Floor Statements

Mr. President, I recognize Duha Mahmud, a spring 2024 intern with my Orlando office, for the hard work she has done for my office and the people of Florida.

Duha graduated from Towson University with a degree in international studies. She is a dedicated and diligent worker who was devoted to getting the most out of her internship experience.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Duha, and I look forward to hearing of her successes in the years to come.

Mr. President, I recognize Ethan Jacob Morin, a spring 2024 intern with my Orlando office, for the hard work he has done for my office and the people of Florida.

Ethan is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in international and global studies with a minor in legal studies at the University of Central Florida. He is a dedicated and diligent worker who was devoted to getting the most out of his internship experience.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Ethan, and I look forward to hearing of his successes in the years to come.

Mr. President, I recognize Anne Shaddock, a spring 2024 intern with my Jacksonville office, for the hard work she has done for my office and the people of Florida.

Anne is pursuing a bachelor of science in communications with a public relations emphasis alongside a minor in nutrition at the University of North Florida. She is a dedicated and diligent worker who was devoted to getting the most out of her internship experience.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Anne, and I look forward to hearing of her successes in the years to come.

Mr. President, I recognize Jamila Thomas, a spring 2024 intern with my Orlando office, for the hard work she has done for my office and the people of Florida.

Jamila is currently completing her secondary school studies at William R. Boone High School. She is a dedicated and diligent worker who was devoted to getting the most out of her internship experience.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Jamila, and I look forward to hearing of her successes in the years to come.

In a few hours here, the press headlines are going to read that the Senate just passed the Ukraine funding bill. That is what they will call it. This bill is about a lot more than just Ukraine. There is a lot in this bill, and I want to go through some of it.

First of all, it provides something I have strongly supported, which is providing, in this case, $26 billion to the State of Israel to defeat Hamas, to defend itself against its enemies. This is actually something we tried to pass on its own or could have passed on its own months ago. It was blocked. It was held hostage for Ukraine funding, but it is something we should have done months ago.

It is interesting. I think Israel, in and of itself, is a miracle country. On the first day of its existence, it was invaded, I believe, by 12 separate armies. The whole world thought they would be overrun and defeated very quickly, and they survived. And they have throughout their entire existence had to deal with the fact that everywhere they turn, they have enemies all around them.

It also happens to be the only pro-American democracy in the Middle East. Today, it is engaged in a battle to not just defeat these vicious criminals and terrorists who committed a slaughter on the 7th of October of last year, but they also have to deal with rockets being launched against them from Lebanon. You have 90-something thousand, potentially, Israelis permanently displaced in their own country. They can't go back to where they live in the northern part of their country. And then there is the threat from Iran and the threat from all the terror groups--Hezbollah and the like--that are constantly targeting Israel and then having to face all the things that are happening around the world, as well, in this effort to delegitimize their right to be a Jewish State.

I am a strong supporter of Israel's defense. We should have done this weeks and months ago, and it could have been done as its own bill, but it was held hostage.

This bill provides, as well, $8 billion to help nations in the Indo- Pacific, particularly Taiwan, and the purpose of that is to build up the military capacity of our partners in the region, frankly, to dissuade and prevent the Chinese Communist Party from starting a war in the Indo-Pacific that would make the one going on in Europe look like child's play--far more dangerous.

By the way, that is something I have been trying to do since 2019. I believe I was the first Member of Congress to call for a banning--not a banning of TikTok, a banning of ByteDance, which is the company that owns TikTok. If ByteDance sells TikTok, TikTok could continue to operate. But we should not have a company operating in the United States with the algorithm that it has and the access to the data that it has that powers the algorithm. We should not have a company like that operating in the United States that happens to do whatever the Chinese Communist Party tells them to do.

But the reason why the headlines are going to be about Ukraine funding is because that is the part of this bill that, frankly, has been controversial and has people who oppose it.

I, personally, believe it is in the national interest of the United States to help Ukraine. Ukraine was invaded, not once but twice, by Vladimir Putin. I supported Ukraine in helping Ukraine back in 2014 when they were first invaded by Putin; and President Obama would only supply them with blankets and meals, ready-to-eat. And I support continuing to help them now to defend themselves. They didn't start this war. I support helping them defend themselves to the extent we can afford it and to the extent we can sustain it.

