care and the Republicans’ monstrous reconciliation bill threatens to slash Medicaid funding on which rural hospitals rely. 

The Trump Administration has also recently implemented its xenophobic travel ban to unilaterally ban entrance to this country for all nationals of 19 countries, with minor exceptions. Categorically denying visas to nationals of these countries does not make us safer, freer, or more prosperous. It cements us in the eyes of the world as a vindictive, isolationist, and increasingly authoritarian country.

The travel ban will likely have significant economic consequences by restricting travel and migration from the targeted countries. In 2022, at least 298,600 noncitizens from countries affected by the new travel ban arrived in the United States. Most of these people come to the U.S. temporarily, spending money as tourists or as students fueling our economy. The following year, households with nationals from the targeted countries collectively earned $3.2 billion in income, paid $715.6 million in federal, state, and local taxes, and held $2.5 billion in spending power.

Donald Trump also paused the refugee program, claiming the entry of these thoroughly vetted and re-vetted individuals would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States. But then, he allowed white Afrikaners to apply via a Google Form and undergo an expedited process to come to the United States as refugees. And it should shock no one to learn that after they arrived, reporters dug up numerous antisemitic posts from one of the refugees—he had never been subjected to the new antisemitism screen being used for visa candidates.

The title of this hearing is “Restoring Integrity and Security to the Visa Process,” but how does any of this restore integrity or security to the process? These random pauses, arbitrary bans, and ad hoc detentions, do nothing to improve security or bring integrity to the system. 

Trump has turned our visa system into a terrain of caprice and selective punishment he can wield against his chosen political enemies—those who refuse to bend to his monarchical will—and use to demonize and scapegoat immigrants, including visa recipients. This war on immigrants is designed to distract us from the fact that he is trying to cut 14 million Americans off Medicaid, destroying small businesses with his chaotic and unlawful tariff policies, gutting agencies and programs charged with protecting Americans from scams and frauds, and using the pardon power to transfer more than a billion dollars from victims of crimes to perpetrators of crimes. 

Sometimes President Trump has lucid moments on immigration. During his first term while saying he wanted to build a “big beautiful wall” he said that wall would have a “big, very beautiful, door” signifying his support for legal immigration.

In these brief, lucid moments I try to find hope that my Republican colleagues will be willing to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats on common-sense immigration reform focused on:

• A secure border;
• The removal of immigrants convicted of serious crimes and other public safety threats;
• A pathway to citizenship for the law-abiding, tax-paying undocumented immigrants who Trump recently called them “very good, long time workers;” and
• A modernized immigration system that makes it easier to come here lawfully while protecting American workers.

We’ve come very close to doing this in the past. You can do it again.

Tom Paine, who arrived in the country in 1774, fell in love with America when he got here. He said this land will become an “asylum to humanity”—not an insane asylum, mind you, but a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious and political and economic persecution and discrimination from all over the world.

So, let’s live up to the original vision of the founders. This is a nation made up of immigrants and the descendants of people who were enslaved and of the original Native Americans, but this is a land of immigration, a land of immigrants, and a land of laws. We can make it all fit together, and I hope we can work together on a bipartisan basis to make that happen.