Stopping Border Surges Act

Madam President, I appreciate my friend and colleague, the Senator from Alabama, for leading this discussion today. This is an important one to have. And I am honored to be here to be part of it.

You know, the situation at the border, across our southern border, is, by any standard, a humanitarian crisis and nothing short of that. Vice President Kamala Harris, appointed by President Biden as his border czar, publicly declared that she would focus as border czar on addressing the root causes of immigration.

However, now that Kamala Harris is the Democrats' nominee for the Presidency, she and the legacy media want to pretend that was never the case. Axios even reported that Vice President Kamala Harris ``never actually had''--that is a direct quote--``never actually had'' the title of border czar.

That is funny because that is a claim that contradicts the reporting that we have seen from Axios itself on this. In fact, we can see that right here in this chart.

On April 14, 2021, Axios reported that ``Harris, [who had been] appointed by [President] Biden as border czar, said she would be looking for the `root causes' that drive migration.''

Moreover, a tweet from her official Twitter handle further emphasized her role:

@POTUS asked me to lead our diplomatic work with Mexico, El

Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. To address the situation

at the southern border, we have to address the root causes of

migration. It won't be easy work--but it's necessary.

I agree; it is necessary. She took on this role. She acknowledged the role, and she failed.

Since Biden and Harris's inauguration a little more than 3\1/2\ years ago, over 10 million undocumented immigrants have entered the United States and have done so illegally. This figure exceeds the population of 36 States. Meaning the overwhelming majority of our States, 36 out of 50 have populations smaller than the total number of persons entering the United States illegally on the watch of border czar Vice President Kamala Harris, thus creating a crisis that has been met with a troubling combination of silence and inaction from this administration--the executive branch of government responsible for enforcing our border laws and the border itself.

Now, if the Biden-Harris administration were serious about addressing the crisis at the border and addressing the issue and ensuring, in the process, that the real victims of government persecution in other countries would receive asylum here, then they would support reforming our broken asylum process. And, sadly, they are not. We are still encountering over 100,000 illegal immigrants at our southern border each month.

Now, since President Biden took office, there have been almost 10 million illegal immigrant encounters nationwide. Keep in mind, this doesn't reflect the sum total of those who have crossed into our country. These are just the documented immigrant encounters throughout the country. Though, there are more. That is a subset of the total flow of illegal immigration. Over 360 individuals on the Terrorist Watchlist have been stopped while trying to cross the southern border.

And, shockingly, 27,583 Communist Chinese nationals have been encountered at the southwest border in the last year alone. That is a lot of people. And China is not close to the United States.

By any metric, the Biden-Harris administration has shown no interest in securing our border. In fact, the data suggests this administration wants as many illegal immigrants to enter this country as possible.

My Democrat colleagues want to pretend that Republicans are somehow responsible for this crisis. Why? Well, it is obvious why. They don't want to own it given that their party owns the crisis, as their party is running the administration and it is responsible for making decisions that has allowed this in.

What argument did they use in order to blame Republicans who are not in control of the administration, do not occupy the White House, or control the majority in this Chamber? What is their argument as to why we as Republicans are to blame? Well, because we were unwilling to pass a bad immigration bill that would have normalized thousands of illegal entries across our southern border each month--and particularly in the hands of the Biden administration, it could have and inevitably would have made the situation much worse.

But today I am offering a smaller bill, a narrower bill, a more focused bill that would help alleviate the crisis by closing loopholes in the law. These would be helpful. They are not necessarily things that represent a complete loophole such that President Biden would be powerless to enforce the border without them, but they would make it harder for President Biden to justify the massive loopholes that he has manipulated.

This isn't the entire answer. This bill wouldn't necessarily solve the whole problem. But if my Democratic colleagues can't agree that these commonsense reforms need to be adopted, then how can we take their concern about the border crisis seriously?

My bill, the Stopping Border Surges Act, would address loopholes in our immigration laws, which have helped create some of the perverse incentives for illegal immigration. It made it easier for the Biden administration to facilitate this flow of 10 million illegal immigrants into our country over the last 3\1/2\ years.

The bill would clarify that an adult cannot bring a child into this country expecting that child to be his or her ticket to avoid detention. This would help eliminate the disturbing practice of what is sometimes referred to by the Border Patrol as the practice of recycling children and babies by coyotes and cartels.

People will bring in a child, and sometimes that same child will be brought in under similar circumstances over and over and over again as the ticket into the United States--the ticket thus making it less likely that they will be detained and ultimately deported.

It allows all unaccompanied children to be returned to their home countries, thus ending the incentive for the parents to send their young children here alone, leaving them vulnerable to abuse.

Sadly, we see what is happening to those children under the supervision of the Biden-Harris administration and Secretary Mayorkas. They are trafficked either into child slavery, sex slavery, or as drug dealers.

My bill would require that the Department of Health and Human Services provides DHS with biographical information about the persons to whom children are being released so that they know something about them, rather than just ``This is the person to whom you are going to release the child.''

It also requires asylum seekers to apply for and be denied asylum in at least one safe country on their route from their country of origin to the United States. It would combat the Biden-Harris administration's obliteration of the credible fear standard by heightening the burden of proof.

The correct application of this standard is pivotal to the operation of our asylum system and making sure that it is there for those who need it and not subject to rampant abuse by those not eligible for it.

It has been corrupted over the years. But this administration has destroyed it entirely--manipulating it to the point where it is now beyond recognition. We must fix it.

It is sad that we have to fix it, but we have to fix it in large part because it has been so distorted and abused by this administration, profiting international drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year, leaving a huge--huge--wake of human suffering in its path.

It would close loopholes and restrict asylum to aliens who present themselves at an official point of entry. We must eliminate these loopholes and not allow the Biden-Harris administration to make more of them.

Congress needs to take back the authority to establish law. We can start today by passing the Stopping Border Surges Act.

Ending the ambiguities in our current asylum law will help to mitigate the situation at the border and prevent unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats from acting with utter impunity to enforce their own policy preferences, culminating inevitably in open borders

with more than 10 million people coming into this country in a space of only 3\1/2\ years. So I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

To that end, Madam President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 685 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, I appreciate the thoughtful remarks from my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Illinois. He and I have worked together on many issues. We don't agree on everything, but when we do agree, it is a lot of fun. We are able to do a lot of great things together. I appreciate his leadership on the Judiciary Committee and the fact that he has always been friendly toward me.

I also appreciate his reference to our sort of civics aspect of what we do. The notion of how a bill becomes a law is always, always instructive. It is always helpful to bring that up. You know, we have lost some of that in our system, and people get confused as to how laws are made.

Of course, the very first operative provision of the Constitution-- article I, section 1--has only one clause, so it is clause 1. The very first language after the preamble says that all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.

Remember, legislative powers are lawmaking powers, meaning all power to make law--to make Federal law--is vested in this body and the body with which we share the legislative power just down the hall, the House of Representatives.

Article I, section 7 elaborates on this function and makes clear yet again that you cannot make a Federal law without following this formula. The formula prescribed by article I, section 7 is bicameral passage followed by presentment to the President of the United States. You have to pass the same legislative text down the hall and also pass it here. It doesn't matter in what order unless it is a revenue bill, but that is not relevant here, but it does have to be the same text passed by both bodies. Then and only then can you present it to the President for signature, veto, or acquiescence. That is how you make a law. That is what the Constitution requires.

