Agent Raul Gonzalez Officer Safety Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I begin with an urgent constitutional public service announcement based on millions of calls and messages that have been flooding Congress.

There is a serial constitutional violator at large right now in the District of Columbia whose overall project to dismantle our Constitution and rule of law is now the target or subject of at least a dozen different Federal court temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions across the land and also faces emergency civil actions in dozens of other courts and jurisdictions.

The suspect has been described as a very evil individual by Steve Bannon and has been operating in a clandestine fashion with a night crew of computer-hacking juvenile associates, one of whom goes by the alias of ``Big Balls'' and another one they call ``the kid,'' who has been known to post racist and anti-Semitic provocations online.

The accelerating spree of constitutional offenses alarming the Nation involves dozens of episodes of computer fraud and data theft affecting potentially 300 million Americans and escalating threats against congressionally created Federal agencies serving the people from the NIH to the National Weather Service to NOAA to the Department of Justice; public workers; teachers and students; prosecutors of cop- assaulting criminals and seditious conspirators against our government; FBI agents; and anyone who depends on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other computerized public payment system.

The apparent ringleader of all the constitutional mayhem is a reported father of 12, a formerly deportable undocumented immigrant who worked illegally in the country and is apparently part of a loose network of Silicon Valley billionaires who oppose American constitutional democracy and openly favor creation of a monarchical techno-state under their control.

The suspect was seen yesterday in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and is known to have been consorting as recently as a few days ago with a convicted felon from New York.

Described as the richest person in the world, the suspect is both a government contractor with billions of dollars in defense contracts-- and we learned yesterday $400 million slated from the State Department for some of his armored Tesla vehicles--and also he is a part-time government worker whose many taxpayer-supported businesses are being investigated, fined, or sued by numerous Federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The suspect has allegedly been working to seize control over several of these same agencies to shut them down, which would presumably terminate all of the relevant threatening investigations.

The public has never received from the suspect any ethics disclosure forms required of all Federal workers nor any conflict of interest waiver to resolve his glaring conflicts of interest.

The suspect spent his formative years in apartheid South Africa and has been known to post racist and anti-Semitic material and to engage in a Nazi salute in public.

Steve Bannon calls him a truly evil individual. The ringleader and his associates, sometimes called the Muskovites, have been seen by numerous Federal workers violating the separation of powers and the Spending Clause, usurping the powers of this body, trampling the civil service laws, and violating the rights of both his Federal and corporate workers.

The suspect, his sponsors, and accomplices should be considered dangerous to the constitutional rights, freedoms, and institutions of the people as well as their property, their jobs, and their livelihoods.

If you know anything about the situation and you are a Republican Member, please get in touch immediately with the Democrats so we can form a majority to stop this unprecedented attack on the Constitution and American law and order before we end up like apartheid South Africa or Orban's Hungary or Putin's Russia.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program where we avoid the constitutional crisis overtaking the first and greatest multiracial, multiethnic constitutional democracy on Earth and instead pass completely redundant, unnecessary, and sloppily drafted laws that allow us to vote against immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, as Elon Musk was, without either engaging in comprehensive immigration reform or fixing the border.

Now, with this bill, House Republicans are once again seeking to take political advantage of a horrific crime by seizing on the death of Agent Gonzalez in the performance of his duties, while doing nothing to make our border more secure or to repair our broken immigration system.

Everyone knows, of course, that they blew up the bipartisan border security deal that we had at the end of the last Congress.

H.R. 35 seeks to establish new criminal and immigration penalties on anyone--citizens, permanent residents, documented immigrants, or undocumented immigrants--for this offense: fleeing a Border Patrol agent or a law enforcement officer who is working with the Border Patrol.

Fleeing Border Patrol at the border already carries substantial criminal and legal penalties under current law. That is already a crime. Under 18 U.S. Code 758, whoever flees or evades a checkpoint operated by the Customs and Border Protection, or any other law enforcement agency, in a motor vehicle and flees from Federal, State, or local law enforcement in excess of the legal speed limit can be charged with and convicted of high-speed flight from an immigration checkpoint.

Furthermore, many decades of prosecution and case law make it perfectly clear that fleeing law enforcement is a crime involving moral turpitude for which a conviction will render a noncitizen, whether documented or undocumented, immediately deportable and inadmissible to the country.

In other words, what they are dragging us through again is already against the law. If all of it is already a crime, why do we need another version of it, except for plainly opportunistic political purposes.

I know those are the only bills they have been bringing forward. They have got no other agenda for the country. They have handed over the legislative authority of the Congress of the United States to Elon Musk, the fourth branch of government.

In any event, they want us to pass again something that is already against the law. We don't need it. In fact, this characteristically poorly drafted, pile-on bill is so poorly drafted this time that it could subject not just undocumented people, not just permanent residents, but American citizens to prison sentences for conduct that the vast majority of Americans would not even recognize as a crime at all and would not see as a crime.

