Jamie Raskin EXPOSES Trump's Criminal Record and US Military's Case

[00:00:00]Why don't we have a one serious hearing about drunk driving in America and people getting killed every single day? When I was a state senator in Maryland, I advanced legislation which passed to impose a a mandatory compulsory ignition interlock device on the cars of convicted drunk drivers.

[00:00:21]And yet what have our colleagues done about that? Nothing.

[00:00:24]No hearings, no markup, no legislation, but they will use DUI as a way to make an argument for more um our colleagues want to strike the pose of anti-crime warriors uh over this legislation, but they are complete bystanders even enthusiasts when it comes to certain kinds of crime.

[00:00:46]White-collar crime, the frauds that are sweeping the country today, any of Donald Trump's crimes, and any of the crimes committed by the convicted felons he pardons. Pardoned more than 1,500 felons who attacked and assaulted our police officers, stormed the capital of the United States, threatened to assassinate his own vice president.

[00:01:15]They did.

[00:01:17]And tried to overthrow a presidential election, and then he pardoned all of them, commuted their sentences, gave them clemency, forgave any fines or restitution that they owed to their victims, including to the United States of America. And we don't hear a peep from them about that kind of crime.

[00:01:35]We heard about DUI.

[00:01:37]Well, a lot of our families have been touched by DUI. Lots of families in America.

[00:01:43]12,000 people every year are lost to drunk drivers. 34 deaths a day.

[00:01:52]Don't all these families deserve something more than just a rhetorical invocation of DUI in order to pass a a terrible anti-immigration bill that everybody knows is going nowhere in the dwindling days of this Congress.

[00:02:11]Why don't we have a one serious hearing about drunk driving in America and people getting killed every single day. When I was a state senator in Maryland, I advanced legislation which passed to impose a a mandatory compulsory device on the cars of convicted drunk drivers.

[00:02:32]And yet, what have our colleagues done about that? Nothing.

[00:02:35]No hearings, no markup, no legislation, but they will use DUI as a way to make an argument for more immigrant bashing in America.

[00:02:48]We keep hearing fairy tales about the Obama administration, the Biden administration.

[00:02:56]If if if the Democrats had their way, they say there'd be a hundred million uh illegal aliens swarming the streets of America. If Democrats had their way, there'd be a billion people. The whole world would be here. Well, you know what? Under the Obama administration, more than 3 million people were removed, deported, and repatriated. Under the Biden administration, more than 4 million people were removed, deported, and repatriated from the country. I went back cuz I remember the hearing that we had. The Republican chairs of the Oversight and Homeland Committees interviewed the Border Patrol Chiefs for each section of the southern border to try to find out what was going on under Biden. Here's what they said. You can go back and listen to the whole hearing or check out the report. The Biden administration made investments to address the spike in undocumented immigration and to control the border.

[00:03:45]There was no open border. They tried everything they could to get one of them to say there was an open border, and they said, "No, there was no open border. There was robust drug interdiction at the border." Gregory Bovino, whom Trump made the commander-at-large of the Border Patrol, was the chief patrol agent for the El Centro sector under President Biden, and he testified about the successful Border Patrol operations he was running, and he discussed applying consequences for those illegally crossing the border and drug traffickers under President Biden.

[00:04:18]So, look, if you want to go off and continue to divide and polarize Americans and demagogue this issue, do it, but stop misstating the historical record when it comes to the administrations of President Biden and President Obama.

[00:04:35]While America's involved in an illegal, unconstitutional, disastrous war in Iran, taking American lives as well as Iranian lives, they want to replay the best of, the worst of all of their anti-immigrant fantasies, which have turned the vast majority of the country against them, as more than 60% of Americans reject the failed immigration policies of this administration. Tom Paine said, when he got over to America in 1774, 2 years before our revolution, that this country, if it lives up to its ideals and values, will be an asylum to humanity, not [clears throat] an insane asylum, but a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from political and economic and religious and intellectual persecution from all over the world. That's who we are as a country.

[00:05:23]And instead, they wanted set Americans against Americans and continue to have ICE agents killing Americans, shooting them down in the streets. And we say, "No, enough of this. Let's get together and have serious bipartisan, common-sense immigration reform." My amendment is about the necessity of ICE agents wearing body cameras, something which I think the vast majority of Americans and people in Congress agree to.