Now, on top of that, we have a number of other procedures that we have added by Senate rule, precedent, procedure, common practice. Those are not required by the Constitution, but those rules and practices are acknowledged as legitimate by the Constitution. Yes, most of the time, we pass those, but it is ultimately up to us to decide when, whether, to what extent, and in what ways to follow all of our procedures.

And I agree with the Senator from Illinois--it does make sense whenever we can do it--that we always should follow our own procedures. It generally works out best if we can move something through committee, if we can have a full committee hearing and we can have what is called a markup, where we introduce and entertain amendments to proposed legislation, pass it out of committee, and then bring it to the floor ultimately.

I think we generally have much better legislation when we do it that way, and I would love to follow that procedure with this particular bill. If what the Senator from Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is offering is for us to have a full committee hearing and a markup on this bill, I would love that, and I would gladly entertain that.

Tragically, in the Senate, we have seen a deviation from that same practice--that same practice to which he attributes great significance, understandably, today. In fact, fully 94 percent of all legislative matters passed by this body are passed by this same procedure that I am attempting to utilize here today--by unanimous consent.

The way it works is, essentially somebody makes a request, and they ultimately come down to the floor like I have done today and say: Let's call up and pass this bill.

Why would we do that? Well, in many instances, committee chairmen have become somewhat stingy with what bills on which they are going to hold hearings and markups. We have been unable to get a hearing or a markup set on this bill, and so this bill, like so many others--in fact, like 94 percent of all legislation passed by this body--comes to the Senate floor today without the benefit of having had either a hearing or a markup.

Well, that doesn't stop the 94 percent of the legislation from moving forward. In fact, in addition to that 94 percent of the legislative proposals that are passed by unanimous consent, an additional number of them--I am not sure what the number is; it probably varies a little bit from year to year--but an additional number of them are brought to the floor and passed not unanimously but by rollcall vote without having had the benefit of either a full committee hearing or a markup. This, too, is unfortunate. Sometimes it is necessary and unavoidable, and other times, it is not.

The point is this: Neither the Constitution nor the Senate rules prohibit passing legislation this way. Sometimes it becomes necessary when the other path has been made unavailable to us by the majority party and the committee chairman.

In this circumstance, there is an additional reason why we need to bring this forward. We talked a minute ago about the legislative process required by the U.S. Constitution to pass a law to make or change any statute that is Federal in nature. You have to go through that article I, section 7 formula: bicameral passage in Congress, followed by presentment to the President for signature, veto, or acquiescence.

What the Constitution does not countenance and certainly prohibits is the making of new law or the modification of existing law by the executive branch of government or by anyone or anything outside the framework of article I, section 7. That is what we have seen with our immigration laws, including and especially with this administration with regard to laws that are relevant here--laws, for example, involving asylum standards.

The asylum standards have morphed over the years, over many decades, and the practice of applying our asylum laws has become so different under this administration than what the law actually says, although this is comparable in many respects to another great frustration of mine that is closely related to this where we outsource de facto lawmaking authority to unelected, unaccountable bodies in the executive branch, allowing them to just make new law. We call them regulations to get around the obvious awkwardness that would otherwise be created by this thing called the Constitution to which we have all sworn an oath, but we allow, in effect, the executive branch to make laws that way under the form of rules and regulations.

But either way, whether it is by the stroke of the Executive pen or whether it is through an administrative Agency, we have seen laws being made and changed entirely outside the constitutionally authorized process recognized by article I, sections 1 and 7.

So it is one of the reasons we are here today because we have had the executive branch making and changing law not authorized by the Constitution, and we have had a lack of access to committee hearings and committee markups. So that is why we come here today and do this.

While it is not ideal, it is how 94 percent of the legislation passed by this body is, in fact, passed. So that kind of matters. That provides some helpful context.

We talked a little bit about asylum and how the asylum laws have been abused and modified. The idea behind asylum is that if you are subject to certain kinds of persecution in your home country, we want to provide people with a place to go.

The problem we had in this administration--the way it is supposed to work is if you show up without documents at the U.S. border and you make the case that you are entitled to stay here as an asylee, well, you are supposed to be detained until such time as they can decide the issue. You don't have a statutory or a constitutional right to be granted asylum. It is a discretionary grant of authority given to the Secretary of Homeland Security. No one has a guaranteed right to it. So you are supposed to be detained while they consider your application, whether or not they are going to grant it.

But instead, what this administration has been doing is just saying: OK. Come in. You claim asylum. And they let you go. And because there are so

many people coming in--about 10 million of them; many of them are claiming asylum--they decide that the best thing to do is not deport them because they can't handle all those asylum applications. They can't adjudicate them. They say: Well, let's just let them go--let them go and tell them that at some point you may hear about a hearing that will be scheduled before an immigration judge. We hope you will come to your immigration hearing. At the current rate, many of these people are being told that their immigration hearing may not happen until the mid- 2030s.

This doesn't make any sense. This amounts to a de facto change in law.

It definitely amounts to a de facto change in law when we have got things like what is called immigration parole. Immigration parole is supposed to exist as a discretionary grant of authority, allowing the U.S. Government to let somebody come into the United States either for a specific humanitarian purpose or a public purpose. But it has to be individualized, not generalized by country, not broad categories, and an individual person. The law specifies that.

An example of a humanitarian purpose is somebody is in a foreign country. Maybe their mother lives here. She is about to die, and that person needs to come in and be there for the funeral with the understanding that he or she will probably leave thereafter.

The public use, the public benefit example, would be someone who maybe speaks an obscure language. We don't have adequate interpretation services in that language here. We need somebody to come in and translate for that language. We allow them to come in, be a translator for that trial, with the understanding that they will leave.

Well, this President has granted contrary to what the law allows. He has effectively rewritten the law so as to just grant huge categorical blocks of immigration parole. We are talking to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people who have been admitted in a single year on these things.

That is lawless. That is outside what the law requires. So, yes, that is a change of law, and that is why we need to tighten this law here.

Now, I do want to get to this point about the so-called border bill, the border bill that my friend and colleague from Illinois claims-- mistakenly but very wrongly--was killed only by one man, Donald J. Trump. It is just not what happened, not what happened at all. And I don't agree with his description of the bill either.

The Senator from Illinois and I share a common friendship with and great affection for the senior Senator from Oklahoma. The senior Senator from Oklahoma did a fantastic job. He had done a great job on so many things that he decided that he would try to negotiate this. I think it was done at the request of the minority leader, the Republican leader in the Senate, to try to negotiate something.

The Senate Republican conference wanted legislation that would, in one way or another, tie President Biden's hands so he couldn't continue to abuse and negotiate that system of laws, and so he went in there. He did his best to negotiate that. At the end, most Members of our conference didn't feel comfortable with what he negotiated because it wouldn't adequately tie President Biden's hands.

It is not his fault, and it is not Donald Trump's fault. But the fact is that most of the Members of our conference didn't feel that it did enough to tie President Biden's hands.

