Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL) rejects a nine-day continuing resolution funding ICE, demanding judicial warrants and body cameras to curb aggressive tactics—like Alex Predty’s fatal shooting after intervening in an ICE arrest or the Zips restaurant raids—while criticizing military-style enforcement in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis. He dismisses the SAVE Act’s voter ID requirements as unnecessary suppression, arguing states already verify citizenship, and calls out baseless accusations against figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) as divisive distractions. Schneider insists on comprehensive immigration reform, prioritizing external threats over political scapegoating, and warns ICE’s unchecked actions risk harming public trust and safety, urging sustained congressional oversight to enforce accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
In the December 1st, 2025 edition of the Wall Street Journal, there was this headline on page R25.
These 10 books changed the way Americans thought about work.
Carol Heimowitz, the author, wrote, it began with Benjamin Franklin, who couldn't stop working or writing about work throughout his 84-year-long life.
Carol Heimowitz has been associated with the Wall Street Journal since she got her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.
Other books she featured in this article about work include Tocqueville, Frederick Douglass, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Dale Carnegie, and C. Wright Mills, plus others.
We wanted to know how she chose these 10 books about work, and so we had a chat.
A new interview with journalist and writer Carol Heimowitz about her Wall Street Journal article.
These 10 books changed the way Americans thought about work.
Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb, is available wherever you get your podcast and on the C-SPAN Now app.
Welcome back to the program.
We're joined now by Brad Schneider.
He's a Democrat of Illinois and a member of the Ways and Means and Foreign Affairs Committees.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you.
So yesterday you voted against a bill that included the Senate passed 10-day, now nine-day continuing resolution to fund DHS.
Why did you vote against it?
So I'm not ready to give any more money to ICE until we change what ICE is doing.
Last month, the end of last month, I joined most of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote for the five funding bills and against the ICE bill to send to Congress, ICE funding for the year, to send to Senate.
The Senate put those together, sent them back with a 10-day extension for ICE.
And until we rein in ICE, until they are following the law, upholding the Constitution, respecting the rights of Americans and everyone in this country, we can't give ICE any more money.
Well, now the government is open and you've got these nine days to negotiate those things.
Do you think you can get it done in nine days?
We should be able to.
What we're asking for is not unreasonable.
We're asking for ICE officers to behave the same way we expect of our local law enforcement in our cities and towns across the country.
When they approach someone, if they're going to arrest someone, they're doing it with a judicial warrant.
They have identification, who they are, where they're from.
They're showing their face.
They're doing it with respect, not throwing people to the ground or pulling them out of the car with guns blazing, but rather treating people with the respect that every American deserves.
Now, one of the requirements is to wear body cameras.
And Secretary Noam has already said that body cameras would be worn in Minneapolis.
That would roll out to other states.
There's already funding for that from the One Big Beautiful bill.
But you would want that codified into law so that they can't take that back.
Right.
We want to make sure that what ICE is doing is according to law.
And the Constitution protects Americans' rights.
It's within the Bill of Rights, whether it's freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
That was something that the founders were worried about 250 years ago.
And it's as true today that every American should have the ability to live their lives with freedom and respect.
Now, requiring agents to take their masks off, the argument is that these agents are being doxxed, they're being harassed, they're being assaulted in many cases, and that it's just not fair for them to be putting their identification out so that they and their families can be harassed.
I appreciate the concern.
I think we look, and as I said, that we're asking the same thing of what we ask of our local police enforcement.
If they were behaving with the appropriate decorum, if they were following procedures that required a judicial warrant, that they introduced themselves, said why they were there, I don't think you would have the same attacks.
What we've seen, whether it's in Chicago, most recently in Minneapolis, is ICE officers aggressively, violently approaching individuals, yanking them out of their car.
What you saw with Alex Predty, ICE officers approached him.
First, they shove a woman down to the ground.
Predty steps in to protect the woman, and the next thing you know, they're throwing him to the ground and ultimately shooting him five times.
