Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2024
Floor Speech
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer my amendment that utilizes the Holman rule to reduce the salary of Ur Jaddou, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to $1.
Ms. Jaddou is a radical leftist. Before joining the Biden administration, she worked for an open borders group called DHS Watch. While at DHS Watch, Jaddou called for stopping Border Patrol funding and referred to CBP as President Trump's ``personal militia.''
Ms. Jaddou has also previously called for the mass release of illegal immigrants. Someone like this should not be in a position of influence at the Department of Homeland Security. She has no regard for the rule of law.
Ms. Jaddou proposed and finalized the rule Procedures for Credible Fear Screening and Consideration of Asylum, Withholding of Removal, and CAT Protection Claims by Asylum Officers, which removed ICE attorneys and the adversarial process from the credible fear asylum application process. The rule violates the jurisdiction of Department of Justice immigration judges as stated by section 103 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Homeland Security Act.
Ms. Jaddou also heavily prioritizes USCIS resources to adjudicate and issue employment authorization documents for millions of illegal aliens, parolees, and ever-expanding populations of temporary protected status instead of adjudicating lawful nonimmigrant and immigrant applications. These misguided amnesty pursuits have rapidly increased the USCIS' pending backlog to over 9 million cases.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Jaddou previously pushed other amnesty policies in her role as USCIS during the Obama administration.
Specifically, she aggressively tried to expand parole in place in order to bypass Congress and implement mass amnesty.
Jaddou has also defended the unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, falsely claiming this is a permissible exercise of discretion by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
As an attorney, she should know only Congress has the authority to authorize this type of program. With that, Obama and DHS should have never unilaterally created this amnesty program.
Jaddou in her current role is literally enabling and supporting the Biden border crisis. In August alone, there were 232,972 illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border.
Customs and Border Patrol has seized 25,500 pounds of fentanyl so far in fiscal year 2023. Of course, that is only what has been seized, not what we know is coming into our country illegally and killing Americans, at least 300 a day.
Biden's bureaucrats like Jaddou are literally allowing deadly fentanyl to easily flow into our communities and kill our children.
My amendment is supported by the National Immigration Center for Enforcement, NumbersUSA, and the American Accountability Foundation.
I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and hold Ms. Jaddou accountable for her blatant disrespect for the law of our Nation.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I do appreciate my colleague on the other side of the aisle and his efforts to promote border security.
He and I have had conversations about the border. I realize that he represents a district on the border, and I appreciate his sincere concern for what is taking place.
Unfortunately, we do have an invasion. My colleague mentioned that much of the fentanyl that is coming into our country is being found at the ports of entry.
We know that it is being found at the ports of entry, but unfortunately, our Border Patrol agents are overrun, they are overworked, and there is just too large of a surge for them to handle everything that is happening at the border.
Certainly, we want more funding to secure the border, but we don't want more funding for our Border Patrol agents to simply be process agents and bring people into our country in these mass amounts that we are seeing.
I do appreciate my colleague and his efforts to work with us to secure the southern border, and I look forward to future conversations, as well.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer my amendment that utilizes the Holman Rule to reduce the salary of Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, Kenneth Wainstein.
In 2020, Mr. Wainstein claimed that President Donald Trump's leadership was a threat to the rule of law and endorsed Joe Biden for President of the United States.
I will tell you what is a threat to the rule of law: blatantly violating Federal immigration law and intentionally facilitating a complete and total invasion at our southern border.
I will tell you what is a threat to the rule of law: refusing to cooperate with State and local law enforcement officials as required under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
I will tell you, Mr. Chair, what is a threat to the rule of law: pursuing a radical open border agenda, purposefully and willfully circumventing every safeguard, check, and balance required by law, allowing terrorists and deadly drugs like fentanyl to freely flow into our great country.
This administration has presided over the largest influx of illegal immigrants in American history. Since they took power, there have been over 6 million illegal crossings of our southern border. That's right-- 6 million.
Under this administration's watch, illicit fentanyl has killed more than 100,000 American citizens. Furthermore, 151 people whose names appear on the terrorist watch list were stopped.
I applaud our brave men and women who serve as our Customs and Border Patrol agents who were able to detain these 151 people who are on the terrorist watch list.
They were trying to cross our southern border, an all-time record of known terrorists on the watch list crossing into our country, beating the previous record also held by the Biden administration in fiscal year 2022. This is more than the encounters in all fiscal years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 combined.
In August, we discovered that a smuggler with ties to ISIS was helping migrants enter the United States from Mexico. This madness needs to end.
This has all occurred on the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis, Mr. Wainstein's, watch.
The American people deserve to have a Department of Homeland Security committed to securing the homeland, not sitting idly by as terrorists flock across our wide open southern border.
My amendment is supported by the National Immigration Center for Enforcement, NumbersUSA, and the American Accountability Foundation.
I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and hold Mr. Wainstein accountable for not doing his job and for his role in facilitating the worst border crisis in our Nation's history.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I would agree with my colleague on the other side of the aisle. We do want to sit down and have a conversation.
We realize we are in divided government right now, and that is the process that we are currently working on. We are trying to avoid doing things as normal as they have been done since the mid-1990s here in Washington, D.C.
We do not want to govern and fund the entire government with a straight up and down vote ``yes'' or ``no.''
We don't want continuing resolutions or omnibus bills. We want to go through the funding of the Federal Government bill by bill, sit down, and work with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
This will be bipartisan. This will be bicameral. We do not have the majority in the Senate. We will have to come together in conference and hash out our differences and work with one another.
I do agree with my colleague that we are going to have to work together in a bipartisan, bicameral way to fund the Federal Government.