Perhaps under the jurisdiction of a different President, that legislation might have worked but not with this President. It certainly didn't tie President Biden's hands.

So it wasn't Donald Trump who killed the bill. It was the fact that we didn't have the votes here.

So, look, this is a big deal. It matters. I reject, fundamentally, the premise that we can't reform any of our immigration laws without so-called comprehensive reform, which is usually code for something else, including allowing large numbers of persons entering illegally to be deemed legal.

So let's make sure we have the facts right, both on the way laws are made and based on what happened with this legislation and why it is necessary to pass the Stopping Border Surges Act.

Mr. President, this week, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is bringing up the failed border bill that the Senate already rejected in February, all on a political ploy to give vulnerable Democrat Senators up for reelection camouflage to hide their real views on the border.

That failed border bill is nothing but a fig leaf that pretends to do something about border security but wouldn't actually secure the border. In fact, if it became law, it would make the problem worse.

This Democrat bill would codify catch-and-release. It would put into Federal law Joe Biden's policy of releasing illegal aliens into this country. That is the cause of the open border crisis we have right now. It would normalize 5,000 illegal immigrants a day. That works out to 1.8 million illegal immigrants a year every year, year after year, forever. It would provide immediate work permits to illegal aliens when they cross the border illegally, and it would provide many of them with taxpayer-funded lawyers.

Not only is the bill by design utterly ineffective at securing the border, it is designed to fail. In fact, we can quantify mathematically the chances this bill has of passing the House of Representatives, and those chances are 0.00 percent.

There is, however, a bill that we know would actually secure the border and would do so right now. It would put real penalties in place to end catch-and-release and to defund the NGOs that are a critical part of the human trafficking network. That bill is H.R. 2. H.R. 2 has already passed the House of Representatives. I am proud to lead H.R. 2 here in the Senate.

If the Democrats want to do the responsible thing that would actually secure the border, we would pass H.R. 2, but instead the Democrats deliberately want this border crisis to continue--every single Democrat Member of this body. We know this because every one of them has voted over and over and over again against policies to actually secure the border.

When Joe Biden came into office, he inherited the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years. All President Biden had to do was nothing--just don't screw it up--but instead he deliberately broke the system.

He made three decisions his first week in office that caused this crisis:

No. 1, he immediately halted construction of the border wall.

No. 2, he reinstated the disastrous policy of catch-and-release--the policy the Democrats now want to put into Federal law.

No. 3, he pulled out of the incredibly successful ``Remain in Mexico'' agreement. The ``Remain in Mexico'' agreement is what had produced the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years.

And what happened? We went from incredible success of securing the border to immediately the worst illegal immigration in our Nation's history. Over 11 million illegal immigrants have come into this country under Joe Biden and the Democrats. It is an invasion. It is larger than the population of more than half of our States.

Now, why on Earth would the Democrats turn a blind eye to the people who are suffering and dying? Why would they turn a blind eye to the body bags, to the 853 migrants who died last year crossing illegally? Why would they turn a blind eye to the children being brutalized by human traffickers? Why would they turn a blind eye to the women being sexually assaulted by human traffickers? Why would they turn a blind eye to the more than 100,000 Americans who died last year of drug overdoses? Why would the Democrats turn a blind eye to the families, to the children being murdered by illegal immigrants whom Joe Biden is releasing? The answer, sadly, is that they see every one of these 11 million illegal immigrants as future Democrat voters. It is a cynical decision that in order to stay in power, it is fine for people to suffer and die.

In just a moment, I am going to propound a unanimous consent request to take up and pass H.R. 2. When I do so, we will have a moment of decision. All the Democrats have to do for this to pass is nothing-- just like Joe Biden. All Joe Biden had to do at the beginning of his Presidency to not break the border was nothing, just keep in place the policies that were working.

When I ask for unanimous consent to pass this bill, if the Democrats do nothing, it will pass the Senate and go immediately to President Biden's desk, and he can sign it into law.

I am going to predict right now we are going to hear two magic words from the Democrats. We are going to hear the words ``I object'' because they object to securing the border. They object to stopping this invasion. They object to standing up to the cartels. They object to protecting the American people.

But before I do that, I want to yield to my colleague from Kansas, Senator Marshall.

Mr. President, now is the moment when we will discover whether or not the Senate will pass real and strong legislation to secure the border. Again, all the Democrats have to do to send H.R. 2 to the President's desk to be able to be signed today is nothing. And so let's listen for those magic words. The two magic words that would kill this bill are ``I object.'' Let's hear if that is what the Democrats have to say.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 71, H.R. 2; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, well, I would like to say I am surprised, but I am not. It is worth, though, pausing to reflect both on what the Senator from Illinois said and what he didn't say.

What he didn't say: He didn't dispute the point I made about this Democrat bill they are having a show vote on later this week. He didn't dispute that this bill codifies catch-and-release; that it puts into Federal statute Joe Biden's lawless practice of releasing illegal immigrants when they are apprehended. He didn't dispute that.

He didn't dispute that this bill would normalize 5,000 illegal immigrants a day, 1.8 million illegal immigrants a year, every year, forever. He didn't dispute that either.

He didn't dispute that this bill would give illegal immigrants who are apprehended immediate work permits. He didn't dispute that. He didn't dispute that this bill would give many of them taxpayer-funded lawyers. And he also didn't dispute a point I have made many other times, though I didn't just make it, that it would give billions of dollars to the NGOs that are part of the human trafficking network; that it would fund the people trafficking millions into this country.

He didn't dispute any of that. Instead, he said the standard Democrat line, which is: Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump is the bad guy. It is all Trump's fault.

And I get that, in Democrat circles, Trump is the bogeyman. But there is a simple fact. When Donald Trump was in the White House and when he was actually working to secure the border, we had the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years. When Joe Biden and the Democrats are in charge, we have the highest rate of illegal immigration in American history. That is a fact. And all the political smoke and mirrors from the Democrats can't hide that fact.

But it is also interesting what he did say. He gave these epic words about Chicago welcoming immigrants. And he is right. Our country was built by legal immigrants, by people following the law, coming here the right way. My father came as an immigrant from Cuba. There is a right way to come following the rules.

I found it striking, though, that when he was saying how much Chicago loves illegal immigrants, that he somehow omitted that the mayor of Chicago has declared an emergency because of the crisis of illegal immigrants flooding into the city of Chicago; illegal immigrants taking resources from the residents of Chicago; being housed in Chicago O'Hare Airport.

We are seeing illegal immigrants in places like New York City being put in public schools and throwing Americans out of their facilities. The mayor of New York City--again, a liberal Democrat like the mayor of Chicago--has said illegal immigration is a crisis that is destroying New York City. And yet Senator Durbin told us, in essence, the Democrats are the party of open borders.

He said farmworkers--we can't get anyone to work on the farm unless we have those open borders. Apparently, in the Democrats' view, Americans are lazy and don't want to work and the only way to grow our food is to open our borders to a full-on invasion. Listen, if some people have to die, if people have to get murdered by criminals and gangbangers released by Democrats day after day after day, that is an acceptable price to the Democrats.

Because, if you listen to his criticism of H.R. 2, you know what he said? Well, the people who are here illegally, they wouldn't be able to work. My God, it would stop illegal immigration. That is his objection. That is the Democrats' objection. They object to this bill because it would do what they say they want to do. And the truth is, they don't want to do that.

