Liberty and Justice for All
Floor Speech
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Ms. BALINT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representatives Torres and Jayapal for their leadership. I am very happy to speak here tonight on an issue that is so important to so many Americans.
I want to talk about power tonight, Mr. Speaker. Before I came to Congress, I was a public school teacher. I can tell you, when you are a teacher, you have a lot of power over the young people in your classroom. You set the rules. You decide when to speak and when to listen. You can make students feel seen or feel small. I learned very quickly that the more power that you have over someone, the greater responsibility you have to them.
This is the lesson that this administration hasn't learned. Right now, we are watching our government exercise enormous power over people who have almost none, and they are doing it carelessly, with deadly consequences. Since President Trump took office, 56 people have died in ICE custody.
This is a failure beyond measure. Every one of those people was a human being: someone's mother, someone's father, someone's child, someone who others had been waiting to come home, our friends, our neighbors, our family.
When a government, our government, takes someone into custody, it is making a commitment. It is a commitment that while you are in our care, we are responsible for you. If you are sick, we have a responsibility to give you access to healthcare. If something goes terribly wrong, we have a responsibility to tell your family the truth about what happened quickly and transparently.
There is no immigration status that changes that or makes a human being disposable or expendable. In a democracy, dignity and due process are not optional. There is a lot of talk in this Chamber all the time about who belongs in this country, but tonight I will ask you this: What do we owe the people whose lives we have put in our hands?
We owe them due process. We owe them care. We owe them dignity. We owe their families the truth. When we fail them, we owe them accountability.
In this room, we have a responsibility, too. We must stop funding a lawless and chaotic immigration enforcement system that has treated human lives as expendable. We have to use our power.
Every government official who has abused their power and contributed to this horrific death toll must be held accountable.
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