Providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 4760) to amend the immigration laws and the homeland security laws, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I

call up House Resolution 954 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Torres), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, House Resolution 954 provides for the consideration of a bill aimed at curbing the flow of illegal immigration across our southern border by combining a strong border wall and security measures with targeted modifications to the current immigration visa process.

The rule provides for one hour of debate on H.R. 4760, the Securing America's Future Act of 2018, with 40 minutes equally divided and controlled by the Committee on the Judiciary and 20 minutes controlled by the Committee on Homeland Security.

The rule provides for the adoption of the Goodlatte amendment reflecting a number of provisions, which were negotiated with numerous parties since the bill was first introduced in January of this year. This amendment will be incorporated into H.R. 4760 upon adoption of the rule today.

It also includes the McCaul amendment, which makes technical corrections to the underlying bill.

Further, the rule provides the minority with one motion to recommit with or without instructions.

The laws and legal agreement currently governing our enforcement efforts along the southern border are between 20 and 60 years old. America is a Nation built and continually supported by immigrants. However, the world has changed and how we accept new immigrants may adapt as well.

H.R. 4760 begins the process of reforming our immigration system for the first time in decades, and I encourage the passage of the rule to consider this important bill.

The Securing America's Future Act refocuses legal immigration for the skills that our country needs. It also secures our border, strengthens interior enforcement, and makes changes to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The diversity visa lottery program, which awards 50,000 green cards to a randomly selected pool of applicants, is eliminated, along with visas for relatives except for spouses and minor children. Overall, immigration levels are decreased, while visas for skilled workers are increased and the agricultural guest worker program is reformed to better meet the needs of our farmers and food processors.

Construction of a border wall system is authorized, including the use of additional cameras, sensors, and aviation assets. Recently, President Trump approved the use of the National Guard along the border, increasing capacity by over 1,100 personnel and 14 aircraft. This bill would also authorize the use of the National Guard aviation and intelligence support. It requires full implementation of the biometric entry-exit system at all ports of entry and provides for 10,000 border patrol agents and officers.

To strengthen interior enforcement, the bill mandates E-Verify so that all employers check the immigration status of their employees. It combats sanctuary city policies by withholding law enforcement grants and allows the Department of Homeland Security to detain dangerous, illegal immigrants who cannot be immediately removed from the country.

Many illegal immigrants without legal status claim asylum when apprehended by border agents. While there are legitimate claims of fear of persecution, there are also instances of immigrants being coached to say the correct phrase to obtain asylum. To combat this fraud, the bill increases the credible fear standard. It also makes being a gang member a removable offense and qualifies illegal presence as a Federal misdemeanor.

In 2015, Kate Steinle was killed by an immigrant without status while walking with her father in San Francisco. The man responsible for her death had been deported multiple times and should never have been in the country on that day.

Constituents of the 26th District of Texas experienced a similar tragedy in 2013 when a young girl in a crosswalk was struck and killed by someone in the country without legal status.

While the recent enforcement policies along our southern border have led to a temporary separation of parents and children, a father and a grandmother in the 26th District of Texas will never be reunited with their daughter and granddaughter.

Kate's Law enhances criminal penalties for multiple illegal reentry to help prevent future tragedies. Inclusion of this provision will reduce the possibility of the tragic killing of American citizens.

Finally, the bill provides for a 3-year renewable legal status for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients that allows them to work and travel overseas. This will apply to approximately 700,000 individuals who are currently in the United States. While it was not the fault of these then-children that they entered the country without legal documentation, the fact of the matter is that they are here now and we need a solution.

While I do not support an expedited path to citizenship, I do support allowing them to get in line and apply just like any other law-abiding potential immigrant. The bill does not allow for a special path to citizenship. However, it does allow the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipient to obtain a green card and apply for citizenship like any other law-abiding applicant.

Recently, we have heard a lot about the enforcement policies along the southern border. Mr. Speaker, this crisis is not new. In 2014, the number of unaccompanied alien children increased exponentially and reached crisis levels. It remained steadily above 400,000 apprehensions from 2013 until the present.

During a visit by the Honduran First Lady in 2014, she was asked if Honduras wanted their children back, and without hesitation, she responded that they did. So a planeload of women and children was sent back to Honduras that resulted in an immediate reduction in the attempted crossings of unaccompanied alien children. However, because there was no follow-on enforcement actions, the numbers again began to increase, reaching above 563,000 in 2016.