Now, unlike existing Federal law or similar State statutes, the bill does not define what it means to ``flee.'' In their haste to get this to the floor, they just rushed over that element of the crime, which is of extraordinary interest to every other jurisdiction and even Congress before when dealing with it. Leave that aside, it does not even require evidence of criminal intent, a guilty mind, what lawyers call mens rea, the intention to do the evil thing.

In other words, this bill does not require a person to know that they are fleeing Border Patrol in order to be charged with that crime.

Think about it, Mr. Speaker. It applies to citizens, not just noncitizens, and you can be prosecuted and jailed for fleeing from a Border Patrol that you didn't know was Border Patrol.

This is a radical departure from the prevailing rule in American jurisdictions.

For example, in Maryland--I looked up my State--the offense of fleeing or eluding law enforcement requires that a uniformed officer gives a person a visual or audible signal to stop and prominently displays their official badge or other insignia. If an officer is not in uniform, Maryland requires that an officer give a visual or audible signal to stop while in an officially marked police vehicle to establish the necessary mens rea before we put somebody in prison. Under either circumstance, a visual or audible signal can be by hand, voice, emergency light, or siren.

It is not only blue States like mine that require evidence that the accused knew what they were doing was wrong before convicting them of purposefully fleeing from law enforcement. That is the rule almost everywhere.

I am sure the Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee chairman, Mr. Biggs, and the sponsor of this bill, Mr. Ciscomani, are aware that, in Arizona, the offense of unlawful flight from pursuing law enforcement requires proof that the officer's vehicle had markings indicative of an official police vehicle, evidence that the driver knew that the vehicle was an official law enforcement vehicle, or the defendant must admit knowing that the vehicle was an official police vehicle.

In other words, their own State takes the exact painstaking precautions that they just run roughshod over in order to get this bill, which has not had a hearing, to the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

Should a defendant choose to exercise their right to trial by jury, the trial judge in Arizona would instruct the jury that they may consider whether the officer operated their emergency lights or siren to determine whether the defendant is guilty of unlawful flight from an actual pursuing vehicle.

As was stated in the collaborative reports ``Without Intent'' and ``Without Intent Revisited,'' published by The Heritage Foundation, which is adamant about mens rea, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ``Ensuring that an adequate mens rea provision is included in statutes and regulations that create criminal offenses is critical.''

The Heritage Foundation says that it is critical to specify that there must be a culpable or guilty state of mind before we put people behind bars. It appears that nearly every State recognized this fact when drafting their statutes carefully to address the fears and consequences associated with people fleeing law enforcement.

We don't want people going to jail because they were simply moving away from a person they thought was a criminal who turns out to be, for example, an undercover police officer.

As a matter of fact, of the States represented by the 32 cosponsors of this legislation, all but two of them specifically require, at minimum, an audible or visual signal to stop the vehicle to prove that there was intentional flight from a pursuing officer.

Looking at statutes that address similar conduct in all 50 States, there are only 6 that do not explicitly require an order, direction, request, or signal to stop the vehicle.

Despite this widely accepted approach to legislative construction, H.R. 35 would allow Donald Trump's Department of Justice to not only convict noncitizens but citizens of a violation of this so-called offense and to deport noncitizens without allowing them their day in court and without requiring any evidence of any knowledge that they were actually fleeing a government agent.

Without any limiting characteristics, under this bill, a citizen could be sent to prison because they did not immediately pull over when hailed by someone--for example, a local undercover officer assisting Border Patrol.

Similarly, in the immigration context, admitting to acts that constitute this nebulous and vague conduct would render a green card holder deportable.

The bill applies its criminal immigration penalties even if the law enforcement officer is in plain clothes and is driving an unmarked undercover vehicle.

There are a lot of good reasons why a law-abiding citizen or permanent resident might be wary of pulling over for an unmarked vehicle. Just last week, reports emerged of an alarming trend across the country of rapists, criminals, or vigilantes pretending to be immigration enforcement personnel targeting people whom they thought might be undocumented in order to rape them, assault them, harass them, or what have you.

I saw on TV a case last night of a sexual assailant who accosted a woman and forcibly assaulted her while pretending to be an ICE agent. I saw that last night.

Another man, Sean-Michael Johnson, was arrested for impersonating a law enforcement officer, along with felony kidnapping, larceny, and assault and battery, after he impersonated an ICE agent and stopped a group of men in their car because he told them they were not lawfully present in the country.

In this environment, Mr. Speaker, it would be neither unreasonable nor surprising for law-abiding citizens to be wary of pulling over for an unmarked car that claims to be working with Border Patrol. Further, given that the Trump administration is deputizing anyone they can to get to aid immigration enforcement efforts, the number of officers, both in police clothing and in unmarked clothing, to whom this law would apply is staggering.

