Floor Statements

Mr. President, The American Institute For Foreign Study--AIFS--which was founded in 1964 by Sir Cyril Taylor, is a global leader in cultural exchange and educational travel. For 60 years, AIFS, guided by its mission to ``bring the world together,'' has helped foster global understanding and cross-cultural communication among generations of young people.

From study abroad to the international au pair program, over 1.8 million people have participated in AIFS' high-quality educational and cultural exchange programming. In our increasingly interconnected world, these programs provide unique opportunities for young people to broaden their worldview and become globally minded citizens. AIFS also works in partnership with the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, including through their implementation of the au pair program, to advance public diplomacy and support lasting cultural ties between the U.S. and participating nations.

Headquartered in Stamford, CT, AIFS has offices in five countries and nearly 1,000 employees worldwide, including 100 in Connecticut. Under the leadership of its chairman, William L. Gertz, AIFS remains at the forefront of cultural exchange and educational programs with nearly 40,000 annual participants.

I am proud to congratulate AIFS on its six decades of success. May the next 60 years see AIFS continue its work building the next generation of global citizens.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I agree with the Senator from North Carolina that our priority as a nation and as a Senate should be negotiating the release of the hostages that Hamas currently holds. But the surest way to guarantee that those hostages never get released is to pass this resolution.

I get it. We may not like the fact that we have to be negotiating with a terrorist organization. We may not like the fact that someone in the region has to be the conduit for those talks. But we don't live in a world of fantasy; we live in a world of reality.

And the reality is, without Qatar playing a role, as they historically have, to try to unwind crises in the Middle East more broadly and specifically between Israel and Hamas, there is no existing alternative. If you don't want the hostages released, then pass this resolution.

Further, with great respect for my colleague, I think this resolution is fundamentally dangerous when it comes to protecting broader U.S. interests in the region.

We have 10,000 Americans right now based in Qatar, mostly at Al Udeid Air Base. That airbase allows the United

States of America to project power and to protect our interests throughout the region.

It is naive to think that you can pass a resolution downgrading our status with Qatar without there being an impact on that base, our personnel there, and our ability to use that base as a means to protect our interests around the region.

Qatar is the third largest customer of U.S. defense systems in the world. There are a lot of American jobs at stake when it comes to our relationship with Qatar. And the Qataris, over and over again, respond when America is in crisis. They housed more than 70,000 Afghans during the evacuation of our forces and of Afghan allies. Almost nobody else in the world would do that. But the Qataris said yes because the United States asked them.

They are an imperfect ally. They are an imperfect ally. This is a repressive regime with a bad history on human rights and worker rights, but they are a critical ally.

But more to the point of the Senator's resolution, the Senator's main critique is that Qatar hosts Hamas, a terrorist organization. I can understand why some bristle at that notion of an ally of the United States playing host to Hamas. Qatar plays host to Hamas because they were requested to do so by the United States. Hamas established an office there because the United States asked them to do that in 2012 because we knew we needed an ability to talk to Hamas.

Qatar played a contributing role in Egypt-led negotiations to get a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in 2014, 2019, and 2021. Why? Because we were able to talk to Hamas through their presence in Qatar.

And yes, Qatar has been a conduit to send money to Hamas. A lot of people may bristle at that notion, as well--our ally Qatar sending money to the Hamas political organization inside Gaza, as they have done for years. Qatar did that at Israel's request. Israel approved, in a security Cabinet meeting in 2018, an arrangement whereby Qatar, through their relationship with Hamas, would send money into Gaza ``in coordination with security efforts to return calm [in] villages of the south, but also to prevent a humanitarian disaster'' in Gaza. That was the Israeli position.

So I understand the discomfort of an ally having a relationship with Hamas. It has come at the request of the United States and at the request of Israel and is absolutely vital to protecting our ability to get hostages out.

If you want to make sure those hostages never leave, then cut off Qatar's role as an intermediary. You want to fundamentally harm U.S. interests in the region, you want to shut down our airbase, you want to eliminate the ability of Qatar to help us again when we are in need, as we were as we evacuated Afghanistan--then downgrade their status.

For those reasons, I object.

Mr. President, we have had a lot of good news in the last several months, over the last year. Unemployment remains at its lowest level ever. For the last 2 years, the unemployment rate has been under 4 percent. That is the longest stretch that we have had less than 4 percent of Americans without a job in 50 years. Inflation has cooled to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic. The U.S. economy is booming. We have seen it grow faster than any other large, advanced economy in the world. Crime is down. We saw a 12-percent reduction in urban gun violence in 2023. That is the biggest reduction in the history of the country in 1 year. That is a lot of good news if you look at the metrics that we normally look to when we assess the quality of our public policy.

But here is some other striking data: In a report released this week, we come to find that despite unemployment going down, despite inflation going down, despite GDP going up, Americans are more unhappy than anytime before. This year in the global happiness rating survey, the United States, for the first time since they started doing this survey, fell out of the top 20. We are now No. 23 in the world.

Even more worrying, amongst young people, the United States ranks 62nd in the world. This is reflected by other surveys that show over the last 10 years the rate of happiness and contentment and fulfillment self-reported by Americans dropped despite the fact that the economy is growing, more people have jobs, and crime is plummeting.

So I am on the floor for just a few minutes to ask this simple question: Should we care about this disconnect between the quality-of- life indicators that we normally look to to assess the measure of our public policy and self-reported rates of happiness? My answer is pretty simple: We should care because we are in the business of happiness.

