Floor Statements

Madam President, it is actually good to be back in the Senate this week after 2 weeks back home, and we certainly have a busy schedule ahead of us. The fact is that, unfortunately, this was a product of the inattention or lack of urgency that the majority leader has had to deal with the Senate's necessary work so far. We are a quarter of the way through the 118th Congress, and we, frankly, don't have a lot to show for it.

Under our colleagues' leadership, this Chamber developed an embarrassingly short list of accomplishments. Despite the chaos at the southern border, we haven't had the opportunity to vote on legislation to address this humanitarian and security crisis, either in the Senate Judiciary Committee or here on the floor. They simply just ignore it: 5 million border encounters since President Biden took office. Last year alone, 108,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Seventy-one thousand of those were from synthetic opioids, virtually all of which come from Mexico, the precursors having been imported from China.

Would that be enough to get the attention of the President and the majority leader to actually do something in that area? Well, apparently not.

Yesterday, I was interested to see that the Senator from New York-- the majority leader--sent a letter to our Senate colleagues highlighting his plans for the next 3 weeks. Actually, we only have about 10 workdays in these next 3 weeks before now the regularly scheduled August recess. Again, more of the same that we have seen so far this year--not much time and a lot to do.

Senator Schumer mentioned his desire to move forward on bills relating to drug pricing, fentanyl, permitting reform, rail safety, marijuana banking, China competition, artificial intelligence, and a number of other topics in the next 3 weeks.

Now, to be clear, I don't think the majority leader actually believes we are going to produce legislation in these areas. Maybe you would call this a wish list. But it is only wishful thinking to believe that in the U.S. Senate you are going to be able to get all of these necessary items addressed in the next 10 working days.

And, of course, that ignores the fact that we have a bicameral legislature. We have the Senate and the House. Has he prevetted any of this legislation with the House to see whether, assuming the Senate would act, that the House would actually take it up and pass it and the President would sign it into law?

That is how we legislate around here. It is not performance art. It is not show business. This is actually about doing the people's business and passing legislation through an admittedly difficult process.

But this is where we find ourselves having waited until this late moment to deal with so much important legislation. The Democratic- controlled Senate has been downright sleepy for the last 6 months. And I have no reason that this letter, this wish list, will prompt some miraculous turnaround.

The lack of productivity in this Congress has created a major backlog of important bills, which must be our top focus. We have a lot to do and not much time to do it, but that is by design. That is not the way the Senate should be operating.

We heard from the previous speakers a lot about the national defense authorization bill, which is our annual Defense bill, which we passed for the last 61 years in a row--61 years in a row. Before this last break, the Senate Armed Services Committee completed its work on that bill and passed it out of committee by a vote of 24 to 1--bipartisan bill out of the Armed Services Committee demonstrating an overwhelming bipartisan support.

This legislation, as we all know, is about supporting our servicemembers, modernizing our military, and addressing our biggest security challenges, including China.

Senator Wicker, from Mississippi, the ranking member, has shared his disappointment over the fact that this year's Defense bill doesn't adequately seek to fund our defense needs.

Now, of course, this is an authorization, in the jargon of the Senate--it is not an appropriation--but typically what happens is the authorizing committees will set a level of funding and then the Appropriations Committee will come behind that and fund it, presumably, at that level.

But I know many of us are committed to working in the coming weeks to increase those funding levels to ensure that our military has the resources it needs to protect the American people, especially in the face of 40-year-high inflation.

I don't have to tell anybody within the sound of my voice what inflation has done to their standard of living and their purchasing power over the last couple of years. Basically, this is like a silent tax, where you have less and less to spend for the necessary expenditures in your life, whether it is your transportation, your food, your clothing, your childcare, your healthcare, or the like. Well, the military is experiencing the ill-effects of this 40-year-high inflation, too, and its purchasing power has been decreased dramatically.

Well, I hope that we will have a turnaround of sorts and that the Defense authorization bill will get off to a strong start, but it is a long way from the finish line.

While this bill did pass the committee, it still needs to be brought to the floor. There needs to be an opportunity for Senators to offer amendments and debate the bill, hopefully improve it, and then vote on it by the full Senate, and that takes time.

Under the regular procedures of the Senate, to bring a bill like that to the floor and to account for all of the potential procedural obstacles that would be encountered, it would take you more than a week to process the bill. And we have 3 weeks before August--10 days of actual working time--and this is what the majority leader has presented us with.

So we know that we need to get to work. The NDAA should pass before the end of fiscal year, which is September 30, and the Senate is only scheduled to be in session for 7 weeks before then. So even after we come back from the August recess, in order to meet the deadline of the end of the fiscal year, September 30, we only have 4 more weeks after we get back before the NDAA essentially lapses--the national defense authorization bill--absent our action in the meantime.

I don't have to tell my colleagues that providing for the common defense is one of our most important responsibilities. And the National Defense Authorization Act is the foundation for that. So I hope the majority leader will allow the Senate to take up the bill soon.

I think I heard the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee just now suggest that perhaps the NDAA will come to the floor next week, and I hope that is true. But certainly, in order to give Senators an opportunity to participate and hopefully debate and offer amendments and improve the bill, it is going to take time, and that is something we don't have a lot of.

Every Member of this Chamber has the right to offer their ideas to strengthen and improve this legislation, just like we should on any piece of legislation. And the majority leader should not try to jam the process by saying: Oh, now, we don't have enough time so we are going to have to do away with the opportunity to have full debates and amendment process because we are running up against a deadline. Well, that deadline is of his own making because he failed to deal with this in a timely manner.

But September 30 isn't the only deadline that we have for the Defense authorization bill. It is also the farm bill. Every 5 years, Congress passes a farm bill to support everything from crop insurance to nutrition programs, to rural broadband. The impact of the farm bill is felt in communities across America, including those in my home State of Texas.

Texas is home to nearly a quarter of a million farms and ranches, more than any other State in the country. And one out of every seven working Texans actually works in an ag-related job. These hard-working men and women raise cattle, chickens. They grow corn and sorghum. They produce cotton and hay, not just for the Nation but for the world. Texas farmers and ranchers produce food and fiber for America and for exports as well, and they are facing increasingly strong headwinds.

I mentioned inflation, which has been at a 40-year high. It has increased the cost of every input that farmers and ranchers have, from diesel to fertilizer, you name it. It has eroded their purchasing power. Their operating costs have skyrocketed for everything. I mentioned fertilizer and fuel. Pesticides is another major expense. And so their profit margins continue to get slimmer and slimmer.

I was somewhat amused to hear that President Biden, during our 2-week period away from Washington, DC, began to tout something he calls Bidenomics, like he is proud of it. He said: This is a lot like Reaganomics, except it is Bidenomics. It has nothing to do with Reaganomics, which actually worked. But I was amused because when I looked at the RealClearPolitics' average of the President's approval rating for his economic policies, it stands at a whopping 38.7 percent--38.7 percent approve of President Biden's economic policies. Bidenomics is like putting lipstick on a pig to try to dress it up to make it look better than it really is.

But in addition to our economic woes, Mother Nature has unleashed a set of challenges as well. Last year alone, natural disasters caused more the $21 billion in crop losses nationwide. Today, areas across Texas are experiencing a hot and dry summer. We are used to that. It is summertime. It is July. We are used to hot and dry

summers. But farmers are also battling very little rainfall, and they are praying that their crop loss will not be more than minimal.

The farm bill includes farm safety net programs which are a lifeline for countless producers. They are critical at managing the risks inherent with this critical industry. Everybody knows farming and ranching is risky, for the reasons I mentioned and others.

But this year I hope we can build on the progress we made in the last farm bill to ensure that the agriculture sector is as resilient as possible.

This sector not only feeds, fuels, and clothes America, as I said, it also drives our economy and feeds the world.

In Texas alone in 2021, ag exports totaled more than $7.2 billion. In 2019, Texas A&M's AgriLife Extension Service estimated the economic impact of the ag sector to be nearly $160 billion, which is more than 8 percent of my State's GDP.

So a strong, on-time farm bill is essential to the health and well- being of this important sector of the economy, but it is also important beyond that. It is important to the American people, and it is important to our economy.

Our colleague Senator Boozman from Arkansas is a ranking member. And our colleagues on the Agriculture Committee, I know, have been working hard to draft this year's farm bill, and I appreciate the hard work that they put into it. But I am eager to work with our colleagues to get this bill across the finish line on time, again, before it lapses at the end of this fiscal year.

And then, there is another big one, Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization. As though we needed another big, heavy lift before the end of the fiscal year, it is also the deadline to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. Over the last couple of years, travelers have dealt with widespread flight cancellations, paralyzing staffing shortages, and rising prices. We have also witnessed some jarring safety issues, including near-collisions on airport runways in Minneapolis and New York.

Last month, Senators Cantwell, Cruz, Duckworth, and Moran introduced the FAA Reauthorization Act to address these and other issues. But like the National Defense Authorization Act and the farm bill, the FAA needs to be reauthorized by September 30. Again, all of these deadlines are well-known by the majority leader, but here we are finding ourselves with very little time and a lot to do.

And last but not least is, likely, the biggest lift before us for before September 30, and that is to fund the government. As part of the debt limit agreement, Senator Schumer vowed to bring all 12 appropriations bills to the Senate floor by September 30. How he is going to be able to keep his promise is not clear to me, given the traffic jam that we are going to experience, because this includes funding for our military, veteran services, border security, and so much more.

Senator Collins and Senator Murray and all of our colleagues on the Appropriations Committee are determined to restore some regular order and common sense to the funding process. I hope the majority leader will stick by his word and put all 12 appropriations bills on the Senate floor before the end of the fiscal year.

We don't need, and the country does not want, another omnibus spending bill like we saw at the end of last year, which, of course, was by design, because it empowers the leadership to the detriment of rank-and-file members of the Congress. When you are presented with a ``shut down the government,'' ``take it or leave it'' proposition at the end of the year, having bypassed all of this normal process, the question is, Are you going to keep the government open? Are you going to fund the government? Are you going to fund defense, veterans, border security, or not? And that is simply an abomination we do not need to repeat again. And so I do hope the majority leader will keep his word.

None of these bills are an easy lift. They require a lot of hard work, cooperation, and time, and we only have 7 weeks of legislative session to pass them all. So far, the 118th Congress hasn't been a productive one. The Democratic majority has struggled to complete even the most basic tasks, and now we have a lot of work to do, maybe an impossible amount of work to do, by design. The clock is ticking, and we can't let these critical responsibilities slip through the cracks.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, under Biden's leadership, the United States has experienced an unprecedented border crisis. That is not exactly news because for the last 2\1/2\ years, Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 5.2 million migrants at the border, plus another 1\1/2\ million ``got-aways.''

In other words, under our bizarre and broken immigration system, 5.2 million people basically were welcomed at the border, while another million and a half simply fled the Border Patrol and made their way into the interior of the United States.

Now, it is true out of the 5.2 million under title 42, the COVID-19 order, basically public health order, that 2.6 million of the 5.2 were returned to their country of origin or at least expelled out of the United States. That was a public health order, but that is gone. That is expired. That has served its time.

So under any scenario, you can conclude that under President Biden's tenure, millions of people have made their way into the United States, not using the legal pathways that are designed to make our immigration system safe, orderly, and humane--something that I know we all support, legal immigration--instead, President Biden's failures, when it comes to border policy, has resulted in transnational criminal organizations controlling immigration, and they also control the drug trafficking that makes its way across the border.

And as was acknowledged by the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, when he was testifying before the Judiciary Committee, I believe he said he understood that this was part of the business model of these organizations, these criminal organizations. They would flood the border with people, and as the Border Patrol was diverted to try to deal with that mass of humanity, including unaccompanied children, that left huge gaps in the border which were then exploited by the drug cartels to move drugs into the interior of the United States.

Rather than secure the border or make any attempt to deter illegal immigration, the Biden administration has allowed the chaos to continue for nearly 2\1/2\ years.

Now, inexplicably, the President claims this is all part of his plan to promote safe, orderly, and humane migration, but there is nothing safe about the journey migrants take to the United States in the hands of cartels, coyotes, and ordinary criminals.

There is nothing orderly about migrants using inflatable rafts and ropes to cross the Rio Grande where some meet their death when they drown. And there is nothing humane about what is happening in the United States now as a result of the border crisis.

First, let's look at what happens to the children. Since President Biden took office, more than 300,000 unaccompanied children have been encountered at the border and then placed with a sponsor in the interior of the United States. To be clear, these children did not arrive in the United States with their parents. These children made the dangerous journey north with basically any adult who is willing to convey them from their home, across the border, into the United States.

But the truth is, these children are not unaccompanied. They are accompanied by the criminals who make this their business. The sad reality is that many come to the United States in the care of cartels, human smugglers, and coyotes, and parents pay smugglers thousands of dollars to bring their children to the United States.

I have no doubt that when those children reached the United States, their parents thought they would be safe. After all, this is the greatest country

in the world, a country that values freedom, justice, and opportunity. I am sure their parents expected they would live safe and happy lives while their asylum claims are being considered, but we know the ugly truth.

We know now that countless children have experienced a new hell right here in the United States. The New York Times, for example, published two bombshell investigative reports detailing widespread exploitation of migrant children here in our country. Some children are being forced to work in meatpacking plants, food processing facilities, and construction jobs--underage children. These are not part-time jobs after school; these are full-time jobs instead of going to school, in violation of many States' child labor laws.

