Andrew Garbarino has one of the few jobs in Congress where you don't have to settle for a strongly worded letter.

Since July 2025 he has chaired the House Committee on Homeland Security. That gavel comes with real power over Immigration and Customs Enforcement: he decides what gets a hearing, who sits at the witness table under oath, and what documents get subpoenaed.

Here is what he has done with it over the last six months, in order.

January: he calls the hearing

On January 24, 2026, two Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA intensive care nurse, about ten times in roughly five seconds. Renee Nicole Good was also killed by federal agents in Minneapolis that month. Both were U.S. citizens.

That same day, Garbarino formally requested testimony from ICE acting director Todd Lyons, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott, and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow — memorializing, the letters say, an invitation his staff had already extended on January 15, nine days before Pretti was killed.

"I take my oversight duties for the department seriously, and Congress has an important responsibility to ensure the safety of law enforcement and the people they serve and protect," he said.

Holding the hearing at all was more than plenty of Republicans managed.

February: the hearing happens, and the promise gets made

The hearing was held February 10, 2026. A staffer held up photographs of Good and Pretti in the room.

Garbarino's opening statement did name them: "I cannot put myself in the shoes of law enforcement, nor can I imagine what the families of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are enduring today." It also told the room the hearing "was long planned," and warned, in the same breath as the deaths, that "shutting down DHS makes Americans less safe."

Neither Lyons nor Scott answered questions about the two killings, citing the ongoing investigations. Lyons told Rep. Eric Swalwell he would not resign. He told the room, "We will not be intimidated."

But on body cameras, ICE made a commitment with numbers attached. Lyons said about 3,000 of ICE's 13,000 field agents had body cameras, and that 6,000 more were being deployed. Scott said CBP had roughly 10,000 cameras for 67,000 agents.

That was the deal on the table: the cameras are coming.

Garbarino had already paid for them. The DHS funding bill the House passed in January included money for body cameras, de-escalation training, and the DHS Inspector General — a point his committee has advertised repeatedly.

June: he gives ICE three more years of money

On June 9, 2026, the House passed the Secure America Act, funding ICE and CBP for the next three fiscal years. It passed 214 to 212 — a two-vote margin in which every Republican yes was a deciding vote. Not one Republican voted no. Garbarino was one of them.

He put out a statement the same day:

"Today, Republicans fulfilled our responsibility to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security... I am proud that Republicans voted earlier this year to fund new transparency and accountability requirements for DHS."

So by June, the chairman had held the hearing, extracted the promise, funded the cameras, and handed over the money.

July 7: a man is killed in Houston, and the cameras aren't there

On the morning of July 7, 2026, ICE agents in Houston tried to stop a van. One of them shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived in this country for decades.

An ICE spokesperson said agents opened fire because Salgado Araujo "weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense."

Three men who were in the van with him told their lawyer that isn't what happened — that Salgado Araujo never rammed the ICE vehicles. One of them said there were no officers in front of or behind the van, only to the side. They are now in immigration custody.

We may never know which account is right, and here is exactly why. In the Texas Tribune's words: the agents "did not have body-worn or dashboard cameras."

Five months after ICE promised Garbarino's committee that 6,000 more cameras were being deployed, the agents in the most consequential encounter of the summer had none.

On July 13, six days later, ICE officers shot and killed a second person, in Maine.

July 15: the chairman responds

Garbarino told The Hill his committee would conduct oversight. Specifically, it had asked ICE for a briefing the following week.

Read the next part carefully, because it's the whole story:

He noted the briefing will not touch on ICE officers fatally shooting one man in Texas and another in Maine earlier this month, as the FBI is investigating both incidents.

He wanted the briefing to cover the status of ICE's body camera rollout — after it turned out the Texas officers weren't wearing them, as Just the News put it, "because they had yet to arrive."

That is the same answer, in slightly different words, that the agency gave his committee in February. In February the cameras were being deployed. In July they hadn't arrived. In between, Congress paid for them and a man died.

ICE had paused traffic stops after the Maine shooting. Garbarino said he was "not sure" the agency should "remove that tool" from its tool bag:

"As long as… those officers are focused on what they told us they were focused on, and they are, I don't have a problem with them doing traffic stops."

"As long as those officers are focused on what they told us they were focused on, and they are." The chairman's basis for believing that is what the agency told his committee — the same source that told his committee about the cameras.

What a subpoena is for

None of this requires Garbarino to become a liberal. He can believe every word of his own statements about border security and still notice that an agency made his committee a commitment with a number in it and did not keep it.

A committee chairman in the majority has options a rank-and-file member does not. He can put Lyons back under oath and ask, on the record, how many of the 6,000 cameras have actually shipped. He can subpoena the deployment records. He can demand the use-of-force reports.

What he has done instead is request a briefing that is scoped, in advance, to exclude the shootings.

Meanwhile every Democrat on the Senate's homeland security committee wrote to its chairman on July 31 about the same two deaths. Officials had pledged reforms at that committee's own February hearing, the senators said, but "it is clear that not enough is being done," and DHS "has still not been forthcoming about what, if any, corrective actions have been taken."

The pattern on Long Island

Garbarino's brand is the reasonable one. He voted for the January 6 commission, for the infrastructure law, for the Respect for Marriage Act. He was one of eight Republicans who voted for universal background checks in 2021. Those votes were real.

But the same man cast a deciding vote for roughly $70 billion in ICE and CBP funding — a bill that passed by two, with not one Republican voting no.

His constituents on Long Island have been asking him to show up in person for a year and a half. He does telephone town halls instead. In April 2025, about 2,000 people protested outside his Patchogue office. A month later, nearly 2,000 people came to a town hall in Patchogue, filling the Patchogue Theatre and an overflow venue, to hear a congressman from Maryland, because their own wouldn't hold the event.

He has the gavel. He has the subpoena power. He has an agency that told his committee something that turned out not to be true.

So far, what he has is a briefing that won't discuss the shootings.

Source

Misty Severi, "House Homeland Security Chair Garbarino vows oversight of ICE after shootings," Just the News, July 15, 2026, reporting on Garbarino's comments to The Hill. Photo: Samuel Corum / Getty Images, via WJAR.