I know that doesn't sound right, because your happiness comes from your personal decisions, the priorities that guide your day. America isn't--our government isn't in the business of delivering the last mile of happiness, but we absolutely are in the business of delivering the first mile of happiness. Why do we know that? Because that charge, that mission, is in our founding document. The Declaration of Independence says that amongst the inalienable rights enjoyed by all human beings is the right to pursue happiness. So that means that our job, charged to us by our Founders, is to set up rules of the economy, rules of society, rules of culture, that give people the best shot at achieving happiness.

So it is time that we take a big step back as policymakers and ask, if a job or rising GDP or a safe neighborhood isn't bringing people happiness, what does? And all I am suggesting today is that we engage in a conversation together--an apolitical, nonpartisan conversation--to try to discover the roots of American unhappiness, because it doesn't appear that just dialing the knobs of public policy to the right, as happened under Trump's Presidency, or to the left, under Biden's Presidency, is changing this long-term dynamic of more Americans reporting being unsatisfied with their lives.

Let me just tease this conversation with two routes to happiness that we don't talk enough about. The first is connection. In fact, if you look at longitudinal surveys of Americans' happiness, there is a seminal study done by Harvard where they study, over the course of 75 years, Americans of every income bracket, of every race and ask them questions every year: Are you happy, and, if so, why are you happy?

What they found and what many other surveys found is that it is not a job or career or how much money you make but your relationships--your connections to other human beings--that actually is most indicative, most predictive of whether you will report being happy and fulfilled in your life. And so it shouldn't be surprising or shocking to us that during a moment where more Americans are reporting feeling deeply lonely, we are also seeing more people reporting being unhappy.

There has been a sea change in this country, over the last 20 years, when it comes to the amount of time that we spend with other human beings, and the data is particularly acute for young people, but it is true of adults as well. We spend nearly half as much time today with other human beings in personal connection than we did just 30 years ago. That is a catastrophic decline in socialization.

There are lots of reasons for that, but many of them are connected to public policy choices that we have made. We decided not to regulate this transformative new technology called smartphones, nor the apps that dominate those smartphones, social media.

That technology has facilitated this withdrawal from socialization, from connection, from conversation.

We haven't meaningfully adjusted wages in this country. So people are being forced to work 70 hours now to enjoy the same quality of life that 40 hours of work would have 40 years ago. What does that mean? People are robbed of leisure time. So they can't connect with friends and neighbors through socialization in the evenings or on the weekends.

We have undermined the places where people often find connection, like downtowns, which are less healthy, less vibrant than ever before, as we created an economy where everybody just buys stuff from a set of big monopolistic, internationalized companies.

And so what we know is that feeling connected to other human beings, having strong relationships, is maybe most predictive of whether or not you are going to be happy, but we make public policy choices consistently to make connections harder, not easier. But we don't measure it. We don't measure it. Instead, we just measure things like unemployment and GDP, which are important, but not most predictive of whether people are going to be happy.

Let me give you a second way that people find a route to happiness, and that is living a life of purpose--knowing what your role is in the world and living a life that fulfills that role.

Well, let's be honest. Many of the ways in which people found purpose 50 years ago are not available to them today. One purpose, for instance, was passing along a better life to your kids, making sacrifices as an adult--tough, difficult sacrifices--but knowing that those sacrifices were going to allow for your child to be better off than you. Well, that purpose feels further away than ever before today because we have made it so hard for parents to be able to pass on that better life.

College is 400 percent less affordable today than it was in 1980. Economic mobility is more difficult than before, in part because we favor legacy admissions in colleges, in part because we allow for so much massive transfer of inherited wealth. Economic mobility is further away.

So we have robbed from individuals that sense of meaning and purpose, passing along a better life to your children. Other people found purpose in serving God, living a life in accordance with religious tradition, securing a place in the afterlife. But in a very short period of time, we went from 70 percent of people belonging to church to 50 percent of people belonging to church.

Now, I don't think there is a government solution to reverse that trend, but we need to admit that it is another example of how very quickly people have become unmoored from a place where they previously found all sorts of purpose and meaning. And if we are not talking about trying to create alternative places where people can find that purpose or, perhaps, working together to find a way to make those institutions, like churches, healthier places, then we are not connecting in to the roadways, to the pathways to happiness, connection, meaning, purpose.

I get it. These are hard topics for policymakers to talk about. They feel more natural for philosophers or academics or theologians. But our Founders told us in the Declaration of Independence that we need to be in the happiness business, and we have made some likely wrong assumptions about what leads people to happiness. We have become such a materialistic world, and we have become such a materially focused institution that we make an incorrect assumption that, by changing the rules of the economy, we are automatically providing people a route to happiness. But it is not always economic change. It is not always economic policy that provides people meaning, provides people purpose, makes people feel happy.

So these are the questions that I think we should be answering. I think it is a really lovely way for us to set aside some of the policy fights that have worn this place out.

What brings meaning? What brings purpose? What makes you feel happy? Ask those questions, and then let's let those answers guide the policies that we can work on together. I frankly think that we would be surprised to find out that inquiry and the policies that inquiry commends us to pursue might not divide us as much as policy arguments that currently dominate this business.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this is a perfect example of an amendment that does not deserve to be debated without real work and real bipartisan commitment.

This is a legitimate issue, making sure that we have notice when you have an individual in State or local custody, but this version of the amendment doesn't work. It likely violates the 10th Amendment. It likely violates the Fourth Amendment. It fundamentally misunderstands the statute it implicates--8 USC 1373.

