Linked statement

“I want the Senate to pass my bill right now. It bans immigration officers from arresting parents at schoolbus stops. In my state, officers arrested a father right after his six-year-old got on the bus. This scares and hurts children. Officers can arrest people in other places without doing it at bus stops.”

“Mr. President, there is a great divide right now--a pretty significant divide right now--between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the way that ICE is enforcing our immigration laws in the interior. Democrats believe that what is happening today is both illegal and immoral, and that is why, right now, these operations are being funded through reconciliation--because we believe that it is our constitutional obligation to refuse to fund an Agency that is out of control and not in compliance with the law. Republicans broadly have supported the actions of this administration as they target both immigrants without documentation and legal immigrants for arrest and detention. I am going to offer a request to pass a bill by unanimous consent that does not seek to repair that divide. Instead, it seeks to try to bring us together on a very narrow question, a question that arises from a set of incidents that have happened in my State of Connecticut over the course of the last month and a half. On the morning of August 26, the second day of school for most school districts in Connecticut, in Danbury, CT, busdrivers began reporting to the school district that they had noticed the presence of ICE agents in and around schoolbus stops. At one of them, a constituent of mine, a father, was waiting at the schoolbus stop with his 6-year-old son and, just moments after saying goodbye to his son for the second day of school and even before the schoolbus had fully driven away, ICE arrested and detained him. This practice was reported all around the State: ICE gathering at schoolbus stops, waiting until a young child had boarded the schoolbus, and then detaining and arresting the parent. For parents in this body, you know how anxious that first day of school is, how kids are just brimming with nervous anxiety about that first day, and you know what that feels like to watch your kid walk onto that schoolbus. Well, what do you think it does to those kids on that first and second day of school to see ICE officers at the schoolbus stop? Imagine that 6-year-old who boarded the schoolbus, when he got back from school that day, got off, and his parent wasn’t there--a 6-year-old, feeling like he had been abandoned. In this case, he may or may not have seen the arrest because it happened almost immediately after he got on. To me, it is pretty obvious that the intent here with this new practice of ICE showing up at schoolbus stops is to traumatize the children. But you don’t have to agree with me that the intent is to traumatize the children to just come to the conclusion that ICE does not need to be at schoolbus stops in order to enforce the law. There are a myriad of other settings in which ICE can operate to carry out arrests while staying clear of schoolbus stops, where the intent or at least the result of those operations is to leave little kids in trauma. Now, I have introduced three pieces of simple legislation to say that ICE should not operate at daycare centers, they shouldn’t operate at children’s playgrounds, and that they shouldn’t operate at schoolbus stops. I am asking unanimous consent today for only one of those pieces of legislation that I think is the most urgent. And while I don’t expect the result to be agreement, I had hoped that we could find agreement on this narrow question: that ICE should just stay away from schoolbus stops; ICE shouldn’t be traumatizing children at schoolbus stops, taking parents in the middle of the schoolday--because there are so many other ways that ICE could operate so as to detain the people that they feel that they need to detain without it being done in this deeply traumatic way. In fact, we came close to getting an agreement on a similar proposal before negotiations broke down over DHS funding. Senator Blumenthal, my colleague, has a piece of legislation that is even broader than the three bills I am proposing. The idea is that there should just be a ban on the operation of ICE at sensitive locations, which would include places where children gather but also would include other sensitive locations like churches. And I know my Republican colleagues were close to agreeing to that before these negotiations broke down. And so, today, I am taking a small slice of that broader proposal and just asking my colleagues: Can we come to an agreement that schoolbus stops should be off limits? Can we decide to have compassion for that 6-year-old child who got on the bus for a second day of school and, when he got back off the bus, was abandoned? The last point I will make is this: While that practice is bad enough, it is important to note that ICE tried to cover up the practice. When they were presented with these stories from Danbury, DHS doubled down and said: Any claim that ICE targeted parents at a schoolbus stop is false. But then, just days afterward, we had the video evidence. This often happens: ICE says something didn’t happen, and then we have the video proving that it did. In Danbury’s case, we have two separate videos taken from the schoolbus showing ICE operating at the schoolbus stop and detaining this parent. So my hope is that we can come together and just make a decision that, while we have big differences over the broader issue of ICE enforcement, ICE should stop preying upon our kids at sensitive locations; in particular, schoolbus stops. Mr. President, and so, my motion is this: notwithstanding rule XXII, and as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 5435; I further ask consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.”