Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and have an opportunity, in this great deliberative body, to bring up the…
Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and have an opportunity, in this great deliberative body, to bring up the subject matters of my choice, and the purpose is to inform you and the American people.
Before I go into the topics that I am prepared to speak of, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus).
Meaningful Accomplishments of the 115th Congress
I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his presentation in bringing this topic together in a way that he has. And in his method of addressing the Declaration of Independence on the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I would expound on that as well.
Life is the most paramount. It is a priority right, and our Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. They set up life as the first priority, liberty as the second priority, and the third priority was the pursuit of happiness.
Mr. Speaker, I will start from the bottom because, of the three, I think it deserves the most explanation. That pursuit of happiness is often viewed as maybe a fun tailgate party or a bliss of some kind or maybe a barbecue outdoors with the family, the things that we love. That is the enjoyment of our life.
The pursuit of happiness, as it was understood by our Founding Fathers, came from the Greek word ``eudaimonia.'' And that is spelled, E-U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-A. And under the Greek word ``eudaimonia,'' it means developing the whole human being. And it is not just the mental well- being, but it is developing the intellectual human being, the physical human being, the knowledge base that is there, and the spirit within us, and our theology and our souls--the whole package of what we are as human beings, developing that to the maximum, these God-given gifts, developing them for his glorification, and that is the concept of the pursuit of happiness that our Founding Fathers understood.
So the principle is that we have a right to pursue happiness, developing our whole human being, which includes the human enjoyment that we think of when we say pursuit of happiness.
But no one in their pursuit of happiness can trample on someone else's liberty because liberties are God-given. And the liberties that we have cannot be subordinate to the pursuit of happiness, but they are subordinate to the life of others because life is the most sacred.
Human life is sacred in all of its forms. It is the number one paramount right. So the protection of human life is the principle and is the highest priority in the Declaration of Independence.
And the liberties that we have--freedom of speech, religion, the press, the right to keep and bear arms, a jury of our peers, no double jeopardy, the whole list in the Bill of Rights--those are God-given liberties, as conceived by our Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and, of course, in our Constitution.
The rights that we have cannot be trampled upon or subordinated to someone else's pursuit of happiness. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, a well-thought-out, prioritized list in our Declaration that gives us the inspiration that was the foundation for our Constitution and the principles of our lives in America today.
So I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his explanation of this and for giving me an opportunity to flesh this out a little bit in the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But the segue that he has served up to me is this: that our debates today here in this Congress on the immigration bills that have now just passed the Congress have been focused on the right to life--the right to life versus the criminals that took the liberty to take them. They have violated the very foundations of our Declaration, and, of course, they violated our laws in a number of ways.
But I think, especially, of the onset of this discussion, and I think of Sarah Root. And her legislation that is Sarah's Law was introduced by me in this Congress. I have a copy of this bill today. We introduced it last year also, but in this Congress, it became H.R. 174, and it came about, and then we incorporated it into the broader bill today that we call the sanctuary cities legislation, Mr. Speaker.
Sarah Root had just graduated from Bellevue University in Omaha. Her hometown is Modale, Iowa. She had just finished her graduation the day before with a perfect 4.0 grade point average, and her major was in criminal investigation. She would, today, be investigating criminals if it hadn't been for the criminal that killed her the day after she graduated.
And the individual who is responsible here, Eswin Mejia, who ran her over, ran into her vehicle on the streets with triple the blood alcohol content that is legal. Eswin Mejia was on a first-name basis with at least two of his immigration attorneys. When he was taken into custody, interestingly, as bad as the accident was, Sarah was rendered unrecognizable and she was on life support for a little while while the parents were deciding what decision to make.
And she was also an organ donor. Sarah saved six. And many days I wear this bracelet that says, ``Sarah Root saved six.'' And this bracelet hangs on the antlers in my man cave. And when I walk down there in the morning, I often say a prayer for all of those bracelets that are hung on the antlers in my man cave that represent those individuals whose lives have been lost at the hands of criminal aliens who were unlawfully present in the United States and perpetrated violence against generally American citizens but others that are generally those that are at least lawfully present in America.