[00:05:50]We've watched in horror as poorly trained and out of control DHS and ICE officers shot more than two dozen Americans and immigrants and killed six of them including three US citizens during immigration enforcement operations since Trump has taken office.

[00:06:09]Despite these killings in the streets of America, the majority has refused to conduct any investigative oversight into these homicides or to hold the Department of Homeland Security or its agents accountable in any way.

[00:06:21]To my knowledge, the majority has not sent a single letter, marked up a single bill, or held a single hearing to try to restrain this violence against innocent people on the streets of America from Texas to Minneapolis to Maine.

[00:06:36]Democrats have been demanding reform including a requirement that all DHS officers wear and use fully functioning body cameras when conducting these enforcement operations. But despite repeated assurances from DHS that this would happen, it has not happened.

[00:06:52]Shortly after agents killed Renee Gooden and Alex Bredy in Minneapolis in January, DHS vowed to quickly deploy functioning body cameras for every officer across America but nearly six months later still hasn't happened.

[00:07:07]And the carnage continues. Earlier this month, ICE officers fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, father of three children, all of them US citizens, in Houston, Texas during an operation.

[00:07:19]The officers involved were not wearing body cameras according to reports leaving lots of questions about why this happened. Just days later, ICE officers fatally shot Yohan Sebastian Guerrero during an operation in Maine. The officers were wearing body cameras this time but no, they were not turned on.

[00:07:36]They were not functional.

[00:07:38]For both shootings, we've been forced to rely on DHS's official bureaucratic description of events because nobody camera footage is available to provide either a corroborating or a contradictory account of what actually took place. And DHS's veracity and credibility have been repeatedly debunked after eyewitnesses, reporters, and judges in federal courts have determined the government simply did not tell the truth about what happened.

[00:08:05]Following these most recent crimes against citizens, immigrants, and communities, DHS announced that all agents and officers will be equipped with fully functioning body worn cameras in the next 60 days, they said. We can only welcome this announcement, but given the administration's bloody track record, we cannot take their word for it. Trust, but verify. We need these cameras yesterday.

[00:08:31]No more bureaucratic red tape and evasions. DHS and its component agencies have consistently made false and unsubstantiated allegations about the people that its agents shot dead, including Renee Gooden and Alex Ready, who the secretary quickly called terrorists.

[00:08:49]Terrorists, she called them. A defamatory lie that she refused to retract in this committee. DHS has routinely claimed that its own homicide victims, the people that their agents shot down in broad daylight at point-blank range, were actually attacking the officers and that they had tried to weaponize their cars against them. All of this has been proven obscenely, demonstrably false, both the false charge of terrorism attributed to moms of three kids and VA nurses, and the false assignment of guilt in people causing their own deaths at the hands of DHS and ICE. In each case, evidence emerged that definitively contradicted and debunked the government's claims. In other incidents, it was found ICE agents lied and acted inappropriately, resulting in several of the prosecutions of DHS victims being dismissed in in federal court with prejudice. As a result, Donald Trump's DHS has completely lost the trust of the people that it was created to protect and serve. We need DHS using body-worn cameras to ensure the accountability, bureaucratic transparency, and public safety against a bloated masked paramilitary force.

[00:10:09]This is a basic constitutional requirement, not a partisan complaint.

[00:10:14]Most law enforcement agencies across America are using body cameras as a standard practice. Just last week, representative Republican Senator John Cornyn called it a mistake that the officers didn't have body cameras. So, it's not a question of lack of resources, Mr. Mr. Chairman. They've got the resources to do it. I urge my colleagues to support this constitutionally compelled um this thing is actually even worse than I thought now that I'm able to do some down and dirty legal research on it.

[00:10:44]Um in March of last year, the Trump administration abruptly cut off all funding for the nationwide legal services programs that serve unaccompanied children, the unaccompanied children's program. That cancellation order um was not explained. It was not justified. There was no attempt to make it consistent with the law, which requires it. Um and the consequences were immediate.

[00:11:12]There were 26,000 unaccompanied kids across the country who faced losing an attorney under the dreadful circumstances all of my colleagues have just described so eloquently. There was a group, and I'm not familiar with the group, but I certainly applaud them. Uh COSEP A versus HHS, which brought a lawsuit on behalf of 11 legal services groups and co-counseled with the Justice Action Center um and Gibson, Dunn and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center to challenge this totally unprecedented and unlawful termination in federal court, US District Court in California. And the the a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, then issued a preliminary injunction, and found that the government's actions cannot stand, totally outside of the law. The government has tried multiple times to overturn these rulings, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has repeatedly rejected it. Okay, so they weren't able to get their way and wipe out legal representation for kids just by cutting off all the money, because it's very clear that that was contrary to law. So now they want to sneak it through this legislation in a few words.

