Christopher Murphy

Mr. President, there is a great divide right now--a pretty significant divide right now--between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the way that ICE is enforcing our immigration laws in the interior. Democrats believe that what is happening today is both illegal and immoral, and that is why, right now, these operations are being funded through reconciliation--because we believe that it is our constitutional obligation to refuse to fund an Agency that is out of control and not in compliance with the law. Republicans broadly have supported the actions of this administration as they target both immigrants without documentation and legal immigrants for arrest and detention.

I am going to offer a request to pass a bill by unanimous consent that does not seek to repair that divide. Instead, it seeks to try to bring us together on a very narrow question, a question that arises from a set of incidents that have happened in my State of Connecticut over the course of the last month and a half.

On the morning of August 26, the second day of school for most school districts in Connecticut, in Danbury, CT, busdrivers began reporting to the school district that they had noticed the presence of ICE agents in and around schoolbus stops. At one of them, a constituent of mine, a father, was waiting at the schoolbus stop with his 6-year-old son and, just moments after saying goodbye to his son for the second day of school and even before the schoolbus had fully driven away, ICE arrested and detained him.

This practice was reported all around the State: ICE gathering at schoolbus stops, waiting until a young child had boarded the schoolbus, and then detaining and arresting the parent.

For parents in this body, you know how anxious that first day of school is, how kids are just brimming with nervous anxiety about that first day, and you know what that feels like to watch your kid walk onto that schoolbus.

Well, what do you think it does to those kids on that first and second day of school to see ICE officers at the schoolbus stop? Imagine that 6-year-old who boarded the schoolbus, when he got back from school that day, got off, and his parent wasn't there--a 6-year-old, feeling like he had been abandoned. In this case, he may or may not have seen the arrest because it happened almost immediately after he got on.

To me, it is pretty obvious that the intent here with this new practice of ICE showing up at schoolbus stops is to traumatize the children. But you don't have to agree with me that the intent is to traumatize the children to just come to the conclusion that ICE does not need to be at schoolbus stops in order to enforce the law. There are a myriad of other settings in which ICE can operate to carry out arrests while staying clear of schoolbus stops, where the intent or at least the result of those operations is to leave little kids in trauma.

Now, I have introduced three pieces of simple legislation to say that ICE should not operate at daycare centers, they shouldn't operate at children's playgrounds, and that they shouldn't operate at schoolbus stops. I am asking unanimous consent today for only one of those pieces of legislation that I think is the most urgent. And while I don't expect the result to be agreement, I had hoped that we could find agreement on this narrow question: that ICE should just stay away from schoolbus stops; ICE shouldn't be traumatizing children at schoolbus stops, taking parents in the middle of the schoolday--because there are so many other ways that ICE could operate so as to detain the people that they feel that they need to detain without it being done in this deeply traumatic way.

In fact, we came close to getting an agreement on a similar proposal before negotiations broke down over DHS funding. Senator Blumenthal, my colleague, has a piece of legislation that is even broader than the three bills I am proposing. The idea is that there should just be a ban on the operation of ICE at sensitive locations, which would include places where children gather but also would include other sensitive locations like churches. And I know my Republican colleagues were close to agreeing to that before these negotiations broke down.

And so, today, I am taking a small slice of that broader proposal and just asking my colleagues: Can we come to an agreement that schoolbus stops should be off limits? Can we decide to have compassion for that 6-year-old child who got on the bus for a second day of school and, when he got back off the bus, was abandoned?

The last point I will make is this: While that practice is bad enough, it is important to note that ICE tried to cover up the practice. When they were presented with these stories from Danbury, DHS doubled down and said: Any claim that ICE targeted parents at a schoolbus stop is false. But then, just days afterward, we had the video evidence.

This often happens: ICE says something didn't happen, and then we have the video proving that it did. In Danbury's case, we have two separate videos taken from the schoolbus showing ICE operating at the schoolbus stop and detaining this parent.

So my hope is that we can come together and just make a decision that, while we have big differences over the broader issue of ICE enforcement, ICE should stop preying upon our kids at sensitive locations; in particular, schoolbus stops.

Mr. President, and so, my motion is this: notwithstanding rule XXII, and as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 5435; I further ask consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, just three final points. I think Senator Banks articulates the Republican position, which is that immigrants are by definition a safety threat to the United States of America, and that is just not true.

I don't draw an issue with the fact that there are immigrants who commit crimes, but there are natural-born citizens that commit crimes at higher rates than immigrants do.

