By Ariana Figueroa | D.C. Bureau | Gov & PoliticsWASHINGTON — Nearly all Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee failed to show up for a Wednesday hearing convened by Democrats to highlight President Donald Trump’s aggressive tactics in his mass deportation campaign that have ensnared U.S. citizens.
It marked a rare full committee hearing that Democrats were allowed to conduct because of Minority Day in the House.
Democrats used the opportunity to call witnesses who are U.S. citizens and were harmed, in some cases shot, by federal immigration officers. Lawmakers also focused on two U.S. citizens killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Following the deadly shootings in January, Democrats refused to approve any more funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which has led to a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security since mid-February.
“Under President Trump, ICE and CBP have killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood, and shot, beat, harassed, arrested, or locked up countless more innocent people,” the top Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said. “Congress cannot stand idly by while Americans are hurt and killed by their own government.”
Democrats also invited Trump officials tasked with crafting and carrying out the president’s immigration agenda: White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, the border czar.
Neither Miller nor Homan showed up. The White House did not answer questions from States Newsroom regarding Miller or Homan’s absence from the hearing.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson blamed Democrats for keeping “the Department of Homeland Security shuttered, not caring about vital services – like TSA, FEMA, and ICE – going unfunded.”
“Instead of lying about President Trump’s extremely successful deportation operations of criminal illegal aliens, House Democrats should fully reopen the Department of Homeland Security and stop putting illegal aliens before American citizens,”Jackson said.
The chair of the committee, Andrew Garbarino, called Wednesday’s hearing “a distraction from the fact that DHS has been shut down for over 65 days and the security impacts of that (are) real.”
Garbarino, a New York Republican, and the other GOP lawmakers on the committee did not ask any of the witnesses any questions.
Americans under fire
The Americans harmed by federal immigration officials include:
- Marimar Martinez, a Chicago preschool worker whom Border Patrol officers shot five times.
- Rev. David Black, whom ICE officials shot in the face with pepper-ball rounds while he protested outside an Illinois detention facility.
- George Retes Jr., an Army veteran in California whom immigration agents apprehended on his way to work, tear-gassed and kept detained for three days.
- Ryan Ecklund, a real estate agent in Minnesota whom federal agents detained after he filmed them while at a grocery store.
Martinez has appeared in the past before Congress in unofficial Democratic events to share her story about how on Oct. 4, she was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum.
DHS shared her photo online, falsely claimed she rammed into Border Patrol with her car and labeled her a domestic terrorist. The Trump administration tried to indict her on federal charges, but eventually dismissed the case against her.
“On Friday I was teaching the young children at the Montessori school and we were singing and dancing and getting ready for spooky season preparing fall activities to do the following week and on Saturday my own government was calling me a ‘domestic terrorist’ and I was in a federal detention center with bullet holes all over my body,” she told the committee. “There were times where I did not believe this was all real and then I would touch my bullet wounds and knew it was certainly real.”
She said she was concerned other people would be shot and killed by federal immigration agents, as Pretti and Good were.
“It’s bound to happen sooner or later if we don’t hold these agents accountable for their actions,” she said.
No apologies
Following the two deadly shootings by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the leaders of ICE and CBP appeared before the Senate and House committees that have jurisdiction over DHS.
While there, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott and ICE acting head Todd Lyons refused to apologize to the families of Good and Pretti. Lyons has announced he will resign at the end of May, saying he wants to spend more time with his family.
The aggressive immigration deportation campaign in Minneapolis, which has a high Somalian refugee population, also spurred calls from Republicans to push then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. She stepped down last month after Senate Republicans grilled her over an ad campaign and slow response to providing disaster relief.
The president tapped former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin to steer the department. The Senate last month confirmed Mullin.
One of the witnesses, Retes, said his goal is for Congress to pass legislation in order to hold federal immigration agents accountable.
“Federal officials are basically impossible to sue,” Retes said. “Federal agents basically have immunity.”
He added that he wants Congress to do something, and expressed his frustration that “change doesn’t move fast enough.”
Ecklund criticized federal agents within DHS, and pointed out the irony of the department’s unofficial slogan of going after “the worst of the worst” in conducting immigration enforcement.
“‘Your best’ and the ‘best of DHS’ is the least that the American public deserve,” he said. “You have not given us your best.”
Martinez said agents are not held accountable.
“I’ve been through hell and back,” she said. “These agents — Charles Exum — have not even been held accountable for their actions.”
She added that she doesn’t even know if Exum is still working for CBP.
Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green asked Martinez if she would feel comfortable showing lawmakers where she was shot. She agreed and rolled up her sleeve, showing a dark scar on her upper arm, and pulled up her pants to show another wound across her upper thigh.
“It’s hard to manage all this, to even process what happened,” she said. “Being shot for protecting your community. I want the world to see my pain, my trauma. This is not something to joke about. This is my life.”
Green thanked her and told her that “you deserve justice.”
Minister shot with pepper balls
Black told the committee that he was “horrified by the radical evil being perpetrated by my government.”
He said he was outside a detention facility in Chicago and was in the middle of praying when he was shot by federal agents with pepper balls.
“I am outraged by the blasphemy of those who support brutal ICE and CBP tactics yet call themselves Christians,” he said. “They make a mockery of the sacrifice of God’s love on behalf of the world.
“Yet instead of living into Christ’s rich promise of a Kingdom of peace, freedom, and prosperity, many of those calling themselves Christian are blindly supporting institutions like ICE and CBP, even as they dominate, coerce, and terrorize American communities,” he continued.
The only path forward, he argued to lawmakers, is to dismantle ICE and CBP, and redirect that funding to “support programs that feed the hungry, sate the thirsty, welcome strangers, clothe the naked, and care for the sick — for in the words of Jesus, ‘just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’”
