Liberty and Justice for All

Floor Speech

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Ms. DEAN of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Representative holding this Special Order hour.

Mr. Speaker, I rise with my colleagues to mark a grim milestone: 35 people died in ICE detention custody last year, the deadliest year in more than two decades. This year, there have been 24, with one more death reported just this afternoon.

Ordinarily, this should spark some form of reckoning or investigation. Not under this administration. The President continues to flood American cities with thuggish ICE and CBP agents, acting as though the law does not apply to them, arresting more and more people who have committed few or no crimes.

Since President Trump returned to office, ICE has arrested more than half a million people, 40 percent of whom do not have a criminal record.

I have seen this firsthand, how this administration treats people in custody. I have seen the overcrowded holding facilities at Dilley, Texas--99 children without a toy or anything to play with. I have spoken to people who have been denied critical medications and have been denied legal aid. I saw a precious child whose mouth was so infected, it had turned green.

Texas is not alone. In New York, The Washington Post detailed dozens of detainees held for days in rooms that usually hold no more than 12 for hours and hours.

People are forced to sleep sitting up, to use bathrooms without any privacy, and others with serious health conditions, including tuberculosis, an ovarian cyst, and kidney failure, lacking proper care.

In my home State of Pennsylvania, Mr. Speaker, at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a 32-year-old detainee died allegedly of suicide just 5 days after entering the ICE facility. His name is Chaofeng Ge, a Chinese national. His family wants answers.

In February of last year, Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old woman suffering from untreated severe mental illness, with a significant language barrier, was dropped off by ICE at a bus stop in freezing winter temperatures. She was wearing summer clothes, and she froze to death.

This is under this administration.

Most recently, in the Philadelphia detention camp, Parady La, a 46- year-old citizen of Cambodia, died in ICE custody on January 9 while suffering from withdrawal, which he and his family detailed.

In these conditions, conditions of deliberate neglect, deaths are not accidental. They are inevitable.

Martin Luther King warned, and others too, that justice delayed is justice denied.

For those who have died in ICE custody, waiting for their day in court, there can never be justice. For their families, there can never be peace. For our Nation, it is a failure for which we can never overcome.

This is not a matter of just humanity and ethics. It is about who we are as Americans. Not here. Not in this America.

I urge the administration to stop this illegal set of detentions and not let people pay with their liberty and their lives.

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