Al Green

Overview

Al Green’s House career is ending the way he lived it: fighting. On September 15, 2026 — four months after losing his primary to a redistricting map he did not draw — the 79-year-old Texas Democrat forced the House to vote on his eighth attempt to impeach Donald Trump, accusing the president of running federal immigration agencies as “vicious, quota-driven, unaccountable paramilitary forces killing people” (Louisiana First News). The House tabled the resolution 232–147 — with 18 Democrats joining Republicans to kill it and 46 Democrats, including the entire party leadership, voting “present” rather than take a side (The Straits Times). It was a strange tableau: the chamber’s most committed impeachment advocate, undone by his own party’s caution, months from leaving Congress for good. “It is hard for me to believe that we have Democrats who are going to vote to maintain the president in office,” Green said on the floor (The Straits Times).

The articles, H.Res. 1486, named the four civilians killed in 2026 immigration operations — Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero — and charged that Trump had “transformed ICE and CBP into dangerous, unaccountable paramilitary police forces that operate without oversight and pose a direct threat to the constitutional order of the United States” (Louisiana First News). The administration defended the killings as self-defense by officers who feared for their lives — an account disputed by the victims’ relatives, camera footage, or both (Louisiana First News). In his letter urging colleagues to support him, Green wrote: “The issue isn’t whether the President is guilty of impeachable offenses, because he is. The super salient issue is: What will the U.S. House of Representatives (which has the sole power to impeach) do about it?” (Louisiana First News).

Democratic leaders declined to answer that question. Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Pete Aguilar said the night before the vote they would not support the resolution because Green had skipped the formal process — no “comprehensive investigative process” or hearings: “None of that serious work has been done, with the Republican majority focused solely on rubber stamping Donald Trump’s extreme agenda” (The Straits Times). One Democrat, Rep. Adelita Grijalva, rejected the whole dodge: “I think that my constituents in southern Arizona sent me here to vote yea or nay, and that’s what I’m going to do” (The Straits Times). The arithmetic — 213 Republicans, 18 Democrats, and one Independent to table; 47 voting present — exposed the dilemma of a party that condemns Trump as corrupt while campaigning on the cost of living and trying not to hand Republicans a midterm weapon (Louisiana First News; The Straits Times).

Two years of escalation

The September vote was the culmination of an 18-month sequence in which Green kept going while his party kept flinching. On March 4, 2025, during Trump’s first joint address of the second term, Green stood up waving his walking stick and shouted that the president had no mandate. Speaker Mike Johnson warned him, Green refused to stop, and the sergeant-at-arms escorted him from the chamber (NPR). Two days later, the House censured him 224–198 — only the 28th censure in the chamber’s history, with ten Democrats joining Republicans. Democrats gathered around him in the well and sang “We Shall Overcome” as the rebuke was read (NPR). Green said he would do it again: “I have constituents who need Medicaid, they will suffer, and some will die if they don’t get Medicaid” (NPR).

He forced impeachment votes twice more in 2025. In June, over the military strikes on Iran, most Democrats voted with Republicans to kill his resolution. Months later, when he accused Trump of inciting violence and threats against lawmakers and judges, most Democrats voted against the Republican effort to kill it (The Straits Times). The drift was visible: the party was inching toward him, never quite arriving.

On February 24, 2026, he was ejected again — this time silently. As Trump entered the chamber for the State of the Union, Green held up a white sign reading “Black people aren’t apes,” a reference to a video on Trump’s Truth Social account that depicted former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes. The White House later removed the video, and Trump said a staff member had posted it. Green was removed amid chants of “USA!” and told reporters afterward that the president had seen the sign and “got the message” (Anadolu Agency). “Tonight, I wanted him to have a person confront him and let him know that Black people aren’t apes, (and) that Black people are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior,” he said (Anadolu Agency).

The map ended the career

What Green could not force was his own survival. In May 2026, he lost his Democratic primary — “a victim of the Republicans’ national redistricting campaign,” which had drawn his district out from under him (Louisiana First News). A 22-year House veteran, a man who had been among the first Democrats to pursue impeachment in Trump’s first term when party leaders were still cold to the idea, ended his career not at the ballot box’s judgment of his record but on a map (Louisiana First News; The Straits Times). He leaves Congress at the end of 2026 (The Straits Times).

The judge from Houston

Before any of it, Green was a judge. Born September 1, 1947, in New Orleans — the son of a maid and a mechanic’s helper — he attended Florida A&M, Howard, and Tuskegee, then earned his law degree from the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University (Congressman Al Green). He co-founded and co-managed the Houston law firm Green, Wilson, Dewberry, and Fitch, then served as a Harris County justice of the peace for 26 years, from 1977 to 2004 — during which he also led the Houston branch of the NAACP for about a decade, growing its membership from a few hundred to many thousands and helping buy its headquarters building (Congressman Al Green). Elected to Congress in 2004 — winning the primary with 66 percent and the general with 72 — he took the oath on January 3, 2005, and began what became his eleventh term in January 2025, serving on Financial Services as Ranking Member of its Oversight and Investigations subcommittee (Congressman Al Green).

His official biography notes that he was the first lawmaker to introduce and force votes on three articles of impeachment against Trump in the 115th and 116th Congresses, and that he voted for every article the House passed in 2019 and 2021 (Congressman Al Green). The legislative record behind the confrontations is substantial: the Homes for Heroes Act, creating a veterans’ homelessness post at HUD (passed 2016); a $9 billion Emergency Capital Investment Program for minority depository institutions (2020); the $10 billion State Small Business Credit Initiative reauthorization inside the American Rescue Plan (2021); the Minority Business Resiliency Act permanently codifying the Minority Business Development Agency (2021); and over $100 million in community-project funding for his district (Congressman Al Green).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not assert the guilt of any officer in the 2026 immigration killings — Green’s articles make allegations, the administration offers a self-defense account, and both are presented as claims, not findings. It does not give the exact year of Green’s law degree: his own House site says 1973 in the full biography and 1974 in the member profile, and the timeline flags the discrepancy rather than resolving it. The site also describes him as “elected” justice of the peace in one section and “appointed” in another; this profile says only that he served from 1977 to 2004. It does not detail the 2026 primary’s district mechanics beyond the verified facts that he lost in May and that redistricting drew out his seat. No net-worth claims are made — the figures circulating online come from non-citable sources. No claims are made about his post-Congress plans.