Jayapal returns from Minnesota with stark warning on ICE
Plus: Hill leaders release final funding package, Maryland to move on redistricting and House Oversight Democrats unveil reporting alleging crypto corruption by Trump and his inner circle.
First Things First
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) was stopped by a flight attendant this weekend on her way home from Minnesota, who told her that a white friend walking home at night had been shoved into a snowbank by ICE agents and ordered to show his ID—despite being an American citizen and, if true, an encounter that would raise serious Fourth Amendment questions.
It was one of several accounts the ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration heard while she and more than two dozen House Democrats were in the Land of 10,000 Lakes last Friday for a shadow hearing examining the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign and the conduct of federal immigration agents on the ground.
“It’s hard to pick one thing because it was such a panoply of horrors, story after story after story,” Jayapal told me this evening. “But really the overwhelming feeling that I got from everyone is that Minnesota is under occupation by these ICE and CBP agents. And they are making it less safe and they are trying very hard to push people to violent action because the president wants to bring in the Insurrection Act.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who helped Jayapal coordinate the hearing, told me the stories her colleagues and she heard should mortify every American.
“No American should be picked up by ICE,” the four-term Minneapolis congresswoman added. “And so what we are seeing is really a reshaping of who we are as Americans.”
Jayapal returned to Washington with the impression that Minnesota wouldn’t be the last American city subjected to the Trump administration’s sweeping deportation efforts.
“Listen, this was happening in Illinois as well. It’s happened in other places across the country. So this isn’t just a one-off,” she told me. “I just think it’s because of the murder of Renee Good, it’s just much more clear because everyone saw the video and then saw the lies, kind of trying to assassinate her character, refusing to investigate the officer—just the complete impunity that these people are being allowed to operate under.”
