Deporting Fraudsters Act of 2026

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, another week, another redundant and completely unnecessary immigration crime bill. This one purports to make the commission of certain fraud offenses into deportable offenses, but conviction of a fraud offense is already a deportable offense, as the gentleman's recitation of all the cases involving people who were convicted of a crime and then deported and removed from the country demonstrates.

Fraud is considered a crime involving moral turpitude and a specifically enumerated aggravated felony, the conviction of either of which subjects any immigrant to deportation and removal from the country.

In the past, we have heard our colleagues claim these bills are necessary to resolve an undefined ambiguity in the law, but there is no ambiguity.

Section 101(a)(43) of the Immigration and Nationality Act specifies fraud as an aggravated felony, which is by definition a deportable offense. Supreme Court precedent for more than 70 years has treated fraud as a crime involving moral turpitude and therefore a deportable and removable offense.

I know that President Trump, who knows a lot about the criminal justice system, wants to strike a new pose of being tough on fraud. We still have a First Amendment, so that is his right. But at every turn, the Trump administration has dismantled the government programs and offices that actually combat fraud.

At the DOJ, they disbanded key anti-kleptocracy efforts. They eliminated the Consumer Protection Branch that prosecuted corporate fraud. They gutted core anticorruption units like the Public Integrity Section and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit. As all of America knows, they have completely ravaged and shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the first and only agency devoted solely at the Federal level to protect American consumers against being cheated by scammers and fraudsters and big corporations.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau delivered $21 billion back to more than 200 million Americans who were victims of fraud, scams, and other predatory business practices, and the administration has been gutting it because they are soft on corporate fraud and white-collar crime. That is the reality of what is going on here.

Hell-bent on meeting Stephen Miller's arbitrary mass deportation monthly quotas, this administration has directed FBI agents to deprioritize white-collar crime and instead devote their time to the big immigration roundup, whose beautiful results we can see in the nightmare of Minneapolis, where American citizens were shot down for exercising their constitutional rights.

As a result, prosecutions of white-collar crimes, which include a variety of fraud offenses, were down more than 10 percent in the Trump administration in 2025.

If that weren't enough, ICE is interfering with States' abilities to successfully prosecute crimes, like fraud and theft, and to ensure that perpetrators pay their fines and make restitution to their victims. Why is that? Well, they are deporting people before they can actually be tried and fined and before the fines are paid.

Take the case of Jeson Nelon Flores. He was accused of stealing $100 million worth of diamonds. Before his trial was set to take place, ICE swooped in and simply deported him before trial. That meant he served no jail time and was never ordered to pay any restitution to his victims, leaving them with lots of questions about where the $100 million of diamonds are but no justice.

By bypassing the conviction requirement, this legislation would hand a literal get-out-of-jail-free card to immigrants who commit fraud by deporting them without going through the criminal justice system and giving their victims a day in court.

This is part of a broader trend of this administration siding with the perpetrators against the victims, a trend America has seen in the administration's shameful decision to cover up for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's co-conspirators, accomplices, and enablers, while outing the identities and even the photographs of survivors. It is a trend that includes the President's outrageous abuse of the pardon power to let fraudsters, who also happen to be MAGA donors, to purchase a pardon and skip out on their obligation to pay any fine or restitution to their victims.

That includes Trevor Milton, who defrauded investors in his company to the tune of $676 million. Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to the President's reelection campaign. In March of last year, Milton got his pardon, and erased all of the restitution, the hundreds of millions of dollars he owed to his victims.

Take Lawrence Duran, who was sentenced to the longest prison sentence in American history for Medicare fraud in September of 2016. He filed hundreds of thousands of false claims with Medicare, bilking the taxpayers out of more than $87 million. Then he got his Trump pardon and skipped away without having to pay any of the fines or the restitution.

If you can remember one statistic from today, in just 1 year, Donald Trump's pardons wiped out more than $1.3 billion in restitution and fines to victims and survivors of fraud and other scams and white- collar offenses.

This bill is simply another effort to push a fake narrative while ignoring all of the fraud that engulfs us, which the administration has tolerated or even approved through these outrageous pardons.

The administration used fraud as an excuse to send thousands of masked Federal agents to terrorize the people of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, a blunder so egregious our colleagues are told not even to use the phrase ``mass deportation'' anymore because the vast majority of Americans reject what they saw on the streets of Minneapolis, agents beating up peaceful protesters and killing them. American citizens are dying because they dare to exercise their First Amendment rights and their Second Amendment rights in public.

