Congress set to drill down on immigration enforcement at hearings

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers set up oversight hearings starting this week after the fatal shootings of two Americans by immigration agents, platforms that could result in hours of high-profile criticism of one of President Donald Trump’s signature political issues.

Representatives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Citizenship and Immigration Services will appear before a House panel Tuesday and a Senate panel Thursday.

And Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is set to testify before the House and Senate Judiciary committees the first week of March. Congress is at a critical time as Democrats seek to add provisions to curtail immigration operations into a Homeland Security spending bill. Lawmakers face a Friday night deadline, when DHS funding expires.

Democratic lawmakers had been seeking such oversight hearings for months amid the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement approach, but Republican lawmakers largely have deferred to the president.

That started to change after public outcry in the aftermath of a Jan. 24 altercation in Minneapolis that led to immigration agents fatally shooting Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, just weeks after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good in a highly disputed incident.

Casey Burgat, director of the Legislative Affairs program at George Washington University, said hearings were hard to avoid after the videotaped strong-arm tactics and shootings of U.S. citizens were at odds with Trump’s campaign rhetoric around targeting violent criminals for deportations.

“What they see is not what they were promised. It can lead to a requirement of a congressional response, because often doing nothing is louder than doing something,” Burgat said.

That can be a risk for the administration, giving Democrats and critics of Trump collective hours of questioning on television when anything can happen, Burgat said.

“It can just go a lot of different ways on an issue that everyone is paying attention to, and add politics to it,” Burgat said. “You’re setting yourself up for opportunities to just not look good in front of a national audience.”

David Rapallo, former counsel on the House oversight panel and associate professor at Georgetown Law, said congressional Republicans, who hold the gavels in both chambers, still will set the tone for what might come out of the oversight hearings.

“Will it be a substantive rigorous effort to investigate activities and impose changes as an independent branch of government, or will it be doing the bare minimum and portraying that in a way that pretends to be oversight but really is just a token effort?” Rapallo said.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Thursday showed about 65% of Americans thought immigration enforcement actions had gone too far, up from about 54% last June, including about 71% of independents.

In the same poll, about 45% of self-identified Republicans said they thought immigration enforcement actions were “about right,” down from 49% in June. The results came from surveys conducted during the week after Pretti’s killing.

Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., said actions by the administration have hurt public trust in immigration enforcement, particularly administration statements after officers killed Pretti.

“I want to restore trust in ICE because I think ICE has a valuable function, cooperating with local officials to remove criminals from our country,” Paul told reporters.

Paul linked the hearing directly with the Pretti shooting in an interview with CBS, warning administration officials not to contend that Pretti was aggressively assaulting police officers. “That cannot be acceptable, and that’s why they’re lacking in trust,” Paul said.

Some Republicans, such as retiring Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, acknowledged the political vulnerability for his party with immigration agents issues and midterms coming up.

“If you’re explaining you’re losing right? Particularly in a campaign cycle. So even if you could argue, technically, they’re doing things by the book, there are a lot of encounters with people you’re hearing about,” Tillis said. “How does politics work? Politics work by trotting out the obvious mistakes and sympathetic cases. And there are a lot of them with the way that Noem is executing.”

Still, Tillis said he feels like the department has a lot to answer for, and “they better have very concise answers to a lot of questions.”

“Every one of these operations, you’re so proud of naming these operations now tell me what you did, what the efficacy of it was, and what the success rate of it was, and my guess is under Kristi Noem’s watch, it’s going to be some pretty abysmal numbers,” Tillis said.

Senate Homeland Security panel ranking member Gary Peters, D-Mich., said the administration has been “hit or miss” in responding to letters about DHS activities, and hopes that the hearing this week will mark a change in how Congress approaches the administration.

“I certainly hope this is a change, given what’s happened. The American people are outraged, and they expect Congress to do our constitutional job of providing oversight,” Peters said.

Differing approaches

Other committee chairs distanced the hearings from serving as a direct response to the shootings. House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., sent a public invitation for testimony from ICE and CBP officials the same day as Pretti’s shooting.

A spokesperson for Garbarino said he sent a public written invitation “to underscore the importance of their participation,” and the chairman’s priority is on the funds provided with last year’s reconciliation law.

“As we start to see the funds dispersed and implemented, the chairman remains committed to conducting oversight to ensure these funds help accomplish DHS’s core mission and are used in line with congressional intent,” the spokesperson said.

Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, ranking member on the Homeland panel, and other Democrats had sent public letters to Garbarino calling for testimony from immigration officials and trying to use the minority side’s privilege to call witnesses for hearings. Thompson praised Garbarino for calling this week’s hearing.

Thompson said “there’s no question” that Democrats will ask about perceived oversteps by the administration during the hearings, and Democrats’ efforts to force policy changes, in addition to getting basic information out of the department.

“I think what people have seen over the last few months with their own eyes requires an explanation,” Thompson said.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, characterized the coming hearing as “normal oversight” and said he intended to focus his questions to Noem on issues DHS faces from jurisdictions known as sanctuary cities, which Republicans criticize for refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement activity.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, whose committee announced the hearing with Noem two days after Pretti’s death, declined to say whether it came in response to the shooting specifically but did express some frustration with getting administration officials to testify.

“Every Cabinet person who comes up here I ask three questions including whether you will commit to coming up and testifying,” Grassley said. “Everyone says ‘yes’ but they really ought to say ‘maybe’ so they don’t end up lying.”