But while this invasion of Ukraine most certainly poses a national security risk to the United States and a risk to our country, the invasion of America across our southern border is even more important. It is even more a severe threat.

Today, and every single day for the last 3 years, thousands of people--many if not most of whom we know very little about--are pouring into the United States across our southern border.

I made it clear months ago that while I support helping Ukraine, I would only vote to do so if the President issued Executive orders that would help stop this. It was his Executive orders ordering us not to enforce immigration laws that created the incentive and the driver that has led to this crisis and only that. Only Executive orders to begin to enforce our immigration laws will allow us to stop what is happening now.

But the President continues to refuse to issue those Executive orders. He continues to refuse to enforce our immigration laws, and so the crisis continues. And sadly, just a few moments ago, we took a vote here that basically says that we here in the Senate will not be allowed to vote on amendments to make changes to this bill.

So we are left with the choice. I am left with this choice. If I want to help Israel, if I want to help Taiwan, if I want to ban ByteDance from operating TikTok in the United States, then I have to drop my demand that the President enforce our immigration laws, and, by the way, I have to vote for billions of dollars to be spent on all kinds of programs around the world that I will describe in a moment, including for people who are illegally entering this country. This is moral extortion.

First of all, 9 million people over 3 years--that is how many have entered our country. This is not immigration. We should always be a country that welcomes immigration. It enriches our country. Controlled immigration, in which we control how many people come, who comes, knowing enough about them--that is immigration. But 9 million people and counting in 3 years? That is mass migration, and mass migration is never good. There is never such a thing as positive mass migration, particularly of 9 million people in 3 years. At a time when our country, from the inside and the outside, is being infiltrated by people and by movements that seek to destroy America, mass migration is catastrophically dangerous.

Last week, in a coordinated effort--and it was a coordinated effort; they admitted it--to cause the most economic impact possible in the United States, at least until our leaders abandoned Israel--that was their demand--we had pro-terrorist mobs, which is what they are--these are not protesters; these are pro-terrorist mobs--shut down traffic on an interstate highway in Oregon. They blocked passengers from getting to the airport in Chicago and Seattle. They closed down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

At this very moment--right now, as I speak on the Senate floor--at some of

our most prestigious universities, their campuses are closed because they have been taken over by pro-terrorist mobs, chanting things and harassing Jewish students to go back to Poland, they say. Others are chanting: ``Go Hamas. We love you. We support your rockets too.'' Others--I have heard these chants--here it goes: ``We say justice. You say how. Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.''

The situation has gotten so intolerable that, just 2 days ago, a rabbi advised Jewish students to leave Columbia University and go home for their safety.

This morning, I got a text message from a friend--a Jewish friend-- and I read something I never thought I would ever have to read. Here is what he wrote me:

I have to tell you, for the first time in my life, I see

Jewish people scared for their safety and considering exit

strategies from the USA, including buying homes in foreign

countries and looking to liquidate USA assets.

I never thought I would ever read that from anybody in America.

These mobs, by the way, don't just want to destroy Israel. They want to destroy America. Some of these mobs are out there chanting ``death to America'' in the streets of American cities.

As for one of the mob leaders at one of these riots, this is what he said into a microphone:

It is not just ``Genocide Joe'' that has to go; it is the

entire system that has to go. Any system that would allow

such atrocities and devilry to happen and would support it--

such a system does not deserve to exist on God's Earth.

Do you know what system he is talking about? This system--our system, our system of government--that is what he was talking about.

Where did all of this come from? How did all of this happen from one day to the next? How can things that we once only saw happening in the streets of Tehran, manufactured by the evil regime--how are those things now being chanted in our streets in our country? Where did this come from? The clues are everywhere.

Hamas and Hezbollah have been very, very public about how these violent, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic mobs are part of their strategy to intimidate American leaders to support policies that will help destroy Israel.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terror groups have repeatedly called on their supporters around the world to protest ``in cities everywhere,'' and they boast about how their friends--or who they call their ``friends on the global left''--were actually now responding to their calls.

By the way, they openly brag. This is all coming from interviews that they do on television programs that can be monitored. They openly brag that this is ``because of the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.''

