A group of Republican lawmakers as well as officials from southwest Missouri gathered at the Greene County Courthouse Friday. One of them was U.S. Congressman Eric Burlison.
Burlison’s office described the press conference as centered on the recent murder of 15-year-old Miles Young and public safety. One of the suspects in custody, according to the Department of Homeland Security was undocumented, his exact immigration status was not made clear. DHS exclusively used the term “illegal alien.”
The formal part of the press conference was largely about immigration and disparaging what Burlison called an open border policy during the Biden administration and praising the Trump administration’s efforts to halt immigration.
“Zero illegal aliens have been released into the interior for 10 straight months,” said Burlison.
He touted legislation he’s co-sponsored, including the Laken Riley Act, which was passed into law. He said it “mandates detention of illegal aliens charged with theft, burglary, shoplifting, assault or any crime causing death or serious injury.”
And he boasted about the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which allocated over$170 billion for border security, thousands of new ICE agents and detention capacity expansion.
He encouraged local law enforcement to accept the Immigration and Customs Enforcement 287(g), which provides up to $60,000 for each officer that’s certified under the program. According to ICE, it allows the agency to “delegate state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration officer functions under ICE’s direction and oversight. Likewise, Title 25 USC 2804(e) also allows federal agencies to enter into agreements with Indian tribes to carry out laws of the United States, such as immigration laws.”
Burlison urged city and county law enforcement to take advantage “of the very program that countless agencies across the country are taking advantage of to encourage and bolster the funds that they need to not only address the illegal immigrant problem in the United States, but to address other broader crimes.” He added, “to me, it's, it's illogical to be turning away money that might be helpful to local law enforcement.”
Neither the Springfield Police Department nor the Greene County Sheriff’s Office have signed up for the program.
State Representative for the 137th District Darin Chappell also spoke at the press conference about what he called people in the state who “are here illegally and do not have the right to be within this country.”
“We're not anti-immigration. We're anti-illegal immigration,” he said, “and we need to do a better job of making certain that the law enforcement agencies of our state have every tool available to them to make certain that they take care of the problems as they present themselves in our society.”
State Representative Curtis Trent was the final speaker. He touted Senate Bill 1338, a bill he filed, that he said, “would impose fines, criminal forfeiture penalties and require the removal of any illegal alien to the nearest federal port of entry for immediate deportation.”
One reporter at the press conference reminded the lawmakers that it was a group of people who were believed to have been involved in the killing of Young and asked what the State of Missouri is doing to reduce crimes committed by young people.
Trent said the state of Missouri has committed a “significant amount of resources annually through the budget to try to, you know, address youth crime on the prevention side. And then, of course, there is a significant enforcement on the, on the law enforcement side as well.”
When asked why that had not prevented the recent homicide, Trent again reverted to the point that one of the suspects was undocumented and said, “if there had not been an illegal alien present, in the, in the jurisdiction, it’s very likely that the scenario that we’re dealing with would be very different.”
Burlison said he had not reached out to Miles Young’s family because he wanted to let them grieve.
A KSMU reporter pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security had used the term “monstrous illegal alien” when describing one of the suspects, an 18-year-old, in the Young murder case and asked, “does a phrase like that risk undermining the projection of objectivity?”
Burlison replied, “look, I’m from southwest Missouri. I don’t use terms like that, but, but I’m not going to judge the way that other people talk as well.”
A couple of protesters stood behind the legislators as they spoke. At the end of the press conference, they began shouting at the group.
“Shame on you. You are a stain on our democracy,” they said.
One was Dominique Moore, founder and president of the Southern Missouri Immigration Alliance.
She said her intention “was to bring visibility to the fact that this was propaganda. I, my organization, Southern Missouri Immigration Alliance, we track all ICE detention that comes in and out of our county jail. Today we have 233 people sitting in Greene County Jail for ICE detention. Two hundred and twenty-four of those have no criminal charges against them. So, the realities are the exact opposite of what their propaganda conference is trying to tell the community that we need to protect the people that live here.”