In the lead-up to the 2010 election, the numbers increased, because then-candidate Trump spoke about securing our border with a wall that would finally end the possibility of illegal entry along our southern border. When candidate Trump became President-elect Trump, this number dramatically decreased because potential immigrants believed that construction of the border wall was imminent.

As a Member of Congress representing a border State, I have maintained regular contact with Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. What we heard during this period, 2016, was that immigrants crossing the border illegally wanted to get into the country before the possibility of a Trump election occurred and could direct construction of the border wall. They were under the impression that if

you crossed our border, at a point of entry or illegally, you would be granted amnesty and welcomed into the country. While we do welcome legal immigrants, this perception led to only more vulnerable children being entrusted by parents to human traffickers, typically for large sums of money, to bring their children to the United States.

On this journey, children could experience harsh conditions. Some were abused physically, sexually, and emotionally. And this abuse is not a threat just from the adults that are supposed to care for them, but also it can occur from their fellow travelers. A lot of these kids are just trying to survive, trying to make it to a life where they may one day thrive, but this existence is often all they have known, and they react in a way that reflects this reality.

While there is a concern about children arriving with parents who are then prosecuted for illegal entry and subsequently placed in the custody of the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, numerous children never get to make this journey with their parents or even relatives. Many adults are now bringing nonrelated children with them in an attempt to be released into the United States because of their association with a child that cannot, because of the Flores Agreement from 1997, be held in custody.

When the influx of unaccompanied alien children began exceeding the capacity of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, I traveled to the border area specifically to visit these facilities. I engaged with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to fully understand the care that these children were receiving in 2014, 2015, and 2016. The Office of Refugee Resettlement responded to my concerns about threats of communicable diseases from foreign countries being brought to our homeland. Mr. Speaker, there was not even a physician employed in the Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2014 before I raised this issue.

The issue became a concern because there were members of Customs and Border Control that actually felt that they were perhaps developing a condition as a result of contact with people because of a skin parasite that was easily communicated. And the question arose, could other diseases be communicated as well? And people were rightfully concerned about that. It is not just an illness like scabies; it is an issue like multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis that people were most concerned about.

While treatment in facilities has vastly improved in the last couple of years, the path by which immigrants come here is still dangerous. On one of my visits near the border at McAllen, Texas, I traveled with border patrol agents along a cactus-strewn, dusty road, mesquite bushes growing in from the sides. They brought a bus down there, a big bus. They stopped, they flashed their lights, they honked their horn, and the bus filled up with people. The bus went off to town, bouncing across this dusty road, and I remained back with the Customs and Border Patrol.

Then a State agent came up, someone from Fish and Wildlife, and said: I need help. I have got people over here that I think belong in your jurisdiction because you are the Federal Government.

And Customs and Border Patrol went over to the area that he had pointed out, and here were a number of women, small children, and teenage boys. They had come across the river, delivered by traffickers, just literally on the other side of the river, and dropped there. They had no idea what was the direction to town. They were not equipped to travel in the harsh conditions. It was probably 110 degrees outside that day. Small children, children, babes in arms, probably 1 year of age or less: this is what the traffickers left on the side of the river.

Had the Fish and Wildlife Service not come by and the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol not come by, I don't know how these people would have made it to town. And it is quite possible they would not have made it safely.

So the situation along the southern border is not just a border crisis, it is also an immigration crisis. Attorney General Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy to finally and fully enforce our laws. I believe he did this so that Americans and immigrants alike would recognize and remember that we are a Nation of laws, and also to demonstrate that the dangerous journey to our southern border is sometimes not worth the risk and the struggle required to make it within just a few miles of a fence.

The ebb and flow of border crossings has consistently reflected the rhetoric of American leadership and perception of enforcement of our laws. The rate of border crossings rapidly increased in the last year because there has been no significant visible action by the Congress to President Trump's request for a border wall. However, this is not the only factor.

It is no secret that countries in what are called the northern triangle, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, are some of the most dangerous countries in the world. Yet, these countries receive millions of dollars of aid each year for economic development, for military financing, and security initiatives.