The fact of the matter is that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than people who were born here in the United States. We should just keep people safe in this country no matter the country of origin or birth of the perpetrator.

Second, I think you can make the decision that ICE should be able to operate in the interior while keeping certain sites off limits. In fact, this was the Trump administration policy in the first term.

So Republican administrations in the past have come to the decision that certain sites should be off limits for ICE. In fact, when I talk to Trump supporters in Connecticut, who broadly do support the President's immigration policy, they also believe that they went too far in Connecticut. There were a lot of Republicans who showed up at our big rally the day after this incident happened.

So it is not true that you can only support robust enforcement operations in the interior if you support ICE being even at schoolbus stops.

And then finally, I will be honest with you, I did not anticipate that one of the arguments against this bill would be that it would lead to the development of sanctuary bus stops.

What do we imagine here? People are going to live at bus stops? We are going to have encampments around bus stops of people who are here without documentation?

I just think it is an example of how this whole debate has gone way off the rails. It is just fundamentally detached from the reality. You want to support Trump's immigration policy--you can do that while still saying that we shouldn't have ICE officers patrolling schoolbus stops with the purpose of traumatizing little children. That could be a consensus position, and we could choose to still disagree over the broader Trump immigration policy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the legislation that we're going to be voting on tonight is predicated on a simple idea, the idea that college sports is in crisis and that it requires a fairly extraordinary act of legislative intervention to address this crisis.

I am speaking in opposition to this bill, and I think it is important to start by answering the question: Is college sports in crisis? Is it in chaos, as Senator Cruz is fond of saying?

Well, the facts don't back up that characterization of college sports. I am a huge college sports fan. I watch a lot of college basketball, a little bit less but still a lot of college football, and I know that there are more people than ever showing up to these games and watching the games.

The Big Ten just signed a $13 billion contract to broadcast its games. The revenue of the NCAA, broadly, is at an alltime high. The SEC and the Big Ten are both making over a billion dollars. Women's sports is growing--92,000 people recently filled the stadium to watch a women's volleyball match. Schools are adding, not subtracting, women's programs.

In fact, more people are paying attention to college sports than ever before. College sports is growing both on the men's and the women's side.

And so, what is this crisis? Well, the crisis, it appears to me, is pretty simple. Young athletes who perform a service that would be worth billions in the free market are finally getting what they lawfully deserve. A system

of exploitation--an illegal system of exploitation--in which the colleges and their industry allies colluded to keep as much of the $13 billion that the college sports industry generates for themselves, that system started to crumble because courts--as high as the Supreme Court--came to the inevitable conclusion that that system of exploitation was illegal.

Justice Kavanaugh, in a 9 to 0 decision, says the current NCAA model is ``suppressing the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges [each] year.'' Ruling 9 to 0, essentially, that that system was unlawful.

And so this system of collusion by the colleges designed to keep the compensation of athletes as low as possible, it was ruled illegal is essentially what happened here.

And the industry had two choices. They could either work out a new set of rules with the athletes. That is generally what has to happen if you want industry-wide rules that limit compensation, that limit that applicability of a free market. You have to negotiate with your employees--in this case the athletes--or you could come to Congress and get your illegal system deemed legal.

And that is what we are essentially doing here today. We are taking a system that the Supreme Court said could not persist under our law, and we are changing the law to allow that illegal system to persist.

How do we know that this bill is about solving that narrow crisis that I identified, that crisis of college athletes finally making money, and the adults in charge of the system not liking that the kids were making money?

Well, the first way we know that is that the bill does really nothing to stop the runaway overall costs of college athletics, in particular, some of the biggest drivers of costs being facilities and the salaries of adults. Let us just take one example. And I see my friend from Louisiana is on the floor, currently.

Just last week, LSU's president said the school's sports program is projected to carry a $26 million deficit, and the president said ``We have got to stop that bleeding.'' A $26 million deficit.

But LSU just agreed to pay their new coach Lane Kiffin $91 million over 7 years, along with other bonuses to him like 65 hours of private jet travel, temporary housing, courtesy vehicles. LSU also just paid a buyout of over $53 million to the coach they fired. In fact, last year, the buyouts for just three coaches at LSU totaled over $169 million, six times the annual operating deficit of the entire athletics program.

So if you want to know what is driving the deficit at these big schools, it is not simply the amount of money they are paying the students. Those numbers are dwarfed by the amount of money that is going to coaches and the facilities.

