{"id":477717,"date":"2026-10-27T02:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T02:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/477717\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T02:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T02:22:11","slug":"house-minority-leader-hakeem-jeffries-calls-not-to-give-a-dime-to-ice-at-houston-stop-houston-public-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/477717\/","title":{"rendered":"House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries calls \u2018not to give a dime\u2019 to ICE at Houston stop \u2013 Houston Public Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\"Hakeem<\/p>\n

Andrew Schneider\/Houston Public Media<\/p>\n

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, speaks outside the Houston office of the Service Employees International Union Texas, October 26, 2026.<\/p>\n

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Houston-area U.S. Reps. Sylvia Garcia and Christian Menefee met with members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) on Monday to discuss how President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are affecting Houston’s workforce. Jeffries called for cutting off all funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jeffries praised U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia for her work in pressing for comprehensive immigration reform, in the vehicle of the American Dream and Promise Act of 2026<\/a>. The bill, of which Garcia is the lead sponsor, would provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, as well as immigrants with Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure statuses.<\/p>\n

“That is just the beginning of what needs to happen in terms of getting this national nightmare that the people here in Houston and all across America have been experiencing and get to a much better place here in the United States of America, which will certainly include dramatic change as it relates to immigration enforcement and our continued commitment not to give a dime to Donald Trump\u2019s violent mass deportation machine,” Jeffries said. <\/p>\n

Sign up for the Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n

Jeffries said that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security should not count on getting any funding from Democrats in Congress without structural changes to the agency, including greater accountability.<\/p>\n

“If you\u2019ve got rogue ICE agents who think they\u2019ll never be held accountable,” he said, “then we\u2019re going to continue to see the type of violence that has been unleashed and brutality on law-abiding immigrant communities and on American citizens as we horrifically saw with Alex Pretti and Ren\u00e9e Nicole Good.”<\/p>\n

Jeffries, as the leader of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, is in a strong position to become the next Speaker of the House if his party wins a majority of seats in the chamber in the midterm elections. His visit to Texas came one day before Trump\u2019s Tuesday visit to the state \u2014 in the president\u2019s case, to hold rallies in Lubbock and Corpus Christi.<\/p>\n

Garcia, who introduced Jeffries, stressed that aggressive immigration enforcement measures under Trump were hurting not only immigrants but the Houston economy.<\/p>\n

“Make no mistake, this is an affordability issue,” Garcia said. “When workers are afraid to show up for work, families lose paychecks. When customers are afraid to leave their homes, restaurants, and small businesses lose money. And when construction workers are afraid to go to a job site, homes will not get built.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andrew Schneider\/Houston Public Media U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, speaks outside the Houston office of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[29455,2067,62266,13923,918,39794,288,56,58,57,1724,66,4491,223,287,27,5419,53842,6956],"class_list":["post-477717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-2026-midterm-elections","tag-affordability","tag-congressman-christian-menefee","tag-congresswoman-sylvia-garcia","tag-economy","tag-election-2026","tag-elections","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-immigration","tag-local","tag-national","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-texas","tag-u-s-department-of-homeland-security","tag-u-s-house-minority-leader-hakeem-jeffries","tag-u-s-immigration-and-customs-enforcement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}