Schools Should be Used for Educating Children, Not Housing Illegal Immigrants

Floor Speech

"I rise today in support of H. Res. 461, a resolution condemning the use of elementary and secondary school facilities to provide shelter for aliens who are not admitted to the United States.

Round condemnation of adult, illegal migrants sharing facilities with schoolchildren would be supported by both sides of the aisle but for one simple reason. It would require Democrats to confront the tragedy of their own making at the southern border.

The rhetoric from the Left deploys flowery language to address the flooding of migrants into our country. It's a scam. Democrats must confront reality.

There are real, human consequences to losing operational control of our southern border. Democrats have plunged our southern border into chaos, trafficking, and bloodshed.

Last year, 2.76 million migrants illegally crossed our southern border. Over 800 of them died making the journey.

Customs and Border Protection also seized 14,700 pounds of fentanyl in FY 2022. In a year in which 110,000 Americans fatally overdosed on drugs, each pound of fentanyl missed by Customs and Border Protection has the potential to kill over 200,000 people.

The encounters, the deaths, and the trafficking are a three, four, and five time increase over the last year of the Trump administration. We have a deadly opioid epidemic, human trafficking epidemic, and overall humanitarian epidemic at our southern border, all stemming from the Biden administrations' policies.

H. Res. 461 is a crystal-clear rebuke of the chaos at the border. It applies to K-12 institutions, because make no mistake, Democrats are making elementary, middle, and high schools a battleground for chaotic border policies.

In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams planned to house migrants in up to 20 current and former public-school gymnasiums. In Chicago, local leadership is reportedly considering housing hundreds of illegal immigrants in a shuttered high school.

Housing migrants in public schools is not a new occurrence. CNN, CBS, and the New York Post have all uncovered instances of this already happening across the country. For Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul, these plans are a mere formalization of their unwillingness to enforce the law. This is what Republicans mean when we say every state is a border state and every town is a border town.

Moreover, the collateral of this broken policy are America's schoolchildren. It is completely unacceptable.

Turning schools into housing centers for illegal immigrants distracts schools from their mission.

Schools should be focused on helping students recover from devastating pandemic-era learning loss. We know that children are suffering in the wake of the pandemic; math and reading scores have plummeted to their lowest levels in years. Forcing schools to shelter illegal immigrants will not help with that.

Additionally, hosting illegal immigrants on school campuses poses a significant safety risk to school children and compromises schools' ability to secure their own campuses.

Furthermore, using school gymnasiums as housing for illegal aliens may impede children's access to safe recreation and physical education, may force children to spend their entire school day with little exercise, and may disrupt the ordinary routines of the school day.

As always with the Republican Party, threatening the safety of our children is a nonstarter.

So, we are voting on a resolution today to condemn the threat posed to our children. Our resolution condemns the breakdown of law and order at our southern border. It condemns the lawlessness perpetuated by blue cities and states like New York.

I hope the entire body votes for the passage of H. Res. 461 and sends a message to America that there is no substitute for a secure border."

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