Liberty and Justice for All
Floor Speech
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Mr. LICCARDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Torres for her leadership.
Mr. Speaker, a graveyard of living people, is how Lorenzo described Camp East Montana, the ICE detention facility where guards denied him sunlight and fresh air for a full month.
Lorenzo persevered. Mr. Speaker, 52 others would never feel the sun upon their face again. Fifty-two people have died in ICE custody since Donald Trump took office. They were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, every one someone's child. Every one a child of God. Someone loves us. Someone mourns us. When we die, grief takes part of them with us.
My heart aches for the families who never got the chance to say good- bye, who never held their loved one's hand before they died alone behind barbed wire and concrete.
I have undocumented neighbors in San Jose who have lived there for more than two decades. They have built lives there. They have built families there. Some coach for youth sports teams and others volunteer at their church. Several have built businesses, employing U.S. citizens. All have built our community.
This is not the first time our country has put the most ambitious of our Dreamers and doers behind bars. In 1942, my father came home telling my grandfather that his friend was missing from their weekly pick-up baseball game. It turned out his friend, Norm, had been taken with his family from their home on 5th Street in San Jose and incarcerated in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Norm was Japanese American. That young boy returned to San Jose and grew up.
Decades later, I had the honor of working for him as his intern. His name is Norm Mineta, and he served in this Congress for two decades.
The incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans left an indelible stain on our country. The last of those who endured it still walk among us, and the ghosts of those who did not endure it still haunt our national conscience.
History will harshly judge us also for the abusive and inhuman treatment of our undocumented neighbors. Too many of us have declined to speak out, or perhaps only when ICE's chaotic cruelty takes the life of an American citizen as in Minneapolis. Yet the deaths in our DHS detention centers continue unabated, accompanied only by the incriminating silence of the quietly complicit.
I am proud that in my own Bay Area region: San Mateo County, the city of San Jose, Santa Clara County, and Napa County have all taken steps to obstruct the construction of new detention centers in our communities. We are helping them and others with a toolkit that includes a model ordinance, but local leaders should never have to fight this battle alone.
Congress must act. We must defend human dignity. We must uphold our Constitution, and we must stop digging graveyards for the living.
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