This is not what we should expect of any police or law enforcement effort.
And all we're asking for ICE is to perform in a way that respects rights and upholds the Constitution.
Now, what Republicans are saying, though, is that ICE is operating in red states, and they're not having any of these problems.
This is all happening because of these blue states.
There's sanctuary cities, sanctuary states.
There's violent protests against these officers who are just trying to do their jobs.
If you look at the way DHS, Christy Noam, Bilvino, and no longer responsible there, they come into Chicago, the operations called Operation Midway Blitz.
They're putting on displays of force.
They're dressed in military attire, approaching people in aggressive ways.
I'm not seeing that in red states.
That's exclusively in states like Chicago and Minneapolis, Los Angeles.
They are trying to make a statement.
They are terrifying our communities.
They are trying to basically get people to bow down and kiss their ring and accept whatever they're going to do.
That's not the way this country was founded.
It's not the principles that have defined the country for 250 years.
If you'd like to talk to Representative Rud Schneider, Democrat of Illinois, you can start calling in now.
Republicans are on 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
I want to play for you, Congressman, Speaker Mike Johnson.
He was asked about whether ICE should change its tactics.
I have great, great faith and trust in the leadership of Homeland Security and Tom Holman in particular, who's now in charge in Minnesota.
He brings 40 years' experience to this.
He's very measured.
We all believe that immigration policy ought to be balanced and strategic and smart, and it obviously needs to comply with the law.
And I'm going to leave it to the experts to determine what that is.
I think in the negotiation, I think we've got to remove the politics.
We've got to look at what the Constitution says, what federal immigration law says.
And if anybody wants to adjust immigration law, then that's why we're here in the legislative branch.
But we need it.
We need that approach.
We need the temperature turned down.
That's the president's words.
And you need a steady hand at the wheel.
I think Tom Homan is a great guy to do that.
Do you agree with that?
There's so much in that that I disagree with.
I can start with the trust.
Christy Noam is the last person I'm going to trust.
You watch what happened in Minneapolis.
It was on film.
And she came and immediately said the exact opposite.
She said, don't believe what you see with your eyes.
Believe what I tell you.
And what she was telling us was false.
And that's happened time and time again.
It's rich for Speaker Johnson to talk about immigration policy.
I agree with what he said in the clip.
It's just his actions defy everything he said.
We've been trying to pass immigration reform for decades.
We desperately need comprehensive immigration reform that secures our borders, makes sure we know who's coming in, that changes our laws so we can bring people here.
We're going to help grow our economy, strengthen our communities, and do it in an ordered way.
But the Republicans have stopped us every step of the way.
In 2013, my first year in Congress, we had a bill that had, it passed the Senate, overwhelmingly bipartisan.
Would have passed the House with more than 300 votes, but John Boehner, then Speaker, blocked it.
Paul Ryan, when he was Speaker, blocked our efforts to do anything on immigration.
And Mike Johnson won't even let us have the conversation.
So, if he wants to talk about immigration reform, if he wants to talk about doing a measured, thoughtful way that addresses the needs of the nation and ensures we protect our security, I'm all in.
You mentioned, Secretary Noam, your colleague, Representative Robin Kelly, has introduced a measure to impeach Secretary Noam.
Are you on board with that?
I'm not.
And I think Noam has to go.
I've called for her removal.
I called for her to step down, which she should do of her own accord, but the president should remove her.
And if not, Congress should proceed with the impeachment process.
It starts with an investigation.
We have to build the case.
We have to make the case.
And when the facts are there, if it passes the House, it should be a case that could go to the Senate with conviction.
If the House were to rush to articles of impeachment, pass it now, which they wouldn't do with the Republican majority, Senate wouldn't remove her.
Nothing's happened.
So she needs to go.
She is a threat to our communities, but we need to do it in a formal process where the easiest way is for President Trump to recognize she's hurting him, hurting the country, and needs to get out of the office.
Let's talk to callers.
We'll start with William, Republican in Tennessee.
Good morning, William.