They go on to say that many young Americans have been--this is my term, a term I read today in the Wall Street Journal--have been groomed to ``support armed resistance,'' to support intifada in the United States.

By the way, it is not just the mobs that we are seeing. Beyond that, as the Director of the FBI has acknowledged, ISIS generates income-- they generate revenue--by running a human smuggling ring that brings migrants to the United States.

Just the bare minimum common sense would lead you to conclude that, if ISIS has a business to smuggle migrants into the United States, why wouldn't they use that to smuggle a few terrorists here to do in America what they did in Moscow a few weeks ago?

So we have Hamas, and we have Hezbollah, and we have all of these terror groups encouraging and supporting violent mobs calling for intifada inside America. We already have people here, on student visas, calling for ``Death to America,'' and ISIS controls a migrant smuggling ring that they can use to bring people into the United States to conduct attacks.

But if I want to help Israel, if I want to help Taiwan, if I want to help Ukraine, if I want to ban TikTok, I have to agree; I have to vote to do nothing to stop thousands of people a day whom we know literally nothing about--just allow them to come across our border and be released into our country.

As far as some of the money that is being spent all over the world, I have always supported the United States being engaged in the world, and I continue to be, but I ask you this: I have senior citizens, and I have veterans, and they call my office, and they call our offices, and they say: I have nowhere to live. Housing is too expensive.

I met a senior, a couple of days ago, in his eighties. He still has to work nights as a security guard, and he literally lives in a mobile home--not even a mobile home, in like a trailer parked in someone's backyard.

These people call. They have lived in this country their whole lives. They have served our country. They call for help, and the most we can often do is help get them on a waiting list for section 8 housing. This is a problem that exists in America right now.

But if I want to help Israel, if I want to help Taiwan, if I want to help Ukraine, if I want to ban TikTok, I have to vote for spending billions of dollars to give to charity groups so they can fly people around the country here and put them up in hotel rooms or so they can help for resettlement in another country.

We have rich countries in the Middle East, allies of ours. Their leaders own some of the largest yachts in the world. Some of their leaders own some of the most expensive horses you could possibly buy in the world. They have built some of the most extravagant and luxurious resorts on the planet in some of these countries. These are rich countries and strong supporters of the Palestinian cause, as they call it.

But if I want to help Israel, if I want to help Taiwan, if I want to help Ukraine, if I want to ban TikTok, I have to vote to send American taxpayer money to deal with the catastrophe that has been created by Hamas in Gaza--100 percent by Hamas. There was no war. There was a ceasefire before Hamas crossed over and slaughtered and raped and kidnapped. But now the American taxpayer is on the hook.

Look, I understand that, in our Republic, in our system of government, compromise is necessary. We have to do it all the time. I have passed a lot of bills--I am very proud of that--and every one of them involved my finding someone from a different ideological perspective, from the other side of the aisle. You have to compromise, meaning you are not going to get everything you want. You are going to have to give them something they want in exchange for something you want or you may have to change the way you wrote what you want. That is what you have to do in order to pass laws.

I understand compromise--I do--but this bill is not that. This bill is not a compromise. This bill is basically saying that, if I don't agree to drop my demands that the President secure our border, if I don't agree to spend billions of taxpayer dollars all over the world to resettle people here and in other places in the midst of our own migratory crisis--if I don't agree to all of that, then Israel and Taiwan and Ukraine do not get the help they need and that I support, and TikTok does not get banned. This is not compromise. This is legislative blackmail, and I will not vote for blackmail.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, actually, what the bill does is it requires, especially in cases of politically sensitive queries, that it be approved by a supervisor to take it out of the hands of the career individuals who in the past have or potentially have abused this authority.

Now, there are two ways to skin this cat. The challenge of the political appointees is twofold. The first is it is a political appointee. There is a person who owes their job to the party in power in the White House.

And so the thinking was that if you put someone like that in charge, it actually might lend itself to this being abused for political use.

The second is, it is actually harder to hold political appointees accountable. As we saw this week, the only way to get rid of, for example, the Attorney General would be to impeach them.

In this particular case, if it is a supervisor, that supervisor could be fired. Everyone in these Departments is ultimately accountable to the Attorney General and/or the FBI Director.