Joe Biden could secure the border today. He broke the border by unilateral action. Nothing prevents him from reversing those three decisions, from ending catch-and-release today. He won't do it. He doesn't want to do it. And every Democrat in this Chamber supports those open border policies.

(Mr. MARKEY assumed the Chair.)

I am going to close by observing the very real victims of the Democrats' open border policies. There are some Democrat policies that are victimless. This is not one of them.

We have heard a lot about Laken Riley, but it is worth reflecting on what exactly happened to her, because the murderer who murdered her came from Venezuela illegally, and we caught him. We had him. He was apprehended in El Paso, TX. All Joe Biden had to do was follow the law. If he followed the law, what would he have done with an illegal immigrant from Venezuela? He would have put him on a plane and flown him back. But he didn't do that because Joe Biden and the Democrats have decided they want open borders. Instead, they released this illegal immigrant. They let him go. Now, what did he do? He went to New York City, and we caught him again. He committed another crime. This time, he endangered the safety of a child. New York City caught him. They arrested him. And what did New York have to do? All they had to do was follow the law and put him in jail. You know what, if they had done that, Laken Riley would still be alive. By the way, if Joe Biden and the Democrats had followed the law, Laken Riley would still be alive. But New York City is a sanctuary city, so they let him go again.

The murderer came down to Georgia, and Laken Riley--a beautiful 22- year-old woman, a nursing student--she went out jogging for what she thought was going to be a beautiful day and this murderer, this illegal immigrant the Democrats had released over and over again, picked up a brick and beat her to death. Mr. President, that is happening every week.

Another name you don't hear Democrats say is Jeremy Caceres. Jeremy Caceres is a beautiful 2-year-old boy. He was murdered in Prince George's County, MD, just a few miles from where we are now, by another illegal immigrant who Joe Biden and the Democrats released.

Mr. President, I want to finally point to a 15-year-old girl in your home State, in Boston, MA. Not only is the Biden administration allowing a completely open border and releasing illegal immigrants that are apprehended, but they are flying hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants directly from their home countries into America.

In this case, the Biden administration flew an illegal immigrant from Haiti to Boston, MA. He didn't try to cross illegally. The Biden administration said: Come on, get on an airplane. We will bring you to Boston. You know what he did in Boston? He has been arrested now for violently raping a 15-year-old girl with severe mental disabilities.

This is sick. This is grotesque. And this is happening day after day after day. And we have a bill right now we could pass that would stop it. And the Democrats' answer is ``I object.'' And another American is going to be killed next week and the week after and the week after and the Democrats--all in the name of power--are perfectly fine with this.

The good news is, an election is coming. In January 2025, with a new administration, we will solve this problem. We will secure the border. We will stop this invasion. And we will protect the American people.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss my resolution to disapprove of the Biden Department of Energy's final rule targeting gas furnaces.

In October of last year, the Biden Department of Energy announced a final rule on energy efficiency standards for gas furnaces, and in December, the Agency published the final rule mandating that gas furnaces achieve an efficiency standard of 95 percent when right now, residential gas furnaces only require an efficiency standard of 80 percent.

This rule would remove up to 60 percent of current residential furnaces from the market and would impact 55 percent of American households. It would have a terrible, negative effect on families who are already struggling with historic inflation numbers under the Biden administration, and it would force consumers to spend thousands of dollars they don't have on renovations to accommodate a new gas furnace or to switch to an electric appliance, which could mean higher monthly utility bills for families.

In Texas, 25 percent of households have a natural gas furnace, and of those, over 45 percent would be negatively impacted, meaning they would spend more to retrofit their homes and to purchase and install a furnace than they would save over the life of the appliance.

Now, in every State and in the State of Texas, some Texans may choose to move to an electric appliance for a variety of reasons, and some may decide they would like to stick with a gas furnace, but with this Biden rule in effect, Texans won't have a choice, and neither will the residents of the other 49 States. The Biden administration will have made the decision for them.

Texans aren't alone in this. Other States are in a similar situation. For example, 39 percent of Arizonans with a natural gas furnace would lose money from this rule. Let me give you some percentages from some other States picked almost at random. These are the percentages of households with natural gas furnaces that would be negatively impacted in the following States: in Pennsylvania, 33 percent; in West Virginia, 47 percent; in Montana, 36 percent; in Wisconsin, 16 percent; in Michigan, 35 percent; in Nevada, a staggering 63 percent negatively impacted; in Maryland, 57 percent; and in the State of Ohio, 47 percent of those households would be negatively impacted.

This rule is a continuation of the Biden administration's capitulation to environmental radicals, who value following climate dogma more than helping families actually provide for their kids and save for the future.

Joe Biden, when he campaigned in 2020, told voters that if they elected him, he would halt drilling onshore and offshore in the United States. In his first week in office, he shut down the Keystone Pipeline and destroyed 11,000 jobs with a stroke of a pen, including 8,000 union jobs.

Joe Biden shut down all new leases on Federal land, onshore and offshore.

He shut down development in ANWR, putting in place banking regulators and SEC regulators to cut off debt financing and to cut off equity financing for energy exploration and development.

He put a tax--yes, a tax--on natural gas production despite the cost- of-living crisis many Americans are facing because of failed Democrat policies.

That is why I introduced this Congressional Review Act--to help alleviate the unending assault on American families from President Biden and the Democrats' radical energy agenda.

The average household in Texas has spent $5,113 more on energy due to inflation since January 2021, and $5,113 is a lot of money for a lot of families. This administration's answer to those struggling is that it is more important to appease the environmental radicals than to allow you to pay your rent or pay your mortgage or to save for your family or to put money away for your kids in a college fund.

What is maddening is that this is done, they say, to reduce carbon emissions and to help the environment, but why would Americans take them at their word on this? This is the same administration that has no problem burdening U.S. oil and gas producers, who maintain the highest environmental standards in the world, but refused to crack down on Iran for shipping 2 million barrels of oil a day all around the world. It is the same administration that in one breath wants to reduce emissions globally but will then ban new U.S. permits to ship liquid natural gas overseas, leaving our allies to fend for themselves and driving them to burn dirtier coal, emit more carbon, and pollute the environment even more.

So if you care about reducing emissions, this administration has been an abject failure. Instead of delivering actual solutions, it is their belief that putting a de facto ban on your gas furnace is more important than addressing record coal consumption in China--the biggest polluter on the face of the planet.

According to the Department of Energy's own estimate, 91 to 95 percent of furnace replacements will be at an annual fuel utilization efficiency rate of 92 percent or higher by 2028. So according to the Department of Energy's own estimate, this rule is unnecessary.

The folks who can already afford the higher cost of a new gas furnace can buy one, but Americans who can least afford another price shock after suffering under Bidenflation for years will be hurt the most.

I want the Presiding Officer to listen to these data. According to some estimates, the Department of Energy rule will lead to higher prices for 30 percent of senior citizen households, for 27 percent of small businesses, and for 26 percent of low-income households.

