During a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) spoke about the Trump administration's wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
00:00The chairman from Ohio yields back. I recognize the gentleman, the ranking member from the great state of Maryland, Mr. Raskin.
00:10And thank you, Chairman Van Drew. Even ICE and the Department of Homeland Security recognize that, quote,
00:16any member of Congress has the right to show up for an inspection at one of our facilities in their oversight capability.
00:23Mr. Houser, is that the general policy that you know?
00:25Yes, sir.
00:25Okay. ICE has also, along with lots of other parts of the administration, has been repudiated by the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court.
00:37There are now more than 160 preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders that have been entered by federal judges, Republican appointees,
00:46Democratic appointees against a reign of lawlessness and complete disregard for the Constitution.
00:52President Trump has had to be instructed to bring back a man who the Department of Justice admitted had been deported due to an administrative error.
01:04He was sent to a torturer's prison in El Salvador due to what they confessed was administrative error.
01:11Do you agree that ICE has been violating the law repeatedly over the last few months?
01:20Sir, I would say the administration and the White House has been directing lawless action.
01:25The U.S. Supreme Court even had to issue an emergency order at one in the morning on April 19th to stop an unlawful attempt by the administration to conduct a mass deportation of Venezuelans without any due process whatsoever.
01:39They told them to turn the vans and the buses around.
01:43There had been no hearings, no opportunity to be represented, no opportunity to hear even the charges against them, no court orders.
01:50And just this last Friday, the Supreme Court upheld this ban on deportations, reaffirming once again that every immigrant in the country is entitled to due process.
02:02The two most beautiful words in the English language, it's due process that separates our rights and freedoms from arbitrary power by the state.
02:11And if you have a single libertarian bone in your body, you will understand what due process is all about.
02:20Now, why is congressional oversight important, Mr. Hauser, if the courts are there as a backstop against lawlessness by an executive branch?
02:34Sir, Congress's role, especially in immigration enforcement, is extremely critical for just the simple fact that we have tens of thousands of human beings in custody.
02:46And their care and the carrying out of our public safety and our law enforcement operations need critical oversight and accountability.
02:55So when you were chief of staff at ICE, how many congressional delegations would you say happened at ICE facilities?
03:02Hundreds, sir. And as we've all talked about, we saw large demands and migratory flow to the border.
03:07We were dealing with bipartisan, you know, visits continuously.
03:13These were Democrats and Republicans together coming to visit.
03:17So there's nothing strange about members of Congress doing it. Both parties have done it, right?
03:21Yes, sir.
03:22Did anything like what just occurred at Delaney Hall, where members of Congress were pushed and manhandled and threatened with arrest and there was a melee, did anything like that ever happen in your experience?
03:35No, sir.
03:35And what I saw there was sort of this distilling of what I consider the direction of enforcement, immigration enforcement, in the political theater of this.
03:45That was the outcome that some people in the White House wanted.
03:48And they're putting that pressure both on the non-migrants that are non-criminal, that don't have finals order removal, and also on the ICE officers.
03:55Well, you mentioned the phrase political theater several times, and that's interesting to me because I remember at the end of the Biden administration,
04:04when there was a struggle to get the two parties together, and there was agreement, a bipartisan agreement on legislation at the border.
04:15And you had the most conservative Republicans in the Senate hailing it and saying it's a huge breakthrough.
04:19You had liberal Democrats getting behind it, and everybody was saying, well, it's not perfect, but we'll do this.
04:26And it was sailing through the Senate, it's coming over to the House, and then President Trump, former President Trump at that point, announced he was totally opposed to it.
04:35He didn't want border legislation, he wanted a border crisis to run against.
04:40In other words, he wanted political theater.
04:42I wonder, was that your perception of that same episode?
04:45Absolutely, sir.
04:46And when you watch the videos of what happened at Delaney Hall, ICE officers are trained from the beginning of when they enter the agency on assessing threat and risk.
04:57And clearly, and they sort of apply that threat and risk to what they carry out in operations, and I believe everybody on this planet would agree,
05:03that then they allowed the Congresswoman to then enter the facility and take the tour.
05:08So the idea that there was outside political pressure or influence directed at ICE agents and it created this powder keg of what happened there is pretty clear and logical to me.
