Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I met a woman at a hearing, from Chicago, which I am honored to represent. Her name was Marimar Martinez.

On a Saturday morning, last October, Ms. Martinez decided she had some spare clothes that she was going to take to her church to give to people who needed clothing. She got in her car on Kedzie Avenue and was driving along, when she ran into a group of ICE agents, who stopped her.

She is Hispanic and appears to be Hispanic, and they decided to question whether or not she was in America legally. She had committed no crime, violated no law. She was just driving, looking Hispanic, which was enough for them.

Before it was all over, she was driving away from the scene and was shot five times by the ICE agents. How this woman survived, I will never know, but she did. And, of course, she had to go through a lot of hospitalization and a lot of trouble. But she insisted to the ICE agents that she had never violated the law.

And when it was all over, they sought her out at a hospital and arrested her and then, within days or weeks, dropped all charges. They argued, in the original charge, that her car had crashed into one of the ICE agent's cars and therefore she had committed a criminal act.

When it was all over, that car was removed from the scene and never produced again. They took it to New England, for goodness' sake, from Chicago so that no one could actually look to see if there was any damage on it. There wasn't.

Marimar Martinez survived. It was nothing short of a miracle. She was swept up into this hysteria that President Trump started at his rallies, where he would get up and say over and over again: We have to stop these rapists and murderers and terrorists and the criminally insane and child predators who came across the border under the Biden administration. We are going to get them, and we are going to send in people to make sure that happens.

In came the ICE agents. Did you happen to watch what happened in Minnesota? Did you notice the two innocent individuals who were protesting for sure but were not violating the law, who were shot down and killed in Minneapolis?

That is what has happened here and what has led to what the Republican leader just described, the difference between Democrats here, Republicans there, about how we should handle this issue.

Let me say here again what I have said many times. I was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I am now the ranking Democrat. Immigration is one of our issues, and here is what I think is the bottom line I feel everyone agrees with--I hope they do. The bottom line is this: We should never knowingly allow a dangerous person to come into this country. Short declarative sentence: Never knowingly allow a dangerous person to come into this country.

Second, if someone is in this country and wants to stay, wants any kind of legal status, and commits a dangerous crime, they are gone, no ifs, ands, or buts. They are gone.

Third point, we need an orderly process at our border. We cannot accept all of the people in the world who want to immigrate to the United States at this moment. There has to be an orderly process.

Those, I think, are the three basic principles that most Americans agree on. Some will disagree.

But I come to this issue with a personal agenda. My mother was an immigrant to this country. She was brought here at the age of 2. Hers was a poor family from Lithuania that came to the land of opportunity-- East St. Louis, IL, where I was born and raised.

My grandfather worked jobs that required manual labor, as immigrants do. They took jobs other people wouldn't consider. And here, the next generation produces a grandson who was elected to the U.S. Senate.

That is my story. That is my family's story. That is America's story. We are a nation of immigrants--some brought here involuntarily, some came here voluntarily--and it has made us a great nation. I am proud of it.

In my office just a few steps from here is my mother's naturalization certificate by my desk. I want everyone who comes to my office to know I am the proud son of an immigrant. I don't believe immigrants are inherently evil or bad. I think just the opposite--they are people who come here and work themselves to death so that their kids have a better life.

We have now reached a mindset in this country that anyone who wants to come here is suspected of a crime or dangerous conduct. We should do a background check for sure. But listen to what happened.

I have been in the Senate for a number of years, and 20 years ago, I introduced a bill called the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act basically said: If you were brought to the United States as a child, grew up in the United States, and have nothing serious in your background that raises any question; if you went to that school every day and pledged allegiance to that flag believing you were part of America, you deserve a chance to earn your pathway to citizenship.

That is what the DREAM Act said.

Lucky for me, one of my colleagues in the Senate by the name of Barack Obama was a cosponsor of my bill. Turns out he got a promotion from the Senate and became President of the United States.

I wrote him a letter cosigned by Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, asking him by Executive order to try to create a mechanism like the DREAM Act that gave these kids brought to America a chance to earn their way to citizenship. He came up with something called DACA.

Under DACA, these young people, if they would step forward and identify themselves to the government--they are undocumented--if they identify themselves to the government, if they were brought here as children, we would give them a chance. But the chance was simply this: You can legally work in the United States, and you won't be deported. Every 2 years, you have to apply for DACA again--every 2 years--pay a $600 fee every 2 years, and go through a lengthy criminal background check. If you pass it, you get DACA for another 2 years.

Mr. President, 980,000 young people stepped forward in the United States to sign up for DACA. How are we doing with these people from DACA? Pretty good. They are teachers. They are nurses. They are doctors. They are policemen. They are serving in our military. They are proving the point they wanted to make: They love this country; they believe they are part of this country. They are not the problem. They have never been the problem.

So what is the Trump administration doing to them? Denying them another opportunity to sign up for another 2 years. Their time is up. They are ready to do it, and they are holding them back. Sadly, they are deporting these young people who have done nothing wrong except try to prove themselves to be loyal Americans.

So when you look at the environment here created by the Trump administration on the issue of immigration, you see overwhelmingly that you have to sit and listen to the whole story. Of every seven people who are arrested and deported by ICE under the Trump administration-- out of every seven, six of them have no criminal record. They are not the rapists and the murders and the terrorists. They are people who live next door to you. They go to the same church you go to. They are the ones who just took care of your sale at the convenience store. They are doing their thing in America, and they are not breaking any laws, and the Trump administration has said they still have to be deported. That, I think, is too much.

When it comes to this debate over funding ICE, what the Republican leader--and he is my friend. John Thune is my friend from South Dakota. We disagree on a lot of politics. I respect him as a person. We disagree on this issue. And when he talks about these individuals who are involved with the ICE agents and Border Patrol and such and how they need to be funded, what he doesn't mention is we have already funded them for this year and last year.

