Mazie Hirono Slams ICE For Arresting Visa Overstayers And 'Creating Havoc And Fear'

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During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) spoke about Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Transcript

00:00Senator Hirono. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think we can all agree that our immigration

00:10system is broken, both in the legal side, which is a, we have a visa system that has

00:17a huge backlog of people waiting to come into our country, and also we have a number of,

00:23a lot of undocumented people, and I would like to correct the record in that there are

00:28some 11 million undocumented people here. A rather large percentage of them came here

00:33with legal visas, and they are over stairs. So these are people who already were vetted

00:39in order to get visas to come into our country. So, you know, things are, the issue of immigration

00:47is complicated, but we agree that we have a broken system, and I'm glad that when I was

00:51first elected to the U.S. Senate, one of the major bills that I worked on as a member of

00:57this committee was the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill, and while it didn't have all

01:02of the kinds of provisions that I would have supported, it was a good start, it was a good

01:06faith effort to address the complexities of immigration reform, and I thought it was a relatively

01:13fair bill, so I voted for it. Unfortunately, the House never got around to addressing, addressing

01:20that bill or doing anything with the bill, and so here we are. The whole issue has become

01:25highly, highly politicized. We now have a regime that wants to deport a million people a year,

01:31if not more. They would like to deport 11 million people. How that is supposed to happen is beyond

01:37me, but that maybe that is one of the reasons that they are basically moving so much of our

01:44law enforcement community, whether it's the DOJ or all of our various agencies, into focusing

01:54on deportations. Now, I think we can all agree that people who should be deported are the ones

02:00who are violent criminals, who have committed crimes. That is not what is happening in our country,

02:08so the kind of round-ups where the quota or the requirement is that I should arrest 3,000 people a

02:18day, so that leads to all kinds of actions on the part of ICE and the other agencies that they have

02:28focusing on deportation and rounding up people who pose no danger, no safety danger, to our communities.

02:37But it's certainly creating havoc and fear in our communities, so that is what is happening. So rather

02:44than working on what I would consider to be comprehensive immigration reform that we can, I hope, all agree on some of the

02:52provisions. No, we are continuously blaming the prior administration. Let us not forget that one of

03:03the major issues relating to Trump's first administration was the fact that they separated children from their

03:13parents and never kept track of who their parents are, and there are some of these children who have never

03:17been reunited with their families. And I think that is, you know, that's not the way that we should be

03:24conducting our immigration enforcement. So I would say that we should have ICE prioritize violent criminals,

03:35people who have that kind of record. That is not what is happening. So I have a question for Ms. Fleshakar.

03:44Am I pronouncing your name correctly, please?

03:47Fleshakar.

03:48Fleshakar?

03:49Yeah. Okay, so last month, on June 23rd, ICE forced a disabled Purple Heart veteran named

03:55Say John Park to self-deport. He was a green card holder, but his undiagnosed PTSD led to a drug dependency,

04:05which is frankly all too common among our veterans. After an arrest for bail jumping in 2009, his green card was

04:13revoked, but he was allowed, this is 2009, allowed to stay with yearly checks, check-ins with ICE. So he did that.

04:23Every year he would come in, and he's been living in Hawaii for the past 10 years, where he's raised two kids

04:30and cares for his 85-year-old mother, who is in the early stages of dementia. That all changed this year when ICE,

04:37under this administration, threatened to lock him up unless he left the country. So he's self-deported.

04:47So, Ms. Fleshakar, does Mr. Parks strike you as someone who should be a priority for detention and removal?

05:01I think the issue for me is that when we focus on numbers instead of quality,

05:08we end up focusing on people without criminal arrests, people who are contributing to their communities.

05:16We need to be focusing on real public safety threats, national security threats, and recent border crossers.

05:22Mr. Chairman, I'm sorry that my time is up, but you get my, the priority should be to deport people

05:31who pose a safety danger to our community, and a huge number of the people who are going through that process

05:38do not pose danger to our community. So that is a use of resources that cannot be justified. Thank you.

05:48Senator Graham.

05:49Thank you very much, Senator Cornyn, for having this hearing and all you've done to shed a light on this.

05:55This is very helpful for the country and the Senate, I think. Is it Ms.

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