Federal agents block people protesting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at a nearby licensed cannabis farm in Ventura County, California, on July 10, 2025. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A group of U.S. House Democrats on Tuesday blasted President Donald Trump’s administration for what they called “cruelty” and “lawlessness” in carrying out mass deportations of migrants without legal status.

At a forum at the U.S. Capitol, Democrats who sit on the House Homeland Security Committee and others rebuked the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown and its impact on communities, bringing in prominent voices from immigration and legal advocacy groups and a U.S. Marine veteran who said his father was beaten by federal immigration officers.

Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat, slammed the Department of Homeland Security, calling the agency “unaccountable.”

“They continue to break the law and bypass congressional authority to conceal the ways in which they are abusing (the) power of DHS to violate our rights, undermine due process and tear our communities apart,” she said.

“Under the Trump administration, DHS is an out-of-control, abusive terror force that disregards law, rejects accountability and tramples on the very foundations of our Constitution,” Ramirez added.

Rep. Troy Carter, a Louisiana Democrat and committee member, said “like many Americans, I’m deeply troubled by the cruel and profoundly un-American mass deportation agenda being undertaken by Donald Trump and his allies.”

“These harsh policies are not about public safety or border security — we have seen children torn from their parents, a flagrant disregard for basic due process protections and individuals targeted for exercising their First Amendment rights,” he said.

“Congress must uphold the rights of all people in the United States. We need immigration policy rooted in dignity, fairness and due process, not cruelty and authoritarianism.”

$170B for immigration enforcement

The forum came less than three weeks after Trump signed a massive tax and spending cut bill into law that provides roughly $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement.

NPR reported Monday that DHS is preparing to use military bases in New Jersey and Indiana to detain immigrants who unlawfully entered the United States.

“What is happening right now is just plain wrong,” Rep. Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said. “We’re all for immigration enforcement and smart border security, but the targeting of innocent people who are just trying to work hard and make a living, the targeting of the elderly, of the sick, of U.S. citizens, of students by an anonymous army of masked men is not who we are as a country.”

‘Violently attacked and detained’

Alejandro Barranco, a Marine veteran, said his father, an immigrant who does not have legal status, was “violently attacked and detained by federal immigration agents” in Orange County, California.

Barranco said his father, a landscaper, was working in June when masked men approached and quickly surrounded him and did not identify themselves or present any warrant.

He said his father was terrified and ran.

“They chased him through the parking lot and into a crowded street,” Barranco said. “They pointed guns at him, pepper-sprayed him. They tackled him to the ground and kicked him. They restrained and handcuffed him. They dragged him into an unmarked vehicle and pushed him into the back seat. As many have already seen, while several agents were holding him down, another beat him repeatedly in the neck and head area, over and over and over again.”

Barranco depicted the brutal conditions his father endured while in federal custody and said it’s been a nightmare for his family since his father was detained.

Barranco said that while his father was eventually released on bond, “the trauma that day and the brokenness of this system remains in our hearts, and we are still under a cloud.”

Masked agents

The Trump administration also faced scrutiny from the panel over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wearing masks during immigration raids. 

Jesse Franzblau, associate director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, said ICE agents wearing masks with no identifying information is not proper, but “quite dangerous” and “puts everyone further at risk.”

“I mean, we’ve seen people impersonating ICE, wearing masks and saying that they’re ICE and then carrying out abuses against other people,” Franzblau said, adding that “it puts communities at more risk when you have masked agents, federal agents that should be identifying themselves, going into communities and carrying out sweeping operations like this.”

DHS response

In a statement shared with States Newsroom on Wednesday, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the department, said: “How many Americans have to die because of illegal immigration for Democrats to give a damn about actual American citizens?”

“Democrat politicians should stop defending criminal illegal aliens and exploiting law enforcement for their 15 minutes of fame and start working with President Trump and (Homeland Security) Secretary (Kristi) Noem to keep Americans safe.”

In a Tuesday press release, the department defended ICE, saying the agency has targeted the “worst of the worst” during immigration arrests.

To mark six months since Trump took office on Sunday, the department touted a long list of its actions, including on immigration enforcement and border security.

The agency described the list as “victories” in Trump’s and Noem’s “mission to secure the homeland and Make America Safe Again,” including record low numbers of illegal border crossings.

Minister of Justice and Public Security Héctor Villatoro, right, accompanies Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) on March 26, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — House Democrats sent a letter Thursday to the heads of Homeland Security and the State Department seeking more information about the financial agreement between the United States and El Salvador to detain more than 200 men at a notorious megaprison.

“Congress has the right and the obligation to conduct oversight over the executive branch and determine what deals our government has struck with a foreign dictator to imprison individuals seized in the United States in an effort to place them beyond the reaches of our court,” according to the letter by California’s Robert Garcia, Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson and New York’s Gregory Meeks.

In March, the Trump administration flew several planes to El Salvador containing 238 men removed either under an 18th-century wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, or because they are immigrants who had final orders of removal and are citizens of El Salvador. The men arrived at the notorious prison known as CECOT.

The letter challenges the Trump administration’s position publicly and in courts that any individuals removed to El Salvador to be detained are no longer in U.S. custody and any court order to facilitate the return of wrongly removed immigrants cannot be fulfilled.

According to court documents filed last week, testimony from Salvadoran officials noted that those individuals removed and detained at CECOT were considered in the jurisdiction of the U.S. government.

“The actions of the state of El Salvador have been limited to the implementation of a bilateral cooperation mechanism with another state, through which it has facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure for the custody of persons detained within the scope of the justice system and law enforcement of that other state,” according to the court document submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union.

That document was submitted in a court case that relates to the Trump administration’s use of the wartime law, and whether or not officials violated a federal judge’s order to return the planes to the U.S. The planes still landed in El Salvador.

“Court filings last week suggest the Administration misled federal judges, Congress, and the American people about the legal status of individuals the U.S. government has spirited away to El Salvador and who are being held in torture prisons like Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT),” the Democrats wrote. 

The Democrats addressed the letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asking to see the agreement between the U.S. and El Salvador to accept non-Salvadoran citizens and information on the men detained at CECOT.

“This document indicates that the Department of Justice has misled federal courts in assertions regarding the agreement with El Salvador,” wrote the  Democrats, who sit on House committees on Homeland Security, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform.

$15 million payment to El Salvador

The State Department is paying up to $15 million to house immigrants removed from the U.S. at CECOT, but the agreement has not been made publicly available. Former State Department officials and foreign policy aides have raised concerns that the State Department payments violate a human rights law.

The Leahy Law bars financial assistance to “units of foreign security forces” — which can include military and law enforcement staff in prisons —  facing credible allegations of gross human rights violations, such as CECOT.

The State Department has denied any wrongdoing.

The Trump administration has resisted court orders to return wrongfully deported men from CECOT, such as in the high-profile deportation case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and a separate case out of Baltimore, Maryland concerning another wrongly deported man sent to the megaprison. Abrego Garcia detailed how he experienced physical and psychological torture while at CECOT.

Noem visited CECOT earlier this year, and said the prison would be one of the Trump administration’s tools amid its aggressive immigration crackdown.