At Thursday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) spoke about the threat of antisemitism and the continued flights of migrants to foreign nations.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00for many years. Thank you. Senator Booker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First, I just want to
00:06join my colleagues and the ranking member and the chairman for condemning the violence of last
00:12night. We all abhor political violence and should in every way, I think, investigate. And as
00:18the ranking member said, I think that it would be good to have a briefing from the FBI.
00:24I take note of something as one of the bipartisan leaders of our efforts on antisemitism to note
00:32that hate crimes in this country targeting religious groups are seen in so many of America's
00:38great religions, but none come close to the targeting of American Jews. And that should
00:43be an added layer of analysis as we try to combat this kind of violence and these kind of hate crimes.
00:49Mr. Chairman, I wanted to make three points very quickly and ask for some oversight hearings.
01:00Trump's Department of Justice has taken numerous concerning actions that demand the committee
01:05to exercise constitutional oversight. We are a co-equal branch in a government with checks and
01:11balances, and we need to address these issues in hearings. There are three concerning DOJ actions
01:18that I hope we can discuss, Mr. Chairman. First, we have the issue of due process less
01:23deportations. This week, the conservative Cato Institute reported that over 50 of the Venezuelans
01:30imprisoned in El Salvador came to the U.S. legally with advanced U.S. government permission
01:35and entered at an official border crossing. Most Americans have only heard of Kilmar Obrego
01:41Garcia, but this report from the Cato Institute makes clear he is not the only person who was
01:49deported by the Trump administration without due process, who was legally in the United States.
01:56I'd like to, without objection, I'd like to enter this Cato report into the record.
02:01I want to reiterate the committee's request led by my colleague Senator Welsh for an oversight
02:10hearing to the circumstances surrounding the deportations of more than 200 people removed
02:14to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Acts, including the 50 individuals who, I repeat,
02:21entered the country legally through, with our permission, and are now in what is one of the
02:28more awful prisons on this planet. Mr. Chairman, you have for decades led and championed the
02:35Senate Judiciary Committee's exercise of our oversight, and we need to know who are these
02:4050 people. Can we at least confirm their names and that they're still alive? And understand that
02:46an assault on due process anywhere is threat to the due process rights everywhere. We have seen
02:51a 9-0 Supreme Court affirm that. Secondly, at last week's markup, you talked about the Department
02:57of Justice's cancellations of public safety grants. Here I have an unanswered letter I wrote on April 30th
03:05that was signed by every Democratic member of this committee and 30 Democratic senators total,
03:11which I'd like to enter into the record. Is there objection? I hear none, so it's entered.
03:17We were asking the Department for information about the Office of Justice Program's abrupt decisions
03:22to cancel at least 365 public safety grants on April 22nd, 2025 that serve crime victims and improve
03:32public safety, totaling an estimated $500 million. These are programs that were supported in a bipartisan
03:39way that have led to more safety and security and strength in our community. Some of them have
03:46helped victims of crime, and they have been unjustly canceled. On the day of this letter, DOJ defunded
03:53programs that prosecutors, police, and sheriff's departments, judges, mental health service providers,
04:00academics, and more depend upon to keep America safe. This is an outrage to all of us on this committee
04:07who share a commitment to public safety, to have resources that we put out that were being effective
04:14in an evidence-based way. To have them stopped by this administration demands that we at least have
04:19an oversight hearing to provide, to get a justification, or at the very least have letters
04:25responded to. Finally, Mr. Chairman, the Justice Department dismissed several civil rights cases
04:33against pattern and practice agencies of law enforcement yesterday. Almost five years to the day,
04:41this country watched in horror, and we all condemned, when a now convicted criminal, then a police
04:47officer, used deadly force to murder George Floyd. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division
04:53thereafter investigated the Minneapolis Police Department's pattern and practices of constitutional
04:59violations and proposed a fair, court-enforceable consent order to prevent future police misconduct,
05:06but to improve the excellence of police accountability and professional standards.
05:13They did the same in Louisville, Kentucky, after Breonna Taylor was killed by police during a no-knock raid
05:18that was condemned by people on this committee and beyond in a bipartisan way.
05:24Yesterday, A.G. Bondi's Justice Department dropped both consent decrees in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
05:30and Louisville, Kentucky, where neutral investigations and attorneys found evidence
05:36of constitutional and civil rights violations by those law enforcement agencies. Without more than saying
05:43that the consent decrees were, quote, no longer in the public interest, the department dismissed those
05:49cases along with six other investigations where it had shown a pattern and practice of the violation,
05:55constitutional violations against American citizens. I sent a letter to the DOJ yesterday with my
06:00Democratic colleagues requesting the preservation of and submissions to the committee materials related
06:07to retracted police misconduct investigations and dropped consent decrees. I asked to enter this
06:14letter into the record, sir.
06:16Is there objection? I hear none, so it's entered.
06:19To add to the further outrage to these DOJ actions, there are reports today that people are
06:25pushing the Trump administration to pardon Chauvin. This would be unacceptable, outrageous,
06:31and injurious to the public safety, injurious to community trust, injurious to the environments we
06:39need that keep people safe and support our law enforcement officers. We are lagging and lacking in
06:46our oversight of a department that appears to be on a turbocharged, turbocharged chip away at civil rights
06:53protections and not do common sense measures that can make our community stronger and safer and have
06:59the highest professional standards in policing. I ask again for this third time that you hold an
07:06oversight hearing so that we can get some of the answers that Congress and the public deserve.
07:10As someone who used to be a mayor and oversee a police department that itself had a pattern and
07:17practice investigations. This is not to an end other than making our police department stronger,
07:24raising our professional standards, deepening trust, and ultimately creating an environment
07:29where we have greater community safety. I hope on these three issues, we can have oversight hearings
07:34soon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
07:36With all the requests for oversight hearings, I think we're going to have to prioritize that. Before I call on
07:45the Senator from Rhode Island, you mentioned something I said last week about grants, and I think I had
07:55information yet before the meeting was over that grants for nonprofits and law enforcement, that they were
08:04going to reinstitute the ones for law enforcement. That's what I think I said last week, Senator Whitehouse.
08:11Mr. Chairman, can I respond to that, sir? Some of the proudest work that I've seen in this committee, done by people on both sides,
08:19courageous leadership by Senator Cornyn, and people on our side of the aisle, passed this extraordinary bill on public safety.
08:27And a lot of those grants weren't just to law enforcement, they were improved. They were to address mental health, something we've
08:34all talked about on both sides of the aisle. To focus just on grants directly to law enforcement,
08:39and not the grants that are going to institutions that help people with mental health.
08:43We know a lot of the gun crimes in our country have a lot of unaddressed mental health illness there.
08:49And so all of these grants are important, sir, not just the ones that are vital for law enforcement, but also the ones that are vital for
08:56public safety that go to nonprofits that deal with things like mental health that are critical for public safety.
09:02Well, Senator Whitehouse and Senator Schiff withhold. We've got 11 people here and I'd like to vote.
09:08Hold on.
09:09Hold on.