Good morning.
Thank you for your hard, professional, personable, knowledgeable, hard work.
I lived in California and escaped.
California is one of the battlegrounds of La Raza.
They want to take over Southern California.
The Raza has declared war against the United States in Spanish, of course, and we have to stop them.
AOC is an agent provocateur for the overtaking of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California.
Working With Authorities00:13:19
That's called treason for the people that aided and abed that.
Treason, sedition.
This is serious business, and people are going to be surprised what's going to happen in this country.
God bless America.
God bless Donald Trump.
All right, William.
Any comments on that?
So I think where William and I would find common ground is that we need to unite.
It's not a partisan issue.
We need to make sure that we're keeping our country secure.
There are people and forces outside the country, organized crime, terror organizations that want to come into this country and do us harm.
We need to stand united and protect all Americans against that.
We're far better off uniting and focusing on the threats that are real rather than seeing perceived threats that really are fabricated.
Neil, Independent, Galloway, Ohio, you're on the air.
Yes, how are you doing?
Well, you guys are all over the place.
Well, first, let's start off with unmasking our federal agents.
I live right beside a fire station, and there are several cruisers parked there from local police to county police.
There's a reason an officer does not park their car at their house because of the threat of them being an officer by people in the neighborhood or whoever.
So you can't unmask an officer because of the threat that it poses to their life and the safety of their family.
Do people understand that you cannot do that?
And second, oh gosh, you guys are all over the boards.
You forgot your second point, Neil?
It's okay.
We'll take it first.
Neil, thanks.
Look, I have a great relationship with the police departments across my district.
These are our men and women who day in and day out are working to keep our communities safe, serve the people with whom they live.
As far as the cruisers being parked at the station, they're parked at the station for a purpose.
There are shifts that come in two, three times a day, and they are sharing resources.
So it's not for that.
Every one of those men and women that I work closely with, that I'm proud to support, that I'm grateful for their service, every one of them comes through community with their faces shown, their name on their badges, and they are part of our community and we celebrate them.
I want to ask you about the requirement for judicial warrants as opposed to administrative warrants.
So there's the issue of agents entering a home without permission.
That would be a violation, according to some scholars of the Constitutional Fourth Amendment.
Then there is a judicial warrant just to arrest and detain people.
Do you draw a distinction or do you want a judicial warrant for all of those cases?
I want them to follow the same rules and regulations that our local police are following.
I heard a story yesterday from one of my colleagues in Minneapolis.
Her neighbor, who happens to be Hispanic, a U.S. citizen, works in the community, was on his way to work, stopped at a light, knew he was being followed.
When he stopped at the lights, suddenly a bunch of officers jumped out of the car behind him, ran, guns pulled, yanked him out of the car, accused him of resisting arrest because he was buckled into his car, wrestled him out of the car.
His passport was on the driver's, on the passenger side because he travels with his documents.
They didn't care that he was a U.S. citizen.
After 30 minutes, when they determined he was a U.S. citizen driving around, they left him far from where his car was.
That's the behavior that's unacceptable.
I don't care whether it's ICE or local police, whomever it is.
Everyone in this country deserves to be protected by the constitutional right, to know why they're being accused, what they're being accused of, why they're being arrested, and to have the constitutional protections.
Camden, Scottsdale, Arizona, Democrat, you're on the air, Camden.
Yeah, hi, ma'am.
I'd like to just make two quick points.
First one's related to ICE and their enforcement.
Out here in Arizona, they had an initiative where they, I think through a federal warrant, went after a company called Zips, which is a restaurant out here, local restaurant.
There's 15 locations that they targeted all at once.
And when these folks did it, they deployed tons of resources, you know, maybe 12 agents, and then they had an armada of vehicles come in at the end in alignment with their exit.
And they had IRS agents standing out front.
It was very weird and very costly just for some like I-9 violations.