And I would add one more point. Another reform that is in this bill that is important to point to is that the compensation of the FBI Director will now be directly tied to how the Department performs every single year on the audit of compliance with 702.

So I urge this amendment be defeated.

Vote on Amendment No. 1834

Briefly, this is actually pretty narrowly tailored even though it is written in the way it is. It is tough to talk about in this setting. The information is available to all the Members and has been now for 5 or 6 days.

It is actually narrowly tailored to a very specific problem that was identified by the court. Basically the FISA

Court of Review said that if there is an unintended gap in coverage revealed by their interpretation, you have to go to Congress to fix it. That is what this tries to do. It is important.

As I said, that information has been available to Members in the appropriate setting for the last few days.

I hope we can defeat this amendment. It is actually a 21st-century solution to a unique problem in an era in which telecommunications is rapidly evolving, and so are our adversaries.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-born cleric who became a leader of al-Qaida. Syed Farook was born in America, and he murdered 14 people in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino. The brothers that committed the Boston marathon--one was naturalized, and the other was a lawful permanent resident. I could go on and on.

If we had suspected them of terrorism, we would not have been able to--and none of these were prevented. But if these cases emerged today and you suspected them of terrorism, under this amendment, you would not have been able to surveil them to prevent the terrorist attack. Afterward, you could have gone after them, but now it is too late to prevent the terrorist attack. That is what this amendment would--that is the harm that this amendment, if passed, would create, and I urge you to vote against it.

Mr. President, there is some validity here, and the bill begins to cover some of it, but there is more we can do to fix this.

In Crossfire Hurricane, particularly in the case of Carter Page, the FBI agents lied to the court, and they inserted a dossier that proved to be opposition research, which you no longer can do under the reforms of this bill. You can no longer also include things like press media accounts of the case before them.

The function of this would be, on the other hand--and this is a real application because they would have probably brought it beyond that setting. Manuel Rocha was a spy in the Cuban Government, working for us as an Ambassador. Now he would have some advocate there arguing on his behalf in the court, someone who doesn't even have to have an intelligence background, and you may potentially even have to provide that advocate with intelligence information as exculpatory even though it really isn't exculpatory.

So this, as drafted, is problematic in the context of what we are trying to fix here, especially in light of the reforms that are already coming in as part of the bill.

Mr. President, I honor Nick Selimos in celebration of his 50 years as manager and maitre d' at The Monocle Restaurant, a fixture on Capitol Hill.

Nick Selimos was born in Sparta in the Peloponnese region of Greece. He spent his childhood there before immigrating to the United States of America to study physics at the University of Maryland. On Friday, March 8, 1974, Nick started what he expected to be a part-time job working with a Greek family but ended up with a 50-year career at The Monocle.

When you enter The Monocle, it is Nick that who greet you by name, firm handshake, and a smile. He always asks about your day, your family, and enjoys a little political banter as he walks you to your table. An avid reader, Nick takes current events seriously; he is always on top of what is happening on Capitol Hill, across the country, and internationally.

Nick embodies true ``Greek hospitality'' by always treating everyone with respect and familial ease. The magic of Nick's charm is evidenced by the regular customers who dine at The Monocle who enjoy spending time with him. His tireless work ethic has set a standard for excellence in the industry. Please join me in congratulating Nick Selimos on his remarkable career.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I want to start by talking about Ukraine because we have a lot of different opinions here on it. So I wanted to take a moment and discuss this issue of Ukraine because there has been a lot of talk about it.

I have been watching. As the Senator from Kentucky has just pointed to a moment ago, there has been a lot of debate over the last 5 days about the topic of Ukraine.

I want to set the stage for why what is happening in Ukraine happened. But let me just, first, preface it by saying what is happening there is not irrelevant to this country and certainly not unimportant.

To set the stage, we have to go back a little bit. In 2014, Vladimir Putin actually invaded Ukraine. He didn't admit it was his people. He sent in these special forces. They were dressed in costumes. He pretended that wasn't his people, but it was.

The rationale was this. I want to go back for a moment with the history about Ukraine. Ukraine was supposed to join--wanted to join-- Europe. There was this push inside of Ukraine to join the European Union and to become European in its orientation. Putin didn't like it and began threatening and pressuring the then-President of Ukraine. The then-President of Ukraine, under that pressure from Putin, backed down.