They are being treated as indentured servants as they try to pay off the debts they owe to the traffickers who brought them here. And there is no question the Biden administration understands what is going on, and, yes, their silence is complicity. Once unaccompanied children are apprehended and processed at the border, the Department of Health and Human Services has the legal responsibility to place these children with a safe sponsor.

According to longstanding policy, the agent follows up with a phone call 30 days later to make sure that the child is safe. On both counts--the preplacement vetting and the post-placement wellness check--the Biden administration has completely fumbled its responsibilities.

Health and Human Services actually loosened the vetting requirements in order to get children out of shelters fast--as fast as possible-- with little regard for the increased danger to these children.

The New York Times has documented that at least 85,000 of those 300,000 children cannot even be reached within 30 days. So the practice is to make a wellness call in 30 days, but 85,000 of those 300,000 children, there is no answer.

So the Biden administration can't tell you where these children are, whether they are being fed, whether they are going to school, whether they are being neglected or abused or forced into involuntary labor. President Biden's administration doesn't know, and I think the sad truth is they don't care--because if they did care, this would not be allowed to continue.

This isn't breaking news. This isn't something I am announcing here today for the first time. Two major investigative pieces by the New York Times has exposed this scandal.

Over the last couple years, the Department of Health and Human Services has received countless warnings that these children are in danger. Those warnings came through its own hotline, government contractors, and scores of employees who sounded the alarm. Not only did Health and Human Services ignore the warnings of whistleblowers, it tried to silence them.

Department leadership retaliated against employees who shined a light on this massive abuse. As a result, countless children have remained in dangerous situations just so the administration could avoid an embarrassing PR headache.

As we know, the tens of thousands of migrant children who have been lost--literally lost--by the Biden administration are not the only victims of the border crisis.

Now, I sometimes ask myself, what is it going to take? How bad are things going to have to get before this situation registers with enough people of good conscience and good will that they are actually willing to do something about it? And I am constantly disappointed that in spite of the scandal, we can't find enough people of good will and good intentions here in the U.S. Senate to change this, to make it better, to throw a rescue line to these kids.

But the story gets worse. We know the fentanyl epidemic has killed more than 70,000 people a year in the United States just last year, making it the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49--the leading cause of death. We know that the fentanyl epidemic does not discriminate. It kills young people. It kills old people. It kills rich people. It kills poor people, both those living in major cities and those living in rural America.

And we know the overwhelming majority of this fentanyl comes across the U.S.-Mexico border. Again, this is not breaking news. This is something known to all of us, including the Biden administration.

We also know where the precursor chemicals come from. These are chemicals shipped from China, shipped to Mexico, where the drug cartels mix them up. They use industrial-sized pill presses to gin out hundreds of thousands of pills that are contaminated with fentanyl.

Now, most of the time people who get poisoned by fentanyl don't actually know they are taking fentanyl. They may think they are taking a Xanax or Percocet or some other more innocuous medication, something we would prefer our kids not to take, but we understand sometimes that happens.

But they have no idea that a tiny dose of fentanyl can kill them and that many of these pills ginned out by the drug cartels, using these precursor chemicals in Mexico, are then shipped across the border and, unfortunately, routinely, take the lives of young, bright children who have the best of their lives ahead of them.

Between October of last year and April of this year, Customs and Border Protection seized more than 12,000 pounds of fentanyl at the southern border. Again, if you have a pencil--and I don't have a pencil, but I have a pen--it is basically the part of the pen that sticks out of the end of the part you hold onto. It takes that little amount of fentanyl to kill you. And last year, Customs and Border Protection seized 17,000 pounds of it.

Now, some people say: Well, that is great. We don't have a problem. The Border Patrol seized it. Well, you remember those ``got-aways'' I mentioned earlier, more than a million of them? They were running away from law enforcement, and I guarantee you it was for a reason. Either they knew that their criminal record and background would not make it possible for them to legally migrate into the United States or they were carrying drugs like this fentanyl. And we know a lot of it is getting through because we are seeing the devastation that it has wrought--again, with 71,000 fentanyl-related deaths last year alone. So we know CBP is not able to interdict every ounce of illicit drugs--far from it.

Over the past couple years, the unprecedented border crisis under the Biden administration has affected all of our missions at the border, including those that have nothing to do with immigration. Law enforcement has been shifted to the frontlines in order to process and care for the migrants. Instead of stopping dangerous drugs and criminals, many agents are pushing paper and changing diapers.

No one is happier with this situation than the drug cartels and the criminals who smuggle migrants for money. They are getting rich. What is not to love from their standpoint? With fewer agents on the frontline, they have a clear and easy path to move fentanyl, heroine, methamphetamine, and other deadly drugs into the United States, and our communities are being ravaged by the overdose epidemic. The administration has given the cartels clear and easy corridors to traffic even more of their poison into the United States, as I have described.

Well, this is hardly a picture of a humane response to the border crisis, as President Biden and his administration claim. This is not humane.

Well, as I said earlier, sometimes I ask myself, what will it take? What will it take to get the attention of the people who actually have the authority to change this, to make it better, to save lives? Because hearing about these crises is enough to make your blood boil.

The administration cut corners in order to place migrant children with sponsors. It exerted minimal effort to follow up with those children to ensure they are safe and healthy. At the same time, the chaos caused by the border crisis has led to a security breakdown which enables fentanyl and other dangerous drugs to pour into the United States, killing Americans--108,000 last year alone.

Despite the widespread suffering caused by the Biden administration's policies, the President and his senior officials just don't seem to care. They don't care. If they did care, they would

do something about it. So it is clear to me they don't care.

There is a clear need to secure the border and stop the unprecedented migration crisis, but the majority of our Democratic colleagues refuse to address the border crisis unless Congress passes what they call comprehensive immigration reform. So, in other words, they are holding these children, they are holding the rest of the country hostage in order to achieve a legislative goal which they know is not possible-- one, because we have a divided government: a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate and a Democrat sitting in the White House.

There is no question that America's immigration system is in need of modernization. It is outdated, inefficient, and crippled by backlogs. But, as everyone knows, immigration reform is a very, very difficult, thorny issue. For 2 years, our Democratic colleagues controlled all three branches of government, and they couldn't even pass a partisan immigration bill. Now that we are operating in divided government, that calculus becomes harder, not easier.

There is absolutely zero chance that the Democrat-led Senate and the Republican-led House will be able to reach an agreement on immigration reform anytime soon. I wish that were not true. It doesn't have to be true, but I think, unless attitudes change, that is a fact.

Still, this elusive idea of comprehensive immigration reform has become a holdup for other problems relating to the border and immigration. In other words, these emergencies occurring at the border are being held hostage to an impossible goal, which is passing bipartisan immigration reform as a demand for solving these other problems.

Right now, the major problem we need to address is the humanitarian crisis fallout from what is happening. We can't prolong the suffering caused by the border crisis while our Democratic colleagues try to build support for a massive immigration reform bill that many of them seem to have zero interest in, because if they had interest, I assume they would be rolling up their sleeves and doing the hard work, doing more than just talking about it.

For example, in the Senate, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction to mark up and presumably pass with some combination of Republican and Democratic votes a bill to address the crisis that I mention. The Democratic majority leader has the authority to bring a bill to the floor, to open it to amendments so that all Senators can participate to try to find out if there is some path forward and some consensus. But in the 2 years our Democratic colleagues controlled all three branches of government, they did zero about it.

That means that the young adults who are in a box because of deferred action on childhood arrivals--this is an illegal scheme that President Obama did unilaterally 10 years ago which has been tied up in litigation ever since and is likely to be held illegal by a court of last resort here very soon.

So trying to address that, trying to address the drug crisis, trying to protect these 300,000 children--all of that is being held hostage for our Democratic colleagues to pursue an unattainable goal given the current political environment.

Migrant children are being abused within our own borders. Drugs kill about 109,000 Americans a year. We cannot leverage these lives for unrelated and unattainable measures.

There is nothing safe, orderly, or humane about the Biden administration's response to the border crisis, and until something changes, more people will continue to suffer and die.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I wanted to come to the Senate floor this afternoon to talk about a scandal of incredible proportion.

Since President Biden became President of the United States, 300,000 unaccompanied children have been encountered at the border and then placed with sponsors inside the interior of the United States--300,000.

Ordinarily, there would be a process by which Health and Human Services would attempt to contact those minor children, in the custody of those sponsors, for a wellness check 30 days after they were placed with them. The New York Times has documented that at least 85,000 of those 300,000 children cannot even be reached--no response to the phone call or any other outreach.

So under the Biden administration's policies, an untold number of minor children have been placed with sponsors in the interior of the United States, and the Biden administration can't tell you where they are; the administration can't tell you what their condition is, whether they are being sent to school, whether they are being recruited into gangs, whether they are being sexually or otherwise physically assaulted, or whether they are being neglected. They simply don't know.

Now, I know it takes a lot to get people's attention these days because there is so much competing for our attention--so many different types of outrage. But the fact that this hasn't been front page news for a long time now or hasn't motivated the Biden administration to actually do anything to change this situation leads me to the conclusion that President Biden simply doesn't care. He doesn't care. He doesn't care what happens to these children. If he did care, he would do something about it, but he doesn't, apparently, care.

These are some of the most vulnerable individuals encountered at the border. They come to the United States, not in the care of their parents, but in the care of transnational criminal organizations, the cartels--the coyotes, as they are called--who treat them like a commodity. They don't treat them like a human being. They treat them like a commodity because the only thing these cartels care about is cold, hard cash.

This is a huge cash cow. And it is not just the children. It is the other 5 million migrants encountered at the border, as well. All of them pay these criminal organizations to transport them here to the United States.

I mentioned previously that when I went to Yuma, AZ, with a bipartisan group of Senators, that Border Patrol sector chief greeted us by saying: Welcome to the Yuma Sector. It is a sleepy little agricultural community.

He said: We encounter people from 176 countries, speaking 200 languages.

So people are literally being transported around the world to show up at our border and claim a right to be admitted, and the Biden administration continues to roll out the welcome mat and not deter illegal immigration by people who cannot qualify, whom we know will not qualify for any legal relief.

The children, particularly, endure a dangerous and long journey to our country, and they are often exploited en route. We heard from one of the witnesses in the Judiciary Committee yesterday about them being particularly vulnerable to sex trafficking, but we know they are subjected to violence and other forms of exploitation as well.

You would hope that once these children arrive at the border, they would be safe. I think that is our obligation, to make sure they are safe.

But over the last few years, we have seen mounting evidence that shows that tens of thousands of these migrant children who show up at our border without a parent or legal guardian are placed with sponsors and are essentially lost by the administration. Again, they don't know where they are. They don't know what is happening to them.

And, of course, we all should be concerned that they are being taken advantage of in a multitude of ways and being damaged in ways that we don't want to even imagine.

In August 2021, Bloomberg reported that Federal law enforcement was investigating unaccompanied migrant children who had been released to labor traffickers. This is kind of like modern-day slavery. The reporting uncovered situations where dozens of children were released to the same sponsor--dozens of children to the same person. You think that would have raised some questions, and maybe they tap the brake a little bit and investigate further--apparently not, because this same individual then exploited them for labor in poultry processing facilities. It is impossible for me to understand why the administration wouldn't see the warning signs.

About a year later, Reuters reported on another deeply concerning discovery. Federal and local officials were struggling to locate a dozen migrant children in Houston. They simply lost them. The Health and Human Services refugee office conducted an emergency review and found that 57 migrant children had been reported missing in Houston since the year prior--lost by the Biden administration.

As bad as those two reports are, the story does not get any better. Recent reporting by the New York Times has

confirmed that these aren't just the exception. These are part of a deeply disturbing trend, and it shows what bad things can happen to innocent children when their own government doesn't even care.

Of course, many of these are migrant children so, technically, I guess, the United States isn't their government. But we owe them a duty while they are in our country to protect them from the predators and the exploiters--the traffickers.

In February, the New York Times published its first story detailing widespread exploitation of migrant children. It includes countless stories of unaccompanied migrants who are working dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws: a 15-year-old girl, for example, who packages cereal at night in a factory; a 14-year-old boy working on a construction job; a 13-year-old day laborer; children working at meat processing plants, commercial bakeries, and suppliers for automakers. These are not after-school jobs. These are grueling and dangerous full- time jobs that are meant not for children but for adults.

Two months later, the Times published another story that detailed the extent to which the Biden administration officials knew about these abuses and chose to ignore them--willful ignorance.

The Health and Human Services Department received warning after warning that some of these migrant children were at risk. These warnings came through government staffers, outside contractors, and on the Department's own hotline established for that purpose. But not only were whistleblowers ignored, many were silenced, pushed out of their jobs. They were retaliated against for trying to protect these vulnerable children. These concerns made their way to the highest echelons of the Biden administration.

Health and Human Services Secretary Javier Becerra was aware of the credible reports of trafficking abuse but continued to push for the expedited placement of migrants with sponsors, with no regard for the dangers that presented.

At one point, he reportedly told his employees:

If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have

never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an

assembly line.

So here is the highest level government official, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a member of President Biden's Cabinet, who considers placing vulnerable migrant children in a dangerous situation, as he regards it as an assembly line.