Sarah Root was one of those victims, a stellar young lady with a 4.0 grade point average and a fresh diploma from Bellevue University; her whole life and a world ahead of her, and run down on the streets.
Her father came to testify here in the Judiciary Committee in Congress, and he said: ``The judge bailed Eswin Mejia, this perpetrator, out of jail for less money than it cost to marry my daughter, and he was back home in his home country before we could bury my daughter.''
Those were some of the most powerful and moving and memorable words that I have heard in my time here in Congress. We think Eswin Mejia went back to Honduras, his home country. He had been incarcerated before. He had been encountered by law enforcement before, and they turned him loose on the streets.
This happens again and again in America every day, local law enforcement picking up people that are unlawfully present in America, violating our immigration laws. The law requires that they be placed into removal proceedings. That is the law, but they turn them loose anyway and turn them out on the streets because we have sanctuary cities and sanctuary cities policies. Some local jurisdictions that don't have a written policy, but they just simply--it is a practice that they have evolved into accepting.
So when I say every one of the Americans who died at the hands of someone who is unlawfully present in America, illegal aliens, generally speaking, every one of those are a preventable death. If we enforced the law, they wouldn't have been in America in the first place to commit the crimes they committed against our American citizens, our innocent people like Sarah Root, this beautiful young lady with a perfect grade point average, the world ahead of her, a happy, joyful young lady that, today, would be living, loving, laughing, and learning and contributing to our society. But she is in her grave today because Eswin Mejia got triple drunk, was unlawfully in the United States, and ran her car down and killed her on the streets and absconded for a $5,000 bond.
What we did with Sarah's Law--this is H.R. 174, the original language--and I wanted to assure the family of Sarah Root that this language is incorporated into the bill we passed today. It is incorporated into sanctuary cities legislation that we passed today. And what it does is it prohibits the judge from releasing an illegal alien on bond if they have been charged with or subject to a homicide or a crime where there is serious bodily injury.
Once this issue came up in Omaha, Nebraska, and the public knew about this, we tried to unseat the judge that released this criminal that may have done damage again. But the judge that had let him out on $5,000 had a similar case. The next time, the bond went way up into six or even seven figures. So I think he got the message, but the public got the message, too.
And I don't know whether he will be able to hold his seat or not, but we have got to bring the right things. We have got to put the fixes in place. You would think we would have a judge that would understand this, yet, somehow in the political culture of America, we are watching criminal aliens be turned loose on the streets over and over again.
I recall, Mr. Speaker, sitting in on immigration hearings in the Judiciary Committee. This is over a number of years now, and I suppose there are a couple of people in this Congress that have sat through more, not many. The witnesses would be--every week or so we would have a hearing and there would be witnesses that would testify about how many people died in the Arizona desert trying to sneak into America. And that number would be 200 in a year, 250 in a year, maybe the next year it went to 300. I remember that number going to 400 or more who died in the Arizona desert on the way into trying to sneak into America.
Finally, with this parade of witnesses that were experts on why we ought to open the border so they didn't have a difficult time getting into America--that is the lunacy that we have heard in the debate today over on this side of the floor, from my view, Mr. Speaker.
I began to ask the witnesses this question: You are an expert on immigration and you have come to testify on how many didn't make it through the desert. Could you tell me how many Americans died at the hands of those who did make it through the desert?
And I would ask the witnesses--generally four witnesses--and they would go down the line: I don't know the answer; I don't know the answer; I don't know the answer.
And that went on for a while.
And the fourth witness in one of those days was a former INS agent, Michael Cutler. And we are just a few years after September 11, 2001, when I asked him this question: How many Americans died at the hands of those who made it through the desert?
Which is the phrase to imply how many Americans died at the hands of those who were unlawfully present in America.
And Michael Cutler's answer was: I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you it is in multiples of the victims of September 11.
Now, think of that. Three thousand Americans were killed that day. Multiples of that would be at least 6,000. If he is right--and he is confident he is right, and now I am confident he was right--that started me thinking.
So shortly after that, I commissioned a GAO study. That GAO study dug down deeply into the records that we had access to.
It is hard to get this Congress to compare apples to apples, so I began to ask the questions: Of the people in the prisons of America, what are they in prison for? How many of them are criminal aliens?
