Mr. President, there is a great divide right now--a pretty significant divide right now--between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the way that ICE is enforcing our immigration laws in the…
Mr. President, there is a great divide right now--a pretty significant divide right now--between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the way that ICE is enforcing our immigration laws in the interior. Democrats believe that what is happening today is both illegal and immoral, and that is why, right now, these operations are being funded through reconciliation--because we believe that it is our constitutional obligation to refuse to fund an Agency that is out of control and not in compliance with the law. Republicans broadly have supported the actions of this administration as they target both immigrants without documentation and legal immigrants for arrest and detention.
I am going to offer a request to pass a bill by unanimous consent that does not seek to repair that divide. Instead, it seeks to try to bring us together on a very narrow question, a question that arises from a set of incidents that have happened in my State of Connecticut over the course of the last month and a half.
On the morning of August 26, the second day of school for most school districts in Connecticut, in Danbury, CT, busdrivers began reporting to the school district that they had noticed the presence of ICE agents in and around schoolbus stops. At one of them, a constituent of mine, a father, was waiting at the schoolbus stop with his 6-year-old son and, just moments after saying goodbye to his son for the second day of school and even before the schoolbus had fully driven away, ICE arrested and detained him.
This practice was reported all around the State: ICE gathering at schoolbus stops, waiting until a young child had boarded the schoolbus, and then detaining and arresting the parent.
For parents in this body, you know how anxious that first day of school is, how kids are just brimming with nervous anxiety about that first day, and you know what that feels like to watch your kid walk onto that schoolbus.
Well, what do you think it does to those kids on that first and second day of school to see ICE officers at the schoolbus stop? Imagine that 6-year-old who boarded the schoolbus, when he got back from school that day, got off, and his parent wasn't there--a 6-year-old, feeling like he had been abandoned. In this case, he may or may not have seen the arrest because it happened almost immediately after he got on.
To me, it is pretty obvious that the intent here with this new practice of ICE showing up at schoolbus stops is to traumatize the children. But you don't have to agree with me that the intent is to traumatize the children to just come to the conclusion that ICE does not need to be at schoolbus stops in order to enforce the law. There are a myriad of other settings in which ICE can operate to carry out arrests while staying clear of schoolbus stops, where the intent or at least the result of those operations is to leave little kids in trauma.
Now, I have introduced three pieces of simple legislation to say that ICE should not operate at daycare centers, they shouldn't operate at children's playgrounds, and that they shouldn't operate at schoolbus stops. I am asking unanimous consent today for only one of those pieces of legislation that I think is the most urgent. And while I don't expect the result to be agreement, I had hoped that we could find agreement on this narrow question: that ICE should just stay away from schoolbus stops; ICE shouldn't be traumatizing children at schoolbus stops, taking parents in the middle of the schoolday--because there are so many other ways that ICE could operate so as to detain the people that they feel that they need to detain without it being done in this deeply traumatic way.
In fact, we came close to getting an agreement on a similar proposal before negotiations broke down over DHS funding. Senator Blumenthal, my colleague, has a piece of legislation that is even broader than the three bills I am proposing. The idea is that there should just be a ban on the operation of ICE at sensitive locations, which would include places where children gather but also would include other sensitive locations like churches. And I know my Republican colleagues were close to agreeing to that before these negotiations broke down.
And so, today, I am taking a small slice of that broader proposal and just asking my colleagues: Can we come to an agreement that schoolbus stops should be off limits? Can we decide to have compassion for that 6-year-old child who got on the bus for a second day of school and, when he got back off the bus, was abandoned?
The last point I will make is this: While that practice is bad enough, it is important to note that ICE tried to cover up the practice. When they were presented with these stories from Danbury, DHS doubled down and said: Any claim that ICE targeted parents at a schoolbus stop is false. But then, just days afterward, we had the video evidence.
This often happens: ICE says something didn't happen, and then we have the video proving that it did. In Danbury's case, we have two separate videos taken from the schoolbus showing ICE operating at the schoolbus stop and detaining this parent.
So my hope is that we can come together and just make a decision that, while we have big differences over the broader issue of ICE enforcement, ICE should stop preying upon our kids at sensitive locations; in particular, schoolbus stops.
Mr. President, and so, my motion is this: notwithstanding rule XXII, and as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 5435; I further ask consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
Mr. President, just three final points. I think Senator Banks articulates the Republican position, which is that immigrants are by definition a safety threat to the United States of America, and that is just not true.
I don't draw an issue with the fact that there are immigrants who commit crimes, but there are natural-born citizens that commit crimes at higher rates than immigrants do.
The fact of the matter is that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than people who were born here in the United States. We should just keep people safe in this country no matter the country of origin or birth of the perpetrator.
Second, I think you can make the decision that ICE should be able to operate in the interior while keeping certain sites off limits. In fact, this was the Trump administration policy in the first term.
So Republican administrations in the past have come to the decision that certain sites should be off limits for ICE. In fact, when I talk to Trump supporters in Connecticut, who broadly do support the President's immigration policy, they also believe that they went too far in Connecticut. There were a lot of Republicans who showed up at our big rally the day after this incident happened.
So it is not true that you can only support robust enforcement operations in the interior if you support ICE being even at schoolbus stops.
And then finally, I will be honest with you, I did not anticipate that one of the arguments against this bill would be that it would lead to the development of sanctuary bus stops.
What do we imagine here? People are going to live at bus stops? We are going to have encampments around bus stops of people who are here without documentation?
I just think it is an example of how this whole debate has gone way off the rails. It is just fundamentally detached from the reality. You want to support Trump's immigration policy--you can do that while still saying that we shouldn't have ICE officers patrolling schoolbus stops with the purpose of traumatizing little children. That could be a consensus position, and we could choose to still disagree over the broader Trump immigration policy.
I yield the floor.
