Congress Must Rein in ICE to Improve the State of the Union

In times of war and peace, prosperity and depression, American presidents have complied with their constitutional obligation to deliver to Congress an update on the nation.

It’s a hallowed tradition, but this year, due to President Donald Trump’s own actions, the state of this union is bleak. However, the good news is that We the People are showing tremendous courage and pushing back to protect each other.

Our country approaches a crossroads at ever-increasing speed, pushed to this brink by the Trump-Vance administration’s lawless immigration force. The administration says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol are pursuing the president’s cruel mass deportation agenda. But the implications are far broader, causing violence, chaos, and civil rights abuses at an accelerating rate. Around the country, federal agents have descended upon communities, targeting citizens and noncitizens alike, going after young children and families.

For months, the Trump administration has encouraged federal agents to commit horrifying abuses claiming they have "absolute immunity.” The results have been devastating: Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez, and Keith Porter Jr. are dead at the hands of federal agents. Another 39 people have died in ICE custody in the second Trump administration, including 8 just this year. And it’s only February. In addition, ICE has detained at least 3,800 children under this administration.

Federal agents have masked up, demanded to see people’s papers, scanned their faces, and taken people off the street simply for “looking” Somali, Latino, or Asian. Citizens have been dragged from their homes in their underwear, thrown in unmarked vans, driven to detention centers in federal buildings, shackled at the ankles, and denied water. Communities in Minneapolis, Chicago, Charlotte, D.C., New Orleans, Los Angeles, and beyond live in fear — their anxieties justified by accounts of federal agents dragging children from their beds in the middle of the night, stalking families outside hospital emergency rooms, staking out schools, and following kids home.

None of this can be justified as pursuing people who pose a serious public safety theat. According to a leaked internal DHS document, fewer than 14 percent of people detained have been convicted of a violent crime. Instead, these tactics are calculated to inflict terror on anyone not born in the U.S., regardless of their immigration status, as well as on their families and communities.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents, acting more like a secret police force from a totalitarian country than from a nation of laws, have also targeted people exercising their First Amendment rights. People who record federal agents, peacefully protest, offer mutual aid in their communities, or even pray in front of ICE facilities are being sprayed directly in the face with tear gas and pepper spray, shot with pepper balls, surveilled digitally, and followed home. Many have suffered injuries, had property damaged, and experienced severe trauma.

Despite these direct assaults on our constitutional freedoms, we are also seeing the fortitude and resilience of our communities. Minnesotans have turned out week after week — sometimes in sub-zero temperatures and always at personal risk from violent federal agents — to document and peacefully protest the attacks on their neighbors. And their courage has already forced the administration to retreat. The administration has said they’re pulling back agents from Minnesota, although they have not even suggested they are stopping their unlawful policies and practices. The Border Patrol’s ringleader, Greg Bovino, was demoted. Some agents have admitted to lying about agents’ violence.

Public opinion is firmly against Stephen Miller’s dystopian police state and the federal government’s violence overall, and we’re making it known. Nearly 300,000 people joined the ACLU to send messages to their members of Congress, urging them to reject any bill that would fuel ICE and Border Patrol’s lawless operations.

Thanks to the powerful advocacy of people across the country, Congress recently refused to fund DHS without new restrictions. Now, the administration is grudgingly acknowledging a need to negotiate further limits on ICE.

Congress has the power to rein in this rogue agency. Congress must protect our rights by ending ICE's rampant racial profiling and halting the construction of huge human warehouses. It must stop ICE from putting small children behind bars and push for accountability so victims of abuse can get justice. Congress must mandate transparency, so federal agents take off their masks, turn on body cameras, and fully cooperate with any federal, state, and local investigations into wrongdoing.

These important steps would serve as just a downpayment on dismantling the lawless and bloated secret paramilitary force, with a budget bigger than the Marine Corps’, currently terrorizing our communities. We’ve seen the cost of Miller’s hate-fueled terror campaign, from rights violations to the suffering of small businesses because their employees are targeted. People are afraid to get urgent medical care, even to give birth. Classrooms are half-empty. Witnesses to crimes are afraid to come forward. Immigrant family members, friends, and neighbors are afraid to leave their homes and take part in daily life — unable to make the many contributions to our communities we have long counted on.

Ultimately, we need to remake an immigration system that roots enforcement in the rule of law, creates a pathway to citizenship for those who have been longstanding residents, and celebrates the ways immigrants make our country stronger rather than scapegoating and dividing.

You can count on President Trump telling us tonight that the state of the union is the strongest it’s ever been. He may be right, but not in the way he thinks. His attacks are backfiring because we know that our union is strongest when we defend the rights of all of us. It’s up to us to create a stronger, better America, and it starts with Congress reining in the president’s rogue DHS paramilitary.