Then-Labor Secretary Marty Walsh was aware of the situation as well. Last year, the Department's investigators identified major instances of child labor violations that took place in auto parts factories and meatpacking plants. Former Secretary Walsh even confirmed that the Department included details about these situations in its weekly reports to the White House. So at least Secretary Walsh was appearing to do his job by reporting this to the top-level officials at the White House.

Until last month, Susan Rice served as the Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, where she oversaw virtually every aspect of domestic policy matters, including the placement of migrant children. When the border crisis reached a fever pitch during the summer of 2021, Ms. Rice's team received a memo from Health and Human Services managers about possible labor trafficking. Two people confirmed that Ms. Rice was told about the contents of the memo, but the White House now disputes that claim.

High-ranking Biden officials saw clear warnings that children were in danger and chose willful blindness. They did nothing to rescue these children from a dangerous situation or to prevent more young migrants from meeting the same fate.

In the wake of these damning reports, we have yet to see a thorough investigation or explanation of how this happened. How could the administration fail these children so badly over and over and over again? How could they not act on credible reports that children were being exploited?

This is a disgusting failure of leadership, and it is dangerous. We need to get answers and accountability, and we need to fix it, something the Biden administration apparently does not care enough to do. If they did care, they would fix it. But they obviously don't care.

Following the second New York Times report, I wrote a letter to Chairman Durbin of the Judiciary Committee that was cosigned by every Republican. We urged him to invite these three Biden administration leaders who failed to act in the face of these warnings to testify in front of the Judiciary Committee. That included Secretary Becerra, former Labor Secretary Walsh, and former White House adviser Susan Rice.

The Judiciary Committee, on which I am privileged to serve, is charged with oversight of the Unaccompanied Children Program, and we have a duty to ensure that these children are treated humanely. We need to know who made the decision to loosen vetting requirements for sponsors and why those decisions were made. We need to hear from the current and former administration officials who knew about the widespread abuse of migrant children and yet chose not to act. We need a thorough explanation of how the Department is changing its policies, assuming it is, to prevent more children from being placed with dangerous sponsors. And we need to know how those responsible for these grotesque abuses will be held accountable.

But in the Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, we didn't get any of that information. None of the officials that I mentioned that we requested actually testified. They didn't show up. So not only have they neglected the cries of these vulnerable children to do something-- anything--they didn't even care enough to show up at the Judiciary Committee yesterday to explain why they failed to act in the face of these cries for help. We didn't hear from a single current or former Biden administration official. There was not one witness on the five- person panel who could shed light on the decisions that caused so many of these migrant children to be exploited.

If our Democratic colleagues are as disturbed as I am about what I described, I hope they will join Republicans in a bipartisan push to get Secretary Becerra, Secretary Walsh, former White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice to testify under oath before the Judiciary Committee and before the rest of the country.

These senior administration officials saw the warning signs, and they chose to ignore them. They continued to press for the rapid placement of these children with sponsors, and they didn't apparently care enough to make sure that they could track where these children were and what was happening to them. Now they need to explain their decisions on behalf of the Biden administration to the Senate.

I can't imagine the Biden administration doing a worse job responding to this border crisis than it has.

If you set out to design a system that would fail, it would look something like the current policies of the Biden administration. By refusing to secure the border, the administration has allowed criminal organizations to smuggle fentanyl and other deadly drugs into the country. It has enabled more than 1.5 million ``got-aways'' to evade Border Patrol and slip into the United States.

And it has released hundreds of thousands of migrants before we had sufficient information about who they were, where they were going, and when they needed to report to court. Migrants in some cities reportedly wait as long as 10 years to present an asylum claim in front of an immigration judge. And we know that only maybe 15, max 20 percent of them will be able to legitimately show a right to asylum.

So the 80 to 85 percent have had to wait in line for 10 years--or the 15 percent or so with valid claims have had to wait in line for 10 years because of the 80 to 85 percent who can't qualify; but they have gummed up the system so bad by the sheer volume of cases, even people with legitimate claims can't get heard. And now we are seeing how the administration looked the other way and allowed migrant children to be exploited on American soil.

So my question is, how long will we have to go before our colleagues join us in demanding a change? Because failure to do something is, in fact, a choice. Are we going to choose to let

this exploitation of these migrant children continue when the U.S. government who placed them with these sponsors doesn't even know where they are, whether they are getting a good education, whether their healthcare needs are being attended to, or whether they are being recruited in gangs, sex-trafficked, exploited, neglected?

I started out by saying I don't believe the Biden administration cares; but I do believe Members of this body care. And it is within our power to change it. That is a choice, in and of itself.

Now, some of my colleagues like the chairman of the Judiciary Committee said, yeah, we need to get together and talk about comprehensive immigration reform, but we have had those conversations the entire time I have been in the U.S. Senate. We cannot leverage these innocent children for other unrelated measures.

The same problem with the fentanyl and drugs coming across the border. People say, well, we need to do something. Well, we can't do it until we do comprehensive immigration reform. The DACA population, the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival, these young people who came here as children who now are in a box canyon not of their making because President Obama overreached and created a program without working with Congress.

Each of those problems, I think, deserves to be addressed on its own merits. But you can't tell me that you are serious about solving the problem if you say, well, we can't do this, we can't fix those problems until we deal with all of the immigration issues as a whole, because I don't see that happening anytime soon. Meanwhile, these children will be languishing, being exploited, and worse.

The young people who are uncertain about their future because they received this Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival, but now it has been held illegal, unconstitutional by a Federal judge in the Southern District of Texas--and the families that are grieving because their loved ones took a pill they thought was relatively innocuous, but it was contaminated with fentanyl, and their son or daughter lost their life--do you want to tell these people to keep waiting? Just wait until we pass a massive immigration reform bill containing other matters. You wait. They shouldn't have to wait. And we shouldn't let the neglect and the willful blindness of the Biden administration prevent us from doing our duty, Republican and Democratic Senators alike. It is within our power to do it. But doing nothing is a choice too. And I hope that is not a choice we will make.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, last month, the majority leader announced an effort to compile what he called China bill 2.0, alluding to the CHIPS and Science Act that we passed last year dealing with the vulnerability of our supply chains and access to advanced semiconductors, which were overwhelmingly manufactured in Asia--60 percent in Taiwan alone.

To pursue this China bill 2.0, Senator Schumer directed committee chairmen to work on legislation that takes aim at everything from U.S. investment in China to security threats against Taiwan. As each of us knows, these are some of the most urgent threats facing the United States and our allies to date.

The Chinese Communist Party has become increasingly aggressive in recent years. It is rapidly growing and modernizing its military. It is cozying up to Russia. It is bullying and harassing its neighbors in the Indo-Pacific.

Yes, there is a clear and urgent need to counter threats from China, but there is a better way than China 2.0.

As we have seen in the past, our Democratic colleagues can't resist the urge to mix partisan politics along with urgent national security legislation. So every one of these bills tends to become a vehicle for unrelated items. We saw this during consideration of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act 2 years ago, when our colleagues attached prevailing wage legislation to the CHIPS provisions. They injected partisan labor policy into private construction projects that would benefit from national security concerns.

But we won't outcompete China by pursuing a liberal domestic socialist policy. Our Democratic colleagues have shown themselves unwilling to separate themselves from the left's wish list from our most urgent national security priorities.

If the true goal is to counter threats from China, the majority leader doesn't need a new working group to draft a bill from scratch because there is already a strong bipartisan effort underway. Our colleagues on the Armed Services Committee are working around-the-clock to prepare this year's Defense authorization bill. This has literally been something that Congress has done for the last 61 years without interruption.

This legislation is not negotiated in a backroom by a hand-picked group of Members. It isn't thrown together in a matter of days and then pushed to the floor for a vote without the opportunity to offer amendments. It is slowly and thoughtfully drafted over a period of months, including multiple hearings, votes, and hundreds of amendments.

Year after year, all 100 Members of the U.S. Senate are given an opportunity to shape the national defense authorization bill in some way. As a result, the Defense authorization bill has maintained strong bipartisan support for more than six decades.

The Armed Services Committee is set to consider the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act just next week. As it stands right now, the committee should be able to complete its work by the end of the month and put the Senate in a great position to pass a strong and ontime defense bill.

This legislation is all about supporting our servicemembers, modernizing our military, and addressing the biggest security threats, including those posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

The bipartisan national defense authorization bill should be the centerpiece of our efforts to counter threats from Russia, not a bill put together behind closed doors with Members having only the chance to vote yes or no in final passage. Senators on both sides will have an opportunity, in contrast, under the NDAA, to offer amendments and to be able to shape that bill, so it will truly represent a bipartisan consensus of all 100 Members of the U.S. Senate.

I plan to offer several amendments that will strengthen our ability to counter threats from China. One of those bills that I intend to offer takes aim at China and other adversaries that are trying to take advantage of loopholes to influence U.S. policy.

What I am talking about is the Foreign Agent Registration Act. That law requires individuals engaged in lobbying activities on behalf of foreign governments to disclose that information publicly. But there are two major loopholes that are being abused by our adversaries. As a result, foreign agents are able to influence U.S. policy unbeknownst to Members of Congress because they don't have to disclose who is actually paying them. So rather than being engaged in the people's business--the people of the United States--we could find ourselves being lobbied by somebody who is representing a foreign government with interests that are completely different from those of the United States.

Lobbyists for American entities are required to adhere to strict disclosure requirements. We want to know whom they are working for. There is no reason our adversaries should be subject to a more lenient standard, which they are now. In other words, it is easy to hide the ball--come in and lobby on behalf of a foreign government and not let Members of Congress or the American people know whom they are lobbying on behalf of.

Senator Whitehouse and I have introduced a bill we call the PAID OFF Act to help close those loopholes in our lobbying system that are being abused by some of our adversaries that would require foreign agents lobbying on behalf of China, Russia, Cuba, or other countries of concern to register and disclose their political activities to the Department of Justice, just as the law originally intended before these loopholes were identified and exploited.

As our colleagues know, there has never been a more important time to protect our country from the secret and malign influence of some foreign governments. This is a goal Democrats and Republicans should share alike, and I hope this legislation will be adopted as an amendment to this year's National Defense Authorization Act.

Another amendment I plan to offer is the National Critical Capabilities Defense Act, which has been a joint effort with Senator Casey, the Senator from Pennsylvania. We first introduced this legislation last year to help understand our greatest national security risks.

We know that American companies have been investing in China for many years, including some defense and technology capabilities, now at an alarming scale. At the end of 2020, U.S. investments in Chinese companies totaled $2.3 trillion in market value; that is, U.S. companies investing in China have basically built the Chinese economy which now puts them as a peer adversary both in terms of our economies and in terms of our military capabilities. So that $2.3 trillion in market value by American companies that invest in China includes $21 billion in semiconductors, $54 billion for Chinese military companies, and a whopping $221 billion in artificial intelligence.

American companies are bankrolling the capabilities and assets that the Chinese Communist Party could soon use against the United States and our allies.

Right now, the United States is flying blind. We don't have a full understanding of the vulnerabilities this creates, and this legislation is exactly what we hope will begin to change that situation and provide more transparency and, thus, ability for U.S. Members of Congress and others leaders to evaluate whether and how some of these investments made by U.S. companies in China are affecting our national security.

The National Critical Capabilities Defense Act would ensure that we have better awareness of the biggest national security risks so we can plan and prepare accordingly.

Just as it is critical for the United States to have visibility of potential risks, it is also important for the average American to understand how Chinese aggression could impact their own finances and our economy.

President Xi Jinping has made no secret of his desire to invade Taiwan, and he has even said he wants to be ready to go by the year 2027--just 4 years from now. If or when that happens, the global response will be swift and severe. It will affect businesses' cashflow, manufacturing operations, employees, assets, business relationships, and so much more.

So stockholders, to whom the companies owe a fiduciary duty-- investors need to know, whether it is a teachers'

retirement fund or a union pension retirement fund, how much risk these investments in Chinese companies carry.

I think of this like the warning on a box of cigarettes that says: Smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy. Now, consenting adults have the freedom to read this warning and ignore it, but they are at least presented with clear information about the risks associated with their decision. American shareholders and investors--teachers' and firefighters' pension funds, union pension funds--deserve the same transparency when it comes to the dangers of military conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

I am finalizing legislation that will require public companies, investment companies, investment advisers, and tax-exempt organizations to disclose the risk posed by a potential military conflict in the Indo-Pacific. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan poses a material risk to many Americans' livelihoods and retirements and investments, and that information should be disclosed and transparent.

So these are just a few of the bipartisan bills that are aimed at countering China that I hope will be included in the National Defense Authorization bill.

Once again, I appreciate Senator Wicker and Senator Reed for their work to make the national defense reauthorization a thoughtful, fair, and open process.

This is what we call regular order around here as contrasted with the backroom negotiations which only a handful of people get to participate in and basically where rank-and-file Members are excluded.

This also would reaffirm that the National Defense Authorization Act should be the pillar of our efforts to counter China. I fear that a China 2.0 bill will turn into just another vehicle for partisan freight. It will lead good, bipartisan bills to be held hostage by unrelated partisan demands. We cannot allow competition with China to become so politicized. The answer, of course, is the National Defense Authorization Act, which has a long and proud history of bipartisanship, and I hope we can continue to build on that success this year.