So, you know, in a world where we have to prioritize and where we have to allocate scarce resources towards areas that need them, it just doesn't seem reasonable to go after a small business for like I-9 violations and maybe payroll tax evasion or whatever it is versus, you know, pardoning like Devin Archer, Trevin Milton, Lawrence Duran, Todd and Julie Christley, Paul Wozniak.
You know, like the taxpayers are losing out on like $1.3, $1.4 billion in restitution just during this first year of this administration.
And then they're going after Zips on the other end over like I-9 violations.
It doesn't make sense to me.
And then if I might just make a quick second point, kind of unrelated, but I just have to say, I think the reason that the president is releasing the names of these folks on the Ev scene files is just because he's scared of all these powerful men.
I really don't see any other reason other than maybe he might be in it, but I think he's just genuinely scared of all the pressure that comes from releasing the names of those extremely powerful individuals, and he's beholden to them and scared of them.
All right, Camden, go ahead, Congressman.
All right.
First, about what Camden described in Arizona is what we're seeing in other places.
What I was talking about is how they're approaching it.
They say the administration says they're going after the hardened criminals.
What we're seeing is they're going after hardworking members of our community, our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, and they're doing it in the most aggressive way.
And they're pulling people off from the FBI and other agencies from hard work or important work that they should be doing to keep us safe.
In Operation Blitz in Illinois, seen numbers of approximately 4,000 people who were arrested, only 200 of whom were so-called dangerous criminals.
Those 200 should be off the streets.
I want to work with the authorities, local, state, and federal, should be working together to keep those people off our streets.
But when they're going after people working at a restaurant or people working in the community, just going about their business who have been in this country, we need, that's what we've talked about, immigration reform.
Let's find a way to get them right and give them the opportunity to get aligned with the law.
But the targeting and violent assaults are unacceptable.
With regard to the Epstein files, let's keep in mind a couple of things.
The reason we are seeking the release of those files is because of the victims.
What Epstein and the people around him did, they should be held to account for.
It was a horrific crime, and the victims deserve justice.
And it's not the president who's releasing it, it's the president who's hiding these files.
They released approximately half of what they had.
The law says everything should be released to the public so the public can make their own judgments.
And the question that leaves for all of us is: what is this administration, what is President Trump trying to hide?
Now, your colleague, Democratic Representative Ted Liu of California, repeated allegations in the Epstein files that President Trump raped and threatened to kill children.
A lot of these allegations are unproven.
They're unsubstantiated.
How should Democrats deal with this?
I haven't seen that.
I don't know what Ted said.
From everything I've heard, there's nothing that has been released so far that implicates President Trump, which again raises the question, what are they hiding?
But in this, and related to the question we were talking before about impeachment and everything we do, is we should follow the facts.
We should stick to what is actually in a document or is the history of a case and talk about that.
And so I'll leave Ted to talk about that specific issue.
But from what I've seen, the president hasn't been implicated, which is why it's even more confounding that they're hiding these files.
Danny, Jamestown, South Carolina, Republican, you're on the air.
Yes, thank you for taking my call, CPAN.
I just have a few questions for Mr. Snyder.
I'm not sure if he was in office, but during the Biden administration, when May Orkis and Joe Biden and the Democrats opened up the border, did you vote against DHS funding, Mr. Snyder?
And another thing when Biden had 300 and something thousand children in cages and then lost them, I don't remember hearing any Democrats wanting to find them, but I think Trump's found about 100 and something thousand of them.
C-Fan, you can give us that number because I like to give the man a win when he deserves a win.
And as far as what's going on in Minnesota, I don't know about Chicago where Mr. Snyder's from, but in Minnesota, he said he didn't like the way that ICE was arresting illegal immigrants that are in this country.
I presume that he prefers that the illegal immigrants get to kill American citizens and rape them and do whatever crimes they want to do.
So it sounds like Democrats are on the side of lawlessness.
And Mr. Trump, you're doing a great job.
The border is secure, America.
The border is secure.
Thank you, Mr. Trump, and God bless America.