But yet, this bill constricts only--only caps--the money going to the players. It does nothing to cap the money going to the coaches. It does nothing to stop the continued billions of dollars going in to feed this facilities' arms race.

Second, what about the antitrust exemption? Why is that in the bill? Well, certainly not to help athletes. This antitrust exemption will allow schools in some cases to continue their practices that compromise athlete safety because now they have a broad antitrust exemption to do that. Perhaps we will pass an amendment that will help with that later today.

What it primarily is in the bill for is to allow the schools to be able to bargain collectively in order to get a better TV deal. If the schools don't have to worry about antitrust law, one of the things they can do is join together across conferences to bargain for additional TV revenue. And in this bill, only one-fifth of the revenue that comes in will have to be shared with the athletes. Whereas, in the professional leagues, about 50 percent of the revenue, including TV revenue, goes to the athletes.

So, the antitrust exemption allows the schools to make a whole lot more money, and other provisions in the bill allow the schools to keep that money for themselves rather than share it in the same way that professional leagues might share it with the athletes.

And then what about the transfer restrictions in the bill? Why do those only apply to players? I admit that the current system in which players can move from one school to the next every year is probably not in the best long-term interests of the sport.

But if the goal is really to control costs, that provision would apply to coaches as well because one of the ways costs go up is that coaches can freely move after every season from one program to the other, bidding schools against each other.

This bill says that a coach can't leave in the middle of the season, but that almost never happens.

The reality is this bill only says players can only transfer once without penalty. It doesn't say anything about coaches.

Now, as I said, I think that there are rules inside college athletics that don't make a lot of sense right now: unlimited transfers; the potential ability for pro players to come back to college. These agent fees look ridiculous to me.

But you don't need a bill of this sweeping scope to address what are a set of minor but important practices in college athletics that have gotten out of control.

We could have either passed a very narrow bill here to address the aging issue and the transfer issue, or we could have done what happens in most industries which is just say to the NCAA and to the colleges: Tough luck. Congress isn't going to come in here and micromanage your relationship with the athletes. If you want to work something out, sit down and talk to the athletes about it. If you want rules that apply across the industry, then do what every other industry does, which is have a dialogue with the workers.

Now, whether you want to admit that the athletes are workers or not, the Supreme Court has basically ruled that they need to be treated as such for compensation purposes.

And so we have two other options besides this sweeping bill that, in my belief, preserves this system of exploitation. We could have either passed a much more narrow bill that I think would have gotten even broader consensus here, would have had an easier time passing the House, or we could have just said: You know what? Congress doesn't want to get involved in litigating the details of the arrangement between players and coaches and schools. You guys work that out, just like we require every other industry to do this.

I think in the end, this bill, if it passes and becomes law, is actually going to be a long-term threat to college athletics. And I will just end here.

In the short run, I get it. It makes coaches' lives easier. They don't have to worry about players leaving if they are treated badly, if they are not compensated adequately. By Congress stepping in, dictating the terms with which students can play college athletics, it empowers coaches. But especially in football, where every single additional year you play, you are doing more damage to your brain, more damage to your ability to make money once you get into the pros, students are not dumb. They are not going to sit in college sports with a cap on their earnings and currently an inability to get to the pros until they have played 3 years of amateur athletics. They will find a way around college sports. That will be the primary impact of this artificial cap on compensation, this massive antitrust exemption for colleges. I think it may well, in the end, be the unwinding of college sports.

The way to save college sports is to admit that these kids provide an incredibly valuable service, as the Supreme Court has judged as well, and they deserve to be fairly compensated. That, in the long run, would have been the best way to have made sure that we preserve college sports, which I agree with my colleagues is worth preserving. One of the most basic, fundamental American pastimes is the ability for us to come together, no matter our religion, our race, or our political affiliation, to root for our State's team. That binds us together as Americans.

In the end, I think this bill--maybe not in the first few years but in the long run--will be a greater threat to the stability of college sports than doing nothing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am on the floor today to support yet another resolution to end the war in Iran.

Here is the latest poll regarding public support or approval. Eighteen percent of respondents--this latest CNN poll--say that President Trump's decisions around the war in Iran are helping the United States. Seventy percent of Americans say that his decisions around the Iran war are hurting Americans. That is a stunning number.

Basically, it is only the hard-core MAGA supporters that still believe this war is a good idea. Everybody else--Independents, Democrats, independent-thinking Republicans--have all decided that this body needs to vote to end this war. And it is not hard to figure out why.