There is a better way to do this in a bipartisan manner. In fact, a number of us just recently introduced legislation that would allow ICE to obtain a legal warrant when you have an individual in State or local custody to make sure that they end up being put into removal proceedings.

So let's continue to work on this very important issue. This is just the wrong way to do it, likely deeply unconstitutional.

Motion to Table

For that reason, I would move to table the motion to concur with Johnson amendment No. 1706.

I would ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, it has been deeply uncomfortable to be in such regular agreement with Senator Lankford on immigration policy. So it feels good to be back disagreeing with him.

This amendment is a bad idea for three reasons. One, it shuts down the government if it passes. Second, it is overly broad. What this really amounts to is a ban on individuals from certain country-- countries that tend to be Muslim countries--coming to the United States. But third and most important, it is unnecessary. It is duplicative. The Department of Homeland Security already has the power to deny entry to the country to anyone who is a public safety threat or a national security concern.

And so for those three reasons, I would urge my colleagues to oppose the bill.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks, Senators Stabenow and Wyden be permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes each prior to the scheduled vote.

So here is a snapshot of what happened. Republicans said that fixing the border was their top priority. They appointed a hardline conservative, my friend Senator James Lankford, to come up with a bipartisan bill to fix the border. They said that if Lankford can get the deal, they would support it.

We got that deal. If it had passed, it would have been the toughest border

security bill in our lifetime. Arguably, it would have been the toughest border security bill ever--$20 billion for border security, more detention beds, more patrol officers, more asylum officers, more equipment to intercept fentanyl, a new power for the President to close parts of the border when crossings get too high, an end to the era in which an asylum applicant could spend 10 years in the country before their application was heard.

It was tough. It would have helped to fix the border. It was a compromise. Get this: It was supported by the conservative pro-Trump Border Patrol union and the left-leaning association of immigration attorneys. The Washington Post was for it, and the Wall Street Journal was for it.

It was a true compromise, but within hours of the bill's release, Republicans killed it. When it came to the floor, only four Republicans voted for the bill they asked for.

It has now been 22 days since Republicans killed the toughest border security bill of our lifetime--a bipartisan bill that would have helped us control the border. Why did Republicans do this? Because Republicans do not want to fix the border. The secret is out. For Republicans, the border is a moneymaking grievance machine, and if we passed our border bill and fixed the problem, Republicans literally wouldn't know what to do with their days. FOX would lose ratings. Republican Senators would lose clicks and donors. Donald Trump would lose an issue to campaign on. What would some of my Republican Senate colleagues do with their weekends if they couldn't go down to the border and dress up as Border Patrol officers and scream about fake outrage? If the border bill passed, if the border was under control, Republicans might have to get hobbies.

If the bipartisan bill to control our border had passed, our border would be more orderly, our immigration system would be vastly improved, and America would be better off and more secure, but, yes, Republicans would lose their moneymaking grievance machine--the broken border.

That is what happened. Republicans killed the toughest bipartisan border bill that they have ever seen because they don't want to fix the border. They want to keep it a mess because they think it helps them politically.

Twenty-two days since Republicans killed the toughest bipartisan border security bill in over a decade.

Do you know who does want to fix the border? President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress. Joe Biden asked for those additional resources to hire more Border Patrol Agents, to build more detention capacity, and to install more technology at the border to interrupt the fentanyl trade. Joe Biden helped write the bipartisan border bill which gave him those new powers I talked about.

Today, Joe Biden is going to be at the border to talk about his agenda to put border security first but also to make other badly needed changes to our immigration system, like improving our asylum system and getting a pathway to citizenship for people who have been living in the shadows of our society for far too long.

Donald Trump is going to be at the border today, too, but for a different reason. Donald Trump does not see the border as a problem that needs to be fixed; Donald Trump sees the border as a problem to be exploited. He openly brags about instructing his followers here in the U.S. Senate to kill the bipartisan border bill because its passage would have been good for Joe Biden and the country.

To Joe Biden, the border is a serious issue that he wants to fix, and he has a plan to do it. For Donald Trump and Republicans, the border is just a moneymaking grievance machine that they refuse to solve.

The problem is, nothing can pass in Washington without Republican support. I know there are Republicans who voted for the bipartisan bill--only four--but the rule is that Republicans refuse to support more resources, more patrol officers, more detention beds, and the rule is that they will vote against any bipartisan legislation to make the border more secure.

So 22 days since Republicans killed the toughest border security bill during our time in the Senate, and unfortunately the border is going to remain unresolved so long as Republicans don't want to solve it.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to finish my remarks before the scheduled vote.

Madam President, my colleagues, I come to the floor today to celebrate a remarkable man, a really important friend of mine, an irreplaceable member of a community that is very important to me. Monsignor Robert Weiss--more affectionately known as Father Bob-- retired last month from his post at St. Rose of Lima Church in Newton,

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to complete my remarks before the scheduled recess.

Mr. President, this is unbelievable. Like, I can't believe this is happening. We were all here. This wasn't a dream. This really happened.

Republicans all stood up and said that they wanted a bipartisan bill to fix the border. The border is a priority. The border is a crisis.

We delivered a bipartisan bill to fix the border with the Republican Senator appointed by the Republican caucus to cut the deal. And within 24 hours, before the ink was even dry, Republican Senators decided they don't want a bipartisan bill to fix the border. They want to pretend they never asked for a bipartisan border bill because what they actually want is chaos because that is what Donald Trump says he wants. What the hell just happened?

