Bennie Thompson has already told the Department of Homeland Security to stop deleting things. In January, Democrats will hand him the gavel of the House Homeland Security Committee, and with it the power to compel testimony from the people who run the country’s immigration enforcement.
Thompson, who represents Mississippi’s majority-Black 2nd District, said the Trump administration “will finally be faced with real oversight next year.” He has demanded that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin preserve all records under the Federal Records Act, and he has asked for every document his committee has requested over the past two years by Dec. 2.
The first target is ICE itself. Its payroll has grown by 12,000 hires under this administration, and Democrats want to know who was hired, how they were trained and what it cost. Thompson also wants to examine what he calls the administration’s “blatantly corrupt self-dealing,” including the purchase of luxury jets from a political donor connected to former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The deaths come next. NPR counts at least nine fatal shootings by federal immigration agents since Donald Trump took office. They include Renee Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen, killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January, and Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs nurse and U.S. citizen, killed by Border Patrol in the same city weeks later. In Houston in July, an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three and a Mexican immigrant.
Thompson and the incoming chairs of the Judiciary and Oversight committees, Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia, plan to subpoena border czar Tom Homan, Noem and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller for sworn testimony and the agencies’ internal use-of-force records. Miller was promoted to chief of staff on Friday, three days after voters handed Democrats the House.
A Homeland Security spokesperson said Democrats are “more interested in political shenanigans than in governing.” The department said it was prepared to engage with the investigations.
For Black readers, the stake is who gets to ask the questions. Thompson chaired the House committee that investigated Jan. 6, and he comes from a state where Black voters spent decades being told that the people with power over their lives did not have to answer to them. Black immigrants from Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana and across the Caribbean live under the same enforcement agency, and Black citizens have little reason to assume that a force with no accountability will stay pointed only at someone else.
The limits are real. Democrats hold the House but not the White House, and they lack the votes to cut ICE’s funding over a presidential veto. A White House that has shown “complete lack of interest in accountability,” as NPR described it, can slow-walk every subpoena into court.
That is a reason to start early, not to start small. Nine families are owed an answer about who gave the orders, and the agents who fired should be named in a hearing room. Thompson’s Dec. 2 deadline is the first test of whether the department will comply.
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