Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. SERRANO. I thank the gentlewoman.

Madam Chair, this is one of those moments where the best thing you
can do is kind of scratch your head and say, What the heck are they
thinking?

We have a bipartisan bill, a Homeland Security bill that, as was said
before by Mr. Farr, if it was put up for a vote, would pass almost
unanimously, if not unanimously.

But no, they couldn't help themselves. They had to take one more shot
at the President and a bigger shot at immigrants. And so the bill is
weighted down with attacks on immigrants. Mostly Latino immigrants, I
would say, would be affected, and that is personal to me.

So what this bill now would say if it gets all these amendments on
it--and, by the way, I want to say that I am opposed to the bill with
the amendments and not opposed to the bill in its clean fashion, and I
think that is the way most Members think.

What this bill now says is that, for instance, if you are in the
military, serving our country, your spouse can be deported while you
are away. That is really sad and insulting.

We are going to have now new bumper stickers on the other side on
their cars that will say, ``Support our troops and deport the
spouses.'' It will be sad, and it will be horrible what we are doing.
Now, our opportunity here is to defeat these amendments. Our
opportunity here is to understand that if we have a gripe with the
President using his constitutional power, deal with that. But don't
take it out on every immigrant in the Nation.

Incidentally, nothing that the President did is outside the law. We
have a Constitution, and what he did is constitutional. It is within
his powers as our Chief Executive in this Nation.

This President waited and waited and waited for the majority party to
do something about immigration. It refused to do something. You are
upset that he took action on immigration. His action was due to your
inaction on immigration. That is why we have this situation.

So these 2 days will probably go down in history as two of the
saddest days in this House, and I have been here 25 years, starting
this January, because we will go after a group of people, and we will
say to the DREAMers, you can't dream anymore, and we will say to the
spouses, you are in danger of being deported.

We will say to those who serve our country, we don't respect you
anymore. And we will say to the whole world, we are not the Nation of
immigrants; we are the Nation that doesn't want any more immigrants.

This is sad. This is it not the way to go, and we should really
rethink this before we take a final vote.

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