This funding rapidly increased to more than $600 million each year beginning in fiscal year 2014, mostly in response to the growing crisis with unaccompanied alien children. So I think it is appropriate to ask ourselves, is the funding being allocated in a way that will help improve domestic conditions on the ground and reduce the desire to leave?

To address this concern, I introduced the Unaccompanied Alien Children Assistance Control Act, and I offered this bill as an amendment to H.R. 4760. Simply put, this bill would reduce foreign aid allocations to Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala by $15,000 per child to each country if their child crosses the border illegally or if they are referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement for custody and care.

While this may not seem like a lot, the reality is that each child cared for by the Office of Refugee Resettlement costs the American taxpayer about $35,000. Even Attorney General Sessions has stated that the care these children receive is better than the average American child.

While we cannot leave children without care, we must recognize that prioritizing alien children over our own sends the wrong message. Removing that $15,000 of foreign aid per child will send a message to Mexican and Northern Triangle leaders that our accepting their children will not be without cost to them.

As we all know, Mr. Speaker, if you want to make it important, it has to be about the money.

Unfortunately, the accountability in these countries is poor, and the use of funds largely goes unchecked. They rely on American aid, and we must ensure that it is being used appropriately and wisely to combat the forces that are driving their future generations--it is their future--away from their own countries.

By withholding funding in the face of rampant corruption, we not only provide a potential funding stream for President Trump's proposed border system, but we send a signal that we will not willingly deprive the children and desperate immigrants of the life they desire and need in their countries of origin.

The best place for a child and a family is their home. Because of the condition in the Northern Triangle countries, home for many children is now a stark facility along a foreign border.

It is time to take steps that would not only strengthen our immigration laws for the security of American citizens, but is in the interest of restoring and maintaining the home from which many would-be immigrants try to escape.

Congress has not successfully reformed our immigration laws in decades. It is time to begin that debate to align our immigration system with current realities. For this reason, I encourage the adoption of the rule to begin consideration of H.R. 4760, Securing America's Future Act.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support today's rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, this is not a crisis of President Trump's making. Those of us who served here during the Bush administration were aware that this was a problem. Certainly, those of us who served during the Obama administration were aware that this was a problem.

When President Obama declared the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2012, it was immediately followed, 2 years later, by the wave of unaccompanied alien children who came to our southern border. This crisis has been a long time in the making. Congress does need to solve this problem. The President is quite correct in that.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, I would just point out that, under current conditions, current laws, the United States of America takes in 1.1 million new citizens every year. We are the most generous country on the face of the Earth. American citizens should be rightly proud of that.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I just remind people in this body that 10 years ago the Democrats were in the majority. Indeed, then in the 2008 election that occurred 10 years ago, they strengthened that majority. House Republican Members were so far in the minority as to be irrelevant in all exchanges.

There was a 60-vote majority over in the Senate. You may recall that is where the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank and other pieces of legislation that I would have thought would never pass actually did pass in that environment.

A question that I hear a lot is: Why didn't Democrats do something about the Dreamer problem when they controlled all the levers of power? And it is a valid question.

Senator Durbin had a bill, as you will recall, in that next session of Congress that began in January of 2009. Senator Durbin had a bill to deal with the Dreamer situation, and he worked on it all year. It never came up until December of 2010.

Now, you remember in November of 2010, actually, the majority changed in the House of Representatives and there were enough Republicans elected that the Democrats would not be in the majority the next year.

So here we are in a so-called lame duck session of a party that is exiting power, and I think it was December 8 of that year that, in the House, the Democrats brought Senator Durbin's bill up and passed it on the House floor, as would be expected. They did have a significant majority.

They lost one vote over in the Senate, as I recall, and had 59 Democrats. Speaker Pelosi told me at a Rules Committee hearing several months ago that it was then that the Republicans blocked that vote from happening in the Senate.

But that is not exactly true.

Three Republicans voted with the Democrats on the Durbin bill. Five Democrats voted in the negative, and that is what killed the Durbin bill when the Democrats controlled all levers of power in 2010, the last time they did.

Mr. Speaker, don't blame this problem on President Trump. It has been in existence for some time, but it is up to us to solve it.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the author of H.R. 4760.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time to close.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I want to talk to you about a story of separation, a father and daughter who have been separated. Chris, my constituent, came to me with this story several years ago.