We saw the price of this authoritarianism. Every day this administration is pushing lies to try to get the American people to ignore the reality that is discernible by our own senses. That is the real fraud on the American people.

Now, they want us to believe that they are combating fraud when they pardon it, and they wipe out all of the government units that are designed to ferret out fraud. They started by firing 17 inspectors general, whose job it is to fight fraud, waste, corruption, and abuse in the Federal Government. They sacked all of them to make it possible for the kind of rampant corruption we have seen to take place. The American people can see what is going on.

Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to oppose this redundant, unnecessary, and distractionary bill.

Mr. Speaker, they are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. I am afraid that the gentleman owes former President Biden a major apology for what he just said.

He said that hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution owed by people whom Joe Biden pardoned was forgiven. According to a study by the Cato Institute, which the gentleman can look up, all of the fines and restitution forgiven by Joe Biden was $680,000, not even $1 million; whereas, Donald Trump has forgiven $1.3 billion in fines and restitution owed by the fraudsters and conmen and white-collar criminals whom he has pardoned since he got back into office under their pay-to-play pardon operation they have got going over there right now. That is the reality and the fact. That is the truth of the matter.

No, Joe Biden did not forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. What Donald Trump has done is utterly aberrational in American history.

I see the gentleman is fleeing the Chamber right now rather than dealing with the facts and the reality of it.

The gentleman was completely wrong.

The gentleman was fleeing the Chamber rather than deal with the reality that he was absolutely wrong when he accused President Biden of forgiving hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and restitution to people he pardoned. It never happened.

It was less than $1 million. It was $680,000.

Mr. Speaker, I will submit the Cato Institute report for the Record.

Mr. Speaker, I would love to be contradicted if there are any facts over on that side of the aisle. If anybody wants to traffic in facts-- but, no, maybe it is more imaginary and delusional sophistry from the gentleman.

Does he have any facts?

It is no problem just saying: I made a mistake.

It is like Secretary Noem calling Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist, calling Renee Good a domestic terrorist. That was a terrible mistake and a blunder, but she couldn't admit it.

Will the gentleman admit that he was wrong about that or does he have facts?

I don't know. I ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether there might be some way of determining whether there are any facts available to contradict me on this, but the study that I have shows that all of Joe Biden's pardons result in less than $1 million in fines and restitution to be forgiven.

Mr. Speaker, do you know why that is?

It is because up until President Trump, every other President had demanded ordinarily as a matter of course that fines be paid and restitution be paid.

I hope that there are some people on the other side of the aisle-- they have got a huge staff of hundreds of people, can somebody find a fact that would contradict what I have just said.

Jayapal), who is the ranking member of the Subcommittee of Immigration Integrity.

That was an amazing evasion of what we are really talking about.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the Cato Institute study, ``President Trump's Pardons: An Embarrassment of Riches.'' [From the Cato Institute Blog, Feb. 11, 2026] President Trump's Pardons: An Embarrassment of Riches (By Dan Greenberg)

Yesterday, I described the final scandal of the Clinton administration: Bill Clinton's midnight pardon of Marc Rich. If the Rich pardon was a snowflake, then the pardons of President Trump's second term are a blizzard.

The scope and magnitude of Trump's second-term pardons are unprecedented. Joe Biden granted 80 pardons in his four-year term, but Trump's pardons make his predecessor's look like a drop in the bucket. In the first year of the second Trump administration, the president issued 166 individual pardons, as well as a mass pardon that erased the verdicts of more than 1,500 January 6 Capitol rioters. In other words, even putting aside the rioters' collective pardon, Trump is now issuing pardons at eight times the rate Biden did. Nonetheless, the fact that a president issues more pardons than his predecessors is not necessarily problematic. The real problem lies in the great number of particular second- term pardons that appear indefensible. Such pardons fall into five categories.

First: Biden's pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government. In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump's second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion. This staggering sum--composed of money owed to crime victims and to government treasuries--has been zeroed out by presidential edict.

Trump's pardon pen was a boon to ex-criminals like Trevor Milton (who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded $660 million) and Lawrence Duran (who no longer must repay the government he defrauded $87 million). It was also a boon to HDR Global Trading Ltd., which owed the nation a $100 million fine; in this case, Trump also made history by granting the nation's very first pardon to a corporation.