Here is what happened--because the facts are just the facts. In October, Republicans refused to support funding for Ukraine. They voted against stopping Putin from making Kyiv a Russian city, not because they opposed Ukraine funding, they said, no, because they demanded that Ukraine funding be paired with bipartisan border reforms.

Democrats took them at their word. America took Republicans at their word that these two things had to be combined. Republicans appointed a lead negotiator--one of their most conservative Members, a serious legislator--Senator Lankford, an unquestioned border hawk.

I represented the Democratic caucus in those negotiations. Now, I will be honest with you, a lot of my friends told me that I was crazy. They told me that I was hopelessly naive, that Republicans are never going to agree to a bipartisan bill to fix the border. This is just a setup. You shouldn't go into the negotiating room. It is a trap. But I did because, you know what, I am an optimist, maybe a hopeless optimist.

I still believe that when people say things in this body, they mean what they say. And I do believe that the border is a mess. It is too chaotic. We can't handle 10,000 people crossing on some days.

And I believe the asylum system is broken, and my constituents, whether they be right or left, believe the asylum system is broken. It shouldn't take 10 years to process an asylum claim, especially when the majority of those asylum claims are ultimately rejected.

And so I went into the room skeptical that we could get a deal but sincere because my party actually wants to fix the problem at the border, and we are willing to reach out across the aisle and find a compromise in order to do it.

And so we met for months every day. We took Thanksgiving off. We took Christmas off. But that was it because Republicans told us that they wanted a bipartisan border deal. We met every Saturday, every Sunday. We worked straight through the holidays because we saw an opportunity to cut through the politics, to get a bipartisan agreement done, to finally start fixing the border.

We saw that opportunity because Republican Senators told the country that if we could find an agreement with their appointed negotiator on border policy, that they would support it, and they would support funding for Ukraine.

And against the odds, we made the deal. We actually achieved the compromise. And here is just a snapshot of what it does: It allows the President to close portions of the border on those days when 10,000 people are crossing, to funnel people who are applying for asylum in a much more orderly manner, to make sure that you don't have those chaotic scenes that we have watched on the news.

It reforms the asylum system, a comprehensive reform, so that it doesn't take 10 years to get your asylum claim adjudicated; it will take months. And it screens individuals so that no longer are we going to let people into the country who don't have a likely positive claim of asylum.

It allows more people to come into the country legally. We expand visas so that folks can find nonasylum pathways to come to the country or reunite with family or to work. It speaks to our values by making sure that the most vulnerable people who come to the country, like young, unaccompanied kids have an advocate standing next to them when they are making their case for an asylum claim.

It honors the commitment we made to our Afghan partners by allowing those individuals who are in the country today to have a pathway to citizenship. And it speaks to the nightmare in many cities where you have immigrants who can't work on the streets and in homeless shelters. It makes sure that we get more immediate work permits to individuals who do have legitimate claims for asylum.

This bill is not comprehensive immigration reform, but it would fix the crisis at the border. It would immediately give the President tools to start better managing the border.

We released the text of the bill on Sunday night at 7 p.m., the first serious bipartisan compromise on border policy in a decade, a breakthrough, a real chance for this Nation to come together on an issue--immigration--that too often divides us. And within 24 hours, by 7 p.m. Monday night, almost every single Senate Republican, including the Senate Republicans who set us on the mission 4 months ago, declared that they wouldn't support it. For some of them, it didn't even take that long.

When the text of the bill came out, Senator Lee tweeted that ``it's 370 pages long. Time to start reading.'' Three minutes later, he tweeted again that ``no self-respecting Senator should vote for this bill.'' That is either record time for reading a 370-page bill or, more likely, Senator Lee didn't even open the PDF.

What happened? How did Senate Republicans tell us they wanted a bipartisan bill only to end up opposing the very bill that they asked for?

Well, here is the simple truth, and there is no way around this: Republicans don't want to fix the border. They want the border to remain chaotic. They want the asylum system to remain broken because Republicans in this country don't view the border as a problem to fix anymore. They view it as a problem that needs to be exploited.

Senate Republicans have been pretty unapologetic about just wanting to keep this issue open as an election issue. Less than 24 hours after the text came out, one Senator launched killtheborderbill.com, a website to fundraise for his campaign. Senator Barrasso said today that he can't support the bill; that Americans should just go to the upcoming election to solve the border crisis.

Maybe I am a sucker. Maybe I should be mad at myself, but, yes, I believed that there were enough Senate Republicans of good faith who would actually support Senator Lankford's sincere efforts to work to achieve a bipartisan fix, but I was wrong.

Senator Lankford doesn't matter. What his colleagues have put him through is unforgiveable. Senator McConnell doesn't matter. The migrants and regular Americans who are getting screwed by a broken immigration system and a broken border don't matter. There is only one person who matters to Republicans, and his name is Donald Trump.

Donald Trump made it clear last month. He told Republicans they should oppose any bipartisan bill to fix the border, and he meant it. To Trump it didn't matter at all what the policy, what the substance was. His only advice was kill any bipartisan bill. Why? Because President Trump wants to win an election, and if the border is fixed by a bipartisan bill, then that hurts his reelection chances.

Trump wants chaos at the border because it helps him personally. He asked Republicans to back him, and nearly every single Senator did exactly that less than 48 hours after introduction of this bill.

This country should be outraged. Regular people out there don't think this is a game. They don't think that the only thing that matters is Donald Trump's election odds. They do think the border is broken.

