Criminal Alien Gang Member Removal Act

Floor Speech

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Madam Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill, which will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended. I offer this amendment to recommit to reveal the flaws in the bill.

The sponsor of this bill, Mrs. Comstock and I both represent northern Virginia, and she and I both want to eliminate gang violence. MS-13 is a menace to society, and I endorse the goal of destroying it through legal means, but this bill wouldn't do that.

This bill will promote widespread racial profiling. It will violate First Amendment protections. It will expand mandatory detention of immigrants. It will raise serious constitutional questions on judicial review of government designation of certain groups. And it bars humanitarian relief for individuals in violation of international treaties.

I take gang violence and MS-13 very seriously. The young man Mrs. Comstock referred to, found dead in a park in my city of Alexandria, was actually found by a dear family friend. But we can do this in a bill that doesn't promote racial profiling or violate the Constitution.

So in this motion to recommit, we offer language to get at one of the most glaring flaws in this bill that it can go after humanitarian workers. The Criminal Alien Gang Member Removal Act creates an overly broad definition of a criminal gang by allowing DHS to essentially designate any individual as a gang member. As written, it could cover a wide range of organizations ranging from churches to fraternities, to political groups. This will allow ICE to target people who may or may not appear to be in a gang and charge all those who seem in any way connected to individual members of a gang.

Religious workers who are engaged in immigrant ministry could be subject to prosecution. Immigrant ministry is not smuggling in airless trucks. In my district, we have a number of faith communities who provide for the unemployed, the homeless, those without language.

Already, ICE swept up half a dozen men as they exited a church service. Under this bill, the pastor could be next. If a nun, through her work, interacts with a potential gang member, she, by the context of this bill, could be a gang member. It is not accidental that the Catholic bishops and the nuns have written to oppose this bill. The harboring provisions are so sweeping, the religious workers who provide shelter, transportation, or support to undocumented immigrants could be found liable of criminal activity. And this is not transportation across the U.S. border. This is transportation to work or to English lesson classes.

It is incredibly concerning that it would subject people who have never committed a crime, never been arrested, never been indicted, to deportation; and it would apply retroactively. Indeed, mere suspicion of involvement in harboring could classify individuals as gang members.

So it is very obvious here that humanitarian exemption is needed, but that is not the only concern with this bill language. The overly broad definition would empower immigrant authorities to conduct dragnet sweeps of Latino communities and other communities of color.

Media reports make it clear that law enforcement has recently relied on questionable and unreliable evidence to assert that Latino individuals are gang members, including wearing certain kinds of clothes or doodling in an area code from a Latin American country on a school notebook.

Officers have alleged gang membership sometimes based on merely being seen with people who are alleged gang members or living in neighborhoods known to suffer gang activity. This expansive language could and will sweep up people who have committed no criminal activity whatsoever.

As a representative of Virginia, a State with a long and troubled history with race, I think we need to be very careful before we implement policies that allow for structural racism. This bill has many more flaws, which general debate covered. But I want to be clear, before we pass this bill and start locking up nuns and priests and other religious workers, we should not continue this one-dimensional conversation on immigration policy.
We cannot focus only on enforcement and a mass deportation agenda. It doesn't fix our immigration system. We have got to work on comprehensive immigration reform, and we begin with the President's recent decision to eliminate DACA and put Congress on the clock. We should be acting today to protect our DREAMers. 800,000 young immigrants'--not members of MS-13--lives depend on it. I urge my colleagues to vote for this motion to recommit.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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