Second: Trump has normalized the pardoning of disgraced politicians, such as former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (who orchestrated a spree of state-sponsored drug trafficking leading to a 45-year prison term), Nevada legislator Michele Fiore (who embezzled $70,000 out of a police memorial fund for personal expenses like rent and plastic surgery), Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins (who handed out badges to untrained businessmen in exchange for $75,000 in bribes), and Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada (who defrauded state government with a fake-payee kickback scheme). Perhaps I should disclose my proximity to one such pardon recipient, Arkansas legislator Jeremy Hutchinson (who traded official acts for bribes, embezzled from campaign funds, and filed false tax returns); Hutchinson's tenure in the state Senate, which ended with simultaneous indictments in three federal districts, began when he defeated me in a Republican primary.

Third: Trump's pardons are beginning to undermine the contemporaneous work of his own Department of Justice. Alina Habba, Trump's own US attorney in New Jersey, announced Joseph Schwartz's three-year sentence for $38 million in tax fraud in April; Trump pardoned him seven months later. Real estate developer Timothy Leiweke was charged earlier this year with conspiring to rig the bidding process for a Texas sports arena; Trump pardoned him in December. Federal investigators and prosecutors must find such pardons demoralizing and self-negating.

Fourth: [REDACTED] For instance, the ordinary vetting procedures of the Office of the Pardon Attorney have often been sidestepped. Formality in pardon deliberation is desirable because it immunizes the president from the appearance of pay-to-play; the absence of such formality makes it plausible that a multitude of recent pardons are transactional. Trump pardoned Paul Walczak (who evaded millions of dollars in taxes) after Walczak's mother raised millions of dollars for MAGA candidates and paid a million dollars to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Trevor Milton--the securities fraudster mentioned above--donated $1.8 million to Trump's campaign before a presidential pardon wiped out all $660 million of his restitution obligations. (That is, if nothing else, an impressive ROI.)

Before Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao--who headed the cryptocurrency exchange Binance while it fostered more than 1.5 million illegal virtual trades as well as prohibited transactions to Al Qaeda, Isis, and Hamas--Zhao had brokered a $2 billion investment in Eric and Donald Trump Jr.'s cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. (When asked about Zhao in a subsequent 60 Minutes interview, Trump explained, ``I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.''

[REDACTED] Trump evidently hoped Cuellar would return the favor by switching parties to the GOP; when that didn't happen, the president released an angry statement on Truth Social, criticizing Cuellar for ``Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry's daughters, will not like. Oh well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!'' Previous presidents would surely take offense at the suggestion that a pardon could be traded for something of value; [REDACTED]

Fifth: Here is another occasion for alarm bells: Donald Trump has increasingly focused on providing pardons to his campaign supporters who stretched or broke the law, such as John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis. (As the president's pardon attorney, Ed Martin, famously explained on X, ``No MAGA left behind.'') Indeed, Trump apparently views the exercise of his pardon authority to forgive federal crimes as insufficient; Trump's inability to eliminate state- level convictions has apparently led him to pressure state government officials to pardon state-level offenses related to the 2020 elections.

I am not the only Cato analyst who has explained the risks of political and constitutional crisis created by presidential attempts to get state-level election criminals pardoned; normalizing such actions will inevitably create ripple effects in future elections. Historically, the central principle of the Justice Department's role in elections has been ``prosecution, not intervention.'' The latest edition of the DOJ's governing manual in this sphere, Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, explains that the states have primary responsibility for overseeing elections--and that any federal investigation of elections must minimize the likelihood of affecting that election or otherwise ``chill legitimate voting activities.''

That edition of the manual has disappeared from Justice's website. Bob Bauer, Obama's former White House counsel, has speculated that the manual is being revised to match Trump's goal of ``nationalization'' of election administration.

The Supreme Court has explained that pardons are justified if ``the public welfare will be better served.'' It is impossible to see how the public welfare is served by many of Trump's pardons today. The president's power to pardon federal crimes is practically absolute. It cannot be modified by Congress. Furthermore, just as an uninvolved citizen lacks standing to challenge a prosecutor's actions, a third party likewise may not challenge the grant of a presidential pardon. [REDACTED] It looks like the floodgates will remain open for the foreseeable future. Perhaps future presidents will behave better; perhaps a future constitutional amendment will encourage them to do so.