They have spent the last 40 years hearing about how the border is a problem, but they don't see any action from Congress. They are sick of this, and they want the two parties to come together to fix the problem. And they are going to be furious to find out that when Republicans here had the chance to support a bipartisan bill that they requested, that they asked for, almost every single Senate Republican opposed that bill because Donald Trump wants to keep the chaos.

There used to be a difference between House Republicans and Senate Republicans. I used to explain this fact to my constituents all the time. I defended my Senate Republican colleagues. I explained how Trump doesn't control the Senate Republican caucus like he controls the House, but I don't think that is true any longer.

I think this conference is just as big a mess as the conference in the House. And that is terrible for the border, which will remain a wreck because Republicans have just chosen to keep it that way. That is terrible for Ukraine, which will soon be overrun by Russia because Republicans have chosen to leave it undefended.

And that is terrible for America because the one group of Republicans who used to be able to exercise original thought and independent judgment now just seems to be another subsidiary of the Trump campaign.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, this week is National Gun Violence Survivors Week.

I wanted to come down to the floor today to share with my colleagues the meaning and the impact of this week and the meaning and the impact of a national network of gun violence survivors on the debate to change the Nation's gun laws.

I also wanted to share with my colleagues some good news about what has happened over the course of the last year since the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. That is the first significant change in our Nation's gun laws in 30 years.

I want to start by talking about survivors. I want to start by talking about two people whom I have referenced on the floor of the Senate in prior speeches, two of my great friends in Hartford, CT--Sam Saylor and Janet Rice. Sam and Janet shared a son, Shane. Shane was a pretty incredible young man, not without challenges, but he had risen up and met those challenges over the course of his life.

On October 20 of 2012--just a month before the shooting at Sandy Hook--he became the 20th victim of gun violence in Hartford that year in a typically random act of violence. He was fixing up cars and selling them for a small profit.

He was transferring one of those cars to an acquaintance. His girlfriend was with him. Some coarse words were exchanged between the two parties about his girlfriend. A physical altercation broke out, which caused Luis Rodriguez to go to his car where he had a gun--an illegal gun. He took it out, and he shot Shane Oliver, essentially after an exchange of words about Shane's girlfriend. Shane collapsed to the floor. When he reached the hospital, he was dead--20 years old with his whole life ahead of him. He left behind a network of survivors--his parents--but also a daughter, Se'Cret.

Both Sam and Janet went into the work of preventing gun violence. They joined advocates in Hartford to try to create a reality in which that kind of random death--that kind of random gun violence--wouldn't be a reality any longer in Hartford, and they devoted themselves to that work. Janet joined an organization that responded to shootings to try to interrupt the cycles of violence that often happened in Hartford. So she has spent much of the last several years responding-- on a nightly basis often--to episodes of violence and to shootings.

In April of last year, she got a phone call to respond to a shooting that had happened. She got in her car, and she headed for that scene. As she was driving there, she got a second call from her supervisor, who told her to pull over.

He said: Janet, you can't be driving when you hear this news. The young woman who was shot, who you are going to respond to, is your granddaughter--Shane's daughter.

Se'Cret died that night. A couple of days later, I went to her funeral.

That is what is going on out there in the world today, right? For Sam and Janet, they lost Shane, and then a decade later, they lost Shane's daughter. I wish that their story was the anomaly, but it is not. There are thousands of families in this country who have lost multiple loved ones--brothers and sisters, daughters and granddaughters--to this epidemic of gun violence.

So, in this week in which we commemorate the survivors, it is important to understand the depth of this tragedy; but it is also important to celebrate the work that these survivors have done, because over the past 10 years, in particular, through a number of organizations in this country, survivors like Sam and Janet and many others have come together to demand that Congress and State legislators and mayors and city councils do something to stop this reality in which parents and grandparents have to lose sons and granddaughters to gun violence.

Last year, we finally stepped up to the plate and did something, in part because of the advocacy of all of those survivors. We passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Our theory was that, if we make a big change in the Nation's gun laws to make it a little bit harder for dangerous people to get their hands on dangerous weapons, well, then, we can try to make a dent in the epidemic levels of gun homicide in this country.

Now, I have said all of this while standing next to this chart so you know of the success story that I am about to tell you. Last year, urban homicides in this Nation fell by 12.1 percent. That is the biggest 1- year reduction in urban homicides in the history of the United States of America.

Now, is that a cause for celebration? No, because there are still far too many people in this country who are dying at the hands of gun violence, but we should appreciate the fact that a 1-year 12-percent reduction in urban homicides is proof that, when you change the laws of the country, our communities get safer.

So I want to talk to you, just for a moment, about what happened over the past year. Urban homicides fell by 12 percent. Gun-related injuries and deaths all across the country have fallen by 10 percent--again, just an absolutely remarkable 1-year reduction: a 10-percent reduction in gun injuries and gun deaths in a 1-year period of time. The reason that this is happening is, in part, because we have changed the law.

One of the things that happened over the course of this last year is we have started to get a lot more careful about selling guns to young buyers. So we have had a number of young buyers in this country who have been disqualified from buying an assault weapon. Often, those young buyers are in crisis, and by stopping hundreds of young people from buying assault weapons--because we found out through the provisions of this bill that they were in crisis--we have likely interrupted many mass shootings.

Second, we have a lot more prosecutions of gun traffickers because we made gun trafficking a Federal crime. So hundreds of prosecutions have been successfully completed over the last year against gun trafficking rings. That means there are less guns in our city that are being trafficked on the black market.

We have more red flag laws in this country and stronger red flag laws, in part because we put money into the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to encourage States to adopt and strengthen their red flag laws. These are the laws that take guns away temporarily from people who are in crisis or who are making threats against other community members. Those red flag laws have become more important.

