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As Americans reel from the Trump administration’s violent raids and plead Democrats for action, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) announced on Thursday that his big demand for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill is to bar the agency from deporting U.S. citizens — a practice that is already illegal.
In a press conference on Thursday, Jeffries said that he believes Democrats must demand “an explicit prohibition that DHS cannot detain or deport American citizens, period.” Ahead of the press conference, he told reporters that the Democratic caucus is making this their demand in order to win the caucus’s support for the DHS funding bill.
As many critics swiftly pointed out, it is already illegal for DHS to deport U.S. citizens. DHS is not given the authority to deport citizens aside from in fringe cases.
“It’s already illegal to deport US citizens. A ‘ban’ on doing that wouldn’t change the law,” said American Immigration Council fellow and former immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on social media.
Others criticized the announcement by pointing out that the issue with the Trump administration’s immigration raids isn’t the lack of legal guardrails — but rather the agency’s explicit orders for agents to break the law and act above even the letter of the Constitution in order to carry out their raids.
When it comes to actions as explicitly illegal as deporting citizens, the administration has straight out lied and said they aren’t happening. There are numerous reports of DHS systematically detaining and deporting citizens — but if it were barred by the funding bill, DHS would likely carry on as usual because it already claims it isn’t targeting citizens.
Just this week, a federal judge said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has violated court orders nearly 100 times amid their surge.
At the press conference, Jeffries also said that he supports Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) demands for the bill, which include requiring a warrant for arrests and a prohibition on agents wearing masks. These demands have been widely condemned as weak — with critics also noting that members of Jeffries’s caucus already helped Republicans pass the DHS bill without these provisions last week.
Democrats have complained in recent days that the citizen deportation ban, which was originally included in the DHS bill, was removed. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who had added the ban in an amendment, said on January 22 that she was told in the negotiation process that the removal came under the direction of Stephen Miller.
However, as mentioned, that bill still passed the House on January 22 with seven Democrats in support.
Jeffries’s and Schumer’s demands for the DHS funding bill demonstrate the wide gulf between the desires of Democratic leadership and demands from the American public — who have poured onto the streets in the hundreds of thousands and waged a historic general strike calling for the withdrawal of ICE from cities and, in many cases, abolition of the agency altogether.
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