US House Republicans vote against
blocking ICE from deporting US citizens
Republicans on the US House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee universally voted against an amendment on Wednesday that would have prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using federal funds to detain or deport US citizens.
Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal from Washington proposed the amendment to a budget bill, which was approved in the House of Representatives on April 10. She stated that
since President Donald Trump began his second term, “a troubling pattern has emerged with US citizens being detained by immigration authorities,” citing numerous examples over the past few months. Jayapal described this trend as “unconstitutional, dangerous, and fundamentally wrong.”
GOP Stays Silent On Deporting Americans In Unusual Immigration Markup
Raskin argued, “The Trump administration has abandoned the rule of law. If Donald Trump can sweep noncitizens off the street and fly them to a torturer’s prison in El Salvador with no due process, he can do it to citizens too, because if there is no due process, no fair hearing, you have no opportunity to object. And indeed, several American citizen children, including one with cancer, were flown to Honduras with no due process, as a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana found.”
Raskin pointed to federal judges who said that if that could be done to noncitizens, it could also be done to citizens. “Because if you assert as your defense that you’re a citizen, but you don’t have the opportunity to get before a court . . . they still get away with taking you out of the country.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) offered examples of students and others swept up by ICE actions. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) spoke in front of a poster of a Rolling Stone article with the headline: “Trump Has Now Deported Multiple U.S. Citizen Children With Cancer.”
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) paraphrased the famous poem by German Pastor Martin Niemöller, which begins with, “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out.”
Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) showed a harrowing video of a news report that began, “A family is traumatized after armed federal agents busted into their home as they were sleeping and took almost everything they owned.” The U.S. citizen family, a woman and her young daughters, moved to Oklahoma only two weeks earlier. The reporter said, “They told federal immigration agents they had the wrong people, but those agents kept treating them like criminals, even though they are all U.S. citizens.” The news report featured the crying mother, who said, “I did feel at times that I was going to die. . . . I kept praying to God, please let me live through this moment.”
Republicans Vote Against
Ensuring ICE Does Not Deport U.S. Citizens
Rep. Jayapal, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, offered the markup’s second amendment. The amendment read: “None of the funds made available by this subtitle may be used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain or deport a United States citizen.”
“Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, I hope we can all agree that U.S. citizens should never be detained by ICE or any agency conducting civil immigration enforcement,” said Jayapal. “They certainly should not be deported.” She pointed to an ICE policy memo that stated the agency did not have the authority to detain U.S. citizens. “And yet since the second Trump administration began, a troubling pattern has emerged with U.S. citizens being detained by immigration authorities.”
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