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Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, the majority leader has said he plans to schedule a vote on President Biden's $106 billion supplemental funding request as soon as this week. He knows, as well as I do, that, as written, this proposal stands zero chance of becoming law. If Senator Schumer puts this funding request on the floor of the Senate, I believe the cloture vote--the requirement here that 60 Senators agree to cut off debate--will fail. In the House, the legislation is so unpopular that it will never even make it to the floor for a vote.
The strong opposition to the President's proposal is completely warranted, not for what it includes so much as for what it does not include. The supplemental is supposed to be all about national security, but it fails to deliver anything on one of the most urgent national security priorities, and that is the crisis at the southern border. National security begins with homeland security, right here at home, and we have a major security vulnerability right here on our Nation's doorstep.
Since President Biden took office, we have logged more than 6.5 million illegal crossings at the southern border. On top of that, there have been roughly 1.7 million people who have gotten away. They call them ``got-aways,'' the Border Patrol does. They are people who have been identified--at least by their physical presence--on a camera or a sensor, but when the Border Patrol shows up to try to find them, they are nowhere to be found.
The truth is, the Biden administration has zero idea of who these 1.7 million people are or what they are capable of or what their intentions are. They could be people just simply coming here to work. They could be terrorists. They could be carrying illegal drugs that took the lives last year alone of 108,000 Americans. They could be people with long rap sheets. They could be convicted murderers or child abusers. We simply have no idea, and that is the point. Uncontrolled illegal immigration is dangerous.
The migration crisis has precipitated another crisis. When thousands of people are pouring across the border each day, it provides a perfect diversion for drug cartels in allowing them to move fentanyl, for example, across the border. Fentanyl alone took the lives of 71,000 young people last year alone. Fentanyl poisoning is the No. 1 cause of death for those Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 years old. As I have said, we are losing somewhere around 110,000 Americans a year.
In all the time I have been working on this issue, I have never seen anything like the current situation at the border. Texas, as you know, has a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico, so this is ground zero for the Biden border crisis, but this is unlike anything we have ever seen before.
President Biden, during his time in office, has shattered every record on the books when it comes to illegal border crossings. In less than 3 years, he has set new records for the most crossings in a single day, in a single month, in a single year. I say ``he'' has because this would not happen if President Biden would simply use the laws that are already on the books to try to bring some control out of this chaos.
It is important to realize this didn't just materialize out of thin air. It was a direct result of the Biden administration's refusal to enforce the law. Instead, the Biden administration has sent a signal that our borders are open to anyone who can show up at our borders, and that message has gotten through loud and clear.
A recent story in the New York Times highlighted just how far the President's open borders message has traveled. In the past year, more than 24,000 Chinese citizens have been apprehended at the southern border. That is more than the previous 10 years combined. Many of these individuals claim asylum, but whether or not their claims are successful really doesn't impact on their ability to stay in the United States. As the New York Times noted, those who are not granted asylum end up staying anyway because China usually will not take them back.
It is no secret that word travels fast. When a group of migrants reaches the southern border and is allowed to remain in the United States, then people watching on television or people on the other end of a telephone call are told: I made it. You can too. So they keep coming. Chinese citizens now represent the fourth largest group making the trek to our southern border. That is astonishing, and it ought to be concerning.
The reason so many people from around the world are making this expensive and dangerous trip is that they are all but guaranteed by Biden administration policies to be able to stay. There is absolutely no deterrence, no consequence. The Border Patrol has told me countless times that the migrants used to run away from them, but now they run to them and turn themselves in, knowing that they will be able to stay. Migrants used to go to great lengths to avoid being arrested because, once it happened, it was most likely game over. Law enforcement would detain the migrants and determine whether they had a legitimate cause to remain in the United States, but if they didn't, they would be removed or repatriated to their home countries. If someone wanted to claim asylum, law enforcement would conduct a credible fear screening to determine whether they had a colorable case for asylum, but if they did not, they would be returned to their home country. That is what the Border Patrol calls consequences and what I would call a deterrent for people coming who know they don't have any arguable legal basis to be able to stay.
But, today, that entire story has been flipped on its head. Personnel and detention facilities are so underwater that the normal processes have gone out the window. When thousands of migrants are crossing the border every day, law enforcement simply doesn't have the ability to detain each and every person long enough to determine if their claims to stay in the United States are legitimate. Today, migrants want to be arrested or detained by Border Patrol because they know they are highly unlikely to be removed. In fact, they are all but guaranteed a yearslong stay, probably, even openly, with a work authorization.
Today, migrants are quickly processed and released while they await a court date that is years away. Recently, we had a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee where some of the immigration judges who have the most experience in considering these cases testified that only about 15 percent of the people who ultimately appear in front of an immigration judge legally qualify for asylum. That means 85 percent of the people in that line do not. Yet what is causing this huge backlog is the 85 percent who prevent the 15 percent from getting their cases heard on a timely basis.
Since President Biden took office, the immigration court backlogs have more than doubled; now it is more than 2.9 million cases. As a result, the wait for a court date just keeps on growing.
You know, that is part of the plan of the smuggling organizations that get rich by smuggling individuals into the United States. The more people they can move into the United States, the more money they make, and the more they can stack up immigration court hearings, the more they can ensure that people are actually released rather than detained. Then the smugglers win, and we lose.
Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported that, in New York, court dates were being assigned in the year 2033--not 2023, the present year, but 2033, a decade away.
With each day that passes, it becomes clearer and clearer that money alone will not fix the problem. After all, the border crisis isn't the result of scarce resources but of an intentional refusal by the Biden administration to actually enforce the law. It is clear we need more than funding to solve this crisis. What we need are policy changes that will lead to real change--in other words, stop the exploitation of our asylum laws and of our catch-and-release policies. President Biden has proven he is not up to the job. He apparently doesn't care. He has had nearly 3 years to do something meaningful to stop this crisis, but he has simply refused to do so.
Congress has a responsibility to act, and this national security supplemental is the best place to force action. Whether or not Democrats will admit it, the border crisis is a major national security risk, and it has to be addressed. I know it is not easy, as border security and immigration are some of the thorniest issues we debate here in Congress, but we will not continue to fund broken policies that have contributed to the situation we find ourselves in today. We need and will insist on real, substantive changes.
This side of the aisle has been clear that a security supplemental must include funding and policy reforms to address the crisis at the southern border, and if that doesn't happen, we will not proceed to the rest of the supplemental. Yes, there is a bipartisan group of our colleagues working on a border provision that includes both funding and policy changes. I am eager to see what they come up with, but unfortunately it looks like we are running out of time. That means that if Senator Schumer, the majority leader, puts a bill on the floor that fails to address the crisis at the border with real, substantive policy reforms, we will not proceed to that bill.
National security begins at home. Our security cannot come second to that of other countries around the world, our allies, even those like Ukraine and Israel.
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