We have put out the door $438 million for community anti-gun violence work, like the work that Janet Rice and Sam Saylor do. So there are dozens of anti-gun violence organizations in our cities that are receiving money to help them interrupt violence.

We have sent billions of dollars out the door for additional mental health services, particularly targeted at young people, who are often the primary victims and the primary perpetrators of gun crime in this country.

I can't tell you that this 12 percent reduction in urban homicides is completely due to the implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. I can't tell you that. But what I know is that if you look at the trajectory of violence in this country over time, the biggest drops have always happened right after Congress does a better job of regulating firearms. The two biggest drops in violence in this country's history are right after the 1930s gun control act and right after the 1990s Brady bill and assault weapons ban.

Whether this trend continues, I don't know, but if it does or even if we get a 6-percent reduction next year and an 8-percent reduction the next year, this could represent the third giant reduction in violence rates in this country's history. If that is the trajectory, then a piece of that story is the bipartisan legislation we passed.

As we commemorate Gun Violence Survivors Week, it is important to remember that when you lose a loved one, especially in that sudden violent way, to gun violence, there is no repair; there is no recovery; your life never returns to normal.

After Janet lost Shane, she didn't leave her house for months, wouldn't leave her house for months. When she finally did start leaving her house, often she would do it in this manner: Often late at night, when the streets of Hartford were quiet, she would get in her car, and she would drive from her home to the site that Shane was shot. She actually got to see Shane alive after he was shot; she held him in her arms as he bled out. She would go to that site, which is just two blocks away from where I live today in Hartford, and she would turn on her high beams, and she would wait.

When she told me the story, I asked her: What are you waiting for? What were you waiting for?

She said: I was waiting for Shane to come back.

She would go to the site where he was shot, where he bled to death in her arms, and she would turn on her high beams in hopes that maybe Shane would come back.

That just gives you one single window into what life is like for a mother when she loses a son or a daughter to gun violence.

Survivors of gun violence--those who have lived through a shooting or those who have lost loved ones in a shooting--their lives are changed forever. This week, we pay tribute to them by recognizing the work they have done to rattle the conscience of this country, to change the gun laws of this country in a historic way, leading to the largest ever 1- year drop in urban homicides in this country's history.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I have four requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. President, the weapons that we send to Ukraine aren't used in military parades. They don't sit in warehouses. They are used by the Ukrainians to fend off the brutal Russian invasion of that country. They are used by Ukraine to maintain that country's sovereignty and independence.

At the height of the summer offensive, Russia was firing 10,000 artillery rounds per day at Ukraine. In response, Ukraine was firing back 7,000 rounds per day. But by the end of last year, just a few weeks ago, Ukraine's stocks were so low that they were firing just 2,000 rounds per day. Russia is still firing 10,000 rounds per day.

I want my colleagues to step back for a moment and imagine you are in a duel with an opponent where, in each round, your opponent has five bullets for every one that you have. You are not going to survive that fight. That is not a fair fight. Soon, you won't even have one bullet. How long do you think that fight continues for you?

Right now, ammunition levels are so low that a Ukrainian artillery brigade that used to fire 50 to 90 shells per day is now forced to ration its supplies down to 10 to 20 shells per day. That is barely enough for them to just defend themselves, let alone push forward or reclaim any additional territory.

And it is not just ammunition that Ukraine desperately needs right now. It is supplies for their air defense system as well.

For 2 years now, Russia has not had air superiority, except once, in the city of Mariupol, and there Russian bombs flattened the city. In 2 months, 95 percent of the city was destroyed, and 25,000 people were killed. But, elsewhere in Ukraine, the casualties are much more limited because Russian planes were being shot down.

So, perhaps, it is no coincidence that, just a few days ago, Russia launched a major missile barrage at Kyiv in what was the single largest attack since the start of the war.

Why do I say that perhaps it wasn't a coincidence? Well, maybe it is because Russia is pushing all its chips in on a bet that Ukraine is not only going to run out of ammunition, but it is going to run out of air defense missiles.

And with no American funding to replenish those systems, Russia would then be able to destroy the missile defense batteries themselves, finally giving them a free hand to completely decimate every single Ukrainian city. They will apply the Mariupol tactics--the Mariupol playbook--to Odessa, to Kharkiv, and to Kyiv. And millions will die, and Kyiv will become a Russian city.

While this body hesitates to resupply Ukraine, Russia is putting one- third of its entire budget for 2024 toward its war effort. Russia is receiving new ballistic missiles, artillery rounds, military equipment, and attack drones from its allies--North Korea, China, and Iran. And yet we are still deciding whether we, as Ukraine's primary ally, are going to support them in the fight to come.

I just want to remind my colleagues what is at stake in this fight. We are making a decision, as we speak, right now, as to whether Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, or whether Ukraine, once again, is a Russian state, a Russian vassal, a Russian province; whether Kyiv is an independent city or whether Kyiv is a Russian city.

Never before in our lifetime has a large, nuclear-armed nation like Russia invaded a neighboring country with the sole purpose of destruction, annihilation, and annexation. If they succeed, if Kyiv does become a Russian city, the post-World War II order is over. It is over, and no one here is really prepared to deal and live with those consequences.

The rules that have governed the past 70 years and that have provided us with relative global stability, the rules that have protected our country and our economy, which relies on a stable global system--they will all be permanently broken. Consider the Pandora's box open.

