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).
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. 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.
"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’s violent mass deportation machine," Jeffries said.
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.
"If you’ve got rogue ICE agents who think they’ll never be held accountable," he said, "then we’re 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 Renée Nicole Good."
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’s Tuesday visit to the state — in the president’s case, to hold rallies in Lubbock and Corpus Christi.
Garcia, who introduced Jeffries, stressed that aggressive immigration enforcement measures under Trump were hurting not only immigrants but the Houston economy.
"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."
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