This rule represents the fundamental transformation of the Democratic Party. There was a time the Democratic Party called itself the party of the working class. That is no longer the case. Today's Democratic Party cares more about the money from California environmentalist billionaires than they do about the jobs or the monthly budgets of hard-working families in America.

Today, the blue-collar family in America is the Republican Party because the Democratic Party looked at

their union brethren and said: We don't care about you anymore. We are chasing the money.

That is why groups like the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents 300,000 small businesses across the country, strongly support this CRA.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Biden administration is being sued for this illegal rule. The law that empowers the Department of Energy to set efficiency standards was passed during the energy scarcity of the 1970s, but the law also contains a prohibition against weaponizing efficiency standards to eliminate entire product categories like this rule seeks to do.

The American people are required to comply with Joe Biden's rule effectively banning affordable gas furnaces on December 18, 2028. Congress should come together and vote for the resolution to stop this rule. Doing so would save American families and American seniors thousands and thousands of dollars as well as save American jobs. We should do this without delay.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object--now, for the rest of the story.

Last October, President Biden had a major piece of legislation that provided

assistance to Ukraine in its battle against Vladimir Putin. It provided assistance to Israel, assistance to Taiwan, and a massive amount of humanitarian aid. It was bipartisan, we thought.

Then the Republicans, particularly in the Senate, stepped up and said: We are not going to consider any bill like that unless you attach something to deal with our border, border security.

Well, we said: How are we going to achieve that? They gave us a formula that they wanted. They wanted to have their lead negotiator, the Senate Republicans did, one of our colleagues, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. James Lankford is a certified conservative--I am sure he would be happy to be called that--and a person I respect a great deal. He is a man of principle, and he was in charge of negotiating on the Republican side.

So they asked us: Whom do you want--the Democrats--to negotiate? We said: Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Kyrsten Sinema, an Independent Democrat from Arizona. The three of them went to work in October of last year, and they worked on this for weeks, months. It went back and forth, and it looked many times like it was hopeless; we couldn't reach an agreement.

Lo and behold, they did. They came up with a bill, a bill that massively changed the way we manage the border. They brought it to the White House, this bipartisan bill, and they said to Joe Biden: This bipartisan bill, will you support it? He said: I will.

So we had a perfect formula: a bipartisan bill and a Congress with a Democratic Senate and a Republican House and a President of the United States who says: I will sign it.

So what happened next? That is the best part. Many of the Republicans didn't take yes for an answer because we had this bipartisan bill, the architect being the Republican Senator of their choice. They decided to ask one man whether they should go forward. Want to guess who it was? Donald Trump.

Donald Trump said: No. I am sorry. I don't want to see this issue go away. I want to be able to work on this issue as part of my Presidential campaign in the year 2024. So I am telling you right now, stop that bill; stop that bipartisan bill. Don't vote for it. And he said: If you want to know, you can blame me. Go ahead and blame me for stopping the bill.

That is what he said. That is a quote. It is on the record. I saw him say it. And in fact, most of the Republicans, except for a handful on the other side of the aisle, then decided that the Lankford bipartisan bill was no longer acceptable because Trump said it was unacceptable.

And that is what happened. And so that bill died and didn't go forward. And, unfortunately, we know the reality, as I mentioned earlier, is that any immigration bill that has a ghost of a chance needs to be bipartisan.

This bill would prohibit funding for processing individuals who arrive at our border between ports of entry. Think about that. The bill would prohibit funding for processing individuals who arrive at our border between ports of entry. This would prevent Border Patrol agents from executing their duties and essentially create an open border in between ports of entry.

This bill would also dramatically limit the use of parole programs that the Biden administration and prior administrations--Republicans and Democrats--have relied on for emergencies.

I am proud to represent the city of Chicago. There is a section of that city called Ukrainian Village. It is in the Near North. I have been there many times. I have been to their churches. I have been to their schools. I have been to their bakeries, as you can tell. I really like that section of Chicago, and a lot of Ukrainian Americans live there.

When we decided to help the refugees from the Ukrainian war, under President Biden and others, we said that we would give them an opportunity to come to the safety of the United States while the war was pending. In the city of Chicago, we estimate that 36,000 Ukrainians came to Chicago. We basically said to them: If you can find a family to sponsor you, we will give you a work permit, and you can stay here while the conflict continues in your country.

They were absorbed into the Chicago and Illinois and the Midwest economy without a ripple. They are hard-working people, good people. They were accepted in the churches and the schools--their kids went to school there--and they really contributed to the Chicago scene. They have done a great job.

Well, the authority of a President like Biden to make that decision for Ukrainian refugees is removed by this bill. This authority has been relied on by the executive branch for decades in emergency situations. The evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese allies in the 1970s and the evacuation of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the 1990s would be eliminated by this bill.

This partisan legislation only received Republican votes--not a single Democratic vote. This partisan legislation also includes many provisions that are completely unrelated to border security; for example--listen to this one. How about this. Want to put this in a comprehensive border bill? It would prohibit funds from being used by the Department of Homeland Security to purchase electric vehicles for the Agency's law enforcement agents. What in the heck is that all about?

This bill would also impose mandatory electronic employment verification, known as E-Verify, on every sector of the American economy.

I left a meeting in my office with a person representing farmworkers in the State of North Carolina. Do you know what percentage of farmworkers in America working today, going out and harvesting the crops and fruits and vegetables, are undocumented? Fifty percent. Fifty percent are undocumented today. So this bill would impose mandatory E- Verify and would include the agriculture industry and these undocumented workers. Fifty percent of agriculture workers would be unable to work.

What would that do to our food supply chain? I can tell you, it would come to a grinding halt, and it would dramatically increase food prices. Hear that, America? This provision by the junior Senator from Texas would raise food prices on its own. Massive consequences for American families.

This bill is so extreme, there was a bipartisan opposition to it in the House of Representatives. Under close scrutiny, this bill is simply not a serious effort to secure our border. It would harm our economy and make our country less safe and less secure.

The bipartisan bill which Donald Trump and many of the Senate Republicans killed would have worked to move us in the right direction. We earlier had an opportunity to vote on this legislation that would have actually helped us on the border. Though I had some concerns about it, I thought it was a genuine bipartisan effort I could support.

I was disappointed but hardly surprised that the vast majority of my Republican colleagues, including the junior Senator from Texas, who is making this motion today, voted against it--this bipartisan bill, with James Lankford's leadership on the Republican side, rejected out of hand by Republicans in the Senate.

It is no surprise to me the junior Senator did that. The only time we brought a bipartisan, comprehensive immigration bill to the floor, he voted against that too. It is no surprise.

This bill, written by the Senate Republicans' designated negotiator, Senator Lankford of Oklahoma, endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents--the Speaker of the House declared it dead on arrival in the House before the text was even released.

We can only fix our broken immigration system if we do it on a bipartisan basis. Nobody gets their way around here. You have to work for compromise. It is clear that the House Republicans are unwilling to help secure the border under those terms. Instead, they want to maintain the crisis at the border to help score political points for their favorite candidate for President.

