Trump’s immigration chiefs to testify in Congress following protester deaths
The heads of the agencies carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda will testify in Congress on Tuesday and face questions over how they are prosecuting immigration enforcement inside American cities.
Trump’s immigration campaign has been heavily scrutinised in recent weeks, after the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two protesters at the hands of Homeland Security officers. The agencies have also faced criticism for a wave of policies that critics say trample on the rights of both immigrants facing arrest and Americans protesting the enforcement actions.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Rodney Scott, who heads US Customs and Border Protection, and Joseph Edlow, who is the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, will speak in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
The officials will speak at a time of falling public support for how their agencies are carrying out Trump’s immigration vision, but as they are flush with cash from a spending bill passed last year that has helped broaden immigration enforcement activities across the country.
The administration says that activists and protesters opposed to its operations are the ones ratcheting up attacks on their officers, not the other way around, and that their immigration enforcement operations are making the country safer by finding and removing people who’ve committed crimes or pose a threat to the country.
Under Lyons’ leadership, ICE has undergone a massive hiring boom funded by Congress last summer, and immigration officers have deployed in beefed-up enforcement operations in cities across the country designed to increase arrests and deportations. The appearance in Congress comes as lawmakers are locked in a battle over whether DHS should be funded without restraints placed on its officers’ conduct.
