oversight

“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”

“This is not the conduct of a committed and faithful public servant, especially one entrusted with ensuring the safety of almost 350 million Americans,” the Democrats wrote.

They added: “Your lack of judiciousness regarding your personal travel and dubious use of official travel appear to violate not only government ethics law and Department of Justice policy, but also White House directives.”

“Despite its myriad failures and hypocrisies on this point, the Trump Administration has expressly promised Americans that it would crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse of government spending and has reportedly directed officials to limit their travel, particularly overseas travel or travel unrelated to the President’s agenda,” they wrote.

Kim, a senator from New Jersey, had joined the state’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, also a Democrat, at the protest to speak with relatives of some of those detained. He told USA Today that the incident in which he was sprayed by a chemical substance came shortly after he had been inside Delaney Hall to see conditions for himself.

He said he emerged to a “standoff” between protesters and agents from ICE, who he said had deployed an armored vehicle as a barricade, and that he “kind of lined up in front of them” to try to de-escalate the situation.

“ICE officials told me that they were going to push through the crowd with their vehicle and they wanted to get some vehicles out of there,” Kim said.

“I tried to arrange a situation where people would not get hurt, where there wouldn’t be a confrontation. Unfortunately, ICE just continued on.”

People were “getting tackled and brought to the ground” and ICE “started pushing through with their vehicles” and “started shooting at us with pepper balls and using pepper spray”, he said.

“I tried to do whatever I could standing in the middle to keep people safe.”