Instead of a symbolic and failed effort to pass bipartisan bills that won't actually address challenges, let's work together on a bipartisan basis. Let's start with the Lankford bill. That is where the opportunity will be on the floor. If you want to change it, let's amend it. For goodness' sake, let's start with a bill that we agreed was going to be the starting point not too

long ago, before Donald Trump made his pronouncement, one that supports our frontline law enforcement officials, addresses the needs of the economy, provides a path to citizenship for Dreamers and immigrant farmworkers, and lives up to our Nation's legacy of providing safe harbor to refugees fleeing for their lives.

The American people are tired of partisan bickering over immigration. They want us to work together to secure our border, support our economy, and stand by America's fundamental principles.

Proudly, I object.

Reserving the right to object.

Recapping, we have a bipartisan bill. Republicans in the Senate said: We have a negotiator here. Don't bring anybody new to the table. His name is James Lankford. He is a conservative Senator from the State of Oklahoma.

I respect him and I like him, and he headed up there to negotiate.

On our side, we had Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut, and Kyrsten Sinema, Senator from Arizona, Independent Democratic. The three worked, not for weeks, but months to put together a bipartisan bill.

The bill that they put together was endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council. When I heard the stories said by the junior Senator from Texas about the terrible things that would occur if that bill would pass, I wondered: Did he consider stopping to talk to the Border Patrol agents who endorsed the bill and thought from a law enforcement perspective at the border that it made sense?

We were ready to go. We were getting a bipartisan bill and it was the beginning of negotiations to do something about the border. We need to do something about the border.

Then what happened? And this is a matter of record. Everyone has seen it, all the clips on television. They went to the punitive--I guess that is the word--Republican candidate for President of the United States, Donald Trump, and said: We have a bill, a bipartisan bill to consider in the Senate. He said: Kill it. Stop the bill. Don't vote for it. I would rather have the issue, and I don't want to give Joe Biden any credit for anything. Even though we endorsed this bipartisan bill, we are going to be against it, and everybody who is loyal to me needs to vote no. Guess what? Virtually all the Republican Senators voted no.

That was the end of the bipartisan conversation about the border.

Take a look at what is being proposed by my colleague and friend Senator Lee from Utah. This bill targets the most vulnerable people seeking safety and protection in the United States: children traveling to the United States without a parent or guardian, families with minor children, and asylum seekers fleeing persecution.

This bill would strip away protections for unaccompanied children. It would deport many of these kids back into the hands of smugglers who exploit them, keep others in detention up to 1 month. Do you know what detention on the border is for a child? It is a cage. I have seen them. That is exactly what would happen. They would sit in these cages for a month, keep them separated from adults who would care for them.

This bill would require families to be detained--``detained'' is a nice word for ``incarcerated''--a failed policy that

has disastrous effects on kids and doesn't make the border more secure.

This bill would impose multiple new restrictions on asylum, undermining our longstanding, bipartisan commitment to refugees seeking safety.

The Biden administration is doing what it can do now to secure the border under our outdated immigration laws. The Biden administration endorsed the bipartisan bill, which these Republican Senators all voted against. The administration has dramatically increased deportations of those who are not eligible, made tough changes to our asylum system, and improved access to lawful pathways to deter illegal immigration.

But, ultimately, do you know whose responsibility it is to write this bill? Congress's. Do you know what the best starting point is? The bipartisan Lankford bill that came to the floor of the Senate. That is what we are going to offer on the floor. If you want to negotiate from there, if you want to offer amendments to that, be my guest. That is what the Senate is all about. But the notion by the Senator from Utah that this ought to be the starting point I think is a bad idea.

Recently, a bipartisan group of Senators and the White House negotiated a good starting point. It was written by their negotiator. I respect him, and I think all Members of the Senate should. Yet, when it came to a vote, the vast majority of Republicans wouldn't support it.

I just want to close by saying this: This is an issue I have worked on for my entire career in the Senate. I introduced the DREAM Act over 20 years ago. I really believe this is a challenge which we can only solve on a bipartisan basis. I think that the Lankford bill is a good starting point.

Let's come together and work together on a bipartisan starting point, ignore Donald Trump, who says he doesn't want this to move forward, and let's do something the American people really want. To aspire to that goal, I object to this approach to it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate resume legislative session.

Mr. President, I rise today to voice my support for the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act, which is the strong, bipartisan farm bill proposal that has been put forward by our colleague from Michigan, Senator Stabenow, chair of the Agriculture Committee.

Chair Stabenow's framework reflects more than 2 years of work and outreach and contains more than 100 bipartisan bills, and it puts the 2024 farm bill back on track for being signed into law this year. As Chair Stabenow says, this farm bill is designed to keep farmers farming, families fed, and rural communities strong.

The farm bill touches nearly every aspect of life, and it touches the life of nearly every American. It is a big, complicated piece of legislation, but at its core, it does three things.

The first is that it governs how nutrition assistance, like SNAP, works for 42 million Americans, including 2.5 million rural residents.

The second thing is that it sets the rules for how farm and forestry programs work, including conservation and risk management tools like crop insurance, animal health, research and education, and forestry and timber.

Third, it drives rural development by supporting rural broadband, housing, childcare, and rural energy so that rural America can be strong, prosperous, and competitive.

For many years, the farm bill has bucked the tide of partisanship in Congress by finding common ground, providing stability and predictability to farmers, ranchers, and rural communities, and by sustaining nearly 23 million jobs across the country.

And why does it pass with such broad bipartisan support? Because we have all agreed in Congress to support what I think of as the three pillars of the farm bill: nutrition assistance, farm and conservation programs, and rural development.

This has been the grand bargain of Congress--that we agree together to keep each of these pillars strong, and then you can pass the bill. If you weaken any of these pillars, then a bipartisan farm bill just doesn't stand.

Colleagues, this grand bargain will be the recipe for success for the 2024 farm bill as well. So I want to spend a few minutes talking about where we have agreement and what more we need to do to pass a strong bipartisan bill.

Chair Stabenow released her proposal in early May, and, just this week, the House Agriculture Committee will mark up Chair Thompson's farm bill proposal. While Chair Thompson should be commended for including many proposals with broad bipartisan support, his bill significantly weakens nutrition and conservation programs. This undermines the grand bargain that is necessary to pass a bipartisan bill.

Here is what I am talking about when it comes to nutrition programs: Almost 45 million Americans live in homes that don't have regular access to affordable food. Almost all of these households are working families or seniors or people who are living with disabilities. This is interestingly and especially a rural issue. Households in rural areas are even more affected. Of the top 10 counties facing the greatest food insecurity in this country, 9 are primarily in rural areas.

So Chair Stabenow's proposal, which I support, strengthens nutrition assistance. It makes certain that nutrition assistance now and into the future is going to meet the needs of Americans by making sure that monthly stipends are enough so that families can afford the food that they need.

I want to just note that it is not as if people are getting lots and lots of money here. I think the average cost for a family--the average benefit of a family--is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 a day. So we are not talking about a lot of money per person.

In contrast, the House Republicans' proposal prevents nutrition assistance from keeping pace with food costs. What does that mean for a family that is relying on SNAP benefits, for example? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House Republicans' farm bill could result in a $30 billion cut to SNAP over the next decade. This is going to hurt people. It is not going to help them. It won't work, and it won't pass with bipartisan support.

Simply put, any farm bill proposal that weakens nutrition assistance now or in the future can't pass Congress.