We did a report on that. They sliced and diced it and narrowed it down. It never actually became apples to apples, but it did come down to this substantial number that has been supported a couple of other times in other studies, in one subsequent that I had done in 2011. The number is very close to 28 percent of the inmates in our Federal penitentiaries are criminal aliens--28 percent.
So it is reasonable to do a calculation and an extrapolation off of this, if 28 percent of these inmates are criminal aliens, what percentage of the murders are they committing? What percentage of the rapes are they committing? What percentage of the violent crimes are they committing? Or are they in jail for just simply violating a law of immigration? You will find out very few are in prison for violation of immigration law.
They are the reflection on criminal aliens. They are similar, a very similar, if not identical, proportion of the crimes that are committed by others.
So when you put that on there and hit the calculator--I am not going to speak those numbers into the Record here, Mr. Speaker, because it is shocking and stunning how many Americans have lost their lives at the hands of people who shouldn't have been here in the first place--Sarah Root included, Kate Steinle included, and many more.
A few days after Sarah Root was killed, I sent out a tweet that just said: Sarah Root would be alive living and loving life if the President had not violated his oath and ordered ICE to stand down.
That is what happened during the 8-year period of time President Obama asserted that he had this thing called prosecutorial discretion. Now, that is something that is established in law, at least in precedent, but it has to be done on an individual basis, and he delivered it in a blanket basis. Janet Napolitano delivered the document. I questioned her on it in the committee.
They decided that prosecutorial discretion can be defined. They created four categories of people and essentially granted amnesty to all of them and turned them loose. They turned criminals loose on the streets in America--36,007 of them in one bunch. Some of them were murderers out on to the streets of America.
You can see what happens to the crime in this country. If you are importing people from the most violent countries in the world, and when they are encountered by law enforcement turning them loose, or if they are picked up for a taillight or speeding or getting in a fight or shoplifting, whatever the case may be, failure to signal, running a stoplight, they are picked up for that.
When local law enforcement encounters them, they look at their identification. They ask them a few questions. It isn't hard to figure out whether they are legal or not. Some are good enough liars. But any time that law enforcement encounters people unlawfully present in America, they are to put them in removal proceedings, and ICE is to do it. Yet thousands have been turned loose on the streets.
At least 300 cities in America have established sanctuary policies that they turn them loose. Some of the cities have passed policies that refuse to allow their law enforcement to even gather information or accept information on illegal aliens that they encounter.
So, for example, this is how bad it is even in a place like Iowa. One of my staff people who was involved in a car accident that was caused by an illegal alien who had no license and had no insurance but he did have an illegal job in the town where he caused the accident crashed into my staff and wrecked my staff's car.
So when I got the phone call on that, I turned to my then-chief of staff who is a lights-outs, University of Chicago School of Law lawyer. I said: I want you to go to this town and stay there until you can get this resolved. And I want to find out: What can we get accomplished to enforce the law?
This was our opportunity to learn if a Member of Congress' staff can be run into by an illegal alien without a driver's license and without insurance with an illegal job in town and owning a car, and I have a topnotch lawyer chief of staff to go up there and communicate with law enforcement to try to bring the law enforcement in place so we could at least deport the guy.
After 3 or 4 days up there and a number of phone calls from me down here, I finally got the message back that finally convinced me we couldn't crack through the code of local law enforcement to be able to deport the individual who was clearly illegal. He was unlawfully working--no driver's license and no insurance.
The practice of simply staying out of immigration law because they were local law enforcement and didn't want to touch it was so ingrained that we could not move the bubble off the center.
Finally, I said: Okay, we have got other people to take care of. We are not going to get this solved, so let's turn our focus back to other things.
That is so very frustrating. I tell this, Mr. Speaker, to let the world know the frustration of families who had a loved one who was killed by illegals and watched them turned loose on the streets, and then have them abscond and go back to their home country or go back into the shadows and hide.