Once the Armed Services Committee completes its work, I hope the majority leader will prioritize the consideration of that bill on the Senate floor. We can't afford to repeat last year's drama, when Senator Schumer allowed the NDAA to languish on the Senate's calendar for more than 5 months without any action. If the majority leader truly cares about countering threats from China, he will abandon his partisan China 2.0 bill and allow the Senate to pass a strong and on-time National Defense Authorization Act.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, when it comes to safeguarding the American people, the United States has multiple layers of defenses.

We have, of course, the world's most powerful military, whose ranks are filled with courageous and dedicated servicemembers. Our military is equipped with cutting-edge technology, whether it has to do with weapons systems, aircraft, ships, submarines--all the tools necessary to defend our country and our country's freedoms.

But an important part of our defenses is our intelligence community, the 17 Agencies that make up what is known colloquially as the intelligence community. It is the intelligence community that collects and analyzes information from around the world to make sure that we can always remain at least one step ahead of our adversaries.

This information gathering is an invaluable part of our national defense, and that critical national security information is, of course, carefully safeguarded under what is known as the classification system--secrets. Classification gives us an invaluable edge when it comes to the ability to plan and prepare for threats over the horizon. It strengthens our relationship with our allies around the world, with whom we share much of this information, and it prevents consequential information from falling into the wrong hands.

It also protects--and these are the keys to the kingdom, when it comes to classified information--the sources and methods. In other words, the way that our intelligence community collects information and the people from whom that information is acquired are among the most important secrets maintained by the government, because, many times, if that were revealed, either our adversaries would be able to cut off that access to information or, frankly, maybe even go so far as to kill the sources of that information in the case of human intelligence. So protecting sources and methods is absolutely critical.

Closely guarded intelligence information is vital to our national security, but there is a very fine line between strategic classification and excessive secrecy. If too much information is withheld from the public, it can sow distrust. People let their minds run away with them. They wonder what is going on--conspiracy theories and the like. But, more fundamentally, the American people will question what their government is actually doing and how it is using the vast powers that they have delegated to the government.

Consent of the governed has always been the foundation of our democratic system of government and the legitimacy of government action, and, of course, the people cannot consent to something that is withheld from them. So there is a very fragile balance here from what is necessarily kept classified and secret and the information that should be made public, because without

transparency, there is no political accountability. Without accountability, there is no confidence that the government is actually acting in the best interest of the people.

I have long been an advocate for reforms to the Freedom of Information Act--in other words, the public's right to know. Former Senator Pat Leahy was chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. He and I were sort of the odd couple when it came to ``freedom of information'' reforms. Senator Leahy was one of the more liberal Members of the U.S. Senate, and I am one of the more conservative Members of the Senate. But we found common cause when it came to the public's right to know because it is too easy for bureaucrats to hide behind a classification system that results in overclassification. And when that bureaucrat can hide or bury that information using an overly broad classification system, there can be no accountability and, thus, the public's confidence in the people who actually are governing is compromised.

So we need to figure out how to make sure our classification system is rightsized so that it covers the things that it must cover in the interest of our national security. Then we need to figure out what represents overreach or overclassification, which undermines the public's right to know and the political accountability that should come with it, which is a fundamental basis for our form of government.

America's classification system has been ripe for reform for many years. Daniel Patrick Moynihan chaired a committee that made recommendations, but unfortunately those recommendations made many years ago were put on a bookshelf somewhere and basically ignored. But the problems have not gone away, and we have seen in recent days the focus come back to how classified documents are handled and what exactly represents our Nation's secrets, what should be protected and what should not because it is really not important to our national security.

Earlier this year, a trove of highly sensitive military documents began appearing online. These documents included classified assessments of the war in Ukraine, including tactical information about the expected offensive. They detailed conversations between world leaders and intelligence on adversaries and allies alike. These documents didn't just reveal intelligence itself but also the methods by which the United States collected intelligence. This information, of course, was supposed to be kept confidential because it was intended for high- level military and intelligence leaders and policymakers--not a global audience.

Based on the nature of the leaked documents, there was widespread speculation that the source was a high-level military or intelligence professional, but we now know that was not the case. The source of the leak has been identified as a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. He was an airman first class in the 102nd Intelligence Wing, where he worked as an information technology specialist.

So the first question that arose when the leaker was identified was, How in the world did this relatively low-ranking 21-year-old information technology specialist have access to some of our Nation's most guarded secrets? How was he able to view, transcribe, photograph, and remove these documents from a secure setting?

If this young man, who had a history of violent and racist remarks, was granted access to our top-secret national security information, is that some indication that maybe too many others have been granted access to this information and that maybe too many individuals have security clearances authorizing them to view this information?

Well, at last count, there were about 4.2 million Americans in this country--4.2 million Americans--who have security clearances. That number strikes me as incredibly large and I think is some evidence that too many people have been getting too many security clearances because too much information is classified when it shouldn't be, when it doesn't need to be. Those 4.2 million people with security clearances include more than 1.2 million with access to top-secret information.

The issue isn't just that too many people have access to classified information but also that too much information is classified. As members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, my colleagues and I regularly receive classified briefings and review documents that are highly confidential. There have been many times when I left one of these briefings thinking, this is something that any reasonably informed person already knows. All they need to do is read the major newspapers or watch television--television news in particular.

Many times, we are presented with information which is deemed ``classified'' in a secure setting which is, frankly, common knowledge. That is another indication that our classification system is working in overdrive and needs to be rightsized.

We are presented with information briefed as ``classified'' which could be just as easily learned by watching the news or reading a newspaper, as I said. Still, these documents are classified at the same level as sensitive military documents and intelligence analysis have been classified.

Honestly, I think one reason why we see not only President Trump but President Biden and Vice President Pence concerned about access to classified information outside of a secure setting is because many people who have access to classified information recognize that we have an overclassification problem, and so they let down their guard and they say: Well, this is information that is not particularly secret because a reasonably informed person would already know it or have access to it.

So I submit we have an overclassification problem, plain and simple, and we are not doing nearly enough to declassify information for the public or our allies and make it available to the American people.

There are many circumstances in which declassification safeguards our national security. We can't just be an absolutist about this. We need to be careful. One great example is the way we declassified and shared information with our allies in the runup to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That gave Ukraine enough battlefield awareness to push back against the initial attack and save countless lives. It also unified the Western response, leading to quick condemnation of Russia's attack and resources for the Ukrainian forces.

Declassification is an important way to share valuable intelligence with our friends and allies around the world when we can, and it promotes cooperation, which is key to combating the threats we face today like the Ukrainians are facing with the Russian invasion, but it is also a crucial way to show the American people what their government is doing on their behalf--declassification, that is.

Our ability to govern ourselves depends on public access to information. As I said earlier, you can't consent to something you don't know anything about, and consent of the government is the foundation of our system.

The American people have a right to know what their government is doing. Declassification builds trust and transparency. It inspires confidence in the incredible work our intelligence professionals are doing, and it equips scholars with the information to conduct academic research that informs decision making by looking back on our history and learning from those lessons of history.

As all of our colleagues know, there is a very delicate balance between transparency and secrecy, but it is time that we tune-up the system. We need to examine and refine the processes that govern the classification and declassification of sensitive information and make some long-overdue reforms.

Last month, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Warner, and I introduced a bill we called the Sensible Classification Act, which includes critical reforms to modernize America's classification system. This legislation would increase accountability and oversight. It would require training to promote sensible classification and also promote efficient declassification. It would direct Federal Agencies to justify security clearance requirements, so only those individuals who need access, given the nature of their jobs, are given access to classified information.

This legislation has already garnered broad bipartisan support and a long list

of cosponsors, including Senators Moran, Wyden, Collins, King, Rounds, Heinrich, Lankford, and Casey.

As the Senate Intelligence Committee prepares the Intelligence Authorization Act, I have offered this legislation as an amendment to that bill, which hopefully will be included as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. When the committee votes to advance this bill in the coming weeks, I hope this legislation will be included.

This is an example of broad bipartisan cooperation and the result of many conversations we have had with leading intelligence and national security experts in the United States.

I am confident that this legislation will both protect the integrity of America's classification system and help restore needed trust and confidence in the government.

Recent headlines have shone a light on the flaws in our classification system. It is overwhelmed and in need of reform, and that is exactly what the Sensible Classification Act aims to fix.

I look forward to working with all of our Senate colleagues as we fight to restore transparency and accountability and preserve our ability to classify the most sensitive national security secrets as part of our layered national defense. We can and should and must do both.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, every day, Texans reach out to my office to talk about challenges that they and their families are facing, or maybe they see something on the news or read something in the local paper that causes them concern about what the Federal Government is up to; but most often, they call and tell me that inflation continues to strain their household budgets, and they are fearful that a recession is approaching. They are raising concerns about the security breakdown at the southern border and fears about rising crime rates in their communities. They share stories about teenage students who died from fentanyl poisoning, maybe friends of their family, and they tell me they are terrified for their own children's safety.

Of course, these concerns aren't unique to Texas. People across the country--everyone--wants affordable gas and groceries. We all, presumably, want dangerous drugs off the streets and dangerous people behind bars. We all want to live in safe communities so we can pursue our dreams. In short, the American people aren't asking for a lot. All they want is to be able to live happy, healthy lives. And they are asking Congress to remove some of the burdens that are making that more difficult.

That is what we need to be doing here in the Senate. In recent months, the Republican-led House has been a flurry of activity. They passed legislation to unleash the power of American energy and reduce costs to consumers. They passed legislation to classify fentanyl as a schedule 1 substance--the most dangerous of drugs--and to give parents a say in their children's education. They have also passed legislation to improve veterans' healthcare, to stand behind law enforcement officials, and to address fraud and abuse in the unemployment insurance system.

Speaker McCarthy and the Republican majority in the House have responded to the concerns of the American people not with rhetoric but with action.

That is a sharp contrast with what we have witnessed here in the Senate. The first major piece of legislation that passed this Chamber was just last week after months of President Biden saying he wouldn't even negotiate with the House on raising the debt limit; but he finally did, up against the back of a potential default.

Before that, the Senate has passed legislation repealing the Iraq war authorization. We reauthorized grants for firefighters and we confirmed some Federal judges and other nominees. Then we passed a handful of Republican-led resolutions to overturn Biden administration executive orders, and that is about it.

Now to be clear, there were some wins in there. Less than a week ago, the Senate passed a resolution I introduced with Senator Cassidy, the Senator from Louisiana, to overturn President Biden's student loan scheme claiming to cancel student loans for people who agreed to borrow the money. But, somehow, by ``canceling,'' what he really meant was transferring that burden to the taxpayers. We were able to get a bipartisan vote overturning that decision here in the Senate.

But given the fact we are 5 months into the year, this is an embarrassingly short list of accomplishments. Clearly, the Republican- led House is doing its job, but the Democrat-led Senate is not doing a whole lot. The American people are clamoring for action--again, not just lip service. They want action on inflation, on crime, on the border, energy prices, and so much more.

But for some reason, the majority leader, the Senator from New York, Senator Schumer, seems content to just put us in neutral and coast. We haven't even had votes on Mondays. We come in on Tuesday and leave on Thursday, 3 days out of the 7-day week. The American people understand that we are coasting here. We are not giving it our best or our all. So there is no doubt we have a major productivity problem here in this Chamber. And that needs to change soon.

We have a lot of work we need to do before the end of the year. First on the docket is the National Defense Authorization Act. Each year this legislation provides our military leaders and our servicemembers with the certainty they need to prepare for the threats of today and tomorrow. And those threats are doing nothing but growing on a daily basis. Whether it is China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, an on-time National Defense Authorization Act is absolutely critical.

Senator Wicker, the Senator from Mississippi, is leading those efforts on our side of the aisle, and I am confident that he and our colleagues on the Armed Services Committee will deliver another strong NDAA. But Senator Schumer, the majority leader who is the floor leader, is the one who sets the agenda. He needs to carve out the floor time to make this a priority so we can move on to the Senate's next big task which is funding the government.

Now, as part of the debt limit agreement last week, Senator Schumer agreed to bring up all 12 appropriation bills to the Senate floor by September 30. The reason that is so important is that last year in December, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer decided, basically, that the rest of us were going to be potted plants and given the opportunity to vote up or down on an Omnibus appropriation bill rather than doing the work of passing each appropriation bill out of committee, across the floor, giving every Senator an opportunity to participate in shaping that legislation. So thank goodness Speaker McCarthy was able to negotiate an agreement to get us back to that regular order, a more transparent, more rational process. You would think that with $31.4 trillion in debt, that the majority leader, Senator Schumer, would recognize this as a priority.

But these appropriation bills do some essential things like funding our military, veteran services, border security, and so much more. Again, this is a departure--or what I hope will be a departure--from what we saw in 2021 and 2022, when the Congress and the Democratic-led Senate did not pass a single appropriation bill until that omnibus bill came up in December.

Individual funding bills are the starting point for sound financial decision making here in Washington. They allow us to cut wasteful spending and invest in our priorities. That is what a budget is all about. It is about priorities, and our No. 1 priority needs to be our national security.

Senator Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Murray, the

chairman of the Appropriations Committee, are determined to restore common sense to the appropriation process, especially when it comes to defense spending. So I am glad the majority leader agreed to return to the regular appropriations process, and I hope he will stick by his word. The end of September is the deadline, and it is also the deadline for two other major tasks.

One is reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration. It is time to modernize the Agency and implement long overdue reforms, and I am glad Senator Cruz, the junior Senator from Texas, is leading those efforts on our side of the aisle.