The foundational farm bill risk management, research, and conservation programs--those foundational programs--are also incredibly important. They should be strengthened and not weakened in the next farm bill.

To that end, Chair Stabenow's farm bill includes many bipartisan provisions that I have fought for, along with many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. It updates and improves crop insurance and other USDA programs so that they work better, especially for small and beginning farmers and farmers from more diverse backgrounds. I am thinking, in Minnesota, of Native farmers, of Black, Hmong, and Latino farmers, and of farmers who are recent African immigrants.

It is interesting that, across the country and in Minnesota, the average age of farmers and ranchers in America is 58 to 60 years old. So it is essential for the future of our food system and for agriculture and farming that crop insurance is going to work for the next generation of farmers taking over, and that is what Chair Stabenow's bill does.

I want to also note that Senator Stabenow's farm bill maintains the sugar program, which is so important to Minnesota's sugar beet farmers. The U.S. sugar policy runs at zero cost to taxpayers. What it does is to just simply make sure that American farmers can compete on a fair playing field against subsidized foreign sugar.

Senator Stabenow's farm bill also includes updates to the Dairy Margin Coverage Program that we established in the 2018 bill. I expect this is important to the Vermont dairy farmers, as it is important to Minnesota's dairy

farmers. It basically provides them with an additional tool to help them manage the inevitable ups and downs in the sector in which they are competing.

When it comes to what we need to do around conservation, Senator Stabenow's farm bill also protects the transformational conservation and climate-smart laws that we passed in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Now, you don't need to tell Minnesota farmers that climate change is real. They see it every day in the growing intensity of the storms and droughts and fires and floods that they contend with. They also appreciate that better support for conservation programs for working farm and ranch land is good for their bottom line and improves their resilience. American family farmers are good stewards of their land, and Federal conservation programs need to support them.

Climate-smart conservation means healthier soil and less need for expensive inputs. It is a win for farmers, for rural communities, and it is a win for the fight against climate change. It is also true that we need to get a better understanding of and be able to measure better how farming and ranching practices are working to sequester carbon and improve soil health.

So I appreciate Chair Stabenow's work to include ideas from my bipartisan bill with Senator Young of Indiana to work on this and to help farmers identify best practices to make their farms more resilient and to combat climate change at the same time.

Now is not the time to dismantle or weaken conservation and climate- smart agriculture efforts. This is why proposals in Chair Thompson's bill in the House to strip out the climate-smart guardrails within our conservation programs--I mean, that just won't work, and it will not get the bipartisan support that the farm bill needs.

Both Republicans and Democrats, I know, appreciate the importance of a strong rural development title in the farm bill. I want to touch on that for a minute as well.

Small towns and rural places are creative. They are entrepreneurial. They are diverse, wonderful places to live and to raise a family. They produce our food and our energy. They are hubs of manufacturing, small business, education, healthcare, the arts, and culture. The farm bill needs to support them, and that is what Chair Stabenow's framework accomplishes.

This farm bill has a strong energy title, including reauthorizing REAP. That is the Rural Energy for America Program, which helps ag producers and small businesses design and build projects to improve energy efficiency and to build out new renewable energy sources. This is good, of course. It creates jobs, it reduces energy bills, and it cuts greenhouse gas emissions.

So I am glad that improvements and updates I pushed for are included in the chair's framework. I am also glad to see included proposals that I support and have worked on to increase childcare options and to improve broadband. People living in rural areas and in Tribal communities should not be stuck with slow internet speeds that folks in the cities would never put up with. This farm bill mandates faster minimum speeds for USDA broadband programs. That is what I pushed for in the work that I have done as well.

Over the last several years, many individuals and groups have done excellent work to develop a strong farm bill, so as I conclude, I want to particularly note the excellent work and advocacy of the Native Farm Bill Coalition. This is over 170 Tribes and Native groups that have worked together to improve how USDA and farm programs work with Tribal governments and Native producers, from farming and ranching to nutrition programs, rural development, and forestry.

This is incredibly important work, especially because, too often, Native voices have not been heard in this policy development. In 2018, the farm bill changed that. Under Chair Stabenow's leadership, the 2018 farm bill included over 60 provisions that benefited Indian Country. This was a huge success, and we learned a lot from that. This next farm bill has to continue that progress.

Members of the Native Farm Bill Coalition are visiting Washington just this week to testify to our responsibility in Congress, as defined in our treaty and trust obligations, to include Native farmers and Tribal governments in decisions about agriculture and forestry. We need to listen to them. It is actually our obligation to listen to them and to right the wrongs that have been perpetrated since the beginning of Federal farm and nutrition policy and long before.

Tribal self-governance is an essential step here. Self-governance-- what it does is it recognizes that Tribal nations' authority to administer Federal programs--they have that authority within their own communities, and it recognizes that. This is not a new idea; it has worked successfully for over 30 years and is widely seen as one of the most successful Federal Indian policies that we have moved forward. It works because it recognizes that Tribal governments are in the best position to know what their communities need, and they know best how to deliver for them.

This is called 638 authority. Folks may have seen this on the buttons of people walking around the hallway talking about 638 authority. What it comes from is the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. It says that Tribes can have the authority to plan and conduct and administer Federal programs.

The 2018 farm bill created several self-governance pilot projects in forestry and in nutrition programs. These were very successful, and they should be made permanent. Chair Stabenow's bill does this, along with also including many other provisions to recognize and respect the role of Tribal governments and Native producers.

We can do more, and we should. With expanded self-governance authority, Tribal nations will be able to build food systems that address food insecurity. They will be able to increase access to indigenous foods and to use indigenous knowledge for forest management and to support strong Tribal economies. Tribal leaders often say ``Nothing about us without us.'' This value must guide us as we pass a 2024 farm bill.

I will continue to stand with Native leaders so that we can continue to make progress and pass the very best farm bill possible--one that respects our responsibilities to Tribes and to Native people; one that keeps farmers farming, families fed, and rural and Tribal communities strong.

We have a lot more work to do, but we have made progress, and I am ready to keep up the work with my Democratic and Republican colleagues to pass a farm bill that delivers on this promise.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if my Democratic colleagues were really serious about addressing the crisis unfolding on our border, they would demand Senator Schumer immediately take up H.R. 2 instead of this counterproductive and excessively, at best, weak bill that would, if anything, only make matters worse along the border.

Sadly, they are not. We know that by their actions--their actions today--actions we have seen just moments ago. We are still encountering close to 180,000 illegal immigrants at our southern border each and every month. Since President Biden took office, there have been over 9.5 million illegal immigrant encounters nationwide. Those are just the ones we know about. The actual estimates put it 12 to 13 million that may have crossed illegally. Over 350 individuals on the terrorist watchlist have been stopped while trying to cross the southern border. Over 27,583 citizens of communist China have been encountered at the southwest border in the last year alone.

By any metric, this administration has no interest in securing our border. In fact, quite to the contrary. The data suggests this administration wants as many illegal immigrants to enter the country as possible. My Democratic colleagues want us to pretend Republicans are somehow responsible for creating or prolonging the crisis. Why? Because we were unwilling to pass a bad immigration bill masquerading as a border security bill; a bill that would have normalized thousands of illegal entries at our border each month.

