Republican senator suggests ICE agents wear body cameras on patrols

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could wear body cameras on immigration patrols, a Republican senator has suggested, in a concession that could pave the way to an agreement on Capitol Hill to fund the much criticized agency.

Ron Johnson, a GOP senator from Wisconsin, said he did not “have a problem” with ICE officers wearing the cameras, one of the key demands made by Democrats who are currently blocking the agency’s financing.

“I don’t have a problem with that personally,” Johnson, the chair of the Senate’s homeland security committee, told CNN’s Dana Bash on the State of the Union program.

Wearing body cameras has been among the conditions attached by Democrats to agreeing to continued funding of the agency, whose operations have come under fierce scrutiny over its patrols in Minneapolis following the fatal shootings of two people, Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Democratic senators have refused to vote for a spending bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security without reforms in the way ICE conducts patrols.

In addition to cameras, Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, has called for an end to roving patrols and new rules requiring judicial warrants before entering people’s homes to carry out arrests.

He has also demanded that agents be prohibited from wearing masks and carry proper identification.

The list of demands also includes a universal code of conduct governing the use of force by federal law officers.

Schumer has called the proposed changes “commonsense changes”, adding: “If Republicans refuse to support them, they are choosing chaos over order, plain and simple.”

Agents have come under fierce criticism for arresting and pepper spraying demonstrators and observers who are filming or following them, activities that civil liberty lawyers insist is protected under the US constitution’s first amendment.

Johnson told CNN that agents were “on hair-trigger alert” and claimed some had been shot at and had their cars rammed by protesters. He conceded Bash’s point that wearing body cameras might serve to illuminate such situations.

But he rejected the call for judicial warrants, portraying that as the Democrats’ central demand and a “sneaky way” to derail Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.

“This is immigration law that has always been adjudicated through … administrative judges,” he said. “We’ve got millions of cases backlogged. We’re talking about general criminal law. You’re talking probably hundreds of thousands of cases. We have millions of cases so demanding judicial warrants is their sneaky way of basically neutering our ability to enforce our immigration laws.”

The Senate passed a package of five measures last Friday to fund government departments until next September, as well as a bill to continue homeland security operations for two weeks.

The House of Representatives will consider the legislation this week. Democrats in the House are expected to continue demands for reforms to ICE’s activities after its caucus met on Sunday to plot a strategy.

Hakeem Jeffries, the party’s leader in the House, echoed Schumer’s demands in an ABC interview on Sunday.

“ICE agents should conduct themselves like every other law enforcement agency in the country as opposed to running around – masked thugs, in many instances unleashing brutality on law-abiding American citizens,” he told the network’s This Week program. “What is clear is that the Department of Homeland Security needs to be dramatically reformed.”