Democrats in Congress and George Floyd’s lawyer are calling for a change to federal law. They wish to amend the Civil Rights Act to allow citizens to more easily sue federal immigration officers.
Since the Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis and the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats have called for ICE to be fully defunded. The agency under the Department of Homeland Security is funded through Feb. 13 and has funding for deportation operations through 2028.
However, at an unofficial, bicameral, partisan hearing on Tuesday, Antonio Romanucci, George Floyd’s former attorney now representing Good, called for ICE to be stripped of its qualified immunity, leaving agents vulnerable to frivolous civil lawsuits and possibly preventing them from conducting their deportation assignments.
Immigration officers are federal agents and are granted federal immunity to conduct their operations.
“Anybody who lays a hand on our officers or tries to obstruct or harm them is committing a felony and a federal crime,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Signal.
The hearing was led by the ranking member of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif.
During the hearing Democrat members of Congress echoed these calls to amend the Civil Rights Act and for the entire DHS to “completely overhaul, rebuild from the bottom up and house clean from the top down,” said Blumenthal.
“ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] are making our neighborhoods less safe,” Blumenthal continued.
“My guess is when you take criminals off the street, the streets become safer,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told The Daily Signal in response to the unofficial hearing.
Johnson said the only places that could now be more dangerous are the “cities and states that don’t cooperate with ICE, that don’t keep criminals that they’ve apprehended and jailed in jail, detained. But they release them [back] into their communities to create more mayhem.”
“Blumenthal is not exactly a beacon of truth,” McLaughlin told The Daily Signal, referring to the lies he told during his 2010 congressional campaign. Blumenthal told the press he served in Vietnam when in fact he never left U.S. soil during his service during the war.
“Politicians are laying blame at the feet of law enforcement instead of looking in the mirror at how they have fueled the hatred and violent attacks we are seeing against federal law enforcement officers,” McLaughlin continued.
“We have seen a highly coordinated campaign of violence against our law enforcement,” she stated. “Our officers are facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them, 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks, and 8,000% increase in death threats.”
Romanucci is working to amend the Civil Rights Act to allow citizens to sue federal government officials if their constitutional rights have been infringed. The specific section is U.S. Code 42 of section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871.
“We will not have done our job if there is not legislative change, because transparency is truth,” said Romanucci. “We can’t get to it unless these people can have the right to sue federal law enforcement officers in the same way that the estate of George Floyd was able to sue the police officers who murdered him.”
“Department of Homeland Security, Custom Border Protection, ICE are engaged in legal law enforcement activities, primarily targeting the criminals that the Biden administration Democrats allowed in under the open border policy,” Johnson told The Daily Signal. “There’s no requirement for a constitutional change here whatsoever.”