Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on Friday called for federal reparations for the children and families who have been “traumatized” by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers amid the chaotic and lethal enforcement of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
Jayapal made her case during a congressional hearing called “Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Attack on Children,” which focused on his nationwide ICE deployments and the need for “defensive reform” to prevent federal agents from continuing to inflict emotional damage.
“And then we also need offensive actions around prosecutions,” the Washington Democrat added Friday. “We need real accountability, because at the end of the day, the people that have been inflicting this harm need to be prosecuted.”
She continued, “They need to be brought before us and they need to be held [to] account for the trauma that they have created, and we are going to have to have some form of reparation for the kids and the families that have been traumatized through all of this.”
Trump launched mass deportations shortly after taking office last year, deploying ICE to states across the country. Two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, were fatally shot earlier this year during encounters with federal immigration agents in Minnesota.
The number of children in immigration detention, meanwhile, has skyrocketed. Federal immigration agents arrested more than 3,800 children between January and October 2025, per the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School and an analysis by The Guardian.
Among those children, 1,700 have been held at facilities such as the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas — which reportedly operates under nightmarish conditions — including 5-year-old Liam Ramos, two 5-year-old twins and a 2-month-old infant.
Jayapal on Friday called for these for-profit immigration detention centers to be abolished.
“The enormity in the abuses of the violations are difficult to capture,” she said. “And I think we’re going to have to continue to make these connections for the country about how on every … level, we are seeing these continue. We have to continue to call out the profiteering.”
The former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus added the U.S. should “outlaw private prisons for immigrants,” stating they “should not be there for profiteering for big corporations that then channel those profits back into this administration that facilitates them.”
Jayapal was expectedly slammed for her remarks on Fox News.
Contributor Sara Carter argued that the government should pay reparations, but only to legal U.S. citizens, and brazenly stated that the Democratic Party should foot the bill — for the supposed “atrocities” they’ve committed by supporting immigrants.