Then there is the farm bill, which affects agriculture and food programs across the country. For everything from crop insurance to nutrition programs to rural broadband, passing the farm bill is absolutely vital. The ranking member, Senator Boozman, is no stranger to that process, and he is committed to passing a strong farm bill before the current one expires.

But Congress must pass each one of those bills--both houses of Congress--by September 30. If you include this week, the Senate is in session only 10 weeks before then. So we have no time to waste. As I said, in those 10 weeks, we need to pass the defense authorization bill, 12 appropriations bills, an FAA reauthorization, and a farm bill--and those are just some of the big ticket and most urgent items on the to-do list.

We also need to reauthorize section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before it expires at the end of this year. This is an absolutely essential tool used by our intelligence community in order to detect threats to our Nation and our national security, and it is an absolutely must-pass, must-do piece of legislation.

Then, of course, there is the never-ending humanitarian and security crisis at the border. We need to continue our work to crack down on fentanyl trafficking. Again, unleash the power of American energy; ensure that Ukraine, together with our allies, has the tools they need to win its fight against the Russian invasion and so much more.

So I simply don't understand how the Senate can continue to coast at a glacial pace. We have a lot to do for the American people; and the majority leader who sets the floor agenda needs to make sure that we buckle down and get this work done.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, as we all know by now, yesterday evening, the House passed a bipartisan bill to lift the debt limit and begin the process of reining in our Nation's unchecked spending habit.

From the time the United States reached the debt ceiling in January, it was clear that a compromise bill would be the only way to avoid a full-blown economic crisis, which is what would happen if we were not to raise the debt ceiling. With a Democrat-led Senate and a Republican- led House and a Democrat in the White House, bipartisanship was and is a necessity.

Now, Republicans, for our part, were clear that any increase in the debt ceiling must come with spending reforms. Otherwise, it would be like your maxing out your credit card and then asking to raise the credit limit so you could borrow more money without having an adult conversation about how you were going to pay the money back. In the real world, that is what would happen. You would have to have that conversation or there would be no increase in your credit card limit. But only in Washington, only in the Nation's Capital would it be even argued that you could raise the debt limit without talking about spending reform.

What has happened is, our Nation's national debt has ballooned now to more than $31.4 trillion. That is a number--I doubt that anybody here in the Chamber could tell us how many zeros follow that 31.4.

The American people are clearly unhappy with what they see is happening here when it comes to out-of-control spending. A recent poll found that 60 percent of adults think the government spends too much, and they are right. They are frustrated by the unnecessary and wasteful spending, and they are eager for Congress to do the reasonable, rational thing, which is to begin to get our financial house in order.

That is precisely what Republicans demanded throughout this process-- necessary fiscal reforms as part of the debt ceiling negotiation. But instead of stepping up, doing his job, acting responsibly, President Biden took a very different approach. He said: I refuse to negotiate. This is a President of the United States with $31.4 trillion in debt. He said: I refuse to negotiate. He went on to say that only a clean debt ceiling increase was an option, and he refused to engage in negotiations altogether.

It is helpful to remember that it was in January when we actually hit the debt ceiling. What has happened since then is the Treasury Secretary has engaged in what is euphemistically called extraordinary measures in order to pay the bills as the money comes in through tax revenue. But now she has told us that the X date--which presumably is the default date after extraordinary measures are exhausted--would be June 5. That is Monday. That is Monday.

The President has known since January that this day would come. He has refused to negotiate, and he has led us into this scenario where, unless Congress acts by June 5, we will breach the debt limit and begin to default on paying our bills as a nation.

I don't have to remind anybody that inflation as a result of some of the profligate spending habits of the previous Congress, particularly on our Democratic friends' side--they were happy to spend roughly $2.3 trillion last year on strictly party-line spending votes. But you put enough gasoline on the fire, and inflation is going to spiral out of control. That is exactly what has happened.

As a consequence, two things have happened. One is that hard-working American families have found their standard of living reduced because they simply can't afford to keep up with the increase in costs as a result of inflation. The second thing that happened is that in order to try to deal with this hidden tax, the Federal Reserve has had to raise interest rates, which has slowed down the economy even more.

Why in the world would President Biden, as a responsible public official, refuse to negotiate when he knows that the anxiety associated with hitting this X date on Monday is causing even more uncertainty, even more trepidation, and even more anxiety over exactly what the future is going to look like? Why would he risk that? President Biden stuck to his ``no negotiations, no reforms'' position for literally months even though it was painfully obvious that a bipartisan deal was the only way to avoid a further economic crisis.

I want to pause for a moment to commend the Speaker of the House, Speaker McCarthy, for his leadership throughout this process. Without a negotiating partner, he did everything in his power and within the power of the House of Representatives to move this process forward. He stood strong behind the need for fiscal reforms and led the House in passing the Limit, Save, Grow Act. He lured President Biden to the negotiating table, and he successfully moved a compromise bill through the House. But I think the backstory about Speaker McCarthy's leadership is that President Biden didn't dream that in a million years, after the difficult race for Speaker that we saw in January, Speaker McCarthy would be able to unify Republicans in the House of Representatives and actually pass a bill that raised the debt ceiling. That is what the Limit, Save, Grow Act was. I think President Biden was shocked that he was able to get that done. And I congratulate him for it. It changed the whole dynamics of this negotiation.

But now that the House has acted, the ball is in our court. This Chamber will soon vote on the McCarthy-Biden agreement, and now is the time for the Senate to do its job. Our job is not simply to accept or to rubberstamp what the House passed. That has never been the case. We weren't a party to the agreement; why should we be bound by the strict terms of that agreement?

The Senate has not had a say in the process so far, and it has led to serious frustration on both sides of the aisle. This bill didn't go through regular order; in other words, it didn't go through a committee. Members didn't have the opportunity to weigh in or shape the legislation at that level or even the final text.

Given the time constraints wholly created by President Biden's delay and refusal to negotiate, this rushed process was completely unavoidable. We didn't have to get on the precipice of a default in order to act if President Biden had done his job and responsibly engaged in the negotiations that he finally did engage in at an earlier point, months earlier. So the President dragged his feet for several months, leaving the narrowest possible window to reach a deal and avoid a further crisis.

This is not how this should have played out, but that doesn't mean our hands are tied behind our backs here in the Senate. The Senate is not required, as I said, to rubberstamp the House bill. We have the opportunity to amend this legislation and make it better.

I share the concerns expressed by the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senator from Maine; the Senator from South Carolina, Senator Graham; Senator Sullivan, the Senator from Alaska; and Senator Cotton, I believe, has spoken on that publicly, that the defense number in this agreement is simply inadequate.

It is simply unacceptable to leave it in the hands of Senator Schumer, the majority leader, whether or not we actually pass appropriations bills this

year because if we don't, under the terms of the McCarthy-Biden agreement, then we go back into a sequestration, with a 1-percent cut across the board.

That may not sound like a lot, but our country is facing more national security threats than we ever have before. Whether it is the challenge in Europe with Russia's unjustified invasion of Ukraine; whether it is the aspirations of the Ayatollah in Iran to build nuclear weapons; whether it is Kim Jong Un in North Korea or Vladimir Putin or President Xi, it is easy to see that the threats are not diminishing. They are getting more and more serious, which means that a sequestration of the Defense Department's spending by automatic operation of law is unacceptable.

Senators on both sides want amendments. Members want to make changes to try to improve the bill. As I said, the Senate should not be cut out of the process due to President Biden's foot-dragging. We still have time before the June 5 deadline. The Senate could move through the amendment process fairly quickly. We could do it today. We have ample time to vote on amendments and send an amended version back to the House for final passage.

I might add, there is no reason for the majority leader to block amendment votes. Senators deserve an opportunity to vote on amendments, and I hope the majority leader will not stand in the way of those Senators on both sides of the aisle who want to offer amendments and then receive-up-or-down votes.

This bill does include some very positive developments--beginning to rein in our Nation's spending habits--but it is not a magic pill to cure the Federal Government's chronic financial troubles. America's $31.4 trillion debt developed over the course of decades, so it is unreasonable to expect we are going to turn that around with the passage of one bill. But we can start, and we should start.

We know the pandemic accelerated these problems. We spent a lot of money necessarily on a bipartisan basis to try to deal with the public health crisis and the economic consequences of the pandemic, but then, as I said, at President Biden's request, our Democratic colleagues abused the rules of the Senate to go on two partisan spending sprees.

First came the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, followed by the $700 billion so-called Inflation Reduction Act. That is $2.6 trillion more, which gets us up to the $31.4 trillion today. But then they used that money to do everything from funding a supersized IRS to taxpayer- provided subsidies for rich people to buy electric vehicles.

So I am glad the Speaker was successful. In addition to beginning the long process of beginning to bend the curve when it comes to reckless spending, I am glad the Speaker was able to agree with the White House to claw back some of that money, including $27 billion in unspent COVID funds, and to redirect a reported $20 billion in IRS funding to other priorities.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates this bill will reduce Federal spending by $1.5 trillion over the next decade, which is a strong start in the fight to right America's financial ship.

As I said, this bill is the beginning of that fight; it is not the end. And I know many of us, including this Senator, would like for us to be able to do more. But the fact is, one bill cannot erase decades of financial troubles. We need to build on the progress made in this legislation in the months and years to come. Of course, the best way to do that is at election time because it matters who wins elections. It matters who is in the majority. It matters who controls a body of Congress and the White House.

But the next big battle will be in the Senate and House Appropriations Committees. As we know, every year, the committees are charged with writing 12 separate bills to fund the various components of the Federal Government.

The process of drafting those bills is designed to involve public hearings, committee votes, and rigorous debate. It gives every member of the Appropriations Committee opportunities to shape the individual spending bills and address America's spending habits. And once it gets voted out of committee, then all 100 Senators should have that opportunity to shape and improve the legislation.

Once these bills are completed, they are supposed to pass both Chambers and be signed into law by September 30 every year. But that didn't happen in 2021 or 2022. The Democratic Senator majority leader refused to allow us to pass a single appropriation bill last year, forcing us into the ugly process of considering and passing an omnibus appropriation bill. That is not the way that is supposed to be done.

Congress cannot continue to operate like this--with bloated budgets, last-minute spending bills, backroom negotiations. That is no way to gain the public's trust or to run the Federal Government. We need to return to a transparent and regular process where every elected Member of Congress has the opportunity to participate in budgeting and deciding what the appropriate expenditure of taxpayer dollars should be.

So we have known this date was coming since January. President Biden put us in this difficult situation by wasting valuable time, and he has pushed us to the brink of default. Now, thanks to his delay tactics, the Senate is preparing to vote on a bill that no Member of this body had a hand in writing. Given the time crunch, this truncated process was a necessary evil, but it cannot be the norm.

We need to return to the processes that were designed to promote smart and responsible spending. Hearings, committee votes, and public debate are absolutely critical. For today, Senators deserve the opportunity to amend this bill and, as I said, to make it better if they can; but all of our colleagues have the right to have a say in this process, and I urge the majority leader to allow that process to go forward with up-or-down amendment votes.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, we are back in session today after a week or so of being out of session. We have a habit of calling that a recess although it doesn't necessarily feel like a recess. Some people like to call it a home State work period, which seems a little awkward. Nevertheless, it was good to be back home, but it is also good to be back here in the Nation's Capital to do the work our constituents sent us here to do.

The term ``recess'' implies a restful and relaxing break from work, but for me and most of my colleagues, those recess weeks are some of the busiest ones of the year. Since the Senate gaveled out about 2 weeks ago, I have traveled across Texas to meet with my constituents, including time in Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Pasadena, and Dallas. When you have the privilege of representing 30 million Texans, it takes a little bit of effort just to get around the State, but we do it on a regular basis, and I am always invigorated by the interaction with the folks I work for.

Yesterday, of course, we celebrated Memorial Day. We did so in San Antonio yesterday with an incredible group of students who have been selected to attend America's military service academies. These young people are among the best and brightest in our State, and they have chosen to pursue a challenging and honorable career in our Nation's military.

Each Memorial Day, my office hosts a sendoff for these students, and it is far and away my favorite event of the year.

Now, these aren't just students I have recommended to the service academies; they are the ones--they include those recommended by any member of the Texas delegation.

We had about 500 people there in San Antonio yesterday, including about 100 students, and it was a great event. It is always inspiring to see these students answer the same call to serve that generations before them have answered. They are the next generation of military leaders. But, as we know, it is not just military leaders because, eventually, many of those folks will get into the private sector, as my parents and others did after World War II, and they become leaders in their own right in other capacities other than military. But it was a pleasure to spend the day celebrating the incredible journey that they are about to embark on.

I had a lot of fun kidding the parents because I said: Well, your son or daughter is getting a full ride to a service academy that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that always brings a big smile. Of course, that is not the main reason they go. The main reason they go is because they are young patriots and they work hard and demonstrated a lot of ability and self-discipline to get to where they are. But it was a delightful event.

Last week, I also had the chance to hear about how legislation that we passed last year called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act actually was being implemented. As you will recall, this legislation was introduced in the wake of the shootings in Uvalde, TX, about a year ago, which claimed the lives of 19 students and 2 adults--2 teachers. There was, obviously, a need for more mental health and school safety resources, and that is in large part what that legislation provided.