I wish it were hyperbole to say that the fate of the free world is at stake, and I wish we weren't in a position where my Republican colleagues, who say that they support Ukraine, weren't making funding for Ukraine dependent on solving one of the most vexing, most difficult political issues in American politics: the issue of immigration and border policy. But that is where we are.

My Republican colleagues say they will let Vladimir Putin destroy and occupy Ukraine if we can't come to a conclusion on immigration policy and border policy. I wish we weren't here, but we are. And so Democrats are at the table trying to find a compromise that helps the Biden administration and future administrations better manage the situation at the border while also living up to our fundamental American values.

I wish we weren't here. I wish we could just all say that we believe it is in the interest of the United States of America to support Ukraine, to make sure that they have what they need to defend themselves, and we are going to get that job done. And we are going to sit down and try to work together on the crisis of a broken immigration system. Tying the two together in this way threatens to become the biggest gift America has ever given Vladimir Putin.

Immigration

And so, Mr. President, I want to focus the remaining part of my remarks today on what I think we can do to help the administration manage the border, but I also want to tell you what I think we cannot and should not do--the changes to immigration law that would fundamentally compromise our Nation's values and our moral underpinnings as a nation built by immigrants.

I think it is easy for us here in Washington to forget, when we are talking about asylum, that we are often talking about a life-and-death choice for people. We are talking about men, women, and children who are not safe in their home countries, who will die if they stay, who don't want to leave their family, their neighbors, everything that they know. But they are so desperate that they feel they have no choice but to make the often life-threatening journey to the United States of America.

We are talking about people like Sandra Gutierrez. She lived in Honduras, and, like any parent, Sandra wanted to make sure that her kids were safe at the school they attended every day, but they weren't. They were under regular threat from armed gangs.

So she joined together with her local parents board in her Honduran town and started working with other moms to try to get the violent gangs that were a constant presence at her kids' school away from the campus.

But guess what happened to Sandra. That work made Sandra a target. These armed gangs stalked her. They hunted her. They threatened to kill her and her children if she didn't stop and if she didn't meet their demands. And so she did what any of us would do, what any parent would do. She protected her children. She left Honduras, where she would be hunted by these gangs, and she came to find asylum in the United States of America.

It is people like Aliyah, a journalist in Cameroon, who wrote powerful stories exposing discrimination by the Cameroonian Government and sexual assaults committed by powerful people in her country. She reported the truth, and that made her a target. She was attacked, beaten, detained, and imprisoned, not by gangs but by her own government.

After she escaped and fled her country--the place where she had lived her entire life, where she had built a reputation, a career--she found asylum here in the United States of America.

It is true that many people who come to the United States seeking asylum do not have a story like Sandra or Aliyah. It is true that many immigrants seeking asylum are actually here as economic migrants. And so I agree that we should come together and do what we can to provide a fully funded and much more effective and efficient asylum system to determine which people showing up at our border are like Sandra and Aliyah, with legitimate asylum cases, where the United States of America is a place where they can have their life saved, versus people who are just trying to use the asylum system to find work.

So I support building a better system, but I don't support proposals that completely shut off the ability for people to come to the United States to save their lives. I think it is really important that we understand that, when you are talking about asylum, you are talking about a system that works for thousands of people who are fleeing terror and torture. It does not work when many people are using it as an end route to come to the United States to work.

But we can solve that problem, we can fix that system, while still allowing people, like those brave women that I talked about, to have the ability to come to the United States to save their lives.

We are also talking about another topic, a topic that a lot of Republicans are discussing in the hallways these days, and that is parole. It is one of the most important tools that the administration has at its disposal to respond to humanitarian crises all around the world and to manage the flow of individuals at the border.

Immigration parole authority has been used by every single President for the last 70 years to provide relief for individuals who are fleeing danger and persecution. Republican and Democratic Presidents have used this authority to protect Soviet Jews fleeing persecution, Cubans during the Cold War, and, most recently, Ukrainians and Afghans fleeing violence and unrest.

Despite what some Republicans will have you believe, the Biden administration's use of parole has created more, not less, order at the border. The Uniting for Ukraine and Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela parole programs have enabled more than a quarter of a million people to come to the United States safely after having passed an extensive vetting and background check process and also obtaining private sponsorship, families here in the United States. They have the ability to work, and they are not forced to take that dangerous journey to the southern border. It denies smugglers and cartels the ability to exploit all of these people. It gives us a chance to vet those individuals before they show up in the United States.

What has happened since these programs have been put into place? A significant drop in unlawful encounters at the southern border from individuals from these countries. Unlawful crossings of Venezuelans are down 50 percent. Unlawful crossings of Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians are down 90 percent. This is stunning but important progress.

In November of last year, for instance, Border Patrol encountered 34,000 Nicaraguans on the border--a year and a half ago. This past November, Border Patrol encountered 4,000. Mr. President, 34,000 before parole; 4,000 after parole.

No other tool at the President's disposal has been so effective in reducing unauthorized crossings as has parole. Limiting this ability will only push more people to cross in between the ports of entry, exacerbating the very problem that Republicans claim they want to solve.

I am not saying that we shouldn't have a conversation about reforming this practice. I am at the table. But to completely deny the President the ability to use parole is to make the situation at the southwest border more unmanageable, not less unmanageable.

I think we all do agree that what is happening at the southwest border today, the number of people who are crossing every day compared to the resources we have, is untenable. Democrats--we do want to give the administration tools to better manage the border, but we are not interested in taking away tools that have a proven track record of success.