Here is a chart that is familiar to my colleagues. This is the unreal spike in gas and diesel prices that has occurred solely because of this war.

If you are in Indiana right now, diesel is $7 a gallon. That is why farms are going bankrupt right now in the Midwest at record rates; the tariffs and the high price of diesel. But for American consumers who are just filling up their tank with gasoline, the same disaster: in California, above $6 a gallon; in many States, above $5 a gallon. And it is just going up and up and up.

But Americans also see this has been a national security disaster for the country. It has obviously been an economic nightmare. Mortgage rates are at 7 percent again, by the way, if you hadn't noticed. That is because of the war, primarily; the tariffs as well.

But Americans oppose this war 70 to 18 in the current poll because they know that it is hurting our national security. We have not had a resolution on the floor in a number of weeks.

So I just want to talk about four things that have happened in the last few weeks that show how this war is spiraling and spiraling out of control. Every single day, this war becomes more dangerous for the region, more of a disaster for the United States.

One of the things that the administration said that was a motivating factor for the war was getting rid of Iran's missiles. I don't know how many times we heard Secretary Hegseth tell us that the goal was to destroy Iran's missiles and missile capacity. And back in April, he claimed that they had functionally destroyed--that is his word-- ``functionally'' destroyed Iran's ability to make new missiles.

Well, the Wall Street Journal just reported that Iran is producing ballistic missiles again at scale. And we only were able to eliminate around 30 percent of the missiles. They have most of their stockpiles from before the war, and now they are producing missiles. Again, satellite imagery shows that Iran is rebuilding bridges and roads to production sites; they are restoring tunnel entrances; and they are building capacity again.

Iran is building missiles again. This is the whole reason we were going into the war--a total failure--to eliminate Iran's missile capacity.

What is the strain on our servicemembers? Well, we just learned this week that eight Navy sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have attempted suicide. Two of those sailors, as we all know, tried to jump overboard to end their lives. This is a ship that has been without a port call--was without a port call for 286 days. That is abdication of leadership, an abdication of the responsibility to care about our troops' safety by our Department of Defense leadership.

We have sailors and soldiers and airmen that are in crisis right now because we have put them in harm's way for far longer--for far longer-- than any brave man or woman who has signed up to defend this Nation deserves to be in harm's way.

We have a new war that has broken out. A new war has broken out in the last 2 weeks. This was totally predictable.

Everybody said: If you go to war with Iran, the Houthis are not going to stand put. They are going to start firing inside Yemen and at the Saudis, and that is exactly what has happened.

Drone strikes from the Houthis have knocked out Saudi Arabia's bypass pipeline earlier this month. They have seized control of routes along the Red Sea. And, functionally, the Red Sea is now shut down as a means for the Saudis to move oil out of the region. This is part of the reason why gas prices continue to go up.

The Strait of Hormuz is partially open again, but at what expense? Prewar, it cost a supertanker $200,000 to move through the strait. Today, it costs--this is a per-day cost. Today, it costs $1 million per day for a supertanker to move through the strait, five times the cost before the war. That alone adds $26 to the cost of each barrel of oil. So, even though we are moving some transit through the Strait of

Hormuz, it is at a cost that consumers can't afford.

Finally, there has been satellite imagery in the last few weeks that has shown new construction inside Iran around a complex called Pickaxe Mountain. This is probably their new, most important nuclear site. It looks as if they are digging a very deep bunker--deeper than Fordow--to restart their nuclear research program. As one expert said, the window to strike Pickaxe Mountain has already expired because the regime has dug so far underground that we can now not hit it.

So they are restarting the nuclear program. They are restarting their missile production program. We have not eliminated their drone capability. We are leading up to a mass suicide and self-harm crisis amongst our servicemembers. Costs are spiraling out of control for consumers and for farms. A new war is breaking out in the region that threatens the stability of the Middle East and further drives up gas prices.

That is why support for this war is at 18 percent in this country. We are supposed to be a democratic body that listens to the will of the people. The people--whether they are Republicans, Independents, or Democrats--are telling us loudly and unequivocally: End this war.

And it is not like we can't. This resolution is a chance for this body to end the war. So we are pleading, once again--it is the tenth time that we have had a resolution like this--for our colleagues to join us. The American public is making it clear: They can't handle the costs of this war, and they can't stand for the national security harm it is doing to the United States.

I yield the floor.