Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) called out his Republican colleagues in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday for their behavior online, claiming they were “not serious” about the issue at hand.
“You expected a serious forum,” Swalwell said to the witnesses called to discuss instances of violence related to immigrants in the country illegally. “You are serious. This issue is serious. They [Republicans] are not serious.”
Swalwell referenced a Monday post from the House Judiciary GOP account on X in which an AI-created Donald Trump hugs a duck and a house cat.
The image refers to the false claims from Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio.
“You’d expect some seriousness, some gravitas, respect for the people who came here,” Swalwell said. “What in the hell is this?”
Chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) did not respond to Swalwell.
Vance has since used the attention from the viral story on immigration to spin the conversation to other real instances of migrant violence, which GOP legislators amplified in the hearing.
Jordan and GOP lawmakers referred to Vice President Harris as the “border czar” throughout the session, blaming the Biden-Harris border policies for the violence committed against the family members of some witnesses.
Immigration is one of the top issues this election, and Harris runs behind Trump on the topic. A Pew Research Center report released Monday showed that only 19 percent of registered Harris supporters are very confident that she will make wise choices about immigration, compared to 39 percent of registered Trump supporters who feel the same way.
Republicans argued Tuesday that stronger background checks and necessary vetting are at the center of the issue, claiming that legal immigrants are not the problem.
“If they’re coming over illegally, it’s because they’re hiding something,” Patty Morin, mother of Rachel Morin, who was killed by an illegal immigrant, said at the hearing.
Committee Democrats argued that the current situation is a bipartisan issue, and no significant action has been taken over several administrations under either party.
Legislators on both sides of the aisle encouraged witnesses and families to keep sharing their stories and pushing for border security to dissuade instances like theirs from happening again.
“Immigration doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) said. “It’s a result of a lot of forces that push people from their native countries and pull them to ours.”
