Congress members visit Whipple Federal Building: "I was shocked to see that everyone in here has leg restraints"

Reps. Omar, Jayapal seek answers on ICE activity at Whipple Federal Building

 

Congress members visit Whipple Federal Building: "I was shocked to see that everyone in here has leg restraints"

By Jennifer Mayerle

July 24, 2026 / 7:06 PM CDT / CBS Minnesota

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been taking people they detain in Minnesota to the Whipple Federal Building for processing. On Friday, members of Congress were there for an oversight visit.

Democratic U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington state made their way into the building midday, calling congressional oversight their duty.

"I was shocked to see that everyone in here has leg restraints. That is not common practice in holding facilities and detention centers. And apparently, that is the practice when you are picked up to when you are released," Jayapal said.

They did learn some information about detainees despite saying they had to sign paperwork, agreeing they wouldn't interact with them.

Samosa Caucus condemns Frisco Indian flag-burning incident

Samosa Caucus condemns Frisco Indian flag-burning incident

By Sumit Jangir • June 16, 2026 12:00 PM PDT

FRISCO, Texas (Diya TV) — The six Indian American members of Congress, known collectively as the Samosa Caucus, have strongly condemned the burning and tearing of an Indian flag during an anti-immigration protest in Frisco, Texas, calling the act hateful and harmful to the Indian American community.

The lawmakers issued a joint statement on June 15 after a video of the incident spread widely across social media. The footage showed a man tearing an Indian flag outside Frisco City Hall while demonstrators cheered and shouted anti-India slogans. The protest focused on opposition to immigration and what organizers described as an “Indian immigration invasion” in Texas.

The incident sparked outrage among Indian Americans and community leaders across the United States. Members of the Samosa Caucus said the event reflected a troubling rise in anti-Indian rhetoric and xenophobia.

The joint statement was signed by Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ami Bera, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Shri Thanedar, and Suhas Subramanyam. Together, they represent the entire Indian American caucus in Congress.

The lawmakers expressed solidarity with Indian Americans in Frisco and across the country. They emphasized that all people deserve to live safely and with dignity, regardless of their background.

“We strongly support the constitutional right to freedom of expression for all Americans,” the lawmakers said in their statement. “At the same time, we condemn the tearing of an Indian flag outside Frisco City Hall alongside hateful anti-India rhetoric, which continues to fuel anti-Indian violence and xenophobia.”The group also stated that acts of intimidation and hate directed at any community have no place in the United States.

Jayapal (D-WA) announces she has been working with foreign countries to supply oil to Cuba

Jayapal on Iran ceasefire, Cuba energy crisis and DHS funding plan | Full interview

***

P.S.

As a naturalized citizen, an immigrant that came to the U.S. from India to study at GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY at age 16, Rep. Pramila Jayapal has way too much advise on how American domestic and foreign affairs should function.

US lawmakers visit Cuba as embargo pressure intensifies

 

P.S.

Thinking of Cuba's 1959 Socialist Revolution brings to mind the idiom:

 "You've made your bed, now lie in it"

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WASH) calls for taxpayer-funded reparations for illegals

 

Reps. Pramila Jayapal, et al Introduce Resolution Recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility

Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Sara Jacobs, Mark Takano, and Sen. Schatz Introduce Resolution Recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility

03.31.2026 | News

Washington, D.C. — Reps. Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Sara Jacobs (CA-51), and Mark Takano (CA-39), and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced legislation to commemorate Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31st, recognize the many achievements and progress made by people in the transgender and gender non-conforming communities, and affirm their human rights.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Co-Chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force, said: “On Trans Day of Visibility, first and foremost, I stand with our trans loved ones. As Trump and Republicans continue their cruel and baseless attacks on the trans community, we must support our trans neighbors and work to protect their right to safety, respect, visibility, and equality under the law. Trans rights are human rights, and we must continue working to ensure that every person can live authentically as themselves. To trans people across this country: I see you, I hear you, and I will never stop fighting for you.”

Rep. Sara Jacobs, Co-Chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force, said: “Under an administration that constantly tries to make transgender and gender non-conforming people feel invisible, I am proud to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility. We cannot and will not let their hateful attacks steal our joy. To my trans friends and family, today is a day to celebrate being out, loud, and proud. And I will not stop until everyone can live freely and without fear of expressing their true selves.”

“As the transgender community continues to face attempts by the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress to erase their voices, their contributions, and their existence, I am proud to work with Congresswomen Sara Jacobs and Pramila Jayapal and Senator Brian Schatz in showing the trans community that we stand with them in the fight against erasure and censorship by anti-equality extremists,” said Rep. Mark Takano, Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus. “Transgender Day of Visibility celebrates visibility and is also an opportunity to inspire others as we work towards a United States where people of all gender identities are free to live openly and authentically. The full weight of the Congressional Equality Caucus stands behind the trans community, today and every day.”