Do you know what the funding level is for those Agencies? It is more than the appropriation for the U.S. Marine Corps--more than the appropriation for the U.S. Marine Corps for these ICE agents who insist on wearing masks and don't want to be held responsible for what they are doing in the streets of Chicago and Minnesota and other places.

I think it is reasonable to say to them: You should be held to the same standards as any law enforcement official in America.

My State troopers in Illinois don't wear masks. The sheriff's deputies don't wear masks. The policemen in Chicago don't wear masks. They wear video cameras, which we are insisting that these ICE agents also carry. They have their names above their badges so that you know who they are and can hold them responsible for any misconduct.

It is not unreasonable to do this. The Republicans say: No. We will make the rules.

You probably saw--maybe you didn't; it was a Chicago occurrence, and we all saw it--when they broke down the door of a man's home and went in and said: You are undocumented. We are going to deport you.

They dragged him out, and he was wearing a bathrobe. They took him out of the shower. It took 2 or 3 days to finally square it away. He was an American citizen. They had the wrong house. They had no warrant to tear down his front door; they did it anyway.

That sort of thing should stop. ICE agents should play by the same rules as policemen, professional law enforcement all across America. That is what we feel on the Democratic side. We are getting nowhere on that issue on the Republican side.

So I think the bottom line is this: We want a safe country, but we also have values. We don't want to mistreat people who are doing a good job in their lives and serving us in very important ways.

I think about my State of Illinois and most other States, and we have a very serious problem finding caregivers in daycare centers for children, for disabled people, and certainly for our parents and grandparents who are in nursing homes and places. Who are those caregivers? Go in and take a look. Forty percent of them are immigrants. They are the ones who make sure your mom and your grandmother are treated with respect and have a chance for decent human treatment during the course of a day. We want them gone? Who is going to take their place? We know better. These are tough jobs. They don't pay an awful lot of money. These folks deserve a lot more than they are currently being paid.

The reality is immigrants are critically important.

The Farm Bureau is a very conservative organization in my State of Illinois. Politically, I know they are on the other side for most issues from me. But I always welcome them each year to hear what they have to say. They came to see me recently and talked about farm labor, migrant farm labor.

There was a lady who has an orchard in Southern Illinois that is pretty well known for peaches and apples and the like. She said: Senator, I can't get the local high school kids to take any job at my orchard. I can't even get them to go to the fruit stand--and I put in an air-conditioner--to sell fruit to people who drive by.

I have to deal--if I am going to deal with anybody--with migrant labor, people that I have known and who have worked for me for years. Now they are afraid to come to the United States. Will you help me?

I said: I will try to help you if I can, but the bottom line is that they are scared, they are frightened of what is going to happen to them if they come to the United States.

Is that a healthy thing?

This lady said: I am not going to be able to keep this orchard for another year or two if I can't get workers to pick the fruit and sell the fruit as part of the operation.

A lady from a dairy farm in Northern Illinois, hundreds of miles away--same story. She said: We don't have enough kids. We used to have a lot of kids in dairy farm families. We don't have enough kids anymore. We need migrant labor to come in and help us on the farm.

That is part of America. It is a job that most people don't jump to take, but it is an important job and an important part of our future.

So I would just say to my friend the Senator from South Dakota: We ought to be able to work this out--don't you think?--it seems to me, if we are reasonable.

There are people like Stephen Miller, who works in the White House and advises the President. He doesn't like immigrants. I know Mr. Miller. I have worked on the other side of the table from him for a long time. I know what his values are. He just doesn't like them, and he is pretty clear about that. He inspires a lot of the conduct coming out of the White House. But there are others sitting on the other side of the aisle, the Republican side, who I know feel differently who would be willing to sit down and work.

Is it possible for a partisan U.S. Senate to write a comprehensive immigration bill that both sides agree on? The answer is clearly yes. There were eight of us, four Democrats and four Republicans. I was on the Democratic side with Schumer and a couple other Senators, and the Republican side was led by John McCain. We put together a comprehensive immigration bill and brought it to the floor, Democrats and Republicans, and passed it with over 60 votes.

It can be done, but you have to have people who are willing to sit down and say: Let's be honest about it. Keep the bad guys out, but give those DACA kids, for example, a chance to be part of America's future.

That is what I think is the middle ground most Americans would agree on. It is still something I think we should aspire to.

I don't know where we are going next on this immigration matter, but I worry about what is going to happen to a lot of people that I represent in Chicago. They are so frightened in the Hispanic communities in Chicago that they have stopped going to church, and some won't send their kids to school. They are just afraid of what is going to happen--somebody is going to be arrested, somebody will be deported or, like Marimar Martinez, God forbid, be shot on the street because they look too Hispanic.

That is the reality of where we are today. We are a better nation than that. We can do a better job than that. We can't leave the debate where it is: Who is in favor of law enforcement and who isn't?

I am in favor of law enforcement. I certainly was in favor on January 6 when the insurrectionists mobbed this Capitol and ran us out that door of the Senate because they were coming into this Chamber, rifling through our desks, aping for cameras. That was the reality. They attacked the law enforcement in this building that protected all of you, still protects you to this minute, and protects me and everyone else who works here--the Capitol Hill police. A hundred and forty of them were victimized by those insurrectionists.

Some people are trying to rewrite history and say this didn't happen. They have a problem. It is called videotape. Videotape tells the story, and we all saw it.

So let's respect law enforcement for the job they are doing. Let's not give them impossible tasks. Let's not ask them to wear masks, for goodness' sake, so people don't know who they are. America is better than that.

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