He served his country in Iraq. While he was serving his country in Iraq, his wife developed cancer and died. Chris returned home to be a single dad to his daughter.

His daughter went out with friends one night and was struck and killed by an automobile--an automobile driven by someone who was in the country without the benefit of citizenship.

Chris comes to my townhalls and asks me: While I was serving my country, you were supposed to be enforcing the laws on the border. Because you did not do your job, I am now separated from my daughter in perpetuity.

H.R. 4760, the Securing America's Future Act of 2018, is the product of months of work by Chairman Goodlatte, Chairman McCaul, and other stakeholders. This is an answer to our persistent problems with our immigration system that so many Members of this body have been talking about for years.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support today's rule and move the debate forward on this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me this time and for his hard work on this issue as well.

Mr. Speaker, this is a very good bill. It is not something that was cooked up overnight. This bill was introduced 6 months ago. It is based upon legislation that has passed out of the Judiciary Committee in previous Congresses, and some of it in this Congress. It is a good effort to make sure that we are addressing all three aspects of immigration law that need to be addressed.

It has a very good proposal with regard to the DACA recipients. They get a legal status permanently for the rest of their lives, renewable every 3 years, as long as they don't commit a crime. And that is a statutory protection.

That is not something that is subject to court challenges. That is not something that is subject to the whims of any President, past, present, or future. It is something that allows them, then, to avail themselves of existing pathways to citizenship, and it is something that will allow them to work in the United States, live in the United States, own a business in the United States, and travel in and out of the United States.

I think it is a good first step in addressing this situation.

Secondly, the President has made it very clear, and people watching the news coverage know, the difficulties that the administration--any administration, this administration, the Obama administration, the Bush administration before it--has with laws that need to be corrected to make sure that loopholes are not followed at our border.

We have, now, a waiting list of 600,000 people applying for asylum. Historically, asylum, which is a very good part of our immigration law, has been granted to 5,000--some years, maybe as many as 10,000--people.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, who wrote ``The Gulag Archipelago,'' got political asylum in the United States. But when everyone who is apprehended coming across the border illegally trying to avoid detection, when they are apprehended then says, ``Oh, I am here for political asylum,'' and you create a backlog 600,000 people long and then they are released into the interior of the country and don't return for their hearings in many, many, many instances, that is a very flawed aspect of our immigration system. This bill addresses that, as it does the problem with unaccompanied minors.

Children 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 years of age, mostly young boys, coming across all of Mexico and then through the desert or across the Rio Grande River and then thinking that this is an acceptable thing for them to do to enter our country, they need to be returned safely home, and the laws need to be reformed to accomplish that.

We need to reform many other aspects of our border security laws, close these loopholes.

We need to have greater technology. We need to have, along some segments of our border, improved wall technology. We have fences and some walls already. The fences have big holes in them. People come with chain cutters and cut holes through them in a matter of seconds and go through them when it is foggy there in San Diego or other times when they have that opportunity.

We need to have a more secure border both with technology and with a wall in some places and with the necessary personnel to handle this, including not just Border Patrol, but the judges and other officers who are necessary to process people when they are apprehended. This is a very serious problem, and it is addressed in this legislation.

We also need to move toward a merit-based immigration system.

We have, as the gentleman from Texas has repeatedly noted, the most generous immigration policy in the world. We have tens of millions of people who come to visit this country every year: some to work, some to go to school, some to conduct business. For more than 75 different categories of reasons they come here.

We also have more than a dozen immigrant visa categories that allow people to come to the United States, and we give out, on average, about 1.1 million green cards a year to people who go through the process lawfully. That is the most generous system in the world. We need to recognize that as we do that, we have to move toward a system where we are meeting the needs of American citizens, as well, as we do it.

Areas where we have shortages so that we can keep businesses in the United States rather than having them move elsewhere in the world where they can find the workers they need is an important part of this. So eliminating things like the visa lottery, where we give 55,000 green cards out for no good reason at all other than the pure luck that people attain from that and instead use those to have a new system where we have the opportunity to move towards a merit-based system, which is not in this bill but should be the successor to this bill, is an important thing to do.

I think that all of those measures are contained in this legislation. I think it is very, very good legislation.

But this bill contains two important provisions that are not in the second bill, and I want to particularly address those.