“Trans people should be able to live freely, safely, and openly – just like everyone else. Instead, they continue to face discrimination and violence, both here at home and around the world,” said Senator Schatz. “International Transgender Day of Visibility is a chance to celebrate the trans community’s achievements and courage and renew our commitment to fighting for acceptance and equality.”

“Recognizing Trans Day of Visibility is about more than visibility—it’s about affirming that trans people belong,” said Caius Willingham, Senior Policy Analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality. “Thanks to the leadership of Congresswoman Jacobs, Senator Schatz, and Representatives Jayapal and Takano, this resolution makes clear that even in the face of growing attacks, our communities will continue to be seen, heard, and protected.”

Source

Ed Markey And Pramila Jayapal Hold Press Briefing To Reintroduce 'Trans Bill Of Rights'

 

Pramila Jayapal Leads Shadow Hearing On ‘Trump’s Assault In Chicago’

Jayapal Hosts Shadow Hearing on Trump’s Assault on Families and Communities

09.18.2025 | News

Jayapal Hosts Shadow Hearing on Trump’s Assault on Families and Communities


WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, today hosted a Shadow Hearing titled Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Assault Destroys U.S. Families and Communities. This hearing examined the human costs of deportation on U.S. families and communities. It is the third in her series, Kidnapped and Disappeared, that highlights the multifaceted impacts of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

“Donald Trump lied to the American people. He lied when he said he would bring grocery prices down. He lied when he said he would release the Epstein Files. And he sure as hell lied when it came to immigration enforcement,” said Jayapal. “This indiscriminate immigration enforcement has led to an increased number of family separations. According to a report earlier this week, more than 400 children have been sent to Office of Refugee Settlement shelters from the interior of the United States. In some cases, parents are being told their children will be taken away unless they give up their right to a hearing and to their country of birth. In other cases, children who arrived as unaccompanied minors are being sent back to government shelters for months after they had already been released to vetted sponsors. Families belong together, today we heard absolutely heartbreaking stories about how so many have been ripped apart — and we will continue to shine a light on these horrifying cases.”

Reps. Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal make unannounced trip to Cuba: Axios

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Axios

28 Feb 2024 15:57

The visit has drawn fire from Republican lawmakers.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., left, speaks about the threat of default as Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., during a news conference, on May 24, 2023, in Washington. (AP)

It has been confirmed to Axios by a spokesperson for the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) that two CPC leaders made an unannounced trip to Cuba while the House was on recess last week.

Initially reported by the Miami Herald, spokesperson Mia Jacobs stated that Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the chair and deputy chair of the CPC, respectively, met with "people from across Cuban society and government officials to discuss human rights and the U.S.-Cuba bilateral relationship," Jacobs said.

Both Jayapal and Omar are public critics of the American economic embargo on Cuba.

Even though US lawmakers occasionally travel to Cuba, those trips are usually open and overt in American and Cuban governments and news.

The Miami Herald reported that Cuban state media "traditionally highlight American lawmakers going to the island, usually framing their visit as a gesture of 'solidarity' with the Cuban people or support for ending the U.S. embargo".

On X, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said, "It's outrageous that Members of Congress would visit a country that jails, abuses, and murders their citizens and supports Iran, Russia, and Communist China against our interests."

After the news went public, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) said, "Communist Cuba must remain on the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism."

Earlier in January, a group of 160 lawyers, mostly American, called on US President Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the so-called "State Sponsors of Terrorism" (SSOT) list.

"Given the tremendous economic, social, humanitarian, and commercial effect placement on the SSOT list has had for the Cuba people, maintaining it for such pretextual reasons continues to be a stain on U.S. foreign policy," the letter considered.

The Reagan administration first placed Cuba on the SSOT list in 1982, after which Cuba witnessed decades of US sanctions, assassination attempts, and subversion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

In 2015, then-US President Barack Obama removed Cuba from the list. However, relations deteriorated under his successor Donald Trump, who reinforced sanctions on the Caribbean island nation.


Source

Jayapal: Any Biden action restricting migrants seeking asylum would be ‘extremely disappointing mistake’

BY SARAH FORTINSKY - 02/22/24 9:15 AM ET

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., speaks Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)


Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said if President Biden takes executive action to restrict migrants seeking asylum at the southern border, he would be making a “mistake.”

“This would be an extremely disappointing mistake,” Jayapal wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in response to CNN’s reporting that Biden is considering blocking those who cross into the United States illegally from filing an asylum claim. “Cruel enforcement-only policies have been tried for 30 years and simply do not work.”

“Democrats cannot continue to take pages out of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s playbook — We need to lead with dignity and humanity,” she added, referring to the former president’s senior adviser.

Jayapal’s warning comes as Biden continues to face pressure to take action to curb the influx of migration at the southern border and an asylum system that even many Democrats have said is broken.

CNN’s reporting, while indicating no decision had been made by the White House on future steps, said the action under consideration “involves using an authority known as 212f between ports of entry to try to clamp down on unlawful border crossing.”

