Rep. Scholten provides the standard liberal response to ICE terrorism

For the past 12 months more and more people are waking up to the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is fundamentally an instrument of state violence.

The ICE murder of Renee Good amplified this reality for a lot of people, although ICE has killed many more people over the years, along with their ongoing arrests, sending people to detention facilities, which often leads to deportation. ICE has been doing this since they were founded in 2003. A major difference this year is that ICE has roughly 7 times more money to operate than in pervious years. For details on the evolution of ICE funding see my previous post.

Rep. Hillary Scholten post a new video which is clearly a response to the ICE killing of Renee Good. You can watch the 4:37 video here.

What Rep. Hillary Scholten has to say about ICE is the standard liberal response for how the federal government needs to respond to federal agencies, transparency and accountability. Sounds nice, but not everyone is so naive as to believe that the US government will practice real transparency or accountability.

At about 1:20 into the video Scholten talks about the number of people who have died in detention in 2025, but fails to mention that people have died in detention in previous years, even under Democratic administrations since ICE was created, specifically 8 years under Obama and 4 years under Biden. The Detention Watch Network has been documenting the people who have died in ICE detention centers since ICE was created. The ACLU has also been documenting and reporting on ICE detention center conditions, which have also been bad for as long as ICE has been around. Rep. Scholten frames ICE abuses to suggest that this is new and that it is only happening under the Trump Administration.

Rep. Scholten then talks about the issue of oversight, which has rarely happened when it comes to federal law enforcement agencies such as ICE. (See Silky Shah’s book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.) Scholten continues to lay the blame at the feature of Republicans regarding ICE behavior in the video, but says she will do everything in her power to hold ICE accountable. This is standard political speak that translates into something like this – I can’t do anything because Democrats are not in power. The reality is that since ICE was created in 2003, the Obama and Biden administration, the years when Democrats also had a majority in Congress, did nothing to provide transparency, accountability or oversight of ICE.

Rep. Scholten concludes her remarks by saying that Congress has a responsibility to hold ICE accountable, which has never happened. More importantly, Rep. Scholten is not paying attention to polling which shows that a growing number of people in the US want to abolish ICE. ICE is only been around for 22 years and didn’t really have a significant problem with undocumented immigrants committing violence crimes prior to ICE being created, simply because immigrants don’t commit crime anywhere near the rate that US citizens do.

Lastly, Rep. Scholten fails to mention that she too has not been held accountable for her votes on immigration matters, such as voting for the Laken Riley Act at the beginning of 2025, legislation that further criminalized immigrants. In late January of 2025, Rep. Scholten voted for H.R. 30, which also criminalizes immigrants as I noted then. Then again in February of 2025, Rep., Scholten voted for HR 35, which also further criminalizes immigrants.

For as much as Rep. Scholten likes to remind us that she was an immigration lawyer, she continues to vote for policies that further criminalizes undocumented immigrants, and policies that the Republicans introduced. How could anyone take her seriously when it comes to accountability of ICE, especially with her voting record on immigration matters.