Broader Options for Americans Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1959.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, some of what I just heard, I can readily agree to. Certain things, such as that we are a nation of immigrants-- no doubt about that. We need immigrants. We take roughly 800,000 to 1 million legal immigrants a year. They are welcomed. We also, though, are a nation of laws, and as a nation of laws, we want people to come here according to our laws and abide by the laws.

We are working with a group of people. If you call them DACAs, it would be about 800,000. If you refer to them as Dreamers, it is maybe 1.8 million. We obviously have sympathy for them because as a baby brought here in diapers by a person or family who crossed our border without papers, hence entering our country illegally--we don't attribute the sin and the unlawfulness of the parent to the baby. A lot of that has happened.

There is a general agreement--maybe not everybody in my political party agrees with this, but I think 80 percent of them do--that we need to deal with people who are here through no fault of their own and give them legal status. That is the compassion we are showing for people who broke our laws by their parents doing it but not the kids doing it.

I also didn't ever think we would be here today debating this because I went through the 2013 debate on immigration. The Senate passed a bill; the House of Representatives didn't take it up. I was in the minority at that time, both in the caucus that was in the minority as well as in the minority that voted against that bill, because I didn't think it did things the way I would do them. Everything died in the House of Representatives. Then, 2 years later, I became chairman of the Judiciary Committee. We have jurisdiction over immigration legislation. I could have spent 3 months on immigration during 2015 or 2016 and sent a bill to the House of Representatives that probably would have died, but I made up my mind early in my chairmanship that I wanted to do things that we could get passed. So over the period of the last Congress, my committee voted out 31 bills, all bipartisan, and 18 of them got to a Democratic President. In 2015 and 2016, I felt, why go through that process if it is going to die in the House of Representatives?

Now, a year later, after the election of a President who campaigned so much against anything dealing with immigration and legalization of people who are here--even young people, whom he has now come to the conclusion we ought to legalize--I didn't think we would be having this debate, and somehow I think Members of the Democratic Party didn't think we would be having this debate. I think they probably were shocked 2 or 3 weeks ago when the government shut down and when the majority leader decided to make an agreement to bring up this issue. But here we are, debating an immigration bill that, quite frankly, I didn't think we would be debating. Here we are.

Then, of course, we didn't do anything Monday. We didn't do anything on this issue Tuesday. I don't know whether we are going to have any votes today, but here we are debating immigration. We have a chance to do what Members of the other political party, as advocates for Dreamers and DACA kids--and we have them on this side but maybe not as vocal or as loyal as Democrats are on this issue. Somehow, we are now having a difficult time getting the issue up and getting something passed.

I offer to my 99 colleagues something the President said he would sign. Maybe you don't like exactly what is in that proposal. Then get it up and amend it, and let's see what sort of compromise we can accomplish. But we are here because the leader said that we are going to work on this issue. It was something that the minority demanded. We ought to reach a conclusion on it and get something to the President of the United States.

Once we knew that this issue was going to come up--and we knew that on September 5 when the President said that he was not going to continue the illegal approach to the DACA kids that President Obama did. We have reason to believe this from court decisions on older people where they ruled that the President didn't have the authority to do what he did with the DACA kids. In fact, at least a dozen times before he made that decision, he was telling the entire country he didn't have the authority to do it, and then he went ahead and did it.

So this President comes in, takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of this country, and he decides that he can't continue what was considered illegal activity by the previous President. This is a congressional decision that needs to be made, and Congress ought to make it. We were told on September 5 to do something by March 5, and here we are.

I heard from the previous speaker--and maybe a lot of speakers--that this is the President's plan. Yes, this is something that the President said that he is going to support and will sign, but I want to say to you that the work that a group of us Senators have put into this issue over a period of the last 3 months, with about 18 meetings, 4 meetings with the President of the United States to discuss the issue--most of what is in the proposal that is put before you are things that a group of Senators put together. I would say that as our group met, we probably had subgroups of three who had different views, and some of them felt strongly about their positions, but everyone came together in a compromise that you see here before us in my amendment.

In some of those meetings, we discussed these things with the President, and I want to give the President credit. In a January 9 meeting that he had where he called together 23 of us--bipartisan and bicameral--we were able to dial down all the things that we would be discussing on immigration, and we came to the conclusion that there were four main points that we ought to be dealing with. You have heard of these as the four pillars, but let me repeat them.

No. 1 was legalization of these children who were brought here by their parents; No. 2 was border security; No. 3 was chain migration; and No. 4, diversity visa. We discussed these things with the President, and I suppose the President probably emphasized citizenship to a greater extent than maybe we did in our deliberations, but we have something that has been put together by Members of this body who have compromised, with none of us getting everything we wanted. We are fortunate enough to have the President's backing on this.

So I hope that you see this, not as we have heard from the other side as the President's plan--as if seven of us who introduced this proposal somehow just took something from the White House and put our names on it, and it is here before the U.S. Senate--because that isn't how it worked.