So, Danny, I think there's a wide gap between wanting people to be treated with respect, expecting police officers, whether it's local police or ICE officers, to approach individuals in a secure and safe way, protecting their safety, which we have to look out for the safety of all law enforcement, but also treating the people they approach with respect.
Asking for that is not saying that we should let violent criminals wantonly roam our streets and threaten our communities.
In fact, it's just the opposite.
When federal officers are working in conjunction with local officers, we have a far better chance of identifying and taking the dangerous criminals off the street than what we're seeing ICE doing across this country, which is stopping people at traffic lights.
You saw it with Alex Predi, you saw it with Renee Goode.
We've seen in communities across the country where ICE officials are going to the point of even killing American citizens who are doing nothing but exercising their First Amendment rights.
I'm going to defend the First Amendment and all of our Constitution.
I work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to do that, and I'll continue to do that as long as I'm here.
You do believe that local authorities should be required to cooperate with ICE?
Local authorities, I mean, I can speak for Illinois.
Where there is a judicial warrant, where there is an individual who is identified as a threat to the community, if they work with local authorities and they're allowed to, they are allowed to do so.
That's the case.
And so it's not that local authorities are saying we won't work with ICE.
It's just they're saying we are not going to do what ICE is doing, these random assaults and rounding up people.
There was a case in my community where there were two individuals who should have been taken off the streets.
There was a chase.
Because ICE was not working with local authorities, the chase ended up in a public space.
The two individuals ran in to a place where there were young children, and ICE went in and captured them.
The good news is no one was hurt.
Can't say for certain, but had they been working with the local authorities, the likelihood of that chase ending up in a school probably would have been much reduced.
And that's why working together, I think, would be good.
But it's the way ICE is approaching it.
Many communities across the country said we're not going to be a part of that.
Let's talk to Jeffrey next, Democrat in Washington, D.C. Good morning.
Good morning, Mr. Snyder.
I urge you not to even approve this funding any further until we have guarantees from DHS that the things that she is doing, Christine Noam especially, she has deported people who have served our country, veterans who have fled for our country.
She has deported a green card holder who wrote a few bad checks.
And not only that, in her own state, she tried to deport a student who's working on her PhD over some traffic infraction.
So she had just hijacked our immigration law completely and breaking all kinds of laws.
I think it was, and you were absolutely right.
These ICE agents are acting like they are federal, like this has become like martial law.
Yes.
All right.
Go ahead.
Thanks, Jeffrey.
I agree with you.
And what we are demanding, and I think these are all reasonable expectations, is that ICE change its policies to come into line with U.S. law and the Constitution, that the behaviors of ICE officers are overseen, they're supervised, and it changes as well, that there is accountability for federal officers in the actions they take.
Proof of Citizenship Required00:01:49
And among all of these things, equally important is that congressional oversight is established and sustained.
We need to be seeing what ICE is doing, what DHS is doing in general.
We need to know why they're doing it, and we need to make sure they're doing it in a way that upholds the law and protects our Constitution.
I want to ask you about the SAVE Act, because that came up during negotiations on this bill.
It requires in-person proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
Are you, I'm assuming you're not in favor of that, so tell us why.
So what we know is that the requirement of identification is a way to suppress votes.
Not everyone has access to getting an ID.
Every state controls its registration.
Who can vote?
Only U.S. citizens can vote.
That is a federal law.
But how they register vote is done at the states.
How the elections are conducted is done at states.
And that is something that was established at their very founding 250 years ago.
Requiring the ID for people.
Seniors oftentimes don't have the ID.
people who don't drive.
So it is something that is intended to suppress the vote.
I am all in favor of giving states the resources they need to make sure that they know who's on the rolls, that only citizens are on the rolls.
But how do you know that it's only citizens, that you know that that's the right person that's voting?
The states do that on their check.
You have to come in with proof of citizenship, proof of residency to register.
That's when it's established.
When you're going to the polls, you check the person against their signature, and it's up to the state to do that.
But that's what the SAVE Act is doing, that it is going to require you to prove that you're an American citizen when you register.