Earlier this week, Rand Paul called on the leaders of ICE, Border Protection and Immigration Services to testify before Senate:
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has sent letters to the heads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to testify before his committee amid growing public controversy over immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis and other communities.
Paul informed the leaders of President Trump’s immigration agencies in a tersely worded letter that “Congress has an obligation to conduct oversight” of what he called the “exceptional amount of funding” the Republican Congress has allocated to secure the borders and enforce immigration laws. […]
He is asking them to testify at an open hearing scheduled for Feb. 12 and wants to get responses from the senior administration officials by Wednesday.
Paul made an appearance on this Wednesday’s Mornings with Maria on Fox Business Network and was asked about this and Trump defending DHS head Kristi Noem, and even Paul is getting tired of the gaslighting coming from this administration on the pubic execution of Alex Pretti.
CASONE: Mr. Chairman, you’re the one that asked for this testimony next month from these officials. First, I want to get your thoughts. President Trump seemed to defend Kristi Noem yesterday. Your thoughts?
PAUL: You know, I think one of the best things President Trump has done and really people from across the aisle support, is removing violent people from our cities. So I think that’s been a good thing largely, but it can’t be done with no rules.
And so when people watch that video and the government tells them, well, he was assaulting the police officers, nobody with any objectivity watches that video and believes that’s what’s happening.
As the man retreats with each altercation, he retreats, and then the woman is thrown violently to the ground. He was thrown to the ground. No American believes that he was assaulting the officers. In fact, the opposite appears to be true.
So we have to get some rules of the game, and we can’t have the government justifying this type of behavior because the vast majority of Americans think this was unfair, what happened.
The intimation or actually the explicit call to say you don’t have a Second Amendment right to carry arms in a protest really flies in the face of most of our Second Amendment community.
I can tell you I’ve been to dozens and dozens of rallies and or protests where people are visibly armed or have concealed carry. So the people who are saying this, we need to get this straight so we can have some kind of awareness that people go to a protest, they know what the rules of the game are.
If videoing somebody is an assault, which most people don’t believe it is, but that that is assault, then people need to know that, that if you video someone, you could be shot.
And so we need a clarification on all of this, and I’m a reserve judgment on the secretary for now, but we need to hear from all of the people involved with this, and we need to know going forward that there will be some rules.
There needs to be an independent investigation, for goodness sakes. There has to be an investigation. If this happened on a police force, the officers, whether or not they committed anything wrong, would immediately be put on administrative leave and there would be an investigation.
But I don’t know who trusts an investigation to be done by DHS when they’re the ones calling this person an assassin, a would-be assassin, a domestic terrorist, saying he was assaulting by police. How can they be in charge of an independent investigation? Something’s got to happen here.
I agree with a lot of what he said here, but there doesn’t need to be any “clarification” on whether these people have a right to murder someone for recording them with their cameras. Sadly, this is about as strong of a rebuke as you’re going to get from any Republican, most of whom are happy to continue gaslighting on the murder just like Trump and his enablers surrounding him.
