Ranking Member Raskin's Opening Statement at Hearing on Oversight of DHS

Well, thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman, and welcome, Secretary Noem. We're glad to meet you, even though it's been 13 months since you took office, and more than five weeks since two American citizens were shot dead in Minneapolis. Renee Goode was a 37-year-old poet, about 20 years younger than you are now, and like you, both a devout Christian and the mother of three. She was on her way home from school drop-off when she encountered an ice operation, and one of your agents shot her dead, shot her three times. She bled out in the driver's seat of her car after your agents refused to let a doctor or EMTs approach her. You expressed no sympathy for her family, and no regret for her killing by an ICE agent. You ran a smear campaign against Renee Goode. You called her a domestic terrorist. Alex Pretty was also 37, and like you, a federal worker. He was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital, outstanding in his job, providing comfort to many of our vets in their final hours. He was standing on a street corner filming your agents as they roughed up peaceful protesters. Americans have a First Amendment right to record government agents in public places, as eight different federal circuit courts have unanimously found. But your agents pepper sprayed Alex Pretty for helping a woman that they had pushed to the ground. Then they threw him to the ground. They beat him up. They stripped him of a lawful firearm he had never touched. And then, after confiscating it, they shot him dead with ten bullets. Before his body was even cold, you launched a smear campaign against him, using the same language, asserting without evidence that Alex Pretty had committed a, quote, act of domestic terrorism and intended to kill law enforcement. This disturbing video tells the true facts. You tried to cover up with propaganda. And we can play it only because other brave Americans used their phones to capture the actual reality of this horror. Deadly ICE-involved shooting out of Minneapolis. The Minneapolis police chief says a woman was killed after being shot in the head by an ICE agent. Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old US citizen, mother of three, who moved to Minnesota just last year. It was an act of domestic terrorism. Breaking news in Minneapolis and another deadly shooting involving a federal officer in that city. This video shows the incident from this morning with officers surrounding a man before taking him down and shooting him during a struggle. Officials later said the man had died. Minneapolis city officials said the man is a 37-year-old white male, a resident of Minneapolis. They also say he is believed to be an American citizen and that he was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry. This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism. That's the facts. I'm saying that you've provided no evidence to back up your defamatory lie against either of these American citizens. There have been three homicides in Minneapolis in 2026. Your agents committed two of them. Rather than work with state and local authorities to solve these homicides, you barred Minnesota's investigators from the crime scenes. You're denying them access to all the evidence that you have about the deaths of their citizens. It smells like a cover-up, and it makes me wonder who the real domestic terrorists are. But you didn't just lie about Renee Good and Alex Preddy. In dozens of cases, federal judges have found that your officials lied to them in court. A Reagan-appointed judge rejected the testimony of your acting ICE director as, quote, disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable. Another judge called the affidavit of a top ICE official, quote, the sorriest statement I've ever seen, adding she was shocked when she saw it. And that if you were asking to get a warrant issued on this, I'd throw you out of my chambers. Here are a few more examples of the many scores we found in the case books. Yesterday, you insisted under oath to the Senate that you follow court orders. But that's not true either. Just last month, your lawyers were forced to admit that you had violated immigration court orders more than 50 times in ten weeks. And that was just in New Jersey, one of 94 judicial districts in America. In Minnesota, Judge Patrick Schultz, a George W. Bush appointee, concluded, quote, that ICE has likely violated more court orders in January of 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. And while you make a daily mockery of our courts and our Constitution, you're treating the billions of dollars our colleagues showered on your department like a personal slush fund. You budgeted an astonishing $220 million for media consultant contracts. So you can star in self-promoting photo shoots and lavish ad campaigns like this one of you riding horseback at Mount Rushmore, which was shot during last year's government shutdown. You're living rent free in the official waterfront residence reserved for the commandant of the US Coast Guard. You spent $172 million to buy not one, but two luxury jets for your travel. And now you're using taxpayer funds to lease a third jet, a $70 million luxury 737 Max with a queen size bedroom in the back, a deluxe serving bar, and four flat