In backing this bill, our colleagues want to impose extraordinary criminal and immigration consequences for not immediately pulling over when an unmarked car driven by a total stranger hails you at a time when criminals, including a pardoned January 6 felon, by the way, are going around impersonating immigration enforcement officers.

That is a real trend happening now, and I would love to be convinced it is not if the gentleman has reason to think that all of these reports and arrests of people impersonating officers are wrong.

This is a trend in the country. All of this is simply to give more power to target immigrants, which already exists, just for the purposes of a legislative show. This is outrageous.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose the legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, yes, we have hundreds of thousands of Federal employees who live in Maryland, and we are very proud of them. I assume the distinguished gentleman from Virginia is proud of the hundreds of thousands of Federal employees who live and work in Virginia, including in Roanoke. They have constitutional rights just like other American citizens have.

None of our rights, whether they are constitutional or in the civil service, should be trashed by an unelected billionaire bureaucrat who doesn't understand our system of government.

As to the merits, the distinguished gentleman talks about high-speed chases, which is what most statutes talk about in the country. This bill--I don't know if the gentleman read the language--doesn't mention high-speed chases or any speed at all. It just says ``fleeing.'' It is the only statute I could find in the country that doesn't define what ``fleeing'' means.

It is a very sloppy bill that has not had a hearing and that was brought to the floor for political entertainment purposes.

Jayapal), who is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

Mr. Speaker, just in answer to a couple of the recent comments that the good gentleman, the floor manager, says: How could it be possible that this bill is both duplicative and wildly expansive?

Mr. Speaker, it is duplicative of the actual criminal offense. That already exists. It is already a crime for somebody at the border to flee in a high-speed chase away from an officer. That is already a crime.

What is expansive is this applies to citizens. It goes way beyond the border. It goes all over the country. It doesn't define what it means to flee. It doesn't require a high-speed chase.

As the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal) was saying, it can apply to a woman who hears on the news, the way I heard last night, that there is a maniac out there claiming to be an ICE agent who is attacking women. She hears about it, and then a plainclothes officer in an unmarked car begins to chase her. If she moves away and stops three or four blocks later, she is guilty of violating their sloppily drafted bill.

If Republicans are serious about it, we should go back and have a real hearing, and the majority should look at what States across the country are doing.

Bynum).

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Mr. RASKIN. Tlaib).

Mr. Speaker, the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee (Mr. Jordan) invites us to believe that we should just suspend our own interests in legislative power. We should no longer defend the laws we have passed, the programs we have adopted, the money we have appropriated but that we should turn it over to the new fourth branch of government, Elon Musk, who can do whatever he wants.

Then he wants to also delegate to Mr. Musk our oversight power. We have an entire committee chaired by Mr. Comer. We have our own subcommittee on Oversight in the Judiciary Committee, but do they want to have hearings on Big Bird and Ernie and all of the alleged waste, fraud, and abuse that Mr. Musk is finding with his untutored, unvetted, juvenile computer hacker crew?

Come on. Let's show some institutional self-respect. This is the Congress of the United States. We are not delegating our power to Elon Musk or anybody else.

Mr. Speaker, many of our great heroes have understood that sloppy legislation undertaken as part of an attempt to whip up anti- immigration hysteria comes to haunt not just the immigrant community, of course, but citizens, too.

This bill is a great example of that because I don't know if they meant to write it this way, but it applies to citizens. It doesn't require mens rea, so call the Heritage Foundation about that. They are opposed to bills like this that don't require you prove that people have a specific intent to violate the law and commit a criminal offense. It doesn't define what fleeing even means. It doesn't require a high-speed chase, which is what they keep talking about. That is already against the law in lots of places.

It is a sloppy bill that is going to come back and haunt us if it were ever to become law, which it won't.