That is the thing that happened with Sarah Root. Today, we did honor to her and her life by passing Sarah's Law as part of the sanctuary city law. How utterly appropriate to bring a ban on sanctuary cities, to pass it off the floor of the House, and wrapped up in the same bill is Sarah's Law to respect her; her life; the sacrifice of her life; the sacrifice of her mother, Michelle; her father, Scott; and her only sibling, her brother, Scotty, who carries the whole load now for the next generation--all of that.
Finally, Congress did some justice for Sarah Root. It is only a small piece of justice. It is the least we can do, but it is the right thing for us to do. What her family wants is that no other families have to suffer like they have suffered.
This is the story of Sarah Root whose name was elevated on the national stage by President Trump. As much as I push things out of this Congress, I don't come close to having as big a megaphone as Donald Trump. So I want to thank the President of the United States for picking up the case of Sarah Root when he came to Iowa to campaign for the nomination of the Presidency of the United States.
When he began to make his immigration cases and lay out the platform for his immigration policy, I noticed that it mirrored mine very closely. I mentioned to him one day: Mr. President, I have market tested your immigration policy for 14 years in Iowa. It shouldn't have been a surprise that they understand these issues. They support the rule of law, they support securing the border, they support building a wall, and they support banning sanctuary cities. That is not just Iowa values, that is at least heart of the heartland values.
Those are American values--American values that want to live in a country that has the rule of law, a country where our children can be safe, and where they can play in the streets and they don't have to be looking over the shoulder; or a mother or a father doesn't have to keep them indoors because the streets are too dangerous.
This morning, we have heard from Jamiel Shaw who has been in to this Congress and testified before my committee maybe as far as back as 8 or 9 years ago. He is from Los Angeles. His son, who was a star football player, Jazz Shaw, was shot down and killed by an illegal alien gang member who went on the hunt that day with an assignment, as I understood it, to go shoot a Black person.
Jazz Shaw was murdered on the streets close enough to his father, Jamiel's, house that his father said this morning on FOX News that he could hear the gun shots. He went out there to see his son laying on the street in the blood pooling in the street. A ghastly murder for the sake of what? A gang challenge and a race label.
That would not be the case if that murderer had been deported back to his
country. It would not be the case if he came back in and we picked him up a second time.
Under Kate's Law, the killer of Jamiel Shaw's son would not have been in America if we had had Kate's Law and had enforced Kate's Law because he had been encountered before and had been deported.
This is the evil murderer, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez. This is the beautiful young lady, 32 years old, Kate Steinle, who was down on the wharf in San Francisco with her father enjoying a day and was simply shot down and killed for no reason and at random by this individual who had been five times deported and convicted of something like seven different felonies in this country.
Under Kate's Law, that jacks that penalty up. He would have been locked up for a good, long time if that law had been in place, or the sanctuary city legislation we passed today outlawing sanctuary cities. They would be turning over these kinds of criminals to ICE where they would get their just sentence in Federal penitentiary and then be deported.
But even though we have these laws now passed, and if the Senate takes them up and passes them into law, the President will sign them. We are confident of that. He asked that these bills be brought before the House of Representatives as soon as possible. Of course, that was today. So if these acts that we passed today become law, then many Americans will be saved from the kind of carnage that we have heard about in case after case.
When I saw the story come through of Kate Steinle, I looked at that. It was the most tragic story. Here is a clip of what I sent out that day. This is July 3, 2015. It is a picture of Kate Steinle. The message in the tweet is: A 100 percent preventable crime--dated July 3, as I said, 2015--100 percent preventable crime. Just enforce the law. This will make you cry, too, and it happens every day. Every day in America, there are Americans that die at the hand of illegal aliens.
I recall the case in Cottonwood, Minnesota, where an illegal alien who had been encountered by law enforcement before and turned back on the streets of our country who didn't have a driver's license, didn't have insurance, and should have been deported at least once and probably more times than that ran a school bus off the road in southwest Minnesota.
Four kids in that school bus were killed. Two of them were siblings. Three families lost children in that bus accident where the bus was run off the road by the illegal criminal alien.
The dialogue that came from the left--the people that we heard debate over here today and voted against every one of these bills--was: this doesn't have anything to do with illegal immigration. It has got nothing to do with that. It is just the happenstance of life. In every society, there are car accidents, there are murders, there are rapes, there is assault, there is battery, and there is grand theft.
