Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment Appropriations Act, 2026

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, the American people can be forgiven for wanting to turn off their computers or TVs and feeling a sense of abhorrence and repulsion at what they are seeing again and again and again as the video of Renee Good's killing is replayed for them.

What it shows is a horrific tragedy--a mother who was 37 years old, an American citizen, subjected to alleged murder. I use the word ``alleged'' because I have spent most of my career in law enforcement, and the word ``alleged'' before a conviction is always mandatory. But what is on that tape is there for everyone to see--the absolutely needless, reckless use of excessive force with a firearm, without any apparent need for self-defense.

We are seeing a surge of violence in this country that is not only from private individuals but now from supposed law enforcement--ICE-- which has a responsibility to uphold the law and respect norms that protect everyday citizens.

We are a country built on due process and the rule of law, and we were founded on the idea that we resist tyrannical monarchs; that we fought a war, in fact, against a tyranny that used totalitarian, Gestapo-type tactics. And now we see them on the streets of our own country.

Yes, Americans have a right to be repulsed by these videos and outraged, angry, but also saddened and grief-stricken because the killing of Renee Nicole Good last week at the hands of an ICE agent showed the tragic outcome of abuse of power. This death was preventable and predictable. It was preventable. It needn't have happened.

But it was also predictable because it is only an example of the rising tide of lawlessness and recklessness on the part of ICE that has been documented, in fact, by my report on the investigation we did, as ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and the report that was the result of that investigation. We released it several weeks ago, and it can be found at https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/ wp-content/uploads/2025.12.8-ICE-Report-revised-FINAL.pdf.

I released this report, which documents firsthand accounts of 22 U.S. citizens in 10 different States who were physically assaulted, pepper- sprayed, denied medical treatment, detained, sometimes for days, by Federal immigration agents. And we did a hearing with a number of those American citizens who were injured, denied medical care, prevented from contacting their families or lawyers, some of them for days on end, while detained under very harsh conditions. And it was graphic; it was gripping. But it was only 4 or 5 examples of 22 individuals we interviewed who themselves were only a subset of hundreds of American citizens who were physically assaulted, detained, and many of them injured.

This pattern and practice is not coincidental. It is the result of an apparent policy on the part of this government Agency that involves agents who are masked, unidentifiable, who turn violent without provocation, crashing their government vehicles into citizens' cars, dragging them from those cars, slamming them to the ground, violently assaulting them, often leading to lasting injuries, including trauma.

One of the individuals who appeared at our hearing was a veteran who served and sacrificed for this country in the belief that he was helping to preserve the very liberties that he was denied when he was arrested.

Now, every one of these people sought to tell the agents that they were an American citizen. They offered their passports or their driver's license or other identification to show they were American citizens. There was no reason to assault them in this way.

In California, they beat a 79-year-old man so badly that they broke his ribs, and they slammed another man's head into the ground so hard that he was concussed. In Illinois, a woman was shot five times, while, in Indiana, a man was punched in the face and dragged outside his family home in the early morning hours. It didn't matter whether children were present; agents acted with reckless disregard for their safety and well-being. In Idaho, children were taken from a car at gunpoint and later zip-tied. In Massachusetts, an autistic child was deliberately taken from her parents and used as bait by law enforcement to try to lure their parents out of the house.

These detentions were not limited to one State or a few States. They spanned the Nation--from Idaho to Alabama, from California to Illinois. And we know there are so many stories that haven't been told because people fear retaliation and retribution--American citizens fearing their own government retaliating against them for speaking truth to power about physical assaults by their own government.

These ICE agents have been trained and they have been recruited by the Department of Homeland Security, which is complicit in this misconduct--complicit because it has failed to provide the right training and perhaps has recruited people who are wrongly in these roles, and it has failed to either provide protocols or to enforce them.

What became clear through our interviews and across the stories that keep emerging is that the Department of Homeland Security does not have just a few rogue agents. It has become a lawless force as an Agency of the government. It is engaged in a coordinated, nationwide effort using the same tactics, the same violence wherever they are deploying.

So after months of investigating these kinds of lawless abuses, I am really saddened to say that Renee Good's death came as no surprise. It was predictable, and it was preventable. And also preventable are the injuries and the deaths and the lawlessness that are happening every day, right now, in the streets of America, in the neighborhoods of our great country.

They are a betrayal of the rule of law that is the foundation of our Nation. It should shock America's conscience, and I believe it has, as it has shocked mine. These kinds of brazen, abusive, lawless tactics do not represent our Nation. Americans will have a hard time--and they should--recognizing our great Nation in what they are seeing hour after hour, day after day--right now, in realtime--in those abuses and in so frequently used Gestapo-type tactics.

I initially thought: I don't want to go there. My father escaped Germany in 1935 and came to America after seeing what was to come in those same Gestapo-type tactics in Germany. He came here speaking no English, having not much more than the shirt on his back and knowing virtually no one. If he had stayed in Germany, he would have seen a paramilitary force going door to door, rounding up people just like him, exactly the kinds of tactics we now see unfolding: ICE as a paramilitary force going business to business, door to door, church to church, school to school, seizing people, dragging them out of their cars or homes without much more cause than the fact that they are people of color or they speak a different language or they are working in a place where undocumented immigrants are thought to be working.

In this country, now, decades after that time in the 1930s, in the pinnacle of democracy, what we are seeing is a paramilitary force stopping people in this same way, searching them and assaulting them. And the parallels are unmistakable and frightening. We cannot, in this body or anywhere in our great country, stand idly while our fellow citizens are rounded up and subjected to this treatment. We should not be standing idly as any human being, whatever their status, is subjected to this kind of abuse.

I will continue, on my subcommittee, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the work that we have done, the investigation that is ongoing right now. We will press for accountability. We will press for the facts, the truth. And we have a lot of it already. We will not sit idly and watch as the Nation I love--all of us in this body do--demeans and betrays our Constitution. We have all taken an oath to uphold it. So have those ICE agents that are betraying it. Our Constitution will crumble unless we fight for it.

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