Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (May 20, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on Oversight hearing on so-called “threats” to ICE enforcement, where Committee Republicans aided and abetted the Trump Administration’s campaign to stifle Congressional oversight.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.

WATCH  Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Oversight
Hearing on “Examining Threats to ICE Operations”
May 20, 2025

This week’s events show how MAGA has turned American justice completely upside down and inside out. 

Over the last week, we’ve been talking a single rogue DOGE employee who unilaterally canceled more than $500 million in Department of Justice grants to local law enforcement and victims’ rights organizations and those assisting the victims of rape and sexual assault across the country. That’s what right-wing policies do. I would say to my friend, the Chair of the full Committee, we tried to restore that money. Nobody seems to know how any of this happened, but our colleagues didn’t utter a word against our amendment, and yet they all voted against it. 

What else happened? Well, a 33-year old January 6th rioter who assaulted our police officers at the Capitol and smashed the glass pane through which Ashli Babbitt climbed before she was fatally shot, was arrested again yesterday, this time for burglarizing a neighbor’s home. 

Zachary Alam was serving an eight-year prison sentence after a jury convicted him of seven criminal felonies and three misdemeanors when President Trump granted him clemency as part of his mass pardon of all 1,600 insurrectionists and rioters for the thousands of crimes committed on that day. At sentencing, U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich described the testimony of officers who recalled Alam as “by far the loudest, the most combative and the most violent of the Jan. 6 rioters” who attacked the police in the part of the Capitol they were defending. 

And yesterday, the Trump DOJ has agreed to pay $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who tried to storm the House Speaker’s Lobby on January 6th, and who was fatally shot by Capitol Police. The DOJ had originally taken the position that her wrongful death the lawsuit was wholly without merit, that Babbitt’s civil rights had never been violated, and that the police officer acted reasonably in defense of Members of Congress and Vice President Pence. A Capitol Police investigation also cleared the officer involved, saying his actions at the height of the riot “potentially saved members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol and to the House Chamber where members and staff were steps away.”

In 2023, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said, “I think the police officer did his job.”

Although Trump’s new Attorney General is now set to give $5 million to the rioter’s family, Trump has not proposed to give any compensation to the more than 140 police officers injured, wounded, hospitalized, disfigured and/or disabled in the violence—or their families. He has also proposed no money payments to the bereaved family of Officer Brian Sicknick, an Army veteran who died at age 42 on January 7th, 2021 after being brutalized by rioters on January 6th or to any of the other officers who died in the days and weeks to follow. 

The deeply political decision to give millions of dollars to Babbitt’s family and nothing to the families of the police officers who defended the Capitol exacerbates the insult of Speaker Mike Johnson’s continuing refusal to hang a simple plaque in honor of the officers who defended the Capitol and Congress, a plaque mandated by law and now more than two years overdue on the West front of the Capitol. The Speaker’s stubborn refusal to respect the law here is craven submission to Donald Trump, who wants to pretend that the rampaging mob of Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and other lawbreakers he sent to the Capitol was made up of patriotic heroes and that the people he pardoned were “hostages” and “political prisoners.” A hostage is someone who’s been illegally abducted by a terrorist group, like Hamas, and held for a financial or political ransom. A political prisoner is someone like Alexei Navalny or Nelson Mandela who has been imprisoned for ideological reasons, not for violent assaults on the police, seditious conspiracy, or destruction of federal property. 

But the Administration’s effort to create big news yesterday was Trump’s acting U. S. Attorney in New Jersey – a blatantly political actor who bragged about “turn[ing] New Jersey red” – announcing her intention to indict Congresswoman LaMonica McIver on charges of assaulting, resisting and obstructing law enforcement based on the May 9 incident outside Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in her district that she was conducting a scheduled oversight visit with other Members of Congress including 80-year-old Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, and the Mayor of Newark.

Delaney Hall is operated by the private prison company GEO Group. GEO is a major Republican donor that gave $1 million to Make America Great Again, Inc., and has faced numerous lawsuits for its poor treatment of detainees and unsafe conditions. The Members had a lawful right to be there and to investigate, and even after ICE initiated a scuffle to arrest the Mayor of Newark on public property outside, the House Members were let in to tour the facility to conduct oversight and the tour went off smoothly. 

This indictment is a manifest fraud clearly designed to distract America this week from the Administration’s savage and unpopular effort to strip 14 million Americans of their Medicaid and health coverage, and 11 million Americans of Head Start, Meals on Wheels and other nutritional assistance programs. 

Representative McIver was executing one of the core duties of a Member of Congress—Oversight—pursuant to her precise statutory right to enter and visit an ICE facility. For the Department of Justice to charge her frivolously with assault is an outrage against the Constitution, which protects Members of Congress from civil and criminal prosecution for performance of their core legislative duties. It is also a scandal in light of the Department of Justice’s constant backing of actual cop-beating insurrectionists—including with the shocking policy that these pardons can even apply to criminal charges wholly unrelated to the events of January 6th—and the DOJ’s jaw-dropping decision to fire more than a dozen experienced criminal prosecutors simply because they worked on the January 6th case.

Yet now we have Colleagues who celebrated January 6th insurrectionists and lionized the violent assailants of more than 140 police officers from that day actually calling for prosecution of Members of the House for doing their jobs. Representative Buddy Carter called our Colleagues “rioters.” Representative Dan Bishop actually said this was an “insurrection” and a debacle “worse than 9/11.” 

No police officers or ICE agents were injured at Delaney Hall, no one died, no one was forced to retire from law enforcement, and no one is reported to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet we have Members of Congress who would gladly jettison the Speech and Debate Clause, the First Amendment and the Article I powers of Congress to score a few cheap political points at the expense of their own colleagues.

In Trump world, violent insurrectionists and cop-beating extremists are heroes. Members of Congress performing oversight functions are criminals and insurrectionists. And prosecutors of January 6th felons are fired so Donald Trump can continue to pander to his private militia of pardoned rioters and insurrectionists and a reserve army of extremists who’ve proven themselves willing to “stand back and stand by.”

Let me show you what a real assault on police looks like. Roll the tape. 

Mr. Chairman, if this is really an Oversight hearing on ICE and ICE believes a real assault took place in New Jersey, where are they? Why are they not present today? 

The star of the show is absent, and that, my friends, is no oversight.