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WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s floor statement

Ranking Member Raskin
House Committee on the Judiciary
Floor Speech on H.R. 30
Thursday, January 16, 202

America’s immigration laws are like an admissions policy for the country. How do you get into America? What gets kicked out of America and for what reasons?
 
Our immigration laws today will get you kicked out—deported—if you commit rape, other sex offenses, domestic violence, or indeed any other crime of violence. That’s the law today—you’re convicted, you’re deported, you’re out. That’s been the law for decades in America.
 
Our immigration law establishes a similar policy on the way in. It provides that anyone seeking admission to America who has committed a violent sex offense or a crime of domestic violence is inadmissible to our country. Since the 1930s, case law has made clear that rape, domestic violence, and sexual battery are all Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude (CIMTs) which make the perpetrator inadmissible to America. That’s been the law in our country for decades.
 
So, what does H.R. 30 add? If committing a sexual assault or domestic violence will already render you deportable and inadmissible under our laws, why do we need to create another section of the law doing the same thing? Is it necessary or is it redundant? Of course, its being redundant and unnecessary may not be a sufficient reason to vote against a bill—after all, I cheerfully admit that this body, under the stewardship of our friends, passes a lot of unnecessary and redundant legislation in this House just to “send a message,” as they say. And perhaps this is what our friends set out to do today, to pass another simple “messaging bill.”
 
The complication here today is this: the way this messaging bill is actually written will create big problems for many victims of domestic violence. That’s why more than 200 national and state and local groups advocating for the victims of rape and the survivors of domestic violence—the people across America we should be listening to today—strongly oppose the bill our colleagues have brought forward. The National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence sent us a letter urging us to reject H.R. 30 and I urge every Member of Congress to read this letter carefully before you vote on this bill. The group who is fighting domestic violence warned that this legislation “can ultimately have devastating consequences for immigrant victims of domestic violence.” The signers of this letter include a range of national groups like the YWCA, the National Council of Jewish Women, the AFL-CIO’s Coalition of Labor Union Women and dozens of state and local groups like the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Catholic Charities in Omaha, Nebraska, and dozens and dozens more from states across the country. Please read this letter. These are groups working to change the law and the culture to stop rape and domestic violence in our country, but they see that this poorly drafted legislation would end up harming untold numbers of victims of domestic violence themselves, the putative beneficiaries of the act.  
 
Here’s why. When it comes to a Crime Involving Moral Turpitude, there are exceptions in the law to protect domestic violence victims who often get swept up in the very laws designed to protect them. Anyone who has ever been a prosecutor or a public defender in this chamber knows that it is common for abusers to accuse their victims of domestic violence themselves, and assault, sometimes truthfully and often falsely. It is well-known that victims get arrested, prosecuted, and sometimes convicted simply for defending themselves and fighting back against their abusers and rapists.
 
Here’s a real-life example drawn from the domestic violence survivor advocacy groups opposing this legislation. A young woman on a student visa here was trapped in an abusive relationship and her estranged boyfriend tried to rape her. She fought back, biting his ear and drawing blood. She then called the police to report the rape, but upon seeing the boyfriend’s injury, the officers also arrested the female victim whose language skills kept her from comprehensibly explaining what had happened. She spent several days in jail, and was ultimately convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, but the judge sentenced her to time served once she got a lawyer and translation services which allowed the context of the violent abuse that she had endured to be made clear to the police and the court.
 
Because of exceptions that exist in our laws today, this woman was not deemed inadmissible to America because her simple assault charge carried less than a six-month penalty. But under the new bill, which would establish inadmissibility without any waivers or exceptions at all for victims, she would clearly have to be deemed inadmissible to America. No exceptions would exist any longer for domestic violence victims who have committed minor crimes in the context of resisting their violent abuse.
 
This means that the victim in this case, who is legally in the United States on a student visa while she attends college, would be barred permanently from obtaining a green card or any new immigration status, simply because she was a victim of attempted rape who fought back against her attacker. With no ability ever to adjust her status under the law, she would be deported and kicked out of our country permanently. Now, some would say that is the price she should rightfully pay for biting or hitting back at her violent abuser. But do we really want to say that we would not want our daughters or sisters or mothers to do the same in that situation? Should we really compound the horrors of domestic violence and assault with a harsh immigration penalty on victims? Do we want to give domestic abusers more power over their victims by giving them more opportunities to file charges, true or false, against their victims to keep them from reporting their abuse to authorities?
 
It seems we live in a time, Mr. Speaker, when it is very easy to forgive sexual abusers, assailants, rapists, and sexual harassers but very hard to forgive their victims for fighting back. Look what’s going on across the hallway. Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a conference in 2017 and entered into a major private financial settlement over the charges, and there are people planning to vote for this legislation today who also support his nomination. Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon and her husband were recently sued for failing to act on credible allegations of sexual abuse within the World Wrestling Entertainment organization. And, of course, the President-elect’s initial pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, faces numerous allegations of sex trafficking a minor and statutory rape. 

There are civil adjudications of sexual abuse going to the very top of the new administration.
The law as it stands today, and as we have had it for decades, provides for waivers to protect the immigration status of victims of domestic violence who are charged with fighting back against their abuser. While the proposed bill would retain waivers for victims in the deportability context, it would not allow for waivers or exceptions in the inadmissibility context. I don’t know why this discordance and asymmetry were written into this legislation, whether it was deliberate or just accidental, but the upshot is that the entire national movement working to arrest and reduce domestic violence in America is now opposing this bill that claims to be in support of domestic violence victims.
 
We note another serious problem with the bill which makes it backfire against victims. It would significantly expand the definition of domestic violence to include the statutory Violence Against Women Act definition that is used for the civil context of grants and funding. This much broader definition was never designed to be used in criminal law. In fact, the definition explicitly says it covers conduct “that may or may not constitute criminal behavior.”
 
The definition of domestic violence under existing federal criminal law, which is currently also used in immigration law, focuses on the element of physical force. But the broader, VAWA-based definition, appropriately fitted for grants and funding purposes, sweeps in a broad range of behaviors, including “verbal, psychological, economic, or technological abuse.” 
 
Once again, in the inadmissibility context, this transposition can have severe consequences.  Imagine a domestic violence victim covered by DACA who flees her abuser and removes half the money from their joint bank account or enough to get a train or a bus ticket to get away. Imagine the abuser calls the police and claims she stole from him. By merely admitting to the fact that she took those funds, the victim could end up being deemed “inadmissible” and then removed from America. Remember, the new inadmissibility grounds created by this bill do not require a conviction but a mere admission of the underlying facts.
 
The point is clear. If our goal is to “Prevent Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens,” as the bill’s title says, our current criminal and immigration laws already do that. We have strict punishments in place for anyone who commits such crimes, including deportation and inadmissibility for foreign nationals.
 
This bill will only make the immigration laws much harsher on the victims of domestic violence, sexual battery and rape, which is the opposite of what we need to be doing.
 
America, when it lives up to its ideals, Tom Paine said, will become an “asylum to humanity”—not an insane asylum, mind you—but a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious, political and economic oppression and also, we might add, the kind of private gender violence that creates oppression and tyranny in the home. Two centuries later, Ronald Reagan echoed this sentiment reminding us that America was a “shining city upon a hill”—a refuge “for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
 
Last year, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act, and we must continue our work to oppose the tyranny of domestic violence over women in our country, but this legislation would set back our efforts to protect survivors and stop abuse. I ask the majority to reconsider this legislation and for my colleagues to join us in opposing it.
 
I reserve the balance of my time.