First, we have in this bill the E-Verify program. This is a program, a very fine program, that exists today. More than 800,000 businesses use it. Many large businesses use it. I would bet that probably a majority of the people who process job applications today utilize it. But it is certainly not utilized by everybody.

As a consequence, it is not being totally effective, because the people who aren't using it either don't want to know whether somebody is lawfully present in the United States, or they think they are unlawfully present and don't want to have a system that uncovers that.

But this bill, applying prospectively only--you don't have to apply it to your current employees--works 99.7 percent of the time. It is very, very accurate. And most importantly, it has a safe harbor for both the worker and the employer. So that if you get a false positive, and if you are getting that three-tenths of a percent of the time--that is still a significant number of people when you use the E-Verify system--the new law actually gives them a way to work out the catch-22 situation that workers and employers find themselves in.

Because under the current law, we use the I-9 forms. Oftentimes, someone will look at it and say: I am not sure these are genuine documents. But if they refuse to hire the individual and it turns out that they are genuine documents, they can be sued for discrimination.

And on the other hand, if they hire the worker and it turns out they are unlawfully present, they can be prosecuted for hiring someone unlawfully present in the United States.

And so the safe harbor says, you can go ahead and hire that person until we work out whether it is a false positive or a false negative without that consequence, and only until we know that, will you then have to not employ that person. You will face no consequences in doing that. That is good for the worker and it is good for the employer as well.

When you do that--there is no doubt that there are sectors of our economy where we have a lot of people who are not lawfully present in the United States working. And by far, the number-one sector that is affected by that is our agricultural workforce. There are some estimates that as many as 80 or 90 percent of people working in agriculture, beyond the actual family members who own a farm, are not lawfully present in this country.

Some estimate that more than 1 million people who are working, are not lawfully present in this country. Wouldn't it be great if we could turn that workforce into legal workers where they have the opportunity to go back and forth across the border, to go home to where their family is without the fear of being apprehended and prosecuted?

That is what this bill does. It gives farmers a much more reliable workforce. It gives them a much better program where they can self- certify, where the worker can come in for up to 2 years at a time. And in the dairy industry where they have no program at all today, or in processing plants, raw-food processing plants, they have no program at all today, we have the ability to help those farmers.

This is an area of our economy that is very much affected by international competition. It is exceedingly important that we pass this legislation to

move immigration in the direction it needs to move, and this is an enlightened way to do it. It is not a bad bill. It is a good bill for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.

This rule makes in order H.R. 4760, the so-called Securing America's Future Act, and two amendments in the legislation.

Before I speak on the legislation, let us consider why we are here today. President Trump has created immigration crisis after immigration crisis. President Trump is the reason Dreamers are at risk of deportation. President Trump is the reason families are being separated at our Nation's borders. This is a Trump-manufactured crisis, plain and simple.

President Trump's executive order, signed yesterday, does nothing to fix this. His order does nothing to reunite the thousands of children separated from their parents. In fact, his order directs his deportation force to now jail families at the border, which is in direct violation of current court orders. It will lead to more family separation, and the only difference now is that families will wait 20 days before being separated.

I want every Member of this body and everyone watching at home to imagine what it must be like. Imagine traveling thousands of miles to flee some of the most dangerous countries in the world, countries with the highest murder rates, and then, when you finally think you are safe, having your child ripped away from you.

In 1946 to 1948, during the Truman administration, human experiments were conducted in Guatemala. American doctors infected mostly uneducated and indigenous people with syphilis. Today, in the Trump administration, we are forcing drugs in pill form and injection on the indigenous children seeking asylum.

So this brings us to why we are here today. Mr. Speaker, everyone watching this debate should be crystal clear on what this bill does. This bill fails to solve the separation of families on our Nation's border. It reduces legal immigration. It fails to offer DACA recipients a path to citizenship. It adds $25 billion to our growing wall of debt on top of the $2 trillion that we already added when Republicans voted for their tax scam.

This bill makes it harder for those seeking asylum to receive protection, and it fails to protect the 2,000 children who have already been separated from their parents.

Many will call this legislation the more conservative option that the House will consider today. But let us be clear, this bill is not conservative at all.

After adding trillions to our Nation's debt through the tax scam, Republicans now are putting us in another $25 billion debt. Where are we going to borrow this money from?

Remember, colleagues, President Trump has declared a trade war with China. What will happen if China decides to cash in on that debt?

