Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Mr. Speaker, in February, the Trump administration, in conjunction with the Israeli Government, launched an illegal and disastrous war in Iran. They provided no rationale to the American people. They sought no legal authority from Congress, and they have since descended our world and our global economy into chaos.

That was just the beginning. Now, President Trump has threatened to use the United States military to carry out acts of genocide against the Iranian people, who are innocent civilians. Up until today, he has done this on his own as a rogue actor. Yet, today, we vote on whether or not he will do this in the name of the American people.

Congress must vote to exercise our power to stop this chaos or to sanction it. We must vote to restrain it.

Mr. Speaker, I urge our colleagues to vote ``yes'' and that we end and stop all that is imperiled before us.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that I may hereafter be considered to be the first sponsor of H.R. 5658, the Child Care for Every Community Act, a bill originally introduced by Representative Sherrill of New Jersey, for the purpose of adding cosponsors and requesting reprintings pursuant to clause 7 of rule XII.

Mr. Speaker, President Trump ran on a promise to the American people that ICE would go after the worst of the worst.

Well, we are now coming up on a year of this Presidency, and I want to talk to the folks at home who feel disillusioned by what ICE is doing in our country.

What we have seen is that ICE is not overwhelmingly going after criminals. In fact, over 70 percent of people currently detained in detention facilities do not have a criminal record.

Who are they going after? They are going after 6-year-olds in my district. They are going after students and permanent residents for their political views. They are going after Americans born and raised in the United States. Time and time again, Trump has floated taking away citizenship from U.S. citizens based on their ethnicity.

At every point, this administration has lied to us about ICE in America while some of the wealthiest actors in our country have tried to sell us a myth to defend it, including private prison contractors. That myth, that ideology, is that our immigrant neighbors are our enemies and more dangerous than us. They sustain that myth because if everybody believes it, they can get away with robbing all of us.

I want to remind you where the real crime is. It is in the oligarchs taking $170 billion of our money from healthcare and food assistance and public programs and taking that and funneling it into a secret police program.

It is the authoritarians trying to create a black box, because once it is established they can put political dissidents inside of it.

But their hatred is a story, a myth, and we can choose to reject it. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want you to believe that this is who we are as a country. We are here to say that it is not.

We are a country that has fought and defeated the Confederacy, that has defeated a history of civil rights violations, of secret police, and of fascism. We are a country guided by a monument to freedom on the waters of New York City who shines brightly and welcomes the ``huddled masses yearning to breathe free'' to our shores.

Right now, I ask everyone in our country to fight for that ideal, to fight for this legacy.