This work is not easy. I wish we weren't here. I wish we were passing immigration reform and moving funding for Ukraine, that the two hadn't been tied together. But I accept that this is what has been made necessary by Republicans to get Ukraine the funding it needs.

I am really grateful for the progress we have been able to make. Senator Lankford, Senator Sinema, myself, the White House, and members of leadership have been working together throughout the holiday nonstop, every single day, trying to find a compromise that lets us fund Ukraine, that lets us fund Israel, that gives the President new tools to manage the southwest border but that also respects fundamental American values, that honors our tradition of immigration.

We are not there yet, but we are close. To get to that finish line so that we can all join together in the effort to support Ukraine--that is going to mean that both Democrats and Republicans have to compromise. Neither side is going to get everything they want. I wish Republicans would choose to support Ukraine just because it is the right thing to do, but we are where we are. We have made a lot of progress, and, to me, the stakes are just far too high to give up.

Nomination of Erika L. McEntarfer

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, a few days ago, I was with one of the parents from Sandy Hook Elementary School who lost her son 11 years ago today. She talked about this being the time of the year where she starts to spiral.

Today is a day when we are thinking about all of those parents, about all of those brothers and sisters who, this morning, had to relive the morning that they went through 11 years ago, December 14, 2012, when 20 sets of parents kissed their first graders goodbye as they dropped them off for school and never ever saw them again.

It is a fate that none of us would ever wish on another human being. For those of us who have never experienced the death of a child, there is no way for us to understand what those parents and what those families are going through.

One mother of a child who was lost in Sandy Hook had a tactic that she would use in those early days. She would pretend that her son was just at a friend's house on a playdate to convince herself, as best she could, that he wasn't dead, that he was just visiting a friend around the corner. It was the only way that she could clean up the house, get through her daily work. But then, all of a sudden, it would come flooding back to her that he wasn't at a friend's house; he wasn't around the corner; he was never, ever coming home. The things you have to do on a daily basis to try to process the loss of a child, they are unfathomable to most of us.

I have kind of run out of things to say about these amazing kids and these amazing adults--the adults who protected them that day, the children who would be turning 18 this year.

In Connecticut, we wear our hearts really heavy, but we also get to celebrate all of the things that have happened because so many of these families took their grief and they turned it into action and they turned it into change. So many of these families have started not-for- profit organizations and started charities to try to change other people's lives. Many of these families have been deeply engaged in the work of trying to make sure that mass shootings never happen again.

There has been a lot of joy and many miracles that have resulted from this awful tragedy. It does not square the moral order of the universe, but it is important to pay tribute to the way in which so many members of the Sandy Hook and Newtown community, as well as so many families who are directly affected by this shooting, have been able to manage through the grief and perform miracles at the same time.

We just need to make a decision as a country as to whether we want to live

in a world in which this carnage continues.

This isn't an accident. It isn't bad luck. It is just a choice. It is just a choice we have made to put our kids in jeopardy every single day that they go to school--for kids who live in my neighborhood, in the south end of Hartford, put them in jeopardy every day when they walk to and from school. It is a choice that we make, and we could make a different choice.

So today is a day for me that I think about all of my friends in Sandy Hook, that I think back on that day, being there at the firehouse that was serving as the emergency response hub, being outside the room as parents were told that their children were lying dead on the floor of their elementary school.

But it is also a day in which I remember that we are not helpless. This is also a day in which I recommit myself to the notion that I, as a Member of the U.S. Senate, have something to contribute to the work necessary to make sure that kids never ever, ever face this fate again.

Today, on the 11th anniversary, I have a little bit more hope than I had on the 10th or the 9th or the 8th or the 7th or the 6th or the 5th or the 4th or the 2nd or the 1st anniversary.

Why? Because last year, Republicans and Democrats came together in this Senate in the wake of another mass school shooting, tragically reminiscent of Sandy Hook--the shooting in Uvalde, TX--and we acted. We put aside our political differences. We passed the first serious gun safety measure in 30 years. Even though forces outside of this building opposed it, we decided to come together because we thought we had an obligation to make this country safer, to try to make it a little bit less likely that a parent has to wake up on a morning of the anniversary of their child's death and try to figure out how to survive it. And why, this year, I feel more hopeful and more confident is because we now have data, we now have results in the wake of the passage of last year's legislation.

Right now, as we speak, we are tracking for there to be a 12-percent reduction in gun murders in this country from 2022 to 2023. That would be the biggest ever one-year reduction in gun murders in our lifetime.

What does that mean? It means that 8 or 10 fewer people are dying every day from gun violence. What does that mean? It means that 110, rather than 120, people are dying of gun violence. That is not an acceptable result, but it is proof of concept that when we change the laws to honor the death of so many innocents, we prevent the death of innocents in the future.

So today is a day when I relive that moment 11 years ago today. It is a day when I reach out to my friends in Sandy Hook to tell them how much of my heart is with them. But this year, on the 11th anniversary, it is a day in which I have confidence that if we continue to do the hard work of changing our gun laws to make it harder for dangerous people to have weapons and harder for anybody to have the most dangerous weapons--the kind of weapons that were used to kill these kids and teachers--that we can save lives.

In 1 year, we have seen the biggest drop in gun murders in our lifetime. It is a result of legislation that we passed, and it is a signal to us of what we can achieve in the future.

I thank my colleagues for what we did last year. I thank my colleagues for making it possible to show the families in Newtown and the victims of gun violence all across this country what is possible. And on the 11-year mark of that tragedy in Sandy Hook, I compel my friends in the Senate to do more.

I yield the floor.