screen TVs. A big, beautiful jet paid for by the big, beautiful bill. Yesterday under questioning the Senate, you said you plan to refurbish this jet to make it into this kind of airplane, which is what's actually being used for deportations in order to save the taxpayers money. In other words, you're saying that's actually a deportation plane. But wouldn't it have been cheaper just to buy a deportation plane in the first place? It's like buying a Rolls Royce to turn into a Metro bus. I was almost prepared to buy that story of how the jet was both for executive travel and mass deportation. And then I heard about an airborne episode of entitlement, arrogance, and contempt that I could hardly believe. Apparently, when your special blanket, your blankie, was left on one of the government jets and not transported over the new one, your special government employee, Corey Lewandowski, chivalrously stepped forward to fire the pilot midair. A 2003 Coast Guard Academy graduate and distinguished US Coast Guard commander in Air Station Washington DC. But then he had to be rehired immediately because there was no one else who could fly the two of you on the rest of the journey back home. Secretary Noem, you're flying high now, maybe even a little bit too close to the sun, but with all these free planes and houses and pilots, you've traveled a long distance from your actual job and the things you should be doing as head of Homeland Security. Your agency is charged with protecting the homeland. It includes FEMA, TSA, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as ICE and CBP. Yet you've hollowed out the national security mission. You redeployed thousands of people responsible for tracking terror financing and fighting cyber threats to go work on your mass immigration roundup. You reassigned to the roundup agents working a key national security probe into Iran's terror financing, paralyzing that investigation. And to run what's left of Homeland Security's ruined terrorism prevention office, you actually installed a 22-year-old intern, whose chief listed qualification for the job was that he had participated in a model UN club his junior year of college. Through FEMA, you're supposed to provide disaster relief to our communities. Yet last summer, as floods devastated central Texas and killed 135 people, including 25 girls and two counselors at a Christian summer camp, you withheld crucial support, including search and rescue teams, for 72 hours. Why? Those were three crucial days during which people drowned and died waiting for bureaucratic approval. You promised to use ICE and CBP to expel the worst of the worst, undocumented immigrants guilty of committing violent crimes, like the people responsible for murdering the children of these angel families, these angel moms and dads who've joined us today. Instead, your mask agents have been indiscriminately rounding up any and all immigrants. And citizens who your agents think look like they might be immigrants. They've arrested kindergartners, daycare teachers, and parents dropping off kids at school. They dragged grandparents out of their homes in their underwear in sub-zero temperatures and ripped children out of their beds in the middle of the night, or used them as bait to arrest their parents. Just last month, your agents picked up Nurul Shah Alam, a severely disabled and nearly blind Rohingya refugee, lawfully in America, who didn't speak English. You claimed your agents dropped him at a safe, warm location. Again, not the truth. They dropped him off miles from his home in the dark at a closed coffee shop in sub-freezing temperatures. And now, because of this cruelty, this man, too, is dead. You have a quarter of a million employees and a budget larger than that of 150 countries. You command over 80,000 sworn law enforcement officers, more than the number of police officers in New York, Chicago, LA, Houston, DC, Las Vegas, and Dallas combined. On top of that, our colleagues have handed ICE an additional $75 billion by slashing funds for Medicaid, children's health insurance, and rural hospitals. Secretary Nome, your job is to protect the homeland, but the most precious possession that we've got in our homeland is our freedom. In the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that protect it, you seem to have forgotten what our most precious possession is. The billions of dollars showered on your department have paid for violence and chaos in the American heartland, and a sweeping assault on the basic rights of the American people. But the heroic citizens of Minneapolis have shown America how to fight back against this reign of terror and win with the truth, with solidarity, with mutual self-help, with creative joy and humor and music, with mass non-violent assembly and protest, and with irrepressible love of children and kindness towards animals and other living things. You've turned our government against our people, and you've turned our people against our government. But the people are winning today, although we know we must continue to wake up every day like the people of Minneapolis and go out and fight for constitutional freedom. We are clearly in the fight of our lives, and we obviously have very serious questions for you today about what you are turning our government into. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.