Every society has that to some degree, but every single victim of a criminal alien that is in deportable category is a preventable crime. I have made that case over and over again for years, Mr. Speaker. But I made the point. They will say that it was just an accident, it was happenstance, and it has nothing to do with immigration.
My district director looked at me. He is a mild-mannered, soft- spoken, and judicious kind of a person. He said: If they believe that, if they say that, then you say to them: then you go up there to Cottonwood, Minnesota, and tell their parents that their children would still be dead if we had deported the illegal that ran the bus off the road.
That hits home to me, too, Mr. Speaker. It rings so true. Any family that is suffering the loss of a loved one--the Steinle family, the Root family, and so many other families, the families in Cottonwood, Minnesota, the families in Omaha, and the families around in my district--those families know that if he had enforced the law then their child or their husband would still be alive.
So as part of the sanctuary city legislation that we moved through here today, and as in Kate's Law just passed--I need to make sure that I state that--and in Sarah's, they would both be alive today living, loving, laughing, learning, contributing to our society, sharing joy, and giving joy.
There is another case that I have just picked up. A teen charged in an Iowa woman's death may have fled the country. Authorities say a teenager who was at the wheel of a car that was involved in a crash in Omaha last month that killed an Iowa woman--that is Sarah--has missed a court hearing and may have fled the country.
Well, that is a little memo that says: He absconded, we think, to Honduras. He may be living in the shadows.
Here is another story, and that is addressed, Mr. Speaker, by legislation that was brought by Andy Biggs of Arizona. I thank him for advancing this legislation, also.
This is the story of Grant Ronnebeck. He was 21 years old. He was gunned down in January of 2015, while working at a QuickTrip in Mesa, Arizona. The man charged with killing him, Apolinar Altamirano, was 29 years old, in the country illegally, and had been released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement even though he had previously been convicted of a felony burglary charge.
Now, why are we turning people loose in the streets of America to walk the streets again when they were deportable before they committed the felony burglary charge, convicted of a felony burglary charge, and then turn them loose again? Does the judge decide that somehow he has a right to be in America? That is a clear deportation requirement.
I recall when we had John Ashcroft as the Attorney General. He testified before the committee that when they released criminal aliens on to the streets without bond with a date set for a hearing, 84 percent of them didn't show up.
And that was before President Obama sent the message that it didn't matter. Those numbers have gone up, not down.
Here is another one. This was just another ghastly, tragic story that happened in Omaha. Louise Sollowin died in July of 2013. Three days after the attack in her home, according to Omaha police, an officer sent to the south Omaha house Sollowin had lived in for 71 years found her body covered in blood in her bedroom about 9 a.m.
The officer said Sergio Martinez-Perez, 19--I am going to skip some of this, because it is too nasty to put into the Congressional Record-- was passed out there, having raped the 93-year-old woman. Authorities believed that Martinez-Perez entered the home through an unlocked door. He, too, was an illegal alien who had been encountered by law enforcement and was released and went out to rape and murder.
So when the President said that we have people who do these things among those who have come from some of those countries, that is clearly true. A lot of good people also, but we need to have the rule of law. We need to enforce the rule of law.
And when they are coming from these other countries that have corruption but don't have the benefit of the rule of law and the respect for the law that we have, they are importing those low standards in here.
We must sustain the rule of law, restore the respect for the rule of law. If we do that, we will sustain ourselves as a First World country. If we fail to do so, if we lose the rule of law, then we will devolve into a Third World country eventually. The core of this from the beginning for me, Mr. Speaker, has always been to restore the respect for the rule of law.
Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act in 1986. I give him credit for at least naming it--calling it what it was, an amnesty act. It was a reward for law breakers. The cabinet around him encouraged him to sign the amnesty act.
Me, you know, I kicked my filing cabinet the day I heard on the news that he had signed it, and I kicked a dent in it because--well, out of frustration was why.
But I believe Ronald Reagan would see with clarity that you can't reward law breakers and think that somehow you are going to be able to put that behind you and that the law will be enforced and respected from that point forward.
