Liberty and Justice for All
Floor Speech
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to shine the light on a growing problem in Federal detention facilities, federally owned and privately supervised. Every single day, we stand in this Chamber, look at that flag, and pledge ``with liberty and justice for all.''
Right now, those words are a hollow lie. Today, we learned that Edwin Jovanny Lopez-Cornejo, a 41-year-old Salvadoran man, died after a medical emergency at Delaney Hall in New Jersey. His family says he had complained about not receiving his medications. The day before he died, he told his mother he had lost feeling in his face and arm. Now, his family is left demanding answers.
Edwin is not alone. Under this administration, immigration enforcement isn't just broken. It is lethal. We are witnessing a systematic deadly abuse of power by DHS, ICE, and Border Patrol. It is happening with complete arrogant impunity. The American public sees exactly what is happening, and they have rejected it so strongly that some have even lost their lives standing up against it: Renee Good and Alex Pretti, to name just two.
This chaos is not accidental. It is a direct result of a policy that prioritizes arbitrary numbers over public safety. Under an aggressive quota demanding 2,000 arrests a day, raids have surged by 600 percent. In a single month, Federal agents swept up 800 people every single day who have had zero criminal records, relying on broad profiling, street roundups, and community checkpoints.
To hold this wave of arrests, detention populations have surged by 140 percent, cramming over 60,000 human beings into overcrowded facilities, where basic standards of health, safety, and human dignity have broken down.
In my home State of California, at the Adelanto facility, Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a man from Los Angeles held for months, filmed the filthy water detainees were forced to drink. It was crawling with live wormlike parasites in their potable water, just weeks after a Federal judge ordered the facility to fix those conditions. That isn't negligence. That is cruelty by design.
When you treat human beings in an intentionally dangerous manner and deprive them of food that is not rotten and potable water, they die. Mr. Speaker, 76 lives have ended in ICE custody or immediately after release since January 2025. That is the highest death toll of any administration in its first 2 years in more than two decades. The mortality rate in ICE detention has exploded fourfold.
What is the administration's response? To limit their own oversight visits, cutting them in half, from twice a year to once a year, and in some cases to once every 2 years.
They have purchased privately contracted facilities to prevent State and local oversight. They think that changing the paperwork will wipe the blood off their hands. We all know that it will not.
I am the mother of a law enforcement officer. I know what it means to wear a badge. I know the sacrifice required to protect a community. Let me be crystal clear: Protect the badge. Do not protect the bad behavior.
When you excuse abuse, when you shield rogue agents, when you fail to hold Federal officers to the same basic standards as a basic peace officer in any city across the country, you destroy public trust and disgrace every honest officer trying to do his or her best to protect their community.
I know the terror of this abuse personally. When we tried to conduct oversight, ICE responded by shooting CS gas and then lied about it. A vehicle matching an ICE van once tried to run me off the freeway, right in my district. So when I ask what an innocent family is supposed to do when an unmarked vehicle chases them down a highway; I am not asking simply to ask a question. I am exposing a dangerous, lawless reality.
We cannot look away. Congress cannot remain silent while the executive branch operates a deadly machine of abuse, intimidation, military grade weapons, and imprisonment.
When Members of Congress or Senators try to reduce deaths in custody and conduct oversight, they should never be met with lethal force. Liberty and justice for all does not end at the gates of a detention center. It does not disappear on a dark highway.
These 76 people mean something. They are our neighbors. They are our friends. They are our relatives.
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Garcia).
Imagine being a 16-year-old boy and knowing that you will only get 10 minutes to talk to your father every 2 weeks. That is the reality for one teenager detained at the ICE facility in Dilley, Texas. He has been detained for more than 4 months and has lost 10 pounds. He has described living in rooms with cockroaches, spiders, and mosquitoes. This is a 16-year-old child.
What gets me most is what those 10 minutes with his father must be like. Instead of calling his dad to talk about school, his friends, or what he wants to do with his life, he is watching the clock, knowing that when those 10 minutes are over, he will have to wait another 2 weeks just to hear his father's voice.
He is not alone. At least 60 children at this facility have been held for more than 100 days despite a court order limiting their detention to 20 days. These are children in prison. Think about what those months mean to a child. They are months away from their parents, months away from their classrooms, and months of their childhood stolen by this administration.
That is why these detention facilities matter when we talk about death in ICE and CBP custody. The harm does not begin when someone dies. It begins when we decide that being in government custody means that you can be separated from your family, denied basic dignity, and treated as though your life does not matter.
These are children. Our government has a responsibility to protect them, and it should never be the reason that they lose their childhood.
I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez).
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Clarke).
Ms. CLARKE of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I rise on this day in righteous indignation and vehement opposition to the barbaric policing, detention, and, indeed, even murder of immigrants at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and CBP, on the orders of Donald Trump.
With immunity granted not by the law, but by lawlessness, President Trump's untrained, unrestrained, and utterly amoral agents within ICE and CBP are perpetrating a crusade of cruelty with very few parallels in our history.
It has struck our neighbors, taken our loved ones from their homes, and left dozens of decent people on our streets and those illegally detained dead with no crimes committed, but a belief in an American Dream that no longer exists and has become a living nightmare.
To my GOP colleagues, tell me this: In what moral, God-fearing nation would the penalty for seeking a better life be a brutal death? In what modern country would people fleeing injustice and inhumanity find nothing but more injustice and more inhumanity?
