President Trump announced he was postponing a nationwide immigration sweep set to begin on Sunday, targeting thousands of migrants. Congress now has two weeks to act on asylum law before the federal government says they will move forward with deportations.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Ca) tells Greater LA that he was angry when he heard about the planned ICE raids. He says he’s seen the fear this causes. “Since Donald Trump was sworn in as president we've seen kids have this fear that their parents would be taken away.”
While he still believes in comprehensive immigration reform, he says the immediate need is to get “more resources to take care of the humanitarian crisis that's occurring on the border to make sure that they have the resources that they need.”
When it comes to the immediate crisis, Gomez says that migrants in detention are experiencing “psychological torture.”
He also says he’s been to the border, and has talked to migrants seeking asylum. “When I was on the border, CBP would come up as we're trying to sleep. They would come up and they would wake us up every hour, ask the same questions,” he says. “They actually do it to kind of break your will, to break your spirit. Is it torture in a psychological sense? I think it is. And I think it's meant to break the will of these folks so that they return to their home countries.”