Washington, D.C. (January 22, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing on immigration enforcement.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as delivered, at the subcommittee hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s floor statement
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security, and Enforcement
Hearing on “Restoring Immigration Enforcement in America”
January 22, 2025
The Chairman began by saying the point here is to restore the rule of law, restore the rule of law. Can you even pretend to do that, if you stand by and support Donald Trump, who on day one, as the Chairman of the Committee just said, day one of his presidency, pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists, including hundreds of people who violently assaulted and attacked American police officers.
Let’s just take one person who is free today, Julian Khater, who had been convicted after having every due process protection, the right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses, the right to introduce evidence, but they had him completely. They knew exactly what happened. Most of this was videotaped, so the whole world could see it. Well, Julian Khater repeatedly violently assaulted our officer protecting us in Congress, Officer Brian Sicknick, who then proceeded to have several strokes and died on January 7th, 2021, the next day.
The family of Officer Sicknick is absolutely devastated and demolished by what’s just happened. I invite any of my colleagues, including the new Members to this Committee who maybe weren’t here on January 6th and didn’t experience the trauma of that violent insurrection, when we saw a mob marauding through here, yelling, “Hang Mike Pence, Hang Mike Pence,” and looking to assassinate Nancy Pelosi. And now, you have the temerity to come forward and say, this is about public safety? How much safer are we now with these 1,500 criminals at large in Washington, DC and going out into the country? Are you vouching that these are not, these people are not going to be attacking any other police officers? Are you vouching that they’re no longer a threat to public safety? What an outrage. What a scandal.
Well, the hearing’s been called not on trying to deal with the public safety crisis created by the president on day one of his presidency, but on immigration.
Now, time and again, Democrats have reached across the aisle to fix our immigration system by finding common ground through compromise. We did it in 1986, with a Democratic-led House and a Republican-led Senate, when we passed the immigration reform signed into law by President Reagan four decades ago. In 2013, under President Obama, Democrats worked with Senate Republicans on a sweeping comprehensive immigration reform bill, only to have House Republicans kill the bill because it threatened Speaker Boehner’s grip on power.
Last year, under President Biden, Democrats worked with Republican Senator James Lankford, to produce a tough border security deal, with increased border patrol, with increased technology, with increased asylum judges at the border. But President Trump and House Republicans openly and aggressively tanked the deal—they sank the ship—openly rejecting a bipartisan border agreement hailed by the most conservative Republicans in the Senate because they preferred to have a security crisis to run on than an actual border solution.
Yet as Democrats, we stand ready again to work with our Republican colleagues to fix our broken immigration system. Today, unlawful crossings at the border are lower than they were when President Trump left office. We made progress. Now is the time for us to tackle the daunting task of finding compromises and pragmatic solutions to fix the system that has not been updated in decades—a system that relegates millions of people to the shadows and leaves other people in limbo.
Let’s secure the border. Let’s make it a lot, lot harder to get into America illegally and a lot easier to get into America lawfully. That’s what America wants to see. Let’s not use immigration to destroy our Constitution—unbelievable that a lot of my friends on the other side of the aisle are sitting by idly while Donald Trump proposes by executive order to destroy Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which establishes that everybody born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. And yet, they just let that go. All of these originalists and textualists who claim to care about what the Constitution stands for, that was the whole purpose and meaning of the 14th Amendment, and now they want to destroy birthright citizenship in America, moving to a citizenship based on race instead of a citizenship based on place, which was the whole purpose of the 14th Amendment, to overturn the Dred Scott decision.
Well, we’re obviously going to have some differences moving forward because they don’t want real solutions. They just want to demagogue the immigration issue. That doesn’t move America forward. It’s just like they demagogued the issue of inflation. They said they were going to bring down prices and rent and utilities, energy costs. They said they were going to bring down the price of groceries. Not a single peep from them about that on day one. No, it’s just about releasing all the violent insurrectionists, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who are out there today saying that they want revenge. Now that’s the real program for America.
But let’s hear what their specific proposals are about immigration, if they make sense, then we will get behind them. But if it’s just more demagoguery, Mr. Chairman, I’m afraid we’re going to have to let it pass.
