Lifetime Citizen Portal Access — AI Briefings, Alerts & Unlimited Follows
Lawmaker urges House Judiciary oversight after citing deaths and shootings in ICE and CBP custody
Loading...
Summary
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing, a member of Congress urged the committee to hold oversight hearings after alleging multiple deaths and shootings involving ICE and CBP and saying Republican members have not invited families of victims to testify.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing, a lawmaker said congressional oversight must follow the testimony of victims’ families and accused committee Republicans of failing to invite or contact those relatives.
"Anyone who commits a crime, especially a violent crime, should be fully held accountable," the lawmaker said, adding that "policies have consequences" and that public policy should not require a threshold of victims before it is taken seriously.
The lawmaker named several people discussed in witnesses’ written testimony, including Ruben Martinez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen she said was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in March 2025; Miramar Martinez, whom she said survived after being shot five times by federal agents; Renee Goode; and Alex Priddy. The lawmaker also asserted that "ICE and CBP have either shot or shot at at least 24 people," and that more people died in ICE custody last year than at any time in the 20th century, as she phrased it. She described these statements as reasons families deserve a voice in congressional consideration of immigration enforcement policy.
The lawmaker sharply criticized the committee’s Republican members, saying they have "held multiple hearings on this topic, but still haven't invited the families of anyone killed by ICE or who have died while in ICE's custody," and later said, "Republicans have not invited any of their families to testify before this committee." She also linked broader enforcement trends and prosecutorial decisions to what she characterized as failures of oversight.
The lawmaker urged the committee chair to schedule a hearing to examine the conduct of DHS, ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Justice Department, saying congressional oversight is the appropriate federal response. "I would encourage the chairman to hold a hearing so that we can do that part," she said.
The figures and assertions the lawmaker gave — including counts of shootings and the number of criminal cases she said the Department of Justice ended — were presented as her statements in the hearing transcript and were not independently verified in the hearing record.
The hearing record shows the lawmaker pressing for policy changes and for the committee to exercise oversight; she yielded the floor after her remarks.