At least the specter of corruption in previous presidential administrations (Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, or Biden's pardon of his son) appeared to be an exception to the rule. [REDACTED]

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Mr. RASKIN. In it, it answers the question between the gentleman and me. I thought that I was submitting a very simple, humble request, that he withdraw the false statement that Joe Biden, as President, had forgiven hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and restitution. That is an absolute falsehood. It is inaccurate.

Now, look, let's start with this: I am going to educate the gentleman to the extent that he wants to be educated any further on the matter about the difference between pardons in the Biden administration and the Trump administration.

Joe Biden granted a total of 80 pardons in his 4-year term. President Trump issued 166 individual pardons in his first year and then, of course, famously, the mass pardon of 1,500 January 6 rioters and insurrectionists who stormed this Chamber and the Capitol.

I am quoting directly from the Cato study, for the benefit of the gentleman from Arizona: ``Biden's pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government.''

This is money that a court has determined is owed and must be paid. Biden forgave $680,000. Now, I am sure that if you are one of the victims, you are not happy to hear about that, that that was forgiven, but that is within the power of the President.

``In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump's second-term pardons''--that is just 1 year of pardons--``have forgiven criminal debts''--fines, restitution, and forfeitures--``of more than $1.5 billion.''

In other words, Biden didn't even forgive $1 million. President Trump has forgiven more than $1.5 billion to the fraudsters, white-collar criminals, and scammers who have found their way to Mar-a-Lago and the White House and have been able to finagle the pardon that they always wanted.

``This staggering sum,'' as the Cato Institute puts it, ``has been zeroed out by Presidential edict.''

That is in a completely different galaxy than what President Biden or any other President, Democrat or Republican, has done in American history. It is stratospheric.

I am glad that the gentleman's blatant misstatement and his refusal to retract it have given us the opportunity to focus on this extraordinary corruption that is taking place because it tells the true story of fraud and how fraud is being treated by the current administration.

Cato says to consider the case of Trevor Milton, ``who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded $660 million'' that he owed them. Take the case of Lawrence Duran, ``who no longer must repay the government he defrauded $87 million.''

You can add up all the people who were pardoned by President Biden, and you don't even get to $1 million. Then, you have individual criminals whom Donald Trump pardoned after they made various kinds of overtures to the White House or showed up at Mar-a-Lago, and those people were getting hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars forgiven in fines.

The gentleman got back up to say these people were either convicted for or accused of tens of millions of dollars in fraud under President Biden. I am talking about what a court ordered them to pay. That is the apples-to-apples comparison that the gentleman doesn't want to deal with.

It is interesting that he happened upon that particular issue because it is not one that benefits their side of the argument at all, as they claim to be interested in saving the victims of fraud.

Victims of fraud, thousands of them, have lost more than a billion dollars because of the pardons of Donald Trump. That is the direct policy of the administration.

Mr. Speaker,

Mr. Speaker, some of our colleagues jump up like a jack-in-the-box whenever the President tells them to do that. Others in the Chamber want to stand up for American citizens exercising their First and Second Amendment rights, like Alex Pretti and Renee Good. They were shot down by ICE agents, who somehow believed that, with this Trump administration, they are above the law and beyond the law.

We are going to stand up with the American people. We are not going to take orders from the executive branch, which is utterly humiliating and self-defeating for a Member of the Article I branch of the Congress of the United States.

The gentleman, I think, accuses us of something he called the deranged Trump syndrome, which I can only imagine means following a President who plunges the country into an illegal, unauthorized, undeclared war, spending $1 billion or $2 billion a day, and then not asking any questions about it because somehow you think your political destiny is intertwined with the President, who has shown no loyalty to the people who show loyalty to him. That is a personal problem on their part. We don't have deranged Trump syndrome. I think that falls on that side of the aisle.

Mr. Speaker,

Mr. Speaker, there is such a thick fog of propaganda and disinformation in the Chamber that I think we have lost sight of what the bill is about and what the law is.

The law is very clear today, which is: Conviction of a criminal fraud offense is already a deportable offense. It already gets you deported. That is why the majority began with a whole litany of cases where people were being deported after committing crimes.

