Amy Klobuchar: “I rise today as our country is in the middle of a war to urge my Republican colleagues to support Senator Murray's…”

“I rise today as our country is in the middle of a war to urge my Republican colleagues to support Senator Murray's proposal that would immediately fund the Department of Homeland Security's critical national security functions--cyber defense, airport safety, the Coast Guard--while negotiations continue on critical reforms on ICE and Border Patrol. We must restore accountability. No one knows that better than the people of Minnesota with these Agencies, but there is absolutely no reason that we can't do two things at once, and that is fund the bulk of this Department while we are working on the reforms to these two Agencies, both of which have ample funding. We all saw what happened in Minnesota where the surge of ICE agents-- as local law enforcement in our State made it repeatedly clear--it sadly made our State less safe. Two of my constituents were killed, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In fact, in the month of January, two out of three of shooting fatalities--two out of three--in the city of Minneapolis were committed by Federal agents in the entire month. ICE wrongly arrested a Hmong elder, dragged him out in his underwear as he is trying to show his ID and they didn't see it, drove him around in a car for an hour only to discover they had the wrong guy. The guy they were looking for had been in prison for years. They targeted kids. We saw 5-year-old Liam in his blue rabbit hat with floppy ears and his Spider-Man backpack.”