[00:12:28]Uh I see in parentheses first it says to to get them legal prep representation to the greatest extent practicable, and then in parentheses at no expense to the government. Those are the critical words, at no expense to the government. Now, I I come back to my my friend from Texas, who I I must say I'm going to miss so much when you leave, Mr. Roy, and it's always a pleasure to get to work with you on this stuff. I certainly did not understand the full extent of this. I'm not sure you did, because your argument to me seemed to be we don't need government funding because you've got these not-for-profit groups that will pick up the slack. But the whole point of that parenthetical is to strike at the government funding that those not-for-profits get, which allow them to send lawyers in. They just want to get rid of it, and in fact, there's not a lot written about this, but I found something from the McDowell Social Justice Center.org.

[00:13:23]Unaccompanied children have a legal right to counsel the government cannot ignore the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. And then in this what it says is what's actually going on is that there's an attempt to privatize the whole thing. What do you know?

[00:13:39]There's a profit motive at the center of this particular effort to strip this basic right that kids and all human beings have in court. And what does it say? The as reported by The Lever, it's a journal I admittedly don't know I don't recognize it. As reported by The Lever and its investigation, President Trump is poised to privatize legal aid for migrant children, seeking to privatize all legal representation for unaccompanied children. So, the move likely shifts these services to a for-profit ICE contractor and imposes dangerous requirements, replaces in-person services with virtual videos, slashes funding through fixed-fee contracts designed for private vendors, and results in significantly fewer children receiving any representation all. You know what it reminds me of?

[00:14:27]It reminds me of what the federal district judge down in Florida just found about the completely illegal, outrageous, and discredited $1.8 billion political slush fund they tried to set up for the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which even Todd Blodgett now says is not moving forward, but we need to put that into law for obvious reasons. He says it's not moving forward now, but the judge said that was a collusive litigation. You were on both sides of the issue. And that's exactly what they want to do here. They want to abolish a real lawyer for these kids and put in a for-profit ICE contractor, so you basically have the government being represented on both sides of the issues, and they would impose that on little children whose entire lives are at stake. That is wrong. And we should vote that down today unanimously in this committee. The whole country's got to pay attention to because Thomas Jefferson was someone who warned that if the government was to was to be allowed to violate the rights of non-citizens, it would inevitably come to violate the rights of citizens as well. And this particular language is a very vivid demonstration of that principle.

[00:15:39]Why is that? Because in the United States of America, US citizens cannot be held unless they are convicted of a crime or unless they're charged with a crime.

[00:15:50]That's what habeas corpus is all about.

[00:15:52]If you're being held by the government and you're a US citizen, you've got the right to get out.

[00:15:58]The government can't hold you. There The only two exceptions to that I'm aware of, I think, are enemy combatants in war if they constitute a threat to society.

[00:16:11]And in certain cases, I remember, and somebody maybe can look this up, there were certain cases where US citizens who were material witnesses to a crime could be held even without charges until they testified or until they gave a report.

[00:16:26]But in any event, none of that has anything to do with what's going on here. This this legislation, which the gentlelady from Washington is trying to correct with her excellent amendment, this legislation would actually say that citizens of the United States who happen to be minors can be held against all due process, against habeas corpus, and I I take it indefinitely. Am I right about that? But I Can we get that on the record, Ms. Jayapal? They could be held indefinitely as US citizens under the language of this bill.

[00:16:59]>> That's correct.

[00:17:00]>> Okay. So, um it's an old story. Thomas Jefferson warned about this during the Alien and Sedition Acts. He said, "If we are willing to sacrifice and surrender the rights of non-citizens who are being rounded up and arrested and deported without any due process at all, it is going to come back to haunt us.

[00:17:23]And we know that there are US citizens, and one of them was in my district, who've been held for many days in ICE deportation or detention facilities.

[00:17:34]That's happened to you lots of US citizens. Somebody, please find me the numbers on that. We know there's lots of citizens, but this is an attempt to codify it and to say that US citizen children can be held indefinitely by Homeland Security and ICE.