So I visited three school districts that received school hardening grants that were authorized by the bill. Part of me, Mr. President, is very sad to go into a school and realize that these students have to be protected from these sorts of threats, because no child should have to go to school afraid for their safety. No parents should have to send their child to school afraid for their safety. Such are the times we are living in.

I was glad to see these protective measures in place. For example, in Agnes Cotton Academy in San Antonio, they recently installed a new digital portable radio system that connects to ear pieces and the school intercom system. I saw similar technology at the R. L. Paschal High School in Ft. Worth, which purchased specialized smart radios as well as a system that can send emergency alerts to school phones and digital clocks inside classrooms. At Pasadena Memorial High School, I was shown their ID badge school access system and new technology for anonymous threat reporting.

Each of these schools has been able to review their own readiness using the best practices that have been recommended for schools across the Nation and then invest in the technologies and capabilities that fit their needs. And it was great to hear about the way these and other schools across the State of Texas are using these grant funds.

This legislation also made the single largest investment the Federal Government has ever made in community-based mental healthcare. But experts say there should be about one school psychologist for every 500 students. But we are a long, long way from that goal. Texas currently has one school psychologist for every 2,500 students.

But grants from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act are working to close that gap. First, we have to train the people in these professions so they can provide the services. Colleges and universities in Texas are already using some of these grant funds to help increase the number of mental health professionals in schools and in the State. They partnered with nearby school districts to provide real-world training opportunities. I am optimistic that the investment that we made and the hard work that they are doing will have a positive impact on student mental health on the workforce shortage in coming years--of course, with the goal to provide help for anybody who needs it in or around school.

So it is always good to go home and see the impact of the laws we pass here in Washington, DC.

Over the last few days, I also had the opportunity to talk about a new bill that I am working on called the FANS First Act. For years, musicians, sports teams, performers of all types, and their fans have been frustrated by the predatory ticket sales practices in the so- called secondary market.

What I mean by that is that a performer, an athlete, an entertainer, a museum, can sell tickets for a stated price; but, unfortunately, because of bots, these automated computer programs can go on and purchase large numbers of these tickets. It then provides an opportunity for professional scalpers to buy a huge portion of those tickets, then sell them at dramatically inflated prices on the secondary market. As a result, fans see sky-high prices.

Performers and sports teams have a frustrated fan base, and venues are left with empty seats. The only people benefiting from this current system are the scalpers--not the artists, not the teams, not the theaters, not the concert halls, or anyone else who adds value to the live performance experience.

This has been a problem for a long time, but it came into focus last year when tickets went on sale for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. Countless fans waited in a virtual waiting room for hours but were unable to buy tickets because the bots or computer programs were buying up all the tickets from the primary ticket vendor.

In Austin, I heard from one of those disappointed fans, a young woman named Kate Testone. Kate has been a dedicated Taylor Swift fan for years--she said since she was 5--and was eager to buy tickets to see one of her all-time favorite performers. When she couldn't get a ticket from the original point of sale, she turned to the resale market but was shocked by what she found. A seat with an obstructed view cost $450. An upper bowl seat was $900. Many tickets were selling for thousands and thousands of dollars. Kate is a college student who said she eats ramen for almost every meal. I am not sure that is strictly true, but that is what she said. But for her and other countless fans, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a ticket is simply not an option.

I also heard from my friend, music legend Robert Earl Keen, who is equally frustrated by the current system. Robert planned to sell tickets for the final leg of his farewell tour for about 100 bucks. But once tickets hit the resale market, many were priced at 1,000 bucks. I asked him about that, and I said: Well, does that money come to you, the person providing the intellectual property, the creativity that people wanted to enjoy?

He said: Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, my fans get mad at me if they think they are being gouged for these thousand-dollar tickets when, in fact, I have no control over that.

That extra $900 from his fans' wallets did not go to him; it didn't go to the venue; it didn't go to the ticket takers or the concession workers; it went straight into the pocket of a scalper. Robert noted that fans often think that it is the artist's fault, but it isn't. Once tickets are listed, artists have virtually no control over what happens, even though it is their name and their reputation at stake.

I heard a similar feedback from venues in San Antonio and Austin, including the Moody Center, the American Airlines Center in Dallas, and the Longhorn Ballroom. The same frustrations were felt by sports teams, everyone from University of Texas Athletics to the Dallas Cowboys.

There is an overwhelming sense that the current system isn't working, and it jeopardizes the relationships between fans and their favorite artists, teams, and venues, even though they aren't to blame.

I have been working on a bill called the FANS First Act to address some of the core issues we are seeing. The bill will focus on improving transparency so fans are aware that the thousand-dollar ticket they are about to buy is coming from a reseller who originally bought it for 100 bucks. It will also include reforms that improve consumer protection. That is really what we are talking about here: protecting consumers from the price gouging. It will restore market integrity, and it will punish the bad actors who engage in predatory ticket sales practices, particularly those who use these automated computer programs known as bots to purchase all the tickets once they go on sale just to sell them in the secondary market for a much higher price.

Senator Klobuchar has been one of the leaders in this effort, and I am eager to hear feedback from stakeholders as we try to finalize the text on this bill. I certainly would invite any of my colleagues-- particularly on the Judiciary Committee--on a bipartisan basis to work with us to try to come up with a bill that makes sense.

The frustration among fans, artists, teams, and venues is palpable, but I am optimistic we can come up with a bill that will punish the bad actors from ruining the live entertainment experience and restore the power to the artists that produce the wonderful entertainment that we all enjoy and help them protect their reputation against these predatory secondary market scalpers.

It was a busy week back home, and I am grateful that many people shared their ideas and feedback with me. It is an honor to represent 30 million people from Texas in the U.S. Senate, and I have come back feeling energized and ready to dive back into the work we have here.

It is apparently going to be all about the debt limit here for the next few days. We know that this, unfortunately, has been delayed for many months. We shouldn't have to back up against a potential default, but that seems to be the most common way we work around here. We don't get a sense of urgency until we get ready to fall off the cliff.

I am optimistic that we will be able to address the debt ceiling; and, at the same time, we can help restore some

measure of fiscal responsibility and integrity. It is simply unsustainable to have a $31 trillion debt and say: Well, we want to raise our credit card limit, but we don't want to have an adult conversation about how we are going to pay the money back. That simply is not the way things work in the real world, and it shouldn't be the way things work here in Congress.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am pleased to join with my colleagues to talk about a topic that I have talked about many times before on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Obviously, coming from a border State, the humanitarian, the public safety crisis occurring at our border, which has raged for the last 2 years under this President, has finally made every State a border State, every city a border city because the entire Nation is feeling the impact of the open border policies of the Biden administration because migrants are being shipped to places like Chicago, New York, Washington, DC. And so the mayors are saying: Whoa, we can't take this, even though border communities in Texas have encountered 5 million migrants during the Biden administration.

(Mr. REED assumed the Chair.)

I am sympathetic, but there is no sympathy. And, actually, we don't really want sympathy; we want action to deal with this influx of humanity that will soon become a tsunami.

As I said, since the President took office, Customs and Border Protection have logged about 5 million border crossings. Because of COVID-19, there was a public health law in place, title 42, which we have talked about many times, which was applied by the Border Patrol to expel 2.4 million of those 5 million migrants.

I know the numbers get a little tricky here. But at the same time Border Patrol has said they encountered 5 million migrants during the Biden administration, they also say that perhaps as many as 1.2 million migrants got away. In other words, they were seen on sensors or cameras, but the Border Patrol missed them or they simply evaded Border Patrol because either they were involved in some sort of criminal activity or they did not want to get detained because perhaps they didn't qualify for asylum.

So up until last week, under title 42, the Border Patrol was able to quickly expel illegal migrants who had no legal basis to stay in the United States. Title 42 is gone, which means that nearly 50 percent of migrants whom Border Patrol actually encountered and were able to expel under that rule--they no longer are able to do that.

It is nearly impossible to get an explanation from the Biden administration about where the remaining 2.7 million migrants are. What we do know is that the Biden administration is releasing an unprecedented number of these migrants into the interior of the United States.

Some of them--if you have good vision, you can see the green part of these bars. These are people who are claiming asylum. It is really a rather small part of this total number. So far, in March, we are exceeding 100,000 migrants at the border.

A relatively small number are claiming asylum. So what happened to the rest of them? Well, there is something called parole, p-a-r-o-l-e. We may think of parole as something that--if someone has been in prison and they get parole, but this is different. This is something that Customs and Border Protection does. They claim the authority to do this on a categorical basis simply to relieve the load on law enforcement officials and customs officials at the border.

Effectively, what this means is even if people aren't claiming asylum--at least a small fraction we know would have an opportunity to present their case in front of an immigration judge, and a small fraction of the total number would perhaps be able to prove their right to asylum under the law.

The Biden administration has said: We don't really care whether people are seeking asylum or not. We are going to release them into the interior of the United States using parole and tell them to show up at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in a town near you and make arrangements for their case to be processed there at the local level.

There have been some recent developments. In Florida, a Federal judge has now enjoined Customs and Border Protection's ability to use parole or, I should say, abuse parole by releasing mass numbers of migrants, perhaps never to be heard from again. The judge has said essentially that parole should be used on a case-by-case basis, not to relieve the load at the border because so many people are showing up.

You know, charitably, maybe that is what Secretary Mayorkas means when he says the border is secure. In some sort of twisted way, he thinks 5 million people coming to the border and another 2.7 million of those people being released into the interior of the United States somehow means the border is secure. Well, not under any rational definition of ``border security'' is the border secure.

So what is the Biden administration supposed to do? Back when President Clinton was in office, he signed into law an authority called expedited removal. This would allow the Border Patrol to remove people on an expedited basis. But it takes a little time, so historically what has happened is those people have been detained until their expedited removal is accomplished. But this administration has dismantled the detention facilities necessary to keep people while their expedited removal process is going forward. Instead, they are released.

You heard people talk about catch and release. That is catch and release. That is the big hole in the bottom of the bucket through which this vast sea of humanity is flowing.

Truth be told, there is a lot the administration doesn't know or simply isn't telling the American people about where these migrants are today.

Recently, the New York Times did an investigative piece about some of the unaccompanied children who have been released by the Biden administration into the interior of the country and documented the fact that many of them are in positions where they are performing forced labor, violating child labor laws. Unable to protect themselves, unable to provide for themselves, they are simply being forced to work, in violation of child labor laws. They have no, apparently, adult supervision--no responsible adult supervision--to protect them.

In a strange sense, that may be the least bad thing that can happen to some of these unaccompanied children. Others, I am sure, have been recruited into gangs, have been neglected, abused, sexually assaulted, sold into sex slavery. It just boggles the mind.

I keep asking myself, what is it going to take? What has to happen before the Biden administration wakes up to its failures on the border and the human consequences associated with it?

I haven't even mentioned--the Senator from Indiana did mention the fact that across these same borders, while this flood of humanity is coming across, Border Patrol is distracted or preoccupied with administrative tasks. So the drugs that have killed 108,000 Americans have come across those borders, including 71,000 last year from synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

Well, now that title 42 has expired, the number of people coming across is going to skyrocket. I have been sort of strangely amused at some of the press reports that say: Well, the numbers weren't as bad as we expected. I think maybe that is what President Biden said--oh, it wasn't as bad as we expected.

Well, these criminal organizations that transport migrants to the border and that also smuggle drugs into the United States are not stupid, and they realize that the eyes of the world--certainly of our country--were on the border to see, OK, now that title 42 has gone away, what is going to happen? Well, they just simply restricted the number of migrants they transported to the border in order to make it look like there was not a surge. But we already know that 10,000 migrants a day are being encountered. One Border Patrol agent said he thought that would go up to 11,000 to 14,000 a day.

The Biden administration has gone to great lengths not to secure the border but to make it easier for migrants to be released into the interior of the United States. Earlier this year, for example, the administration announced a new plan to address a specific subset of the border crisis--the way migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela were treated. What the administration said is this: We are not going to secure the border. We are not going to prevent illegal immigration. We are actually going to confer legal status on 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela each month--30,000 a month--and then we are going to take that out of the top number so it makes it look like we actually have less migrants coming into the country illegally.

Well, 30,000 a month, 360,000 a year, without Congress's consultation or consent. We are a coequal branch of government. The President has no authority to do that on his own.

Last week, the administration finalized a rule to funnel even more migrants into parole--which, as I said, is being abused; it is supposed to be done on a case-by-case basis--to release even more migrants into the interior of the country.

It is interesting the way rules and laws are named here in Washington because frequently they are the opposite of what they claim to be. So the administration has issued a new rule called the circumvention of lawful pathways rule, framed as a way to promote orderly migration and ensure those who don't play by the rules are ineligible for asylum.

In addition to the fundamentally false premise that these parole programs constitute lawful pathways--they don't--the rule is brimming with loopholes that were designed to give migrants a clear and easy path into the United States. It is a roadmap. All migrants have to do is claim that they are illiterate or say they experienced technical issues with the CBP One app that the administration wants them to use to schedule their appearance at the border. Well, the administration says they can still be paroled into the United States and given a work permit. Talk about a pull factor.

You know, we hear a lot about the push factors of illegal immigration. Those are real--violence, poverty. We all understand that. People want a better way of life. But we admit--we naturalize or make American citizens out of 1 million migrants a year. But turning this process over to the criminal organizations and cartels that smuggle not only people but drugs into the United States has proven to be an absolute humanitarian disaster.

