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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I am pleased to join with my colleagues to talk about a topic that I have talked about many times before on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Obviously, coming from a border State, the humanitarian, the public safety crisis occurring at our border, which has raged for the last 2 years under this President, has finally made every State a border State, every city a border city because the entire Nation is feeling the impact of the open border policies of the Biden administration because migrants are being shipped to places like Chicago, New York, Washington, DC. And so the mayors are saying: Whoa, we can't take this, even though border communities in Texas have encountered 5 million migrants during the Biden administration.

(Mr. REED assumed the Chair.)

I am sympathetic, but there is no sympathy. And, actually, we don't really want sympathy; we want action to deal with this influx of humanity that will soon become a tsunami.

As I said, since the President took office, Customs and Border Protection have logged about 5 million border crossings. Because of COVID-19, there was a public health law in place, title 42, which we have talked about many times, which was applied by the Border Patrol to expel 2.4 million of those 5 million migrants.

I know the numbers get a little tricky here. But at the same time Border Patrol has said they encountered 5 million migrants during the Biden administration, they also say that perhaps as many as 1.2 million migrants got away. In other words, they were seen on sensors or cameras, but the Border Patrol missed them or they simply evaded Border Patrol because either they were involved in some sort of criminal activity or they did not want to get detained because perhaps they didn't qualify for asylum.

So up until last week, under title 42, the Border Patrol was able to quickly expel illegal migrants who had no legal basis to stay in the United States. Title 42 is gone, which means that nearly 50 percent of migrants whom Border Patrol actually encountered and were able to expel under that rule--they no longer are able to do that.

It is nearly impossible to get an explanation from the Biden administration about where the remaining 2.7 million migrants are. What we do know is that the Biden administration is releasing an unprecedented number of these migrants into the interior of the United States.

Some of them--if you have good vision, you can see the green part of these bars. These are people who are claiming asylum. It is really a rather small part of this total number. So far, in March, we are exceeding 100,000 migrants at the border.

A relatively small number are claiming asylum. So what happened to the rest of them? Well, there is something called parole, p-a-r-o-l-e. We may think of parole as something that--if someone has been in prison and they get parole, but this is different. This is something that Customs and Border Protection does. They claim the authority to do this on a categorical basis simply to relieve the load on law enforcement officials and customs officials at the border.

Effectively, what this means is even if people aren't claiming asylum--at least a small fraction we know would have an opportunity to present their case in front of an immigration judge, and a small fraction of the total number would perhaps be able to prove their right to asylum under the law.

The Biden administration has said: We don't really care whether people are seeking asylum or not. We are going to release them into the interior of the United States using parole and tell them to show up at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in a town near you and make arrangements for their case to be processed there at the local level.

There have been some recent developments. In Florida, a Federal judge has now enjoined Customs and Border Protection's ability to use parole or, I should say, abuse parole by releasing mass numbers of migrants, perhaps never to be heard from again. The judge has said essentially that parole should be used on a case-by-case basis, not to relieve the load at the border because so many people are showing up.

You know, charitably, maybe that is what Secretary Mayorkas means when he says the border is secure. In some sort of twisted way, he thinks 5 million people coming to the border and another 2.7 million of those people being released into the interior of the United States somehow means the border is secure. Well, not under any rational definition of ``border security'' is the border secure.

So what is the Biden administration supposed to do? Back when President Clinton was in office, he signed into law an authority called expedited removal. This would allow the Border Patrol to remove people on an expedited basis. But it takes a little time, so historically what has happened is those people have been detained until their expedited removal is accomplished. But this administration has dismantled the detention facilities necessary to keep people while their expedited removal process is going forward. Instead, they are released.

You heard people talk about catch and release. That is catch and release. That is the big hole in the bottom of the bucket through which this vast sea of humanity is flowing.

Truth be told, there is a lot the administration doesn't know or simply isn't telling the American people about where these migrants are today.

Recently, the New York Times did an investigative piece about some of the unaccompanied children who have been released by the Biden administration into the interior of the country and documented the fact that many of them are in positions where they are performing forced labor, violating child labor laws. Unable to protect themselves, unable to provide for themselves, they are simply being forced to work, in violation of child labor laws. They have no, apparently, adult supervision--no responsible adult supervision--to protect them.

In a strange sense, that may be the least bad thing that can happen to some of these unaccompanied children. Others, I am sure, have been recruited into gangs, have been neglected, abused, sexually assaulted, sold into sex slavery. It just boggles the mind.

I keep asking myself, what is it going to take? What has to happen before the Biden administration wakes up to its failures on the border and the human consequences associated with it?