The news comes after months of negotiations in the Senate produced a bipartisan border agreement that would have raised standards for asylum screening and sped up the process, ended the practice known as “catch and release” and given the president more authority to close the border once crossings reach a certain threshold.

Biden endorsed the agreement at the time, saying it “includes the toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades.”

The bill fell apart, however, after President Trump publicly opposed its passage and it became clear it had little chance of passing in the House. The failed bill was also highly criticized by progressive Democrats, including Jayapal.

A White House spokesperson, who did not comment on the executive actions proposed by the president, reiterated calls for the House GOP to agree to a bipartisan deal that includes border security, per CNN.

“The Administration spent months negotiating in good faith to deliver the toughest and fairest bipartisan border security bill in decades because we need Congress to make significant policy reforms and to provide additional funding to secure our border and fix our broken immigration system,” White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in the statement.

“No executive action, no matter how aggressive, can deliver the significant policy reforms and additional resources Congress can provide and that Republicans rejected,” he added. “We continue to call on Speaker Johnson and House Republicans to pass the bipartisan deal to secure the border.”

Source

P.S.

Jayapal was born into a Tamil family in Chennai, India, to Maya Jayapal, a writer, and Jayapal Menon, a marketing professional. She spent most of her childhood in Indonesia and Singapore.^[4][5] She immigrated to the U.S. in 1982, at age 16, to attend college. She earned a BA from Georgetown University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.^[6]

Born September 21, 1965 (age 58)

Chennai, Madras State (present-day Tamil Nadu), India

Citizenship

Indian (1965–2000)

American (2000–present)

Political party Democratic

-Wikipedia.

‘This is not an infiltration by criminals,’ Democratic congresswoman says after visiting with asylum seekers

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) is shown in Seattle on Aug. 8, 2015, while she was a Washington state senator. (Elaine Thompson/AP)


By Paige Winfield Cunningham December 1 at 9:17 PM

Rep. Pramila Jayapal met Saturday with asylum seekers in Tijuana, Mexico, who are running up against strict new Trump administration policies, saying she is determined to tell the truth about what is happening on the U.S.-Mexico border as she and fellow Democrats prepare to launch an investigation early next year.

“We just have to counter the lies of the president in telling about what’s happening here on the border,” the Washington Democrat said Saturday evening. “This is not an infiltration by criminals — this is people seeking the American Dream, and we should be processing them and we should be allowing them to come in.”

Jayapal, a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of the most outspoken critics of Trump’s immigration policies, visited several shelters where members of a migrant “caravan” are being housed as they wait for their claims to be processed amid large backlogs. The border crossing linking Tijuana with San Diego saw major clashes last weekend between asylum seekers trying to enter the U.S. and border guards who blocked their way.

More than a third of the members of the caravan are women and children, according to numbers provided by the city of Tijuana. Those figures stand in stark contrast to how Trump has described migrant caravans, characterizing them as mostly comprising dangerous single men.

Jayapal said most of the people she spoke with were from Honduras, which is one of several Central American countries with high levels of gang violence. She described several conversations with migrants who had left dangerous situations back home, including a pregnant woman who had left her 3-year-old child behind, a 17-year-old boy who had been shot in both knees, and a mother of three whose partner had been murdered.

“The stories I’ve heard are just so horrific, people seeing tremendous violence,” said Jayapal, whose district includes most of Seattle.

The Trump administration has come under heavy criticism, mostly from Democrats, for using aggressive methods at the border as it tries to turn migrants away. Earlier this week, Trump defended the use of tear gas by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents against migrants advancing at the San Ysidro crossing — and even threatened to shut down the border if the asylum seekers didn’t retreat.

“We’ve just said, look, if they come over here, we’re going to apprehend them and we’re going to close the border,” Trump told reporters on the way to a political rally Monday. “That’s not really been done to the extent that I’m doing because I mean it, and I’ll close it for a long time.”

Last month, the president signed a proclamation barring migrants who cross into the country illegally through the southern border from seeking asylum, although a federal judge has since blocked the rule.

Applications for asylum in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent years, but critics say the administration could be doing more to process claims faster.

“The crisis that has been frankly created by the Trump administration has shut down the legal processes to process people,” Jayapal said.

Jayapal is on the House Judiciary Committee, where Democratic leaders are gearing up to investigate Trump’s approach to immigration once they assume the majority in the House in January. Judiciary and the House Oversight Committee are expected to examine Trump’s family separation policy and his use of troops at the border, among other policy moves.

“I firmly believe the U.S. is in violation of our human rights obligations and our domestic legal obligations,” Jayapal said. “We have to go back to being a country that has always made refuge-seeking bipartisan.”

Source

P.S.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)

Wikipedia

Personal details
Born September 21, 1965 (age 53)
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Political party Democratic
Spouse(s) Steve Williamson
Children 1
Education Georgetown University (BA)
Northwestern University (MBA)
Website House website