Chuck Schumer Rains Hell On Trump, Noem Over Alex Pretti Killing, Asks Senate to Block DHS Budget

If we trust our own eyes and ears instead of Trump administration propaganda, it's pretty clear that Alex was murdered in broad daylight. Mr. President, the Senate gavels into session with the conscience of this nation shaken to its core. Last Saturday in the Eat Street district of Minneapolis, 37-year-old Alex Pretty was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent after he was trying to help a woman thrown to the ground by federal officers. The many videos of Alex's death circulating online are grisly, they're horrifying. They appear to show Alex was shot 10 times in less than five seconds. They show he held nothing more than a cell phone in his hand. If we trust our own eyes and ears instead of Trump administration propaganda, it's pretty clear that Alex was murdered in broad daylight. The grief and anger his parents must feel right now must be staggering. He was a decent young man, an intensive care nurse at the VA who dedicated his life to helping others. In fact, the morning after Alex Pretty was killed, I was at a doctor's appointment, and as it turned out, my doctor's assistant was from Minneapolis. She knew Alex Pretty. She said he was just the kindest, gentlest soul you'd ever meet, not a bad bone in his body. Alex Pretty did not deserve to die, nor did Renee Good deserve to die two weeks ago. Shot in her own car, mere minutes after dropping her kid off at school. Enough is enough, and that's what America is saying from one end of this country to the other. What ICE and CPP are doing in Minneapolis and other cities around the country is not border security and certainly not law and order. What ICE is doing is lawless disorder. What ICE is doing is state-sanctioned thuggery, and it must be stopped. ICE must leave Minnesota today, not tomorrow, not next week, but today. There are reports that the president is thinking about a reduction in force. A reduction isn't good enough. President Trump should act now to completely withdraw ICE and immediately turn down the temperature. Americans support law enforcement. Americans support common-sense border security, but America does not support ICE terrorizing our communities. Look at this picture. This is the kind of picture we're seeing more and more in American cities when ICE descends upon them. Federal agents shooting at and threatening protesters. Black ICE SUVs roaming the streets and agents barging into homes without warrants. ICE encircling schools with riot gear and using kids as bait and terrorizing our communities to the point that people are afraid to go to work, to church, shop for groceries. This madness, this terror must stop. The American people, Democrat, Republican, Independent, demand that the chaos and lawlessness of ICE be severely reined in. This week, the Senate will step into the breach. In a few days, the Senate will consider a package of six funding bills sent to us recently by the House, and five of those bills are ready to go and should quickly pass. I'll say more about that in a moment, but in the wake of ICE's abuses and the administration's recklessness, the Senate must not pass the DHS budget as currently written and must be reworked to rein in and overhaul ICE to ensure the public's safety. The fix should come from Congress. The public can't trust the administration to do the right thing on its own, and Republicans and Democrats must work together to make that happen. In the meantime, I will vote no on any legislation that funds ICE until it is reined in and overhauled, and Senate Democrats are overwhelmingly united on this issue. ICE should meet the same basic standards of accountability and due process that any law enforcement agency is asked to meet. Now, separately, to finish the appropriations process, Leader Thune should split the funding bills and move forward with the five that already have broad support from both parties. If Leader Thune agrees to split the bills, just as Speaker Johnson split them in the House and puts the five on the floor, I'm confident they will sail, sail through the chamber, and we will have funded 96 percent of the federal government. But if Leader Thune insists on holding a vote on DHS legislation that he knows will not pass, then he will guarantee yet another unnecessary government shutdown this Friday, and the shutdown will be on Leader Thune's shoulders. Leader Thune's choice is very simple. Move the five bills that are ready and fund 96 percent of the government while we work to improve the DHS bill, the Homeland Security bill. Or Thune can trigger a shutdown by forcing a vote on a bill everyone knows cannot pass at this moment, the combined bill that contains DHS. The ball is in Leader Thune's court. He must quickly move to prevent a shutdown. In the meantime, the heads of ICE, CBP, and USCIS should all testify before the Senate as soon as possible. We must not wait for hearings weeks from now. The American people demand truth and accountability right now. I'm glad that Republicans like Senator Paul have said likewise, but we must also be candid. It is bone-chilling that in the aftermath of the killings in Minneapolis, some of the Trump administration's top officials have chosen to blatantly lie to the American people like full-fledged authoritarians. Stephen Miller raced to Twitter to call Alex Pretty a would-be assassin who tried to murder federal law enforcement. If you'd watched the videos of the killing, you'd know this is an outlandish, and shocking, and totally dishonest, despicable thing to say. Meanwhile, Gregory Brevino, Donald Trump's top border patrol officer, also claimed, without a shred of evidence, that Pretty wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement. And then, of course, there's Kristi Noem. Merely hours after Pretty's death, Noem claimed again, without so much as a morsel of evidence, that he had committed an act of domestic terrorism and wanted to perpetrate violence. You know what the reaction of these Trump officials, too many of them seems to be, when something terrible happens? To lie about it. That's their immediate reaction. Not to find the truth. Not to express any sympathy to those who are dead. But to lie, lie, lie. It's despicable. It's so un-American. It's so different than what we have seen in so many previous administrations. Lies. All of it. Just blatant, sickening lies. And that is what these administration officials almost automatically turn to when there's difficulty and there's trouble. Kristi Noem is a liar. She's vicious. She's also incompetent. Donald Trump must fire her at once before another American is killed under her watch. So I'll say it again. It's bone-chilling that Donald Trump's goons will so eagerly and almost lazily lie right to the public's face. Right to the public's face. And where is the accountability from Donald Trump? He said nothing to call out the nastiness and lies from Noem and Miller. It seems he almost prefers to have serial liars in his administration than honest people. The kind of dishonesty we see from Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller is the bread and butter of authoritarian regimes and it's dangerous, dangerous territory for our country. When a government tells its people, ignore what your eyes see and forget what your ears hear, just listen to us instead, then for all practical purposes it's not trying to act like a government in a democracy. This is how dictatorships operate and we're seeing the signs right in front of us here in America. The right answer, of course, is to meet the lies with truth. Here in the Senate, the American people deserve to hear that truth under oath when Kristi Noem and other administration officials testify as soon as possible. And across America, the people must keep defending the truth. They should keep showing up lawfully and documenting abuses by ICE. They must continue to protest peacefully and non-violently, to exercise their rights to free speech and free assembly, to protect their communities from the abuses of this thuggish government. It may feel to many like the flame of democracy is flickering into extinction before our eyes and that there's no way to fight back. That is wrong. The good people of Minneapolis and so many cities around the country have shown the answer to authoritarianism. Hold firm, tell the truth, look out for one another, organize, protest. And when the time comes, exercise your greatest power of all. Go to the ballot box and vote. Vote and vote out the liars. I yield the floor.