Press Releases

Washington, D.C. – Today, Rep. Becca Balint (VT-AL) called out the Republican plan to inflate the ICE budget amidst wrongful deportations, illegal abductions of permanent residents and other unjust immigration enforcement practices across the country for the last 100 days. Read her remarks below: 

“Mr. Chair, on the morning of Thursday, April 24th, about 20 armed federal agents broke into a home occupied by a family of U.S. citizens in Oklahoma City who had just moved there two weeks prior from Maryland. ICE agents, mistaking the current occupants for the former. Broke down the door. Terrorized the family. They repeatedly said, ‘we are citizens.’ ‘You have the wrong people.’ ‘We are citizens.’ It happened in the middle of the night. Three children, at gunpoint, were forced outside to stand in the rain in their underwear while their mother pleaded with these agents to tell them what was going on. They ignored the pleas. They ripped apart the entire house. They seized cash, documents, electronics, their computers as evidence. When the family asked when they would get their stuff back, the agents responded, well, it could be days or it could be months.

“This was all a colossal mistake. The names on the warrant did not match the people who lived in the house. This is what we have created here. This is Trump's America. These were citizens who were treated like this. This is what we want you to open your eyes to. If it can happen, as we've said time and time again, if it can happen to folks with greencards, it can happen to citizens. And in Oklahoma City, we see a perfect example of that. This is what we're talking about. It's not other people. It's us. It's our neighbors, it's our friends. It's people who just moved from Maryland to Oklahoma for a better life and have their house destroyed, and they can't get answers. If we watch the rest of the news clip there, they're asking ICE who's responsible for that? And then they're sending them to another agency, and they're sending them to another agency, and nobody is accountable for what happened to them.

“This is what my colleagues are trying to fund with this bill. Armed federal agents breaking into homes, even of US citizens, traumatizing them, taking their possessions. This is Trump's America. That's why we continue to talk about due process. It's not some pie in the sky idea. It's what literally holds our country together. Without due process, without the belief in the Constitution, we are not Americans. That's what gives us the ability to say we are an exceptional country in the world, that everyone who lives here gets due process. And we're going to keep saying this over and over and over again. For everyone who lives here. 

“What happened to that family, once again, of American citizens in Oklahoma City should scare the hell out of all of us. And we should not be using this committee to find more money to pump into ICE so that these things can happen. This family is all of us. That's what we're trying to say today. This family is all of us. And I can't believe that in our name, on our watch, this is happening to people who live in this country. Open your eyes. Wake the hell up. I yield back.”

View her full remarks here. 

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