Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (April 9, 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 Donald Trump’s reckless and lawless immigration enforcement, which is undermining local law enforcement and threatening public safety.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at the subcommittee hearing.

WATCH  Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security, and Enforcement
Hearing on “Sanctuary Jurisdictions: Magnet for Migrants,
Cover for Criminals”
April 9, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Ms. Jayapal, and greetings to the witnesses. 

Donald Trump’s ruinous tariffs and calamitous trade war against the world except for Russia have crashed the stock market and cost American workers and retirees and farmers $11 trillion in one week. One week.

And the Republican majority in the House could stop this nightmare today by exercising our powers over international commerce, but they prefer to own the tariffs and own the trade war. We’ll see how well that works out for them in the future. It’s certainly not working out well for the American people. 

Now I am desperate to displace attention from this world historical economic debacle, and the fact that courts have struck down more than 55 of their lawless unconstitutional executive orders and actions, they invite us to discuss, again, immigration. So be it.

In New York City, Donald Trump’s deportation force grabbed green card holder Mahmoud Khalil for exercising his First Amendment rights in a way Donald Trump disapproved of. Now they’re trying to deport him, as well as other students across the country, using a McCarthy-era statute that the President’s own sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Berry, declared to be “unconstitutional…on its face.”

Then they tried to extralegally deport more than 100 Venezuelans—shackling them and putting them onto planes bound to a self-proclaimed dictator’s infamous mega-prison in El Salvador under cover of night—based on an 18th century law about wartime authorities called the Alien Enemies Act, which palpably did not apply to this case because we are in peacetime; Congress still has the power to declare war under our Constitution, not the president. Despite their best efforts to keep these removals a secret until it was too late, attorneys for some of the people on the plane filed a lawsuit and Judge Boasberg, a George W. Bush appointee, issued an order to stop the removals while planes were still in the air. Today, the judge in that case will likely decide whether or not to hold the administration in contempt for deliberately defying his order to turn the removal flights around. 

On one of those flights, the administration deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man, a father and husband to American citizens, who had withholding of removal – a legal immigration status that specifically blocked him from being removed to El Salvador. He won this status after the government falsely accused him of being a gang member and tried to deport him during the first Trump administration in 2019. Instead, he was able to prove that he posed no threat to public safety, and that he had a well-founded fear of persecution from gangs back in El Salvador. The first Trump administration respected that ruling. But in this second iteration, the administration violated its legal obligation and shipped him off to the Salvadoran mega-prison to be locked up in a giant cage with the very gang members whose violence he had escaped.

The administration admitted that this deportation, which had absolutely no legal basis, was done in “administrative error,” and a judge ordered them to return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States by midnight this Monday. Rather than bring back the man they admitted they wrongfully deported, the administration placed the attorney who argued the case on leave and decided to double down and appeal the order.

We have seen the Trump administration conduct indiscriminate raids that round up people with no criminal records, who have lived in our country for decades, who own homes, who pay taxes, whose family members are U.S. citizens, and who pose no threat to public safety. U.S. citizens have even been arrested and detained by Trump’s deportation force as part of these reckless and lawless raids.

Now, the Trump administration is trying to force state and local law enforcement agencies to use their own time, money, and resources to participate in these reckless and lawless raids. But under Article I, Congress has exclusive power over naturalization and immigration. And under the 10th Amendment. The federal government has no power to “commandeer” the machinery, personnel, or resources of the state and local government for federal law enforcement purposes.

Yet the Trump administration is using threats and coercion to try to force state and local cops to use their limited resources to arrest and detain students, fathers, mothers, and law-abiding community members. That means fewer cops, less money, and fewer resources to focus on protecting communities from actual violent threats—be it violent crime, guns, drugs, or drunk driving. 

There’s no power in our Constitution to do that, something I thought our colleagues believed in and respected in the system of American federalism.

These authoritarian policies have nothing to do with law and order. They are about intimidation and retaliation against disfavored populations, state and local governments, immigrant communities, students, lawyers who dare oppose the administration in court, and judges who stand up to rule against Trump’s continuing rein of unlawful actions. 

I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.