Thomas Jefferson said during the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts where people were trying to whip up hysteria--
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--yeas 264, nays 155, not voting 14, as follows: [Roll No. 42] YEAS--264 Aderholt Alford Allen Amodei (NV) Arrington Babin Bacon Baird Balderson Barr Barrett Baumgartner Bean (FL) Begich Bentz Bergman Bice Biggs (AZ) Biggs (SC) Bilirakis Bishop Boebert Bost Brecheen Bresnahan Buchanan Budzinski Burchett Burlison Calvert Cammack Carey Carter (GA) Carter (TX) Case Ciscomani Cline Cloud Clyde Cole Collins Comer Costa Courtney Craig Crane Crank Crawford Crenshaw Cuellar Davids (KS) Davidson Davis (NC) De La Cruz DeLauro Deluzio DesJarlais Diaz-Balart Downing Dunn (FL) Edwards Ellzey Emmer Estes Evans (CO) Ezell Fallon Fedorchak Feenstra Finstad Fischbach Fitzgerald Fitzpatrick Fleischmann Flood Fong Foxx Franklin, Scott Fry Fulcher Garbarino Gill (TX) Gillen Gimenez Golden (ME) Goldman (TX) Gonzales, Tony Gooden Goodlander Gosar Gottheimer Graves Gray Green (TN) Greene (GA) Griffith Grothman Guest Guthrie Hageman Hamadeh (AZ) Harder (CA) Haridopolos Harrigan Harris (MD) Harris (NC) Harshbarger Hern (OK) Higgins (LA) Hill (AR) Hinson Houchin Houlahan Hoyle (OR) Hudson Huizenga Hurd (CO) Issa Jack Jackson (TX) James Johnson (LA) Johnson (SD) Jordan Joyce (OH) Joyce (PA) Kaptur Kean Keating Kelly (MS) Kennedy (NY) Kennedy (UT) Kiggans (VA) Kiley (CA) Kim Knott Kustoff LaHood LaLota LaMalfa Landsman Langworthy Latta Lawler Lee (FL) Lee (NV) Letlow Loudermilk Lucas Luna Luttrell Lynch Mace Mackenzie Magaziner Malliotakis Maloy Mann Mannion Massie Mast McCaul McClain McClain Delaney McClintock McCormick McDonald Rivet McDowell McGuire Messmer Meuser Miller (IL) Miller (OH) Miller (WV) Miller-Meeks Min Moolenaar Moore (AL) Moore (NC) Moore (UT) Moore (WV) Moran Morelle Moskowitz Mrvan Murphy Nehls Newhouse Norman Nunn (IA) Obernolte Ogles Onder Owens Palmer Panetta Pappas Perez Perry Pfluger Reschenthaler Riley (NY) Rogers (AL) Rogers (KY) Rose Rouzer Roy Rulli Rutherford Ryan Salazar Salinas Scalise Schmidt Scholten Schrier Schweikert Scott, Austin Self Sessions Shreve Simpson Smith (MO) Smith (NE) Smith (NJ) Smucker Sorensen Spartz Stanton Stauber Stefanik Steil Steube Strong Stutzman Suozzi Sykes Taylor Tenney Thompson (PA) Tiffany Timmons Titus Turner (OH) Valadao Van Drew Van Duyne Van Orden Vasquez Veasey Vindman Wagner Walberg Weber (TX) Webster (FL) Westerman Whitesides Wied Williams (TX) Wilson (SC) Wittman Womack Yakym Zinke NAYS--155 Adams Aguilar Amo Ansari Auchincloss Balint Barragan Beatty Bell Bera Beyer Bonamici Boyle (PA) Brown Brownley Bynum Carbajal Carson Carter (LA) Casar Casten Castor (FL) Castro (TX) Cherfilus-McCormick Chu Cisneros Clark (MA) Clarke (NY) Cleaver Clyburn Cohen Conaway Connolly Correa Crockett Crow Davis (IL) Dean (PA) DeGette DelBene DeSaulnier Dexter Dingell Doggett Elfreth Escobar Espaillat Evans (PA) Fields Figures Fletcher Foster Foushee Frankel, Lois Friedman Frost Garamendi Garcia (CA) Garcia (IL) Garcia (TX) Goldman (NY) Gonzalez, V. Green, Al (TX) Hayes Horsford Hoyer Huffman Ivey Jackson (IL) Jacobs Jayapal Jeffries Johnson (GA) Johnson (TX) Kamlager-Dove Kelly (IL) Khanna Krishnamoorthi Larsen (WA) Larson (CT) Latimer Lee (PA) Levin Liccardo Lieu Lofgren Matsui McBath McBride McClellan McCollum McGarvey McGovern McIver Meeks Menendez Meng Mfume Moore (WI) Morrison Moulton Nadler Neal Neguse Norcross Ocasio-Cortez Olszewski Omar Pallone Peters Pingree Pocan Pou Pressley Quigley Ramirez Randall Raskin Rivas Ross Ruiz Sanchez Scanlon Schakowsky Schneider Scott (VA) Sewell Sherman Simon Smith (WA) Soto Stansbury Stevens Strickland Subramanyam Swalwell Takano Thanedar Thompson (CA) Thompson (MS) Tlaib Tokuda Tonko Torres (CA) Torres (NY) Trahan Tran Turner (TX) Underwood Vargas Velazquez Wasserman Schultz Waters Watson Coleman Williams (GA) NOT VOTING--14 Donalds Gomez Grijalva Himes Hunt Kelly (PA) Leger Fernandez Mills Mullin Pelosi Pettersen Scott, David Sherrill Wilson (FL)

Mses. McCLELLAN and JOHNSON of Texas changed their vote from ``yea'' to ``nay.''

Mr. VEASEY changed his vote from ``nay'' to ``yea.''

So the bill was passed.

The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.

A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.

Stated against:

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