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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I appreciate the comments of my colleague from Kansas.

Coming from Texas, this is a familiar topic because we have a 1,200- mile common border with Mexico, and illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and everything that goes along with it has been something we have had to live with pretty much alone for a long time.

But now, as we have heard some people say, every State has become a border State, and every city is a border city, because what happens at the border does not stay at the border. You get migrants who ultimately make their ways to big cities like New York, Washington, DC, and Chicago.

The mayor of New York says a few thousand migrants showing up in New York will destroy New York City. Well, what about the 7 million people who have come across the southern border and then released into the interior of the United States, released at the Texas-Mexico border?

There is not a lot of empathy, not a lot of sympathy for what we have had to endure in our border communities and by the people of Texas, not to mention the billions of dollars that we have had to spend of taxpayer money, by Texans, to do the Federal Government's job. It is outrageous.

The part that is most tragic is, of course, all the lives lost to the drugs that come across the southern border. What the Biden administration does not seem to understand--or they seem to be in willful suspense of their power of disbelief--is that the 71,000 Americans who died of fentanyl overdoses last year, those drugs come from synthetic opioids made from precursors that come from China, go to Mexico, and are made into something that looks like a pharmaceutical product--relatively innocuous. But fentanyl poisoning is the leading cause of death of Americans 18 to 45 years of age.

I keep asking myself: What is it going to take? What is it going to take for the Biden administration to wake up and do something about it, to do its job? Well, obviously, 7 million migrants--that is not enough; 108,000 dead Americans--apparently that doesn't get President Biden's attention. How about the 300,000 children, the unaccompanied minors who have been placed with sponsors in the interior of the United States?

The New York Times documented that in 85,000 cases, when a call was made 30 days after the child was placed with a sponsor, there was no answer. There have been some terrible stories about forced labor and very dangerous jobs. But it doesn't take imagination to realize that what the Biden administration has done is lose basically 300,000 children. We don't know whether they are going to school. We don't know whether they are getting the healthcare they need. We don't know whether they are being trafficked for sex, forced into involuntary servitude. We don't know.

The only conclusion I can reach is that the Biden administration and the President of the United States don't care. He doesn't care because if he did care, he would do something about it.

Well, because we have been met with complete intransigence by the Biden administration and by the majority here in the Senate when it comes to solving some of these problems on a bipartisan basis--there are many of us who would be willing to work on a bill. We have worked on bills. I see the Senator from South Carolina, who bears the scars of having worked on the immigration issue many years, as have I. This is a tough, hard issue.

But enough is enough. We are not going to proceed to this emergency supplemental that the President has asked for unless and until policy changes are made to our asylum policy, the catch-and-release policies, that will stem the flow of millions of migrants across the border only to be released into the United States. It will not happen, I am confident of that.

I won't go through the statistics. Let me just mention one example. It makes no sense for migrants who come from places like Haiti to move to South America--to avoid what are admittedly dire circumstances in Haiti--only to live in South America and then, when the opportunity presents itself, to show up in Del Rio, TX, and claim asylum. They have escaped the circumstances which caused them to leave Haiti and are living in a safe third country. So why is it that under the current policies, we say: OK. If you make it to the U.S. border, we will let you in if you claim asylum.

Well, you are claiming a credible fear of persecution based on what happened to you in Haiti, not what happened to you in South America. Yet this is a huge flashing green light and a ``welcome'' mat for people anywhere around the world who want to make their way to our southern border.

Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas has said the city of Eagle Pass has lost at least $500,000 during the closure of a bridge due to the influx of migrants.

One of the things we did during President Trump's tenure in office, which I think was one of the most significant, was we passed the U.S.- Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement in recognition of the fact that our economies in North America are intertwined and that millions of American jobs depend on that flow of legitimate trade and commerce across our international bridges.

But, again, one of the other consequences of President Biden's border crisis is that even the benefits of that trade and legitimate commerce are being denied because resources at our bridges and ports of entry are being overwhelmed.

I mentioned New York City. Last year, more than 130,000 migrants arrived in New York City. That city spent $2 billion to manage the crisis. That is a drop in the bucket compared to what the State of Texas has had to do over recent years. But it is no surprise that the mayor and others in New York have taken notice. I think that is the point.

Governor Abbott knew that if the Biden administration was going to ignore the plight of border States like Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, that maybe he would care if these migrants showed up in New York City.

Now, polls have shown that New Yorkers are overwhelmingly concerned about the influx of migrants in their State and in their city. Eighty- two percent said it was a serious problem.

So why doesn't President Biden--maybe he doesn't care about a red State like Texas, but he should care about a blue State. The truth is, he should care about the entire United States, but let's just maybe question why he would ignore the pleas of Mayor Adams and the voters in New York State--a State that probably was responsible for his margin of victory in the last Presidential election. Well, he continues to ignore it.

In fact, the Senate majority leader, from New York, where Mayor Adams is mayor--a major capital city there--despite the fact that Senator Schumer represents that same State, he has criticized the Republican effort to actually address the Biden border crisis. He has called it partisan and hard right.

Well, frankly, that is all the majority leader and our Democratic colleagues have been willing to do. But we are not going to miss this opportunity to get true policy changes which help stem the flow of illegal migration across the border.

It is clear that the President and Secretary Mayorkas, who has been an absolute, unmitigated disaster as Secretary of Homeland Security--I told him at the last hearing we had: I have lost confidence, any confidence, in your willingness to do your job. You should resign.

Well, he continues to show up and testify under oath and to lie when he says the border is secure. Well, anybody with eyes in their head can tell that that is not true. And he has told the Border Patrol: Don't actually tell anybody what is happening at the border.

Well, enough is enough. We are not going anywhere on this supplemental appropriations bill until and unless acceptable provisions are made to change the policies that currently implement the Biden border crisis and to staunch the flow of drugs and people across the border.

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