The Statue of Liberty begs to give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Those words call out to the world's most vulnerable people so America might be their survival and not their death.
It is time for this terrible experiment in Trumpism to end and, in turn, to secure a new immigration system centered on compassion, not cruelty, not dehumanization, and not death; entrusted to competent officers, not kidnapping, not killer thugs; and bent toward justice, not broken by Donald Trump.
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Mr. Speaker, I want you to think about what it means to dial 911. You call 911 when you are scared, when you are in danger, or when you need help and you need that help immediately. I know this because for 17\1/2\ years I was that voice on the other side, answering 911 calls, people's calls for help.
Imagine, Mr. Speaker, having to make that call from inside a Federal detention center. That is what happened at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, where ProPublica reviewed more than 160 emergency calls from inside the facility. People were calling 911 because they were sick, in pain, or desperately needed medical help from a place where the United States Government was responsible for keeping them safe but was denying them the help that they needed.
Three men died in just 6 weeks. That is why we are here today. People like Geraldo Lunas Campos told the staff at this location that he needed help, and his cries were ignored. He is not just another statistic, and neither are the other people who have died in ICE and CBP custody. They are fathers, sons, brothers, friends, and people with families waiting for them to come home.
When the government takes away someone else's freedom, it takes on the responsibility for that person's life. Mr. Speaker, you cannot lock someone behind a government door, ignore their cries for help, feed them rotten food and bad water, and then act surprised when someone dies.
These deaths deserve answers. They deserve accountability. The families who lost someone in government custody deserve to know why their loved one died and why they did not come home.
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Sanchez).
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Chu).
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Jayapal).
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Balint).
Mr. KENNEDY of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congresswoman Norma Torres for convening today's critically important Special Order hour.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to remember those whose lives have been cut short at the hands of Trump's out-of-control Department of Homeland Security and to demand accountability for the families who have been left shattered.
In January of this year, the killing of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by DHS personnel forever changed how Americans view this department.
A month later, the DHS culture of cruelty rocked our community in Buffalo, New York, the City of Good Neighbors. Nurul Amin Shah Alam was a 56-year-old Rohingya refugee who came to our country legally after fleeing persecution and violence, seeking safety for himself and his family. He was nearly blind and spoke very little English. He couldn't read, write, or navigate on his own.
On February 19, DHS personnel abandoned him, alone, miles from his home outside of a closed coffee shop in the cold, dead of winter. Neither his family nor his attorney were notified of his release. There was no coordinated hand off and no plan to protect a vulnerable man. Five days later, he was found dead. His death was ruled a homicide.
Mr. Shah Alam should be alive today, which is why I introduced the DHS Release Transparency Act to prevent tragedies like this. No family should ever have to wonder if their loved one is safe after being released from government custody.
DHS was created in the aftermath of 9/11 for one fundamental purpose: to keep the American people safe. Under President Trump, DHS has become synonymous with fear, deadly force, cruelty, and utter disregard for human decency.
Our government has a moral obligation to protect human rights, to live up to our unique role as a beacon of democracy. The Constitution does not permit government officials to act with impunity, to use violence without accountability, or to treat human life as disposable. Trump has turned government into a weapon, incited violence in our communities, and made fear and dehumanization the defining features of his immigration policy. When those in power normalize brutality, they denigrate the sacrifices that have been made for our freedom. When they abuse people in their custody, they shatter the bonds of the social contract that ties us together. When they refuse to answer for the harm they cause, they erode the core promise at the heart of the American experiment, that every person is entitled to dignity, due process, and equal justice under the law.
Under Democratic leadership, this body will hold DHS accountable and uphold the oath that we all take to the Nation and to the Constitution.
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Mr. Speaker, inside an ICE detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas, people detained by our government went on hunger strikes to protest the conditions that they are being held in. Instead of asking why people in their custody were desperate enough to stop eating, ICE went to court for permission to force feed them.
Guards restrain hunger strikers while medical staff inserted feeding tubes through their noses and into their stomachs. One asylum seeker was subject to forced feeding for nearly 8 months.
Think about that. A person is saying: I am so desperate about the conditions you are holding me in that I am willing to stop eating. The government's response is: We are not going to address why you are protesting. We are going to physically stop you from protesting.
Dean).
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Mrs. TORRES of California. Mr. Speaker, I close by bringing this back to my communities, the Inland Empire, because this is not happening somewhere far away.
Since September of last year, four people have died while detained at Adelanto facility.
On February 23 of this year, Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano died in ICE custody. He was a 52-year-old man. He had lived in this country for 28 years. He was a husband, a father, and his family is from Los Angeles. ICE arrested him and took him to the Adelanto facility, a facility run by the GEO Group, a private prison company. One month later, on March 25, he was dead.
ICE says staff found him unconscious and unresponsive in his bunk and that they responded immediately. The men detained alongside him tell a much different story. They said he had been overheating. They said that he could not breathe. They said he pulled off his shirt because he felt like he was suffocating, and they said they tried to get help and that no one came until he was unconscious.
Mr. Speaker, when ICE announced his death, the headline on the press release read: ``Criminal illegal alien passes away in ICE custody.'' That is how our government announced the death of a man who had built a life here for nearly three decades, not his name, not his age, not his family. The agency that had him in its care could not even bring themselves to call him by his name.
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