In addition, President Trump's family jails will cost the American taxpayer 10 times more than the alternative policy he ended for family migration.

Conservative? Absolutely not. Cruel? Inhumane? Absolutely, yes.

Mr. Speaker, last night, during consideration of this bill in the Rules Committee, my colleagues and I offered many fixes, which were all blocked by this rule. My amendment to replace the bill with the Keep Families Together Act, which would have reunited families, was blocked.

Representative Roybal-Allard and Representative Polis joined me in offering the Dream Act as an alternative, but that was blocked also.

Another Rules Committee Member, Representative Hastings, and his amendment to fix TPS, blocked.

But not all amendments were blocked. Just like President Trump's executive order contained misspellings, this bill contained a giant typo to give President Trump an additional $100 billion for his wall.

So which is it? $25 billion? $100 billion? Are Mexicans going to pay for it? What is it?

The committee has said that they are making this correction, and they did so in the middle of the night. But I doubt President Trump would be happy to hear that, so we will wait and see.

If this truly is a mistake, these kinds of corrections could have been caught if Democrats had been allowed to participate in this process, if we would have had a committee hearing.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this rule and this cruel legislation now, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings), a distinguished member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, Chairman Goodlatte just clarified that his bill has been in print for 6 months. I thank the gentleman for clarifying. The American people should know that your real intention was to allocate $100 million for the Trump wall, and it wasn't until we shined the light on that, that in the middle of the night the Republican caucus scrambled to reduce that amount to $25 million.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the Democratic leader.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Barragan).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the Democratic whip.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to strike the text of this rule and insert House Resolution 774, Representative Denham's bipartisan queen-of-the-hill resolution. This rule would bring up four separate immigration bills to be debated and voted on the House floor.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Aguilar) to discuss our proposal.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), who is the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Welch).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Panetta).

Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman from California an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, in 1970, a Guatemalan couple decided to send their daughter to the U.S. That young girl was I. I was welcomed here in a loving home. I was not put in a freezing cell. My parents felt they had no choice. My mother died a couple of years later.

These parents are making a choice that, frankly, I could not make today for my children. A few months ago, I was away from home for so long--4 weeks--that my grandson, a 3-year-old, felt he had to reintroduce himself to me because he had not seen me for 4 weeks. He didn't think that I would remember him. Imagine an infant when that infant is returned to their parent; they will be introduced to a total stranger.

Pope Francis just tweeted: Pray together, walk together, work together. This is the way that leads to Christian unity.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this rule and this cruel legislation. Let's help those who can't help themselves in these very corrupt countries of the Northern Triangle. They are not s---holes as the President has referred to them. Let's give them an opportunity to live another day.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding and for her leadership on America.

I had the privilege of traveling with her, under the leadership of our colleagues Juan Vargas and Susan Davis, to their districts earlier this week to see firsthand what was happening at the border.

So I come to the floor now with that fresh information. And I come to the floor as a mother of five children, grandmother of nine, who knows, as many of you here who are parents know and all of you here who are children know, the importance of the bond between parent and child and how breaking that bond is outside the circle of civilized human behavior.

Mr. Speaker, I want to quote a favorite President, I am sure of yours and many in this body, President Ronald Reagan.

In his final days of the Presidency, President Ronald Reagan said: ``And since this is the last speech that I will give as President''--my colleagues, I want you to hear this because this is about Ronald Reagan. Maybe you don't want to hear it. Okay. They don't want to hear it.

President Ronald Reagan said: ``And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love.''

President Reagan went on to say: ``Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world.''

President Reagan went on to say: ``For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond.''

These are the words of President Ronald Reagan in the final days of his Presidency as he said in the ``last speech that I will give as President.''

Beautiful values.

Today, we are considering two Republican bills that insult our Nation's values and tarnish our heritage, as the President said, ``as a beacon of freedom and opportunity.''

Both do absolutely nothing to solve the heartbreaking and horrific situation for children on the border. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, both bills ``perpetuate child detention and undermine existing protections relating to such detention.''

That is from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Both of these bills fail to provide a permanent legislative fix for our Dreamers, selling out their American Dream to build the President's obscene border wall.