By outlining broad exceptions that are easily gamed, the Biden administration has provided migrants and the cartels that exploit them with a playbook. They can make the dangerous journey to the border, show up at a port of entry without an appointment, say the magic words, and be released into the United States courtesy of the Biden administration; or they can cross between the ports of entry and claim to face an imminent and extreme threat to their life or safety in Northern Mexico and be waved into the United States as well.

Day after day, the Biden administration is allowing more and more migrants to enter the United States despite the fact that the vast majority of these individuals have no legal basis to be here. At the same time, the administration is doing less and less to enforce the law and to remove those who have no valid asylum claims in the United States.

As you can see here, this is--Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the Federal Agency responsible for removing people who have illegally come to the United States. As you can see, in fiscal year 2019, it was over a quarter of a million. In fiscal year 2020, it was just under 200,000. In fiscal year 2021, it was just over 50,000. In fiscal year 2022, it was about 75,000. So not only has President Biden opened the front door, he has closed the back door when it comes to removing people who have no

legal right to be here in the United States.

Well, this isn't an accident. This is deliberate. This is a plan. And it is an outrage.

This is all part of a deliberate effort. I have tried to figure it out. OK, maybe the Biden administration doesn't understand or maybe we just have a different interpretation of the law, but I have come to conclude that that is not true, that it can't possibly be true. So my only conclusion is that this is part of a deliberate plan: You let more people in, and you remove fewer people who cannot legally be present here in the United States.

The circumvention of lawful pathways rule is dangerous, and it is not a serious effort to secure the border; it is a figleaf. And I will be introducing a Congressional Review Act resolution to strike it down.

This rule is part of the Biden administration's shell game to conceal the unprecedented level of illegal immigration on their watch. Because of the loopholes, it will fail to deliver the serious consequences that the administration claims, and it will fail to deter people from making the long and dangerous journey to our border when they have no legal claim to enter our country.

So I hope the Senate will soon vote to strike down this rule and send a clear message to President Biden that his job is to enforce the law as written.

I agree with the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Hoeven, when he says the President has the tools. I mentioned expedited removal, which President Bill Clinton signed into law. The President just simply refuses to do the job he took an oath to do--to uphold and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States. He has no authority to rewrite the laws through executive actions or rulemaking, and I hope the Senate will say so when we vote on the congressional resolution of disapproval.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, last week, President Biden met with top congressional leaders to talk about the debt ceiling. This meeting came 4 months after the United States hit the debt limit and just a few weeks before a potential default.

Considering the high stakes in this looming debt crisis, it is remarkable that it took this long for the President to sit down with the four leaders and to talk about how to solve this problem together. A debt default, of course, would set off an unprecedented economic crisis and inflict real pain on families all across the country.

We all know our economy is just trying to get back on its feet after COVID. Our banking system has endured three high-profile collapses, and inflation continues to wreak havoc on family budgets. If the United States defaults on its debt, those challenges will only intensify. And that is an understatement. Social Security and Medicare benefits could be delayed. Members of the military and Border Patrol would be left without a paycheck. We would see our economy reeling--skyrocketing mortgage rates, sinking stock prices, and instability across our economy.

Given the already fragile state of the economy, default is the very last thing we need. Fortunately, that is a point of agreement between the parties. I haven't heard anybody say it would be a good idea for us to default.

But the $31.7 trillion question is, What does the path forward look like?

As the American people know, the Republican position is not shrouded in mystery. My Republican colleagues and I have said over and over that a clean debt ceiling increase is not an option. It simply doesn't have the votes to pass the House or the Senate, making it a nonstarter. So we should move on.

In order to have a chance of passing both Chambers of Congress, a debt ceiling increase must come with some spending reforms. You would think President Biden, after all of his years serving in the Senate, now as President of the United States, would understand that $31.7 trillion in debt is unsustainable. That is just common sense. But the President has dragged his feet for the last 4 months, saying he would not negotiate--until now. It looks like he, grudgingly, is acknowledging that he has to negotiate, which he knew or should have known all along.

Thanks to the leadership of Speaker McCarthy, the House of Representatives passed a bill last month to avert the debt crisis. I think President Biden actually thought that the Speaker of the House would be unsuccessful in passing any increase in the debt ceiling, so he was happy to sit back, hoping that they would fail and then they would come running to him and agree to his demands. But by passing the House bill, they put the ball in President Biden's court and put the onus on him to drop his ``no negotiations, no reforms'' position, which was absolutely ridiculous in the first place.

For months, the President has said he won't negotiate. He ruled out negotiations over any spending reforms, even though he signed into law trillions of dollars in new debt which has caused us to come to this juncture in the first place. He said he expects Congress to raise the debt ceiling with no conditions attached and let the runaway spending spree continue.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: If you maxed out your credit card, your credit union or your bank is going to say: Well, if you want an increase in your spending limit, you are going to have to talk to us about how you are going to pay this money back.

Those are the sorts of conversations that would occur in our daily lives, and those are the sorts of conversations that the President should have started to have 4 months ago.

Before the President's meeting with congressional leaders last week, his advisers parroted saying his ``no negotiations, no reforms'' message. The White House insisted time and time again that the President wouldn't drop his demand for a clean debt ceiling increase.

Now we have seen a massive shift in the President's rhetoric. I am actually grateful that he's made that shift in his rhetoric because his earlier position was completely irresponsible and unsustainable. But, now, over the weekend, the President was asked about the status of conversations with Republicans about the debt ceiling. He said:

It is never good to characterize a negotiation in the

middle of a negotiation.

So there he goes using the ``N'' word, ``negotiation,'' when he said he wouldn't negotiate.

And while he offered no insight into the discussions themselves, the fact that he described them as negotiations actually marks a major turning point. After insisting for months that he wouldn't negotiate, the President has finally caved in, as we knew he ultimately would. He has finally accepted the inevitable reality that a bipartisan compromise is the only way to avoid a debt crisis. But that has been obvious from day one.

We have a Democrat majority in the Senate, a Republican majority in the House, and a Democrat in the White House. We know that in order to pass a bill, all three branches--two branches of Congress and the executive branch--would have to agree on something. So by definition, it has to be bipartisan. That is the baseline for success in divided government.

It really is baffling why it took so long for the President to come to terms with this reality, particularly given his long experience as a Member of this body, the U.S. Senate. But I am glad he got off the sidelines, finally, and now is at the negotiating table with Speaker McCarthy.

Reportedly, White House and congressional aides worked over the weekend trying to identify the framework for a deal; and the President, as I said, will meet with congressional leaders again today.

The White House is projecting a great deal of optimism, and I hope that is warranted. I mean, I hope that means they will come with a serious offer. But we still have a long way to go because once a deal is reached, there is still going to be a lot of work that needs to be done.

First, the agreement needs to be translated into legislative language. Once the bill is completed, Members need time to review it, then the bill has to pass both Chambers of Congress. This is a process that can occur over several days or much longer. But remember, Secretary Yellen said the United States can default as early as June 1, which is 16 days away.

With this as a backdrop, President Biden is planning to hop on a plane to Japan tomorrow. We are 2 weeks away from a potential economic disaster--largely of the President's own making for taking his ridiculous ``no negotiation'' stance for the last 4 months--but we are 2 weeks away from potential economic disaster, bipartisan discussions have begun, and the President is still planning to go overseas.

The President spent months refusing to negotiate. He said he wouldn't even entertain the idea of negotiations to avoid a debt crisis. Now the President is at the negotiating table. This isn't a time to get up, walk away, and jump on Air Force One and go overseas. You can't fly half way around the globe just as negotiations are gaining momentum, because as he accurately said, the United States cannot default on its debts over the next 2 weeks. So it is crunch time. It is time to roll up their sleeves, get to work, and to work this out.

Speaker McCarthy and the House of Representatives have been ready to negotiate since the beginning, but the President wasted months that could have been spent on hashing out a bipartisan compromise to avoid a debt crisis. And he knew it from the very beginning that, ultimately, he would have to negotiate. So now is the time for the President to take this crisis seriously and to own his responsibility to negotiate a successful outcome.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of quorum.

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

Mr. President, this week is National Police Week, a time to honor the service and sacrifice of America's law enforcement officers. These brave men and women have chosen a difficult and often dangerous career. They have dedicated their lives to protecting the rest of us, defending our civil liberties and protecting our cities and neighborhoods. That decision requires tremendous courage and sacrifice by both the officer and their family.

We have recently been reminded of the dangers they face every day. Just a week ago, shoppers wandered in and out of a busy outdoor mall in Allen, TX, near Dallas. It was a beautiful, seemingly normal Saturday afternoon until the day took a tragic turn. A man pulled up in his vehicle, got out of his car with multiple weapons, and started firing.

Fortunately, out of this terrible tragedy, fortunately, an officer was already on the scene for an unrelated call. He did what he was trained to do and what his conscience told him to do and ran immediately toward the danger. He didn't hesitate to put his own life on the line in order to stop the shooter and save countless lives.

The shooter killed eight innocent people and wounded seven more. Had this brave officer not been on the scene, it is difficult to imagine how many more casualties would have been incurred, how many more lives would have been lost.

The shooter was carrying multiple weapons and had five additional guns in his car. If not for the quick action of that Allen police officer, more families would be making funeral arrangements today.

Stories like this underscore the dangers our officers take in their daily lives. A routine call or a traffic stop can turn deadly without warning. And these men and women still lace up their boots and put on a uniform each morning.

Each year for National Police Week, we honor the law enforcement community, naturally, and remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. One of the most striking reminders of that sacrifice is the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, which sits along the National Mall here in Washington, DC.

It is a powerful tribute for the State, Federal, and local law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty and features marble walls, filled with more than 23,000 names. Each of those names represents an American hero. And, sadly, the names of 67 Texans will be added this year.

These officers gave their lives in service to their communities and our country. And while there is nothing we can do to console the families of those heroes, we can do more to support their brothers and sisters, still in blue.

Over the last couple of years, members of our law enforcement community have faced an onslaught of new challenges. From the pandemic to dangerous ``defund the police'' rhetoric to baseless attacks, the men and women in blue who keep us safe are subject to tremendous risks and strain.

They have watched as progressive politicians have made calls to fund the police and attempted to villainize the very heroes who keep us safe.

I am proud to say I have never been ashamed to support the men and women of our law enforcement community. I will always proudly stand with them. In the face of increasing crime rates and growing concerns about public safety, Congress must do more to

support and empower our men and women in blue.

Last year, we made some progress. The Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program was reauthorized through a bipartisan bill I introduced with Senator Klobuchar, the Senator from Minnesota. We have already seen some real-world impact these grants have made in communities across Texas. And this will promote even greater collaboration between law enforcement and the mental health providers that they serve alongside.

We also took a big step toward improving training for officers by passing the Law Enforcement De-Escalation Training Act, which was signed into law by President Biden last December. This new law will ensure that officers have the skills they need to navigate and defuse potentially dangerous situations, particularly involving those undergoing a mental health crisis. I am proud of the bipartisan progress we have made, and I hope we can build upon it more this year.

In honor of National Police Week, I introduced the Back the Blue Act to strengthen laws that protect our officers. This legislation sends a strong and powerful message to the more than 800,000 officers serving our country--a message that they are supported and that violence against them will never be tolerated.

The Back the Blue Act adds stiff mandatory penalties and makes it a Federal crime to kill--or attempt to kill--a law enforcement officer, a Federal judge, or a federally funded public safety officer. It also makes it a Federal crime to assault a law enforcement officer.

As I have said, these men and women put themselves in harm's way every day to keep our communities safe, and we must make it absolutely clear that violence against them will not be tolerated.

This legislation was endorsed by leading law enforcement organizations like the National Association of Police Organizations and the Fraternal Order of Police and is cosponsored by 39 Senators, so far.

I hope other colleagues will support this bill and show law enforcement across the country that we stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

There is another piece of legislation that I hope will pass soon called the Project Safe Neighborhoods Program. This is a reauthorization of an existing national nationwide partnership between Federal, State, and local law enforcement officers and prosecutors that aims to reduce violent crime, particularly gun crime.

It achieves that goal through data-driven, evidence-based, and trauma-informed practices that have proven to reduce crime rates. Since it was first launched two decades ago, Project Safe Neighborhoods has helped reduce violent crime in large cities and small towns all across this country.

A study in 2013 found that the program was associated with more than a 13-percent decrease in violent crimes in cities and a high rate of program participation.

Given the growing concerns and already serious concerns about crime in our country, there could not be a more important time to make this program better, stronger, and more effective.

This is among the range of bills the Senate should consider to pass and support law enforcement, including the Federal Law Enforcement Service Weapon Purchase Act that would allow retired officers to purchase their service weapons that would otherwise be destroyed.

This bipartisan legislation would prevent waste by allowing agencies to recover the value of these weapons. This bill has been endorsed by multiple organizations that represent law enforcement officers, and I hope we can advance it this year.

I am also a proud cosponsor of other bipartisan bills that were introduced by Senate colleagues. Senator Peters from Michigan and I introduced the Strong Communities Act, with the goal of improving trust between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.

I am also a cosponsor of the Recruit and Retain Act, led by Senator Fischer of Nebraska and Senator Coons of Delaware. It aims to alleviate the personnel shortages that are being felt in police departments across the Nation and ensures that America's police forces are well staffed.

