Becca Balint

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representatives Torres and Jayapal for their leadership. I am very happy to speak here tonight on an issue that is so important to so many Americans.

I want to talk about power tonight, Mr. Speaker. Before I came to Congress, I was a public school teacher. I can tell you, when you are a teacher, you have a lot of power over the young people in your classroom. You set the rules. You decide when to speak and when to listen. You can make students feel seen or feel small. I learned very quickly that the more power that you have over someone, the greater responsibility you have to them.

This is the lesson that this administration hasn't learned. Right now, we are watching our government exercise enormous power over people who have almost none, and they are doing it carelessly, with deadly consequences. Since President Trump took office, 56 people have died in ICE custody.

This is a failure beyond measure. Every one of those people was a human being: someone's mother, someone's father, someone's child, someone who others had been waiting to come home, our friends, our neighbors, our family.

When a government, our government, takes someone into custody, it is making a commitment. It is a commitment that while you are in our care, we are responsible for you. If you are sick, we have a responsibility to give you access to healthcare. If something goes terribly wrong, we have a responsibility to tell your family the truth about what happened quickly and transparently.

There is no immigration status that changes that or makes a human being disposable or expendable. In a democracy, dignity and due process are not optional. There is a lot of talk in this Chamber all the time about who belongs in this country, but tonight I will ask you this: What do we owe the people whose lives we have put in our hands?

We owe them due process. We owe them care. We owe them dignity. We owe their families the truth. When we fail them, we owe them accountability.

In this room, we have a responsibility, too. We must stop funding a lawless and chaotic immigration enforcement system that has treated human lives as expendable. We have to use our power.

Every government official who has abused their power and contributed to this horrific death toll must be held accountable.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the Republican reconciliation bill.

While American families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, and groceries, Republicans are proposing to spend more than $150 billion on immigration enforcement, roughly $59 billion for detention and deportation operations.

Working families right now can't afford a doctor's visit, and Republicans are worried about multiplying our budget for detention facilities--not lowering healthcare costs, not giving relief to families who are struggling with obscenely high insurance premiums, but instead giving even more money to ICE and Border Patrol.

This bill says that while American families pay nearly $27,000 a year for health insurance costs, Congress should prioritize spending even more on ICE detention beds. Healthcare costs are rising faster than wages for many Americans, and this is what we are focused on? It is incredibly screwed up.

This administration wants you to believe that people who don't look like you or don't sound like you are the source of your financial struggles. Trump and his allies do this so you don't see that their policies benefit billionaires and greedy corporations that have hollowed out the middle class in this country. Don't believe them, not for a minute.

We should be lowering healthcare costs. We should be investing in the working families in our communities across this country.

Mr. Speaker, we should be lowering costs and investing in the

working families and communities across this country, not weaponizing our government to go after the most vulnerable.

Mr. Speaker, the President has created an entirely corrupt slush fund to give money to his allies, including the violent attackers who beat police officers on January 6.

This is not a settlement as the President keeps calling it.

Mr. Speaker, you can't spring an absurd $10 billion lawsuit against an agency in your own government then instruct your lackeys at the Department of Justice to make a deal with the other agency to drop your ridiculous lawsuit that you brought in the first place in exchange for a $1.7 billion illegal fund for payouts to your political allies.

This is not a settlement. It is theft. The President is illegally taking our money, taxpayer dollars, to give to his friends, his allies, and his foot soldiers for their craven loyalty.

Former Capitol Police Officers have already filed a lawsuit to stop it. I am cosponsoring a bill to put an end to this disgusting, illegal corruption.

Let's be clear: Congress on both sides of the aisle must say ``no'' to this President.