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Floor Speech
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Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I appreciate the words of my colleague from South Carolina. I fully support everything he said. And I want to come up and speak again to the challenge that we have at the border and why we need to take action now and why that action needs to be taken as part of a supplemental that includes funding for Israel and Ukraine.
The situation at the border simply has gotten out of control. But I think it bears repeating; it has been said by some of the folks who spoke before: We are talking about a fourfold increase.
Donald Trump was President for 4 years. President Biden has been President for 3 years. And in 3 years, we have nearly four times the crossings that we did in the Trump administration.
Now, let's say some of that is because we had title 42 and COVID. That is fine. We can argue that. But we can still recognize this is a two- or three-time increase in illegal crossings.
Now, we have lost operational control of the border. We don't have situational awareness at the border.
Let me explain what that means. When you have 1.5 million people who we know came into this country illegally--they paid money to a cartel-- $5 to $50,000, depending upon what country they came from--to get into this country illegally. But some of them specifically want to go through a sector that the cartels specialize in making sure that you never have to encounter a border agent. They are called ``got-aways.'' Over the last 3 years, 1.5 million ``got-aways'' have entered this country.
Now, I have been to the border several times. Once you cross the Rio Grande River, most people are going to go present themselves to a Border Patrol agent, and then you are going to be processed. You are either going to get screened for asylum or you are going to get paroled. But from the time you cross the border until the time you are released into the United States, it is a matter of days or a week. So why would somebody spend money--why would 1.5 million people spend money to expressly avoid being detained, unless they have a bad record, unless they have criminal intent or malign intent?
Ladies and gentlemen, we have apprehended people at the border who are on the Terrorist Watchlist. So we have lost operational control of the border by a fourfold increase in crossings. We have lost situational awareness because we don't know where these 1.5 million people are. We only know that they set foot on American soil, and it is highly unlikely that they went back.
Now, I hate to almost draw this parallel, but I think it is important. One of the things when Israel is able to be successful in their response to Hamas, Israel is going to have to go back and say: How did this even happen on October 7?
Well, we know. And I think a part of that analysis is going to be that they had lost situational awareness on the threat coming from Gaza. Now, people may say it is an unfair comparison. I don't think it is. When we have almost 8 million people by the end of this administration here illegally, is it fair to say that a few of them hate America, that they could be terrorists, and they are on the Terrorist Watchlist? There is a compelling Homeland Security reason for securing the border.
And the American people are great. I want to get quickly to the negotiations that are being led by James Lankford. The American people now, a majority--we are not talking a plurality; we are talking about a majority of American people--Democrats, Independents, Republicans-- agree that we have a major problem or crisis at the border. Biden needs to fix this problem. Biden needs to fix this problem for Senators that are running up.
This is not a situation where it is just Republicans saying we want a secure border. We always do; we always will. This is now the American people in the electorate saying that we need to fix it.
So when we get into negotiations, of course, we have to change asylum policy and, of course, we have to change parole policy. And, of course, that is going to make some Democrats get out of their comfort zone.
The last thing I will leave you with, in the last Congress, ladies and gentlemen, I participated in every single bipartisan bill that was passed out of the Congress in the last Congress. I took a lot of heat from the right for doing that. And I did it for good reason.
Now, the Democrats can say that they had a bipartisan vote in the last Congress, but they didn't. All 51 of them voted for something I worked hard to get 11 or 12 or 15 Republicans to vote on. So now it is time for Democrats to demonstrate their commitment to bipartisanship. It is time to let some of their Members get out of their comfort zone or vote no on the supplemental, while the other ones who recognize this is a problem and that the American people have disapproved of this administration's handling of it, now it is their time to be bipartisan. Now it is their time to recognize that parole reform and asylum reform is critical to reducing the future flows.
And I hope that my colleagues will, because as someone who has tried to be bipartisan and respectful of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I have no intention of supporting a supplemental bill that doesn't have meaningful bipartisan border security that we can measure on an almost immediate basis in terms of reducing the future flows.
I hope that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, who I thoroughly enjoyed working with on bipartisan efforts in the last Congress, will see that this is an opportunity, this is their time to demonstrate the same courage, to get out of their comfort zone and do what is right for the American people.
I yield floor.
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