I hope the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which I serve, will advance some of these bills later this week and send a strong message that the U.S. Senate supports America's police officers.

Every day, I am grateful for the service and sacrifice of our law enforcement officers in Texas and across the country. And that includes the Capitol Police that keeps this building and Capitol Hill safe, protecting not only the people who work here but also people who visit here.

In honor of National Police Week, we honor the brave men and women who protect us. We pay tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice. And we commit to doing everything in our power to ensure that they have all the resources they need to keep our people safe.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, as the whole Nation knows by now, title 42, the COVID-19 public health laws used by the Border Patrol to expel people at the southern border, will expire at midnight tonight.

At our border communities, in the 1,200 miles of our border with Mexico and Texas, they are bracing for a tsunami of humanity. As we know, over the last couple of years, title 42 has been one of the tools in the Border Patrol's toolbox to prevent the Biden border crisis from becoming the Biden border catastrophe or calamity.

To give you a sense of the impact of title 42, which will go away tonight, since President Biden took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has logged more than 5 million illegal border crossings--5 million. Because of title 42, the United States hasn't been required to detain, identify, and process every single person who crossed the border illegally. In fact, nearly half of those 5 million were removed under title 42, a total of almost 2.4 million people.

Consider the countless stories we have heard over the last 2 years about overcrowded detention facilities. I have seen them myself. We have all seen them on television or in the print media. We have seen these shelters bursting at the seams. That was the case when Border Patrol was detaining only roughly half of the individuals who illegally crossed the southern border because they were able to use title 42.

Starting tomorrow, agents will have to apprehend every single person under DHS's--Department of Homeland Security's--traditional title 8 authority. The problem is that law enforcement doesn't have the space to hold those individuals, not even close.

Last spring, Secretary Mayorcas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said, Customs and Border Protection detention facilities could hold approximately 18,000 people. That sounds like a large number, until you begin to look at the number of people who are crossing the border every day.

This week, we have already seen an average of about 10,000 border crossings a day. And he says we can detain 18,000. And you are getting 10,000 a day?

Well, once title 42 is lifted, that number will climb even higher. Detention facilities, which are already overcapacity, will become even more crowded. And once they are fully maxed out, the Biden administration will simply release people into the United States, using what they call parole.

Now, parole--we are perhaps familiar with parole in the criminal context--but parole in the immigration context means that they will be released into the interior of the United States, whether or not they can satisfy the legal requirement to be granted asylum, and they will be told to go to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in the interior of the United States--in Chicago, in New York, here in Washington, DC, or wherever they may end up.

Unfortunately, immigration court backlogs because of the vast numbers of people coming in. If you show up in New York, and you have been paroled in the United States, assuming you even show up, which many don't, you could wait as many as 10 years to begin the process of being heard in immigration court.

And here is the real unfairness. Consider the people--although it is a small minority, maybe 15 percent or so of these migrants who claim asylum will have a valid claim. They have to wait in line with the 85 or more percent who we know will not have a valid plan. How unfair is it to those people to leave them in legal limbo because of the uncontrolled numbers coming across the border?

Well, anyone who thinks this is somehow a scare tactic or a made-up story is in for a rude awakening. Over the last several weeks, as the title 42 end date has crept closer, we have seen migrants gathering in larger and larger numbers along the border in Mexico. It is currently estimated that more than 100,000 migrants are already waiting. With this deadline just around the corner, the Secretary of Homeland Security traveled to Brownsville, TX, last Friday to talk about what is to come.

Brownsville, TX, which is at the very tip of the Rio Grande Valley, right across from Mexico, is one of three Texas cities to declare a state of emergency already, anticipating the end of title 42. Laredo and El Paso were the other two because they are preparing, as best they can, for an unprecedented surge of migrants.

Over the last couple of weeks, more than 15,000 migrants have arrived in Brownsville. Law enforcement and city officials have been overwhelmed by the arrival of so many people, and they are bracing for an even larger surge on Friday.

With this as a backdrop, Secretary Mayorkas made an absolutely dumbfounding statement last week--one of many that he has made in the past. He said: The border is not open; it has not been open; and it will not be open subsequent to May 11.

It is beyond my comprehension how someone can see what we are seeing on our TV screens or in the media and then to have a public official like the Secretary of Homeland Security tell us a lie repeatedly about the border not being open.

I don't know what he calls 5 million people coming across the border. Well, about half of them have been expelled, so let's say, roughly, 2.5 million after you consider those who were repatriated as a result of title 42. He said this in Brownsville, which is a city that has absorbed less than 15,000 migrants in less than 2 weeks.

You know, in some of the newspapers they have a Pinocchio test where they will give you one Pinocchio, two Pinocchios, three Pinocchios, four Pinocchios, based on how outrageous the lie is. And I don't think you can count up enough Pinocchios to award Secretary Mayorkas for his outright falsehood that he continues to spew, sitting in the critical position to do something about this.

The border has clearly been open, and President Biden and his administration have laid out the welcome mat. And that is why there has been absolutely no deterrence. You know, law enforcement, including Border Patrol, doesn't just enforce the law. They, by enforcing the law and by people knowing that they are enforcing the law, hope to deter other people from violating the law.

But when people see an open border with no enforcement, there is no deterrence. And so people do what we can expect they will continue to do, and that is to continue to come.

Well, at midnight tonight, title 42 expires. Secretary Mayorkas must really think that the American people are stupid or dumb. But they are not. They are smart. They can see what is going on. They know he is not telling the truth. And for some reason, President Biden continues to keep him on the payroll. You would think, at some point, somebody should get fired for this disaster, which is about ready to get worse. There needs to be some sort of accountability.

If you did something like this in the private sector, what do you think would happen to you? You would be held accountable. But apparently not in the Biden administration. You can lie to the American people. You can fail to do your job until it gets so bad that presumably something has to give.

All of us can see photos and videos of the chaos at the southern border. We see it on our social media feeds and on the nightly news. We understand what is happening, and we know who is responsible.

So the administration is being dishonest when they say the border is not open. And they have made it painfully obvious that nothing is going to change until they are forced to do so.

After a couple of years--I have been writing to the Secretary of Homeland Security for at least the last 2 years, saying: When title 42 ends, as we know it will at some point, what is your plan? What is your plan?

Well, on the eve of this looming crisis and catastrophe, after the end of title 42, the administration has rolled out something they call the circumvention of lawful pathways rule.

The problem is, the Constitution does not give the executive branch-- the President of the United States--the power to write immigration laws or to stand up new pathways for legal status. If young people who were given Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals have learned one thing, it is that the President does not have the authority to unilaterally change immigration laws. That is something he has to do in conjunction with the Congress.

But the Biden administration seems eager to repeat history with this rule, which funnels migrants into new, unconstitutional, so-called lawful pathways that were unilaterally created by the executive branch.

You know, there has got to be a little office somewhere--I haven't found it yet here in Washington DC--that generates these names for legislation or new rules and regulations, which actually are the opposite of what they do. That was true with the Inflation Reduction Act, which didn't reduce inflation. And it is true of this so-called circumvention of Lawful Pathways Act. It is not lawful. It is not constitutional for the President to do it by himself.

Unfortunately, that is just one of many problems with this rule. The broad goal, plainly, is to ensure a more orderly asylum process by reducing the number of border crossings between ports of entry and encouraging migrants to seek asylum at ports. Well, if that were actually what was going to happen, that would be improvement. Those who fail to present themselves at a port of entry would, theoretically, be ineligible for asylum. And it purports to regulate the flow of asylum seekers into land ports of entry so they don't become dangerously overcrowded.

As I said, at face value, these seem like constructive ideas, but this rule is brimming with flaws and exceptions and loopholes that were explicitly designed to ensure migrants will be released into the United States en masse.

I learned as a law student: What the front page giveth, the back page can taketh away.

While the Biden administration may want to put on this happy face that, yes, we learned our lesson, we are changing the rules, we are going to restrict the pathways by which people can seek asylum in the United States, the truth is they have no commitment to an orderly, lawful, and humane system of immigration.

The Biden plan includes broad exemptions for migrants who show up at a port of entry without an appointment and are illiterate--or at least claim to be. It provides an exception for migrants who can't access the DHS scheduling system or who experience significant technical issues with the notoriously glitchy CBP One app. And the Department all but admits in the fine print that these migrants will be paroled.

Remember what I said about parole. It is just releasing these migrants into the United States and quickly being

given employment authorization documents.

The exceptions swallow the rule by outlining broad exceptions that can't be objectively evaluated and are easily gamed. If they can't be gamed, they will be gamed.

The Biden administration has provided the cartels with a road map or a playbook. The administration is saying: Instruct migrants to use one of these excuses. Coach them to use one of these excuses, and they will be eligible for asylum, and they will be released into the interior of the United States.

Migrants can make the dangerous journey to the border, show up at a port of entry without an appointment, say the magic words, and still be paroled into the United States.

As the administration has made clear, it plans to ``expeditiously process'' migrants who arrive at the southwest border. With title 42 set to expire and 100,000 immigrants gathering across the border, this is President Biden's plan. It is called expedited catch-and-release.

The circumvention of lawful pathways rule is dangerous and unconstitutional. I am in the process of introducing a Congressional Review Act resolution to disapprove of it. This rule would rapidly increase the number of migrants being paroled in the United States while doing nothing--zero--to deter migrants with weak asylum claims.

Immigration groups on the left and the right, interestingly, oppose this rule. Some of our colleagues in the Democratic caucus have expressed that they are deeply disappointed with the administration and that it has chosen to move forward in publishing this proposed rule. That is from a Democratic Member of the Senate.

I urge Senator Schumer, the majority leader, who sets the schedule around here, to allow us to vote on my resolution as soon as possible.

The White House has claimed that this is the only option available to address a looming catastrophe, but that is false too. In the nineties, President Clinton signed a law establishing something called expedited removal. In short, it allows Border Patrol to detain and quickly remove people who cannot prove their legal requirement in order to stay. Expedited removals have been utilized by Republicans and Democrats over the years. It is a part of that powerful deterrent that we need to reestablish.

So those who have no legitimate claim to legal status will make that dangerous journey, having paid thousands of dollars to a coyote or cartel to get here. If a person is likely to be removed from the United States within a few days of crossing, fewer and fewer of them will even attempt to make the dangerous journey in the first place.

That is the power of expedited removal. It sends a clear message that America's immigration laws will be enforced, something that has not happened during President Biden's watch.

President Biden has the authority today to conduct expedited removals. He has had that authority since day one but refuses to fully utilize it.

I have heard the Press Secretary for the President say: Well, it is up to Congress to deal with this.

Well, Congress has already dealt with this, and President Clinton signed it into law.

It is because President Biden has unilaterally surrendered to the cartels that continue to make billions of dollars and whose poison kills tens of thousands of Americans each year because it continues to flow across the border. President Biden has the tools he needs today. So don't believe this: Well, it is their fault.

It is the blame game, which is an Olympic sport here in Washington, DC--trying to blame somebody else, denying personal responsibility.

But this one sits at the feet of the President of the United States. Rather than stand up new facilities or hire more personnel to make the expedited removal process function, the Biden administration has, instead, chosen to release people into the interior of the country at an unprecedented pace.

Where the expedited removal serves as a deterrent, President Biden's wide-scale catch-and-release is a magnet. People are being released to wait immigration court dates that are years down the road--if they show up, and many of them won't. Some migrants aren't scheduled to appear before an immigration judge until 2032--9 years from now. Believe me, when that happens, word travels fast, and more people are sure to follow suit. Why wouldn't they?

President Biden has effectively said: Keep coming. We are going to wave you on through the turnstile at the border, maybe never to be heard from again and never to appear in front of an immigration judge. How unfair is it to those who do have legitimate claims to have to wait in line for 9 or 10 years with the vast majority of people who we know will not qualify?

Well, this is what we have seen since President Biden took office and decided to undo everything the previous President had done. And the pace is going to do nothing but accelerate once title 42 goes away at midnight tonight.

This administration needs to get serious about expedited removals, about using the tools that are already available. It needs to make sure that those with invalid claims are quickly removed from the United States and, yes, people with valid claims need to be welcomed for following the lawful process.

That is what I mean when I say we need a legal, humane, and orderly immigration system. Legal immigration has been one of the greatest things our country has ever embraced. Virtually all of us, or at least our ancestors, came from somewhere else. And we have always tended to attract people who are leaving dire circumstances--perhaps economic, perhaps otherwise--in their home country, who want to come to the United States to pursue their dreams.

I believe that is the secret sauce that has made our country what it is today--the powerhouse that it is today, economically and otherwise. But it is lawful immigration. It is orderly immigration. It is humane immigration. It is not the chaos and the criminality that we see at the border today.

Sometimes I ask myself: How bad does this have to get before the politicians in Washington, DC, wake up and decide to do something?

I hope we are at that point. I hope it doesn't have to get worse because it can get worse if we simply do nothing.

But the first step is for the President to use the tools available to him already signed into law. In order to do that, they need to increase detention space so frontline personnel will have the capacity to actually carry out these expedited removals.

The Biden administration also needs to stop waving or paroling people into the country to wait for an appointment with immigration and customs enforcement that is years in the future. Again, that is for the ones that show up.

These are just a few of the ways that the President can deal with this crisis today. Those options have been available since the day he took office. He just refuses to use them and tries to shift the blame to others.

I yield the floor.

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