Richard J. Durbin

Not analysed yet

A requested analysis is usually ready within half an hour; come back to this page or reload it.

Mr. President, last week marked 1 year since President Trump launched an assault against my home State of Illinois and characterized his Operation Midway Blitz. For months, chaos and terror reigned supreme in the streets and the city that I loved and am honored to represent. This operation was supposedly targeting ``the worst of the worst,'' as President Trump has claimed: Rapists, murderers, terrorists, child predators, we are going after them. We are going to arrest them, and if they are not properly documented, we are going to deport them. It ended up targeting not that population but American citizens and immigrants who have built their lives and raised their families in Illinois, people who posed no threat whatsoever to the public safety. Let me give you two examples. One was when an ICE agent in the streets of Chicago killed Silverio Villegas Gonzalez minutes after he had dropped off his children at a daycare in Franklin Park, a suburb of Chicago. Mr. Gonzalez lived in the Chicago area for nearly 20 years. His children were forced to enter foster care because of his murder. Immediately after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed Mr. Villegas Gonzalez had hit and dragged an ICE agent with his car when he and another officer attempted to conduct a traffic stop causing serious injuries. However, there was a video of what actually happened, and it contradicted the claims made by the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, Mr. Villegas Gonzalez is not shown hitting or dragging any officer with his car; and in the aftermath, one of the officers said his injuries were ``nothing major.'' In another disturbing example of the horrors of Operation Midway Blitz, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security shot my constituent Marimar Martinez--not once, not twice, five times. Afterwards, the shooter texted his fellow agents and bragged ``I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.'' The administration called Ms. Martinez a domestic terrorist. Ms. Martinez was on her way to her church. She had some clothing she was going to donate to the church clothing drive. That is when the ICE agents pulled her over. She was driving while Hispanic, which under the Midway Blitz rules was enough to stop her, threaten her, and shoot her five times. What happened to the charges against her? All dropped. Not one single charge was prosecuted. This poor young woman, on her way to her church to give some clothing to a clothing drive, shot five times by ICE agents, and no charges filed against her at all. Normally, when Federal agents engage in excessive force like I have just described, the Federal Bureau of Investigation steps in to investigate. They follow up, gathering evidence, videos, witnesses. Instead, following the shooting of Miramar Martinez, FBI Director Kash Patel took to social media to falsely accuse Ms. Martinez of attacking immigration agents. He said, ``Attack our law enforcement, and this FBI will find you and bring you to justice.'' Tough talk when the video shows that this young woman did not engage in any illegal conduct. Today, when I asked Kash Patel when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his failure to investigate the shootings of Mr. Gonzalez and Ms. Martinez, he claimed there are ongoing investigations. We will see. It has been more than a year. He refused when he had a chance, and I gave him that chance, to apologize for attacking Ms. Martinez. I don't have much faith in the director of the FBI Kash Patel, but if the FBI is, in fact, investigating these shootings, they must cooperate with State and local officials to bring these people to justice as well. If you go to the website of the FBI and look under the issue of civil rights, you will find the claim of that Agency that they are the leaders in investigating crimes involving civil rights; and historically that has been the case, but not under this administration. If there is wrongdoing by an ICE agent or a DHS official or any suspicion that a crime has been committed, you hear nothing but crickets when it comes to the Department of Justice and the FBI. Thankfully, the people of my home State are stepping in and shining a light on this administration's wrongdoing. Governor Pritzker established the Illinois Accountability Commission, an independent State board to investigate and document the conduct of Federal agents during Operation Midway Blitz. After a 6-month investigation, the Commission found that most of these arrested under the operation were ``not the worst of the worst.'' The Commission found that from September through December of 2025, last year, the Department of Homeland Security detained over 3,900 people in Chicago; an estimated 85 percent had no criminal convictions. The worst of the worst? No. And Operation Midway Blitz had negative economic consequences as well. I have been to these neighborhoods: Little Village, Pilsen. I have seen what is going on. People live in fear. They don't come out of their homes to go to church or to go shopping; they ask neighbors to do it for them, which they willingly do. But they are afraid of what will happen if ICE returns. A new report by the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago shows that the failed operation of Midway Blitz of the Trump administration cost Cook County $1.26 billion in lost retail activity and restaurants. Unfortunately, this administration has not stopped circumventing the Constitution and the laws of this country. In immigration courts around the country, immigration judges, employees of the Justice Department, I might add, have been holding so-called ``mega master'' court hearings. In these hearings, a single judge hears between 100 and 200 cases over the course of just a few hours. Last month, I decided I would go personally to see these courts. I went to the Chicago Immigration Court to observe one of these ``mega master'' hearings. That day, 850 people were scheduled to appear. The court was so packed that people missed their hearing times because they couldn't get from the lobby to the courtroom in time. There is no way that individuals can meaningfully defend themselves or have due process in this kind of a hearing. I observed a particularly troubling ``mega master'' docket for children. What I saw was heartbreaking. Children who State court found had been abused, abandoned, or neglected, are forced to appear in court without parents and explain why they deserve to stay in this country, all while facing language and cognitive barriers. The last case on the docket that morning was a high school-aged Guatemalan child. Remember, the State courts have a finding that these children have been abandoned or abused or neglected. Because of the delay in finding a translator that day who spoke his dialect, he was forced to sit and watch every other child before him before he was ordered deported. After rambling off a litany of directives through the translator, the judge asked the child if he had any questions. The young boy said ``Why are you sending me back to Guatemala? What did I do?'' The answer is devastatingly clear. That poor boy is just the latest victim of President Trump and Stephen Miller's evil vision of a hateful America that turns its back on immigrants. The President's reckless mass deportation campaign has steamrolled the rights and liberties guaranteed by our Constitution. Its countless victims including Marimar Martinez and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez deserve justice and accountability. That is why my Illinois colleagues and I requested an investigation by the DHS Office of Inspector General into the patterns of misconduct and unconstitutional use of force during DHS's mass deportation operations including Midway Blitz. Let me be clear, it is long past time that Congress holds the President and his MAGA loyalists accountable for failing to focus on public safety. I am retiring at the end of this year. We have very few meetings of this Senate left before the new Senate is brought in to be sworn in on January 3. We still have time to pass meaningful immigration legislation. We still have time, on a bipartisan basis, to resolve some of the many issues that face us. I just left a press conference where we talked about the restaurant industry. We talked about food service and the importance of immigrants. You may not notice in the wait staff many immigrants, but believe me, behind that swinging door are a lot of people who are undocumented and working. A friend of mine who is in the business in Chicago said if you took the undocumented out of Chicago, you could just start closing down restaurants and hotels. These people are hard-working people taking jobs that Americans, frankly, don't want because they are so darn tough, but they do it for their families as all immigrants have done in the past, my own family included. Why do we sneer at these people who work so hard, who make this economy hum, who take the jobs which other Americans won't touch? Why do we want to deport them back to situations that could be the scene of the crime for the very reasons that they came to the United States? That just isn't fair, and it isn't realistic. We still have time to do something. When it comes to the Dream Act, I will continue to fight for that as long as I can stand on this floor of the Senate, and, thereafter, if necessary. We have got to come together on a bipartisan basis and do something constructive to set the immigration laws in this country on the right track. It has been 30 years since we have done anything of substance on immigration--30 years, and things have changed dramatically in this country and in this world. We can do more, and we should do more. Operation Midway Blitz was the extreme. Innocent people were killed in the streets of Chicago and other cities across the United States. It is only right that we investigate these crimes and find out if there is any violation of civil rights and prosecute it if there is. I yield the floor.