Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2026

Floor Speech

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Mr. MAGAZINER. Yesterday, at this time, Liam Ramos was at his preschool in Minneapolis, and today, as we speak, he is in a prison cell in Texas against the will of his parents.

Mr. Speaker, what are we doing here?

I am a member of the Committee on Homeland Security, and under the Biden administration, I pushed for more resources to secure the border. I know that we need to enforce immigration laws, but not like this.

They are sending masked agents into American neighborhoods. They are beating people in the streets. They are breaking into homes without a judicial warrant, profiling people based on their appearance or their accent, and detaining them if they don't have their citizenship papers on them.

Mr. Speaker, is this what we have become, a country where everyone has to carry their citizenship papers around in case masked men come and threaten to beat them, detain them, and throw them into a vehicle?

Is that what we have become?

By the Department of Homeland Security's own data, the vast majority of the people whom they have detained have no criminal record at all. They are detaining and deporting U.S. military veterans, children with cancer, and pregnant women. We don't have to do it like this. We can enforce immigration laws without this level of cruelty.

Now they are asking us to give them a blank check to continue funding this. We, as a Congress, need to start doing our jobs and put commonsense guardrails in place.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill until there are real guardrails in the way that DHS is behaving.

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