[00:17:54]Because one of their parents is being held and will just sweep in the whole family. And they rejected, I believe it was Ms. Balint's amendment to deny the right of family detention. I can't remember if that one was yours.

[00:18:08]That was Ms. Jayapal's amendment. They rejected that, so now they want to sweep the whole family in whether you're a non-citizen or a citizen.

[00:18:17]Look look how far we have come. And this is this is an old story.

[00:18:22]It's an old story not with democracies.

[00:18:24]Democracies like to respect everybody's rights, but it's an old story with empires. Empires would extend their reach over lots and lots of land, and so you had to be a citizen and not a subject in order to exercise rights, but inevitably because of imperial practices, the rights of citizens would be sacrificed and denigrated and diluted just like the rights of the non-citizens. Let's get back on the path towards being a democratic republic and not acting like an empire with paramilitary forces that kill US citizens without warrant, that kill immigrants without any reason. I want to uh salute Ms. Lofgren on making that excellent point. You know, I had um a group of business leaders from my district in my office not so long ago talking about the horrific effect that this violent immigration clampdown is having on people's desire to come visit the United States. People are literally afraid to come to the United States of America right now and it is killing the hospitality industry. It is damaging hotels. My district is right on the border of Washington D.C. and they're seeing dramatic reductions in the numbers of people want to come to our country. Now we want to make it even worse and say if you slip up as the distinguished general lady from Georgia says, through no fault of your own because there's a blizzard or in this shocking climate change weather there's hurricanes or whatever and you don't get out in time and now your visa expires suddenly you're a criminal in the United States when we're trying to get people to come here to go to Anaheim, California to see the distinguished gentleman's district or go to Disney World or come to Washington D.C. which used to be known as the center place of politics for freedom and justice all over the world. And now we're sending this really cruel sick message. But the other point I really liked that um the general lady from Georgia made was that this happens to lots of people. Even happens to Republicans, to conservatives where they're suddenly out of alignment because there's some bureaucratic misstep. It could even be the government's fault. You guys have got to check out the Associated Press's reporting about Melania Trump.

[00:20:46]And she luckily she ended up getting an Einstein visa for people with extraordinary ability.

[00:20:52]I'm not quite sure what the whole background was to that. That goes to you know, people like Niels Bohr and John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Pele the soccer legend. But in the meantime, when she was in the country she worked and did at least 10 modeling assignments unlawfully. She didn't have the work visa when it happened between September 10th and October 15th of 1996.

[00:21:13]And I hold no grudge against her. That kind of thing has happened to a lot of people. Should she have been thrown in jail?

[00:21:19]Should she have been made into a criminal because she was suddenly out of bureaucratic alignment? The distinguished gentleman from Texas says 40% of the people in that situation, and for him, that seems to be an argument for getting tougher and militarizing the whole thing. I think that demonstrates >> time has expired.

[00:21:36]>> Thank you very much. Obviously, we've had some profound differences about the the body and the substance of this legislation. You guys have defended family detention. You have rejected a mens rea, knowing willfulness requirement, which was something that I always admired the gentleman from Texas for supporting before, but we think a lot of constitutional principles have been absolutely discarded and abandoned in the process in the process. I would hope at least when it comes to the question of the title of the legislation, we could all be together in defending the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which of course holds that no person can be elected more than twice to office. This was added in I think it was 1951 when it finally got added, and I don't think that we should send out any kind of confusing signal to the public by adding the words permanent Trump to a federal law. And a lot of the president's hardcore mega allies and supporters have been advancing the cause of Trump serving beyond the two-term constitutional limit. We've heard stuff like that from Andy Ogles.

[00:22:48]I think we've heard it from Miriam Adelson. Even Steve Bannon said that there was a plan, a strategic plan in place on this. And President Trump himself, of course, has repeatedly flirted with the idea in public.

[00:23:01]Um uh and this committee should not feed this dangerous fantasy that we will have any president serve permanently uh in violation of the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution. The president has already lavished praise on dictators uh who've declared themselves uh in office for life, people like Kim Jong Un, uh President Xi, the president of the CCP, and Vladimir Putin.

[00:23:27]Um all of these autocrats who plan to serve for life. Uh that's not how democracy works, and that's not how American democracy works. So, please, let's not feed this fantasy. Let's all agree just to remove those two words. It doesn't alter the substance of the bill, and it and the new title will more accurately describe what you want to do in any event. And with that, I submit it to the wisdom and the conscience of the entire committee. Thank you, Mr.