I want to address some of the issues that have been put before us by people on the other side. I want to express--as you probably have seen me expressing already in my remarks so far--my frustration with the current status of the immigration debate here in the U.S. Senate. It amazes me that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle simply aren't ready to have a serious immigration debate. They have been demanding to have this debate for months. They have even shut the government down to get to this point, and now we are actually on this issue that they have been demanding that we debate for months during this Congress--some on the other side of the aisle for years--and now when it is time to put up or shut up, they have come up emptyhanded. Despite having weeks to prepare, Senate Democrats are still rushing to put some plan together.

Let that sink in. Think about this just for a moment. The Senate Democrats recklessly shut down the Federal Government over immigration, and they did it over plans that they still largely haven't drafted. That should be very frustrating, not only to this Senator but to most of my colleagues, and it is exactly why the American people seem to have less faith in this process in Washington, DC. Even more frustrating is that for 2 valuable days, they have refused to allow the Senate to debate immigration measures.

I do understand why the Democrats are afraid to vote on ending sanctuary cities. Those policies of sanctuary cities are massively unpopular with the American people. In other words, the American people feel that when the Constitution says that immigration law is one of the 18 powers of the United States, then no local or State government should be able to interfere with what the Constitution says is the supreme law of the land.

I can't understand why, for 2 days, Democrats have refused to allow us a debate on an issue like sanctuary cities. That amendment would help us keep our communities safe from dangerous criminals, besides carrying out the intent of the Constitution that the Federal Government has complete authority over immigration.

Who could be against an approach to send a signal that sanctuary cities aren't justified when that is how to protect the American people from the criminal elements that some sanctuary cities protect? Apparently, the Democrats are, since they don't seem to be for outlawing sanctuary cities.

I guess another way to say it is that they could do more to protect hard-working Americans from the criminal element that is, albeit, a small part of the immigration community we are talking about, but it still creates havoc for people like the Steinle family, for example, where Kate was murdered by an alien who was a felon who had returned to this country not once but five times.

In other words, I have to ask my colleagues whether enforcement issues are legitimately a part of the immigration debate, and that is what the sanctuary city situation is all about. Isn't border security more than just throwing money at infrastructure? Shouldn't we be discussing how to reform our Nation's laws so that dangerous criminal elements can't inflict harm on innocent families?

I am pretty sure--I am actually 100 percent confident--the answer to those questions is yes. Those are important issues to the American people. Those issues used to be discussed here.

I have already mentioned the name of Kate Steinle, who was murdered by one of these people. I could add the names of Sarah Root and Jamel Shaw. These people all had dreams, too, but they had their lives ended by felons who had been deported but had come back into this country.

If my colleagues were actually serious about debating this issue, we would be discussing border enforcement. Sadly, it seems as though the plans that I have seen so far from my colleagues fall short of that goal.

Legalizing Dreamers--yes, who is going to argue with that? A little bit of money for border security--there is a lot to argue about there. But not doing something about criminal aliens who are a threat to law enforcement in this country and to the safety of our country--it seems to me that ought to be a part of it.

So we get all the people in this room who say they want to do something about border security by throwing money at it; yet they refuse to actually give our law enforcement the legal tools that they need to protect Americans. Just a wall or whatever you want to call it--electric surveillance, more border patrol--it is all border security, but it is more than a wall. It takes more than just those things to protect the American people.

I am here to tell you that it is a tragedy that some people in this body just want to legalize some people for 1 year, 2 years, or 3 years and put maybe a little bit of money into border security with no commitment to the future. Then all we have done is kick the can down the road.

Worse still, none of my colleagues' proposals are being developed in a way that they can actually become law. Maybe for them, simply passing a partisan bill is enough. Leader Schumer said that this morning, and I was here listening to him. But that is not enough for this Senator. This Senator actually wants to see something passed into law that will provide real protection for DACA kids.

That is why I have offered an amendment that could actually pass the House of Representatives, and we know the President would sign it. Polls show that the framework a number of us developed, along with the President's input, is overwhelmingly popular. A Harvard Harris poll showed that 65 percent of the voters agreed with our plan, including 64 percent of Democratic voters. So despite the hyperbole we hear from our colleagues, the plan that the President said he would sign is not only popular, but, again, it is the only plan that has any chance of becoming law.

It is time for all of my colleagues to get serious about fixing DACA. It is time to stop posturing, to stop showboating, and to stop simply trying to pass a bill out of the Senate that will not get considered in the other body and will not be signed by the President of the United States.

The focus ought to be on making actual law. If all of us here in the Senate, particularly those who are in the Democratic Caucus, focus on those things, then the choice for them will be very clear. They will vote for the amendment that the seven of us have put before the Senate called the Grassley amendment, they will back the President, and they will provide real security and real certainty to the DACA recipients and the American people.

In fact, it is so simple for some on the other side who have been promising DACA certainty for years and some for a few months, but, more importantly, really strongly over the last three or four months. It is an opportunity for everything you have told those kids, including that you are going to get them legal and even give them a path to citizenship that you can deliver.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source