I understand that there are a lot of scary numbers of people who would be impacted by a shutdown, but that is why this week we are here, passing four appropriations bills to fund the Federal Government, to avoid a full government shutdown.
There may be a partial shutdown for a short amount of time, but I believe that we can come together and alleviate that and come to a resolution soon.
We can do our jobs. We are passing the Department of Defense bill. We have that on the floor. We are also bringing up the Department of Homeland Security bill, the State and foreign ops, and the ag bill. We can fund these parts of the Federal Government.
Mr. Chair, again, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer my amendment that utilizes the Holman Rule to reduce the salary of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Director, Office of Immigration Program Evaluation, Claire Trickler-McNulty, to $1.
Ms. McNulty needs to be held accountable for her blatant disregard of our Nation's national security. Ms. McNulty is an advocate for open borders and is implementing policies that encourage illegal entry.
Ms. McNulty admitted publicly that she stayed at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration to sabotage border enforcement.
Ms. McNulty worked for an organization known as KIND where she provided legal services for illegal aliens to fight deportation and stay in the country even though they broke our laws and entered America illegally.
Now this open borders advocate is supposed to help protect America's cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security when she clearly has no interest in following the law and doing either of these things.
The appointment of Ms. McNulty is a prime example of the Biden-Harris administration's ignorance to the importance of securing the border. Not only is she an open borders fanatic, but she was behind an $80 million no-bid contract that the DHS Inspector General criticized as improper.
The Biden administration has essentially closed ICE down. They do nothing about people entering the country illegally, that has been shown repeatedly. Just look at the 151 terrorists on the terror watch list that have entered America on Biden and McNulty's watch.
During Ms. McNulty's tenure at ICE, instead of protecting our borders and enforcing our laws, ICE now is acting more like a social service agency for illegals.
ICE is even partnering with groups that campaign for ICE to be abolished, that give aid to illegal aliens, and that award contracts that strictly prohibit tackling the whereabouts of illegal aliens.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and hold Ms. McNulty accountable for doing her job, or not, and for her role in facilitating the worst border crisis in our Nation's history.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I would remind Members that Ms. McNulty only stayed in the Trump administration, as she was quoted, to sabotage border security efforts. That is not genuine. That is un-American. It is not dutiful.
There are many things that we are doing right now to avoid a shutdown. I certainly do not want a government shutdown. That is why my colleagues do not want a government shutdown. That is why we are debating these four bills and why we are debating the amendments to these four bills.
I agree with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and maybe many on my own side, that we should have done this sooner. We should not have waited until the deadline, but here we are, and we are all in Washington, D.C., working diligently to ensure that the debate is heard on these bills and we have an opportunity to fund these very important aspects of the Federal Government.
Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer my amendment that utilizes the Holman rule to reduce the salary for the Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia to $1.
DHS's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is staffed with people that literally want to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency whose mission is to protect America from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security.
The woman that leads DHS's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties once said that illegal immigrant felons, convicted of murder and rape, shouldn't be eligible for deportation solely because of their crimes.
Let me repeat that. Wadhia believes that illegal immigrant felons convicted of murder and rape should not be deported. She has also advocated for purging the term illegal immigrant and tried to humanize illegal immigration in order to allow mass illegal immigration.
Throughout her career, this open border bureaucrat has aggressively pursued pro-amnesty policies and even defended illegal immigrants in court who should have been deported.
In her current role, she is literally enabling and supporting the Biden border crisis. Since Joe Biden took office, more than 6 million illegal aliens have entered America. In August alone, there were 232,972 illegal aliens encountered at the southern border, and that does not include the got-aways who were not encountered by our brave Custom and Border Patrol agents.
Customs and Border Patrol have seized 25,500 pounds of fentanyl so far in fiscal year 2023, a deadly drug that is literally killing our children.
Mr. Chair, 25,500 pounds is only what was seized at the border, not what is still flowing freely into our country. Biden's bureaucrats are literally allowing deadly fentanyl to easily flow into our communities.
She has also been a major part of the Federal Government's obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion, consistently forcing woke policies down the throats of public servants. These woke Federal policies shouldn't be embedded in our Nation's border and national security policies. These misguided agency initiatives need to come to an end.
My amendment is supported by the National Immigration Center for Enforcement, NumbersUSA, and the American Accountability Foundation. I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and hold Shoba Wadhia accountable for her going rogue in an administration that has ignored the rule of law and has facilitated the worst border crisis in our Nation's history.
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Mrs. BOEBERT. Mr. Chair, legislating is beautiful. It is great to actually be down here debating the real issues that Americans are faced with day in and day out.
I do agree with my colleague on the other side of the aisle that we should have been debating this bill on June 22, but here we are. It is our responsibility to pass these appropriations bills, 12 individual appropriations bills in total, to the Senate.
What the Senate does is up to them and their Chamber. This is our House and it is our responsibility to do our part of our jobs. That is exactly what we are doing tonight.
I, too, would like to see our border secured. And I look forward to my colleague on the other side of the aisle joining us to support H.R. 2 to secure the border. I can tell he is very, very enthusiastic about actually accomplishing something rather than just throwing money at a problem and creating more processing agents.
I can see the sincerity and hear the sincerity in his voice that he wants a secure Nation and secure borders, especially since he represents a district on the southern border and encounters our brave Border Patrol agents each and every day.
My colleague has brought up several times tonight that you cannot have punishment without a trial. Well, this Holman rule is part of our House rules. We are a self-governing, majority rule body. The Holman rule is here in place to hold unelected bureaucrats accountable.
If my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have any sort of qualm with punishment without trial, I would encourage them to visit our January 6 prisoners in the D.C. jail.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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