I haven't even mentioned--the Senator from Indiana did mention the fact that across these same borders, while this flood of humanity is coming across, Border Patrol is distracted or preoccupied with administrative tasks. So the drugs that have killed 108,000 Americans have come across those borders, including 71,000 last year from synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

Well, now that title 42 has expired, the number of people coming across is going to skyrocket. I have been sort of strangely amused at some of the press reports that say: Well, the numbers weren't as bad as we expected. I think maybe that is what President Biden said--oh, it wasn't as bad as we expected.

Well, these criminal organizations that transport migrants to the border and that also smuggle drugs into the United States are not stupid, and they realize that the eyes of the world--certainly of our country--were on the border to see, OK, now that title 42 has gone away, what is going to happen? Well, they just simply restricted the number of migrants they transported to the border in order to make it look like there was not a surge. But we already know that 10,000 migrants a day are being encountered. One Border Patrol agent said he thought that would go up to 11,000 to 14,000 a day.

The Biden administration has gone to great lengths not to secure the border but to make it easier for migrants to be released into the interior of the United States. Earlier this year, for example, the administration announced a new plan to address a specific subset of the border crisis--the way migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela were treated. What the administration said is this: We are not going to secure the border. We are not going to prevent illegal immigration. We are actually going to confer legal status on 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela each month--30,000 a month--and then we are going to take that out of the top number so it makes it look like we actually have less migrants coming into the country illegally.

Well, 30,000 a month, 360,000 a year, without Congress's consultation or consent. We are a coequal branch of government. The President has no authority to do that on his own.

Last week, the administration finalized a rule to funnel even more migrants into parole--which, as I said, is being abused; it is supposed to be done on a case-by-case basis--to release even more migrants into the interior of the country.

It is interesting the way rules and laws are named here in Washington because frequently they are the opposite of what they claim to be. So the administration has issued a new rule called the circumvention of lawful pathways rule, framed as a way to promote orderly migration and ensure those who don't play by the rules are ineligible for asylum.

In addition to the fundamentally false premise that these parole programs constitute lawful pathways--they don't--the rule is brimming with loopholes that were designed to give migrants a clear and easy path into the United States. It is a roadmap. All migrants have to do is claim that they are illiterate or say they experienced technical issues with the CBP One app that the administration wants them to use to schedule their appearance at the border. Well, the administration says they can still be paroled into the United States and given a work permit. Talk about a pull factor.

You know, we hear a lot about the push factors of illegal immigration. Those are real--violence, poverty. We all understand that. People want a better way of life. But we admit--we naturalize or make American citizens out of 1 million migrants a year. But turning this process over to the criminal organizations and cartels that smuggle not only people but drugs into the United States has proven to be an absolute humanitarian disaster.

By outlining broad exceptions that are easily gamed, the Biden administration has provided migrants and the cartels that exploit them with a playbook. They can make the dangerous journey to the border, show up at a port of entry without an appointment, say the magic words, and be released into the United States courtesy of the Biden administration; or they can cross between the ports of entry and claim to face an imminent and extreme threat to their life or safety in Northern Mexico and be waved into the United States as well.

Day after day, the Biden administration is allowing more and more migrants to enter the United States despite the fact that the vast majority of these individuals have no legal basis to be here. At the same time, the administration is doing less and less to enforce the law and to remove those who have no valid asylum claims in the United States.

As you can see here, this is--Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the Federal Agency responsible for removing people who have illegally come to the United States. As you can see, in fiscal year 2019, it was over a quarter of a million. In fiscal year 2020, it was just under 200,000. In fiscal year 2021, it was just over 50,000. In fiscal year 2022, it was about 75,000. So not only has President Biden opened the front door, he has closed the back door when it comes to removing people who have no legal right to be here in the United States.

Well, this isn't an accident. This is deliberate. This is a plan. And it is an outrage.

This is all part of a deliberate effort. I have tried to figure it out. OK, maybe the Biden administration doesn't understand or maybe we just have a different interpretation of the law, but I have come to conclude that that is not true, that it can't possibly be true. So my only conclusion is that this is part of a deliberate plan: You let more people in, and you remove fewer people who cannot legally be present here in the United States.

The circumvention of lawful pathways rule is dangerous, and it is not a serious effort to secure the border; it is a figleaf. And I will be introducing a Congressional Review Act resolution to strike it down.

This rule is part of the Biden administration's shell game to conceal the unprecedented level of illegal immigration on their watch. Because of the loopholes, it will fail to deliver the serious consequences that the administration claims, and it will fail to deter people from making the long and dangerous journey to our border when they have no legal claim to enter our country.

So I hope the Senate will soon vote to strike down this rule and send a clear message to President Biden that his job is to enforce the law as written.

I agree with the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Hoeven, when he says the President has the tools. I mentioned expedited removal, which President Bill Clinton signed into law. The President just simply refuses to do the job he took an oath to do--to uphold and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States. He has no authority to rewrite the laws through executive actions or rulemaking, and I hope the Senate will say so when we vote on the congressional resolution of disapproval.

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