Congress showed ICE leaders images of ICE brutality. Their response was telling.
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After months of watching federal agents terrorize communities all across the country in the name of immigration enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security’s top brass sat before Congress on Tuesday to answer questions about the deaths of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, and the fates of countless others who have been caught in the crosshairs of the president’s mass deportation effort. Though Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, mostly deflected any responsibility and insisted that the agency conducts only targeted arrests, Democrats came prepared with receipts to remind us all just how blatantly racist and out of control the White House’s immigration agenda has been.
“You are only here because public outrage has become so unavoidable,” Rep. LaMonica McIver, of New Jersey, said during the House Homeland Security Committee’s oversight hearing. McIver is being prosecuted by the Trump administration over an incident in New Jersey when she was barred from entering a detention facility. “You are here, Mr. Lyons, because white people are getting shot in the face and chest when the cameras are rolling.”
Lyons remained straight-faced, offering no explanation for his agents’ extreme use of force or denial about his agents’ racial profiling of Americans. That profiling is something the Supreme Court essentially endorsed last year, after the justices issued a decision allowing the federal government to stop Hispanic migrants based on their “apparent ethnicity,” as well as other factors, like if they have an accent or work certain types of jobs. This, predictably, has led ICE to overwhelmingly target Black and brown Americans with excessive force.
Indeed, this was one of the main subtexts of the hearing. New Jersey Rep. Nellie Pou, for example, asked, “Mr. Lyons, I speak Spanish. If I wasn’t wearing my member pin, would me being a Latina and speaking Spanish be enough for ICE agents to harass me or shove me into one of your unmarked cars?”
Lyons answered no, but as Pou and other Democratic representatives pointed out, this has not been borne out by the reality on the ground; even off-duty officers have recently been profiled by ICE. When Rep. Troy Carter, of Louisiana, directly asked Lyons if his agency was arresting or deporting Americans, Lyons denied that it was “arresting” Americans, before quickly adding that it did “detain” Americans. As Carter pointed out, this was a distinction without a difference.
When it came to the way agents currently present themselves to Americans, New York Rep. Tim Kennedy asked whether Lyons would instruct his agents to no longer wear masks and institute a uniform that includes visible identification—one of 10 demands congressional Democrats are requesting in the ongoing negotiations over whether to fund DHS beyond Saturday’s deadline. Lyons immediately retorted, “No.”
And when Rep. Eric Swalwell, of California, asked Lyons if he would apologize for his department calling Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists,” he refused. Lyons also insisted that when his agents arrested Ramos as he made his way home from preschool with his father, “the men and women of ICE took care of him.” Later in the hearing, Lyons also claimed that agents played the boy’s favorite song and got him McDonald’s. Meanwhile, it took the intervention of Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro for a visibly unwell Ramos to be released from detention. The administration immediately tried to detain him again.
This was just one of many moments when administration officials offered what felt like a completely different reality from what people on the ground are experiencing with ICE officers.
Rep. Seth Magaziner, of Rhode Island, brought up the case of federal agents in Chicago, who pepper-sprayed a 1-year-old as she sat in the back seat of her father’s car. “Is it proper procedure to aim pepper spray into the window of a moving vehicle?” Magaziner asked Rodney Scott, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, who also testified. “We try to avoid that,” he said.
Magaziner continued to push. “Were any of your agents investigated or disciplined for this?”
“I’ll have to get back to you,” Scott said.
Magaziner then showed a video and zoomed-in photo of an agent firing pepper spray directly into the face of a protester who was pinned to the ground by multiple agents and asked if this was proper procedure for the use of pepper spray. “I cannot respond to that because you’re only showing one piece, and that subject is clearly not compliant,” Scott said, while refusing to confirm whether there was an open investigation into those agents.
“Your agency has been repeatedly caught on tape using violence against civilians, and you can’t even tell me if any of these agents have been investigated or disciplined,” Magaziner said. “You are supposed to be making people safer, and instead your agents are being unnecessarily violent.”
Tuesday’s hearing was the first time ICE leadership has testified before Congress under the second Trump administration, as the White House agreed to the testimony in a clear attempt to contain the fallout from Good’s and Pretti’s deaths. Though it will not immediately solve the current chaos being wreaked by the president and his mass deportation mastermind Stephen Miller, the hearing did serve as a cathartic moment of rage. For a brief period of time, Democrats accurately embodied the feelings of Americans all across the country who are facing ICE in their communities with no real defense.
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