There were to be a million people that received amnesty in 1986. Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act, and it
became 3 million people because they probably counted a little wrong, and there was a lot of fraud, a lot of people who presented themselves and alleged that they were to be included. This was a faster track to citizenship for them.
Three million people received amnesty in 1986, and I said then that none of them should have, that they should not be rewarded for breaking the law. Yet they got their amnesty.
The signature that Ronald Reagan put on that amnesty legislation was supposed to be in exchange for enforcement of the law, but the law didn't get enforced. The amnesty was delivered triple what was expected. And I knew then that we would have a long, hard slog restoring the respect for the rule of law, but I have set about doing that since that period of time.
More than 30 years later, we are here on the floor strengthening the rule of law after all this time, after the amnesty that has been advocated by others.
Each decade we seem to have to have a battle. They want to come with what they now call comprehensive immigration reform. Just about anybody in America knows if you say ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' you really mean amnesty.
I say to them: Just be honest. If you think amnesty is a good idea, why do you say all those three words when you can say ``amnesty'' and be honest? People know what you mean. If the public is ready for amnesty, then you can pass it. If we are not, you can't.
The American people understand this intuitively, that we have got to stop the law-breaking and that we cannot be rewarding those who break the law.
Now, there are those who think that we should somehow find a path of amnesty for those individuals identified unconstitutionally by Barack Obama in his DACA program--Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. They aren't all innocent little waifs who have been brought in by their mother against their will, as many would say. Instead, many of them are prime gang-age recruitment, young men.
I have gone down there and watched that flow of epic humanity coming out of Central America, coming through Mexico, some from Mexico--a diminishing number from Mexico--coming into the United States. The numbers we looked at were 81 percent male. And if they are under 18, they are coming on their own--if they are 14, 15, 16 or 17 years old. And they don't always tell you the truth either, Mr. Speaker.
So this large group of people are prime gang-age recruitment youth. And these youth are coming from some of the most violent countries in the world. And 11 of the 13 most violent countries in the world are south of the Rio Grande, and one of those countries is not Mexico. So when they come into America, they bring with them the violence and the culture that is part of it, and we can expect our crime rates to go up.
The people from the inner cities, who generally sit over on that side of this Congress, want to get them out of places like El Salvador and Guatemala and put them into the inner cities, in places like east St. Louis and Detroit and Newark, and a number of other cities where the violent crime rate is very high, to get them away from the violence that is part of their neighborhood. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we may be putting them into neighborhoods that are more dangerous than the countries that they come from, but we don't log those crime statistics very clearly because it is so sensitive to the people in the inner city, they don't want to talk about it.
So crime has been pervasive in these countries. They are sending young men especially that are prime gang-age recruitment. They are being recruited to MS-13. Judge Jeanine Pirro said the other day that 30 percent of them become MS-13 members.
Mr. Speaker, let me inquire, if I could, the amount of time I have remaining.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that response.
I wanted to roll through what our sanctuary cities legislation does that we just passed today, and it goes a pretty good, long, comprehensive way.
I pointed out that I brought the first sanctuary cities legislation into this Congress that I could find a record of. It was in 2005 when I brought an amendment through the Homeland Security appropriations to cut all funding to sanctuary cities. 2005. And then along the way, each opportunity that was there, I brought an amendment to cut off funding to sanctuary cities. Most of the time it was in the Judiciary, the justice appropriations bill. And I see a number of them here scattered in my memo that I asked staff to put together.
So as far back as 12 years ago, I have been working to end Federal funding going to sanctuary cities that defy local law enforcement. And we have gotten resistance from the other side of the aisle consistently. Barack Obama was never going to sign anything like that, but I kept beating the drum every year to cut off funding to sanctuary cities.
Finally, I introduced the legislation on sanctuary cities in 2015, and then again at the beginning of this Congress. And Chairman Bob Goodlatte was gracious enough to pull that together so we could bring it to the floor today. And we have had a lot of cooperation from many others on this.
I see the first date I introduced the sanctuary cities legislation as a standalone bill was November 4 of 2015, and here we are today finally passing it.
