Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Sunday he is not opposed to requiring that federal immigration officers wear body cameras, after Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) proposed such a measure last week.
“I don’t have a problem with that personally,” Johnson, the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told host Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Under federal law, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel are not required to wear body cameras when conducting operations. A majority of states require local police officers to use body cameras.
On Wednesday, Schumer proposed a series of reforms to ICE and CBP — including body camera requirements, an end to roving patrols, elevated warrant requirements and a measure to ban officers from wearing masks. Democrats on Capitol Hill have pushed for reforming the agencies in the wake of the fatal shootings of two Minnesotans by federal immigration officers last month.
“These are commonsense reforms,” Schumer said in announcing his list. “If Republicans refuse to support them, they are choosing chaos over order, plain and simple.”
Members in both chambers of Congress will negotiate on the proposals this week, as the House is set to take up the Senate-passed package to fund the government. The Senate deal includes a two-week continuing resolution that funds the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and CBP, until Feb. 13.
Johnson, though, vocally opposed the New York Democrat’s proposal to require that ICE and CBP officials first obtain a judicial warrant before entering a person’s home. A memo signed by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons last May, which was obtained by The Associated Press, allows ICE officers to enter a home in order to carry out an arrest if they have an administrative warrant and a final order of removal issued by a judge.
“We have millions of cases. So demanding judicial warrants is their sneaky way of basically neutering our ability to enforce any immigration laws,” Johnson said, referring to Democrats.
“Is it perfect? Absolutely not,” he later added on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations. “Can things be tightened up? Sure. But the way to tighten it up is not to neuter our ability to enforce our immigration laws. And that’s what Democrats want to do.”