Both are loaded full of every anti-immigrant provision imaginable, dismantling legal family immigration, slamming our doors to millions who have followed the rules and have been waiting for years for a visa, and cutting off the lifeline of asylum to countless vulnerable refugees.

In terms of those refugees, in testimony that was given at the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee meeting that the Democrats had--the Republicans didn't come--the National Association of Evangelicals testified that the United States Refugee Resettlement Program is the crown jewel of American humanitarianism.

And, yet, it is horrible what they do in these bills to cut off the lifeline of asylum to countless vulnerable refugees.

The Speaker's bill carries out the President's family deportation agenda. It paves the way for long-term incarceration of families in prison-like conditions and the denial of basic health and safety protections for children.

The Republican plan is a family incarceration plan. It replaces one form of child abuse with another, and it brazenly violates children's human rights. Why do Republicans think traumatized, terrified little children at the border do not deserve the same basic respect that their own children do?

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, family detention poses serious dangers to children's health and can result in ``lifelong consequences for educational achievement, economic productivity, health status, and longevity.''

Congress should be working day and night to protect vulnerable children. We should be working on legislation that protects Dreamers, keeps families together, and respects America's heritage as a land of newcomers, as spelled out by President Reagan in his last speech as President of the United States.

These bills will not go anywhere in the Senate. Yet, a vote for these bills is a vote to destroy the queen-of-the-hill discharge petition, destroying the best chance this Congress has to provide a bipartisan, permanent legislative fix for Dreamers.

Republicans need to walk away from these bills. They need to call on the President to rescind his family incarceration policy, which is as much a stain on our Nation's history as is his family separation policy, tearing children away from their parents.

Democrats reject this outrageous legislation and reject the Republicans' attack on Dreamers, vulnerable children, and families, and we reject your zero policy. It has no place.

I urge a ``no'' vote on both of these bills in this rule and any subsequent rules that come up.

Mr. Speaker, what we are doing here today is simply insane.

For 8 years, Republican leaders have blocked every attempt to debate bipartisan immigration bills. They blocked Senate-passed comprehensive immigration reform. They blocked the bipartisan Dream Act, which has 203 cosponsors.

Speaker Ryan has refused to consider the Dream Act, all while shedding crocodile tears over the 700,000 Dreamers for whom America is the only home they know. Instead, he has held the Dreamers hostage, used them as bargaining chips, used them as leverage to waste tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on a senseless wall and to militarize our southern border.

Now, as our Nation is haunted by imagines of children being ripped from their parents' arms and by the sounds of their cries, Speaker Ryan decides this is the time to bring two of the most hateful, bigoted, anti-immigrant pieces of legislation I have ever seen to the House floor for debate under a closed process--no amendments, no committee hearings.

This is a scandal, Mr. Speaker. Republicans should hide their faces in shame.

It didn't have to be this way. If the bipartisan queen-of-the-hill discharge petition was allowed to move forward, we could be having a real debate on immigration. We could take up these two hyperpartisan anti-immigrant bills, and we could also consider two bipartisan bills to protect the Dreamers, namely, the Dream Act and the USA Act.

The petition was nearing 218 signatures, but Republicans couldn't stand considering anything they disagree with. They couldn't even stand debating them. This rule will kill the discharge petition because Republicans fear a fair fight.

This is an insult to this institution and to the many Members on both sides of the aisle who have waited so long to vote on these bills.

The Rules Committee even came back at 10 p.m. for an emergency meeting to fix a so-called drafting error in this bill.

Do you know what the drafting error was?

$100 billion. That is right. Republicans almost accidentally gave President Trump $125 billion for his border wall instead of the $25 billion. That is quite an error, although I am sure President Trump would have loved it.

Oh, my God. This is what happens when you jam bills through with no hearings, no markups, no CBO score, which would have caught this enormous mistake.

Mr. Speaker, the President's executive order will only lead to keeping these children behind bars, some with and some without their parents, in unlimited, indefinite detention. And these Republican bills turn this cruel policy into the law of the land.

This is not a solution, Mr. Speaker; this is cruel and inhuman punishment.

The President of the United States must stop his vicious approach on immigration. It is immoral. And he must stop his hate peddling and he must stop his lies.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to reject this rule that kills the discharge petition; reject this rule that kills any hope for action on bipartisan immigration bills. I say to my colleagues: Have zero tolerance for this rule and have zero tolerance for these bills.