I thought I had been at it for a long time, Mr. Speaker, and it added up to 12 years that I have been actively engaged, at least--maybe 14-- until I talked to Congressman Lou Barletta from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who, as a mayor in 1999, began to raise the issue and made it a national issue. He was selected to this Congress. He has been at it 18 years. Others have been at this a long time, too.
So many of us are grateful today that the sanctuary cities language has passed and that Sarah's Law, Kate's Law, all of that that I was able to introduce into this Congress has passed out of the House of Representatives and messaged to the Senate. And I hope the Senate picks it up.
The sanctuary cities language does this:
It bans their policies, for starters, Mr. Speaker.
It blocks the Department of Justice grants to the sanctuary cities that defy Federal law and refuse to cooperate with Federal law enforcement on immigration. And those grants would be generally grants that have to do with law enforcement that would be effected by DOJ.
It allows the Department of Homeland Security to refuse warrants from the sanctuary cities. The sanctuary cities might serve a warrant to someone in custody, and DHS can say: We are not going to hand this person over to you because we are pretty confident you are just going to turn them loose on the streets.
So that piece in there is a protection that keeps some from being released.
And then it requires ICE to take custody of these criminal aliens within 48 hours of the notice that comes from the State or local government that would have them picked up.
It also establishes a good faith provision that holds local government harmless for honoring ICE detainers.
Now, that is something that was undermined on February 25 of 2015 by then-Acting Director of ICE, Dan Ragsdale, who sent a letter out that just simply advised local law enforcement that an ICE detainer is a suggestion, not an order.
Well, the law and the rule says that it is an order, not a suggestion. This statute clarifies it and firms it up with respect to detainers.
And then if a local jurisdiction is sued by, say, the ACLU, as they are wont to do, it gives them a protection, and it lets the Department of Justice and the Federal Government substitute itself for local government, and it holds local government harmless when it comes to the case of ICE detainers.
Here is a very powerful piece, Mr. Speaker, and it is this: the sanctuary cities legislation passed today, H.R. 3003, provides a cause of action against any jurisdiction that releases an alien who subsequently commits a felony.
Now, that is a powerful provision, and it is something that moves me in my heart. As a former crime victim, it occurred to me when they announced the name of the case that I wasn't involved in that equation at all even though it nearly destroyed my business, and I began to think about how this is.
Our criminal law comes from old England. And in old England, if you committed a crime--the king owned everything. If you killed one of his serf, you killed the king's serf. That was the murder that took place. If you shot a deer, you shot the king's deer. If you stole something, it was a violation against the crown.
And we transferred the criminal law into America, and the State has replaced the crown. So when you commit a crime, that crime is committed against the State as if you had killed one of the king's deer, but it doesn't consider the victim hardly at all. We are doing a little better in recent years, but this allows the crime victims to have a recourse, Mr. Speaker. And I think we will hear a lot about this provision in the sanctuary cities law as this moves over to the Senate.
I think we made a lot of progress today. It has been a good day to do honor to the lives of Sarah Root, a beautiful young lady whose mother is here in this Capital City today and speaking and testifying and doing radio and meetings.
And one day I hope we hunt down Eswin Mejia, the killer of this beautiful young woman. And one day I hope we have the relationship with his home country where they will hunt him down and extradite him to the United States of America. That is, of course, a law we need to have in a civilized world.
And Kate Steinle, I thank not only Matt Salmon for bringing this forward, but Bill O'Reilly and the President of the United States.
Something this President has done is he asked the family members of the victims of criminal aliens in America to step up on the stage with him around the campaign trail over and over again. One would think that they were props for a campaign. That kind of criticism flowed out. But here is what he has really done: he illuminated the pain that they went through over and over again. When he came back to Iowa on a ``thank you'' tour, he had some of the crime victims there. He brought them up on the stage. You can tell by the look in his eye that they moved him.
He has said the thing that moved him the most in the entire campaign were the families who had an illegal kill their daughter, their son, their family member. That moved him the most. He has done honor to that.
He has asked that we bring this legislation to the floor. We have done so. We have passed it out of the House.
And the President, yesterday, met with a dozen or so of these families at the White House. He will continue to push this legislation till it becomes law. And I expect at the bill signing ceremony, these families will be invited back to the White House and they will get a closure on the pain that they are going through this day.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