I continue to believe that H.R. 2 would solve most of our most vexing problems at our southern border. It is not that you have to have new legislation to fix it, but this would fix it. It would fix it because it would cabin President Biden's authority to allow this to continue to happen. He doesn't need legislation. He could do this all on his own.

But back to the point. If the Democrats were serious here, that is what Democrats would allow us to do is to take up and pass H.R. 2. Sadly, that offer was rejected moments ago. And so trying to find something that will work, I am offering a smaller, narrower bill; a bill that doesn't contain all the same provisions, but that would help alleviate the crisis by closing some of the most gaping loopholes in the law that are allowing this thing to continue. Again, cabining the President's discretion, forcing his hand so as to make it more difficult for him to perpetuate this cycle of illegal border crossings.

To be clear, this isn't the entire answer. But if my Democratic colleagues can't agree to those commonsense reforms found in H.R. 2, then if they can't agree to consider these reforms that are narrower than I am offering, how, honestly, can we take their concern about the border crisis seriously?

The Stopping Border Surges Act would address loopholes in our immigration laws which create some of the perverse incentives for illegal immigration. It would clarify that an adult cannot bring a child into this country expecting that child to be his or her ticket to avoid detention. This bill would help eliminate the disturbing recycling of children and babies by coyotes and by international drug cartels. It would allow all unaccompanied children to be returned to their home countries, thus ending the incentive for parents to send their young children here alone.

Sadly, we see what is happening to those children under the supervision of the Biden administration and Secretary Mayorkas. They are trafficked either into child slavery, sex slavery, as drug mules, or some combination of the above.

My bill would require the Department of Health and Human Services to provide the Department of Homeland Security with biographical information about the persons to whom children are released. It would require asylum seekers to apply for and be denied asylum in at least one safe country on their route to the United States. It would combat the Biden administration's obliteration of the credible fear standard by tightening that standard back to where it should be. The correct application of this standard is pivotal to operation of our asylum system; for it to be there for those who need it and are entitled to it while protecting it from being abused as it has been. It has been corrupted over the last 3\1/2\ years. More recently, it has gotten much, much worse. In fact, the Biden administration has, you might say, destroyed it entirely. We must fix it. We have an obligation to do so.

This Stopping Border Surges Act would also close loopholes and restrict asylum to aliens who present themselves at an official port of entry. We must eliminate the loopholes, not allow this administration to continue to expand them and, indeed, to make more of them.

Congress must take back the authority to establish law. We can start that today with the Stopping Borders Surges Act. Ending the ambiguities in our current law will help mitigate the situation at the border and prevent unaccountable bureaucrats from acting with impunity as the despots in miniature that they have become to enforce their own policy preferences at their own will and whim.

So I urge my colleagues to support what I am about to do here, which is to ask that we consider this bill. Keep in mind, just a moment ago, I had colleagues offer up to pass by unanimous consent H.R. 2. I am offering a narrower, more targeted fix and I am asking unanimous consent, not that it be passed right now, but just we be allowed to consider it. We bring it up, we debate it and discuss it, and dispose of it with votes.

To that end, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 685 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, this is unfortunate. Keep in mind what just happened here. I asked not that we pass this bill but that we move to its consideration, that we be allowed to debate it, discuss it, and ultimately dispose of it through votes after having an opportunity to review its merits and to consider amendments. That, too, drew an objection even though this would allow the body to work its will through amendments, and we could get to a point where perhaps we could agree on something.

Instead, we see absolute fealty pledged to this bill, what is being referred to as the bipartisan bill. Now, with all due respect to those who negotiated it, keep in mind, Senators in the room were two Members of the Democratic caucus and one Republican, and then you add to that the White House--a significant player even if you don't weight the White House as more than just one Senator equivalent. Putting it generously, this is a 3-to-1 negotiation. Yet this negotiation went on for many months. During most of that time, most of us were unaware of what was being discussed. As soon as the details started to leak out, as soon as we started to become aware of them, many of us started publicly and privately expressing our concerns, first in private and then in public.

Look, separate and apart from what the 45th President of the United States had to say about it, many--I would say most of us in the Senate Republican conference had already formed our opinions and decided to oppose the bill based on its own terms long before the 45th President of the United States weighed in on it. Long before Donald Trump said a word about this, we were concerned. We always would have been concerned even had he not weighed in, based on the merits of the bill.

Look, the bill itself didn't do what it was supposed to do, and it kept referring to one of my colleagues as the designated authorized representative. Well, when you are authorized and designated as a representative of one or more individuals--in this case, 49 individuals--that still presupposes that you are negotiating something consistent with their express desires and subject to their approval.

When at last we became aware of the details of it, we decided this is not nearly what we talked about, not what we ordered, and so we rejected it. Again, this was underway long before President Trump ever said a word about it. So it isn't accurate to describe this bipartisan bill--which, by the way, at the end of the day, received only 4 out of 49 Senate Republicans supporting it on the Senate floor. I believe it would probably receive less than that even today. It is minimally bipartisan at best.

Now, as to the suggestion that my bill, the Stopping Border Surges Act, and bare consideration of it--not just that it be passed into law but that we be allowed to even consider it--he says that it somehow targets vulnerable people, including children, for inhumane treatment. Do you know what is inhumane? What is inhumane is perpetuating a system that incentivizes the kidnapping, the renting, the borrowing, the leasing, the recycling of children for the purpose of creating a ruse by which adults can avoid detention, sometimes sending the same kids back through the system over and over and over again as if they were poker chips or something like that. Look, children are not props. Children certainly are not there as currency to facilitate illegal immigration.

Are there human rights violations? Yes. Constantly, incessantly, directly as a result of this. Somewhere between, I don't know, 35 percent at the low end and 65 percent at the high end of the women and girls who are trafficked into this country by the drug cartels--which are making tens of billions of dollars a year under the Biden administration's deliberately lax policy--are subjected to rape, to sexual assault, in many cases, to sex slavery.

In many instances, people can't afford the many thousands of dollars they have to pay to the cartels in order to be trafficked, so what do they do? Well, they work it off. How do they work it off? They do what they can, what they are told to. In many circumstances, we know exactly what that means.

So don't talk to me about this being an inhumane bill. This is a bill that would stop the inhumanity. This is a bill that would tighten the restrictions so that this doesn't happen anymore, so that kids aren't recycled, so that they are not kidnapped, sold, borrowed, rented, and recycled as props to facilitate illegal immigration.

Anyone who suggests this is humane isn't looking at the reality of the circumstances and at the lives lost even before you get to the Americans whose lives have been ended or have ended in tragedy or met with tragedy unnecessarily by people who should never have been in this country to begin with and then carry out crimes--some too heinous to describe on the Senate floor. Even before you get to those Americans who have met tragically with fate in those ways, just look at the inhumane treatment received by those who are being trafficked.

The humane thing to do here is not to perpetuate this cycle. There is nothing humane about allowing human beings to be trafficked on this scale, enriching international drug cartels whose object is lucre and whose means inevitably involve violence. Shame on all of us if we don't do this. Shame on the Senate for not being willing. Shame on the Senate Democrats not being willing today even to consider a bill that would bring that to an end.