They didn't like the fact that they had the right to appeal it. They don't like the fact that there is due process, but they appealed it. Then, they were deported. That is what the law is.

Their bill is simply an effort to say you don't need a conviction anymore. You could just deport them based on hearsay evidence. An ICE agent says that this person admitted to me that they had committed fraud, and that substitutes for a prosecution, trial, and conviction by a jury.

In the meantime, we have hundreds of judges in America who are condemning ICE for lying in court. We have Department of Justice lawyers who are saying literally in court that their job sucks because they can't defend what is taking place with ICE. We have judge after judge denouncing the fantastical, misleading, deceptive, mendacious testimony of people from ICE, and now you want to just trust an ICE agent to say this person admitted to me that they committed criminal fraud. We are just going to kick them out of the country without a trial.

Thomas Jefferson said during the Alien and Sedition Acts that there are people who want to strip away the rights of aliens and who will inevitably come to attack the rights of citizens, too. We already saw that in Minneapolis.

There were a lot of people in this Chamber willing to look the other way when they were knocking down the doors of immigrants without a search warrant, without probable cause, when they were roughing up immigrants, or when immigrants were dying in custody. Then, suddenly, these ICE agents thought they could get away with it when it comes to U.S. citizens, and that is when America woke up to this threat and said no.

ICE agents are not superior to the rule of law. They are not above and beyond the law. Even President Trump understood that, which is why he has pulled a lot of people out of Minneapolis. They wanted to change the subject. They said stop using the words ``mass deportation.''

A majority of the American people reject these authoritarian tactics that have been unleashed against both citizens and immigrants.

This is a nation of laws. It is a nation under the rule of law and under the Constitution. Their bill is, at best, if not completely redundant, unnecessary, and silly, a gloss on what the law already is, which is that if you are convicted of fraud and you are an immigrant, you get kicked out of the country. You are removed. They want to pick a fight on a nonsensical problem.

We don't need to degrade our own rule of law by taking action against people without a criminal conviction. The criminal justice system works just fine, so we should be encouraging government agents not to lie to judges, not to render false testimony, as judges across the country have been saying. Both Republican and Democratic appointees have been rejecting what is coming out of this administration.

This bill, as far as I know, is not about naturalized citizens. I think our distinguished chairman said something about that. He may have gotten it confused with another bill, but this bill is unnecessary and redundant.

Mr. Speaker,

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, before the distinguished gentleman leaves, I would be happy to yield to him for an answer to a question.

The bill, as he originally introduced it, required a criminal conviction. I wonder why it was changed and whether that was changed with his approval or not. What was the logic for changing it?

I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Taylor) for the purpose of a colloquy.

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Mr. RASKIN. Representative Taylor, this is your bill, H.R. 1958. It begins like this:

``Any alien who has been convicted of an offense that involves defrauding the United States Government or unlawfully receiving a Federal public benefit . . . or a State or local public benefit . . . is deportable.''

You have got the language of ``convicted'' in there. It was changed by the Committee. I am just wondering: Why did you originally have it in such a way as to require a conviction?

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Mr. RASKIN. That is the way it has been changed. It has been altered to that. When you introduced it, it required a conviction. I am just wondering: What was your original logic, and why did you change your mind about that, if you did? Maybe you didn't.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I will reclaim my time.

I supported the original vision. It was basically unnecessary because it was a restatement of what the law is, to put it all in one place, so I could certainly support that.

Then your language was completely diluted in committee to open up this huge, gaping hole to say that you don't need a criminal conviction before deporting someone. We have enumerated the problems with that.

For one thing, it deprives victims of a crime the opportunity to be heard and perhaps to get their restitution and to get their proper justice in court.

Also, it sets a terrible precedent. This is the Thomas Jefferson point. When we say we are going to have lesser standards relating to immigrants, that then carries over to citizens. We have seen already in this huge immigration roundup what that means in terms of the trampling of the rights of our people under the Bill of Rights.

Mr. Speaker,

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for this lively debate. This bill is redundant. It is unnecessary. It is dangerous in terms of eroding a basic principle that we have, which is that there should be full due process and people should not be deported without a criminal conviction. The prosecution is not always right, but also everybody should have their day in court, including the victims.

At a time when we have seen Big Brother bloated beyond belief in terms of budget and in terms of power, the last thing we should do is to look for further ways to aggrandize the power of the executive branch at this point.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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