1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

On Wednesday, January 7, Renee Good, an American citizen, was killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. On New Year’s Eve, Keith Porter of Northridge, California was killed by an off-duty ICE agent. On January 9th, two protestors in Santa Ana were each shot in the face by DHS officers and permanently blinded in one eye. Tuesday, ICE used five-year old Liam Ramos, a preschooler, as bait in an attempt to lure family members from his home. That same day, California’s Senators performed oversight at an ICE detention facility and personally witnessed how DHS has not been spending its Congressionally allocated medical budget on medical care for people detained. This has all been a direct result of unchecked violence, impunity, and abuse carried out by federal immigration enforcement agencies against members of our communities, and in no instance has there been any accountability for the agents, who’ve instead been treated as heroes by the Trump Administration. And yet, the DHS appropriations bill that just passed the House would hand MORE funding to ICE and Border Patrol, and do little to rein in their abuses - Jonathan Ross has been in ICE for two decades and has had no lack of training, the newly revealed memo shows ICE is violating the 4th Amendment by design so ICE training is rather the problem, and the Trump Administration has been impounding funds and flagrantly violating laws like the Tik Tok ban and Epstein Files Transparency Act for over a year. So as your constituent, I  am calling on you to reject the current bill, and withhold your vote from any legislation funding DHS - and ***publicly demand Senate leadership whip against it*** - unless it: 1) Strengthens restrictions on ICE and Border Patrol’s ability to conduct dragnet arrest operations and target people based on their race, language or accent, place of employment, or location at the time of the apprehension 2) Ends Border Patrol deployment to our cities and rejects its ever-expanding mandate in immigration enforcement; and 3) Limits DHS's reprogramming and transfer authority, including specifically preventing reprogramming and transferring funds for detention. I understand there is a lot Democrats cannot do right now. But the buck DOES stop with them in the Senate, and people are getting wise to the ways they operate as a bloc and cover for each other’s votes - please understand it will not be enough to have personally voted against this bill should some number of retiring Democrats or those in safe seats allow it to pass. No points for effort without real effort - demand Chuck Schumer and the rest of your colleagues protect our communities by reining in ICE NOW.