Upon backing down, he faced a fierce public resistance to that decision. As a result of that, the then-President of Ukraine ordered security forces into the street to attack protesters and crack down. Those protesters eventually overwhelmed the government, overthrew that government. Basically, the President had to flee under the auspices of Vladimir Putin's protection, and then Putin decided to take what they call ``little green men,'' because they weren't dressed like the regular Russian military, and some of these separatist groups--again, supported by Vladimir Putin--to seize portions of the Ukrainian national territory.

In addition, the Russians did send their troops, dressed in these little green men costumes, to take a portion called Crimea. There are several reasons why that was important to them. The first is obviously access to the ocean, access to the sea, and for the Navy and so forth. And the other is because Crimea has been historically a pretty vibrant and profitable tourism site. So they believed it would add to their economy as well.

They even went so far as to conduct a fake referendum--a fake election--in which the people of Crimea allegedly voted to join the Russian Federation.

That was the status quo beginning around this time in 2014, up until the invasion that began almost 2 years now.

There was this line of demarcation between these separatist forces backed by Putin and the Ukrainian military. They faced off, and there were skirmishes and the like. Then Putin decided to invade.

Why did Putin decide to invade? Well, Putin--I am confident--was told by his people two things: The first thing he was told is that in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, he would be greeted as a liberator; that people will come out into the streets holding up roses and greet the Russians as liberators. They wanted to be a part of Russia.

The second thing he was told was that Ukraine would collapse, that Zelenskyy and the leadership in Kyiv would abandon the country. They truly believed--the Russians and Putin honestly and truly believed-- that within a

week, 10 days, they wouldn't conquer all of Ukraine but they would certainly conquer much of it, and a friendly puppet government would be installed in Kyiv. They would at least cut the country in half, if not more so, and bring it under the Russian orbit.

I point to Belarus as an example. Belarus is, theoretically, its own independent country, but their leaders do nothing without Vladimir Putin. In fact, when Vladimir Putin decided that he was going to station troops and nuclear weapons in Belarus, Belarus didn't have the right to say: No, we don't want you to do that; you can't do that here.

They have to do it. That is sort of how he envisioned this rump state that he is trying to carve out. That was the thinking that he had.

It is, by the way, one of the things that these authoritarian regimes suffer from. In these authoritarian regimes, no one wants to tell the leader that they are wrong. No one wants to tell them they are wrong. So they are always telling you whatever you want to hear.

The other reason why they tell you what you want to hear is because that is the stuff that gets paid attention to. The leaders--if you want your memo, if you want your intelligence product, if you want your advice and counsel to be listened to in an authoritarian government, then you are going to genuinely produce things that that person is going to like. You want to confirm their preexisting biases.

And Putin, honestly, believed that Ukraine desperately belonged to Russia, wanted to be with Russia, and that the Russian military was so powerful that they would be able to sweep in and take them out.

Well, it didn't work that way. Zelenskyy did not abandon Kyiv. The Ukrainian people did not greet them as liberators, and they resisted.

It is important to remember that they resisted before the flood of American aid and European aid went into Ukraine. Ukrainians were resisting, and they were fighting.

And the Russians suffered enormous casualties early in the war when Ukraine wasn't even well-armed. These are tough people with dignity, and they did not want to be a part of Russia and the Russian Federation.

That sets the stage for what we face today. We don't have time today--even with the hour that I have to speak and everything else--to go into all the depths of history, the way, for example--you know, Putin went on some tirade for 30 minutes in some interview last week with all these weird historical references about why Ukraine belongs to Russia and so forth. Suffice it to say that the history is complex. In fact, many Soviet leaders came from the Ukraine region, but it does not belong to the Russian Federation. It is a country that wants to be independent of Russia, with a substantial percentage of its population that wants to be Western oriented. And Putin does not want a Western- oriented country that is not under his control on his border. And so he decided he was going to make Ukraine a rump state. But it didn't work out that way.

So people do ask me--and the previous speaker, the junior Senator from Kentucky, a moment ago was discussing--because people do wonder, like, OK, that is terrible what happened. Why is that our business?

And I heard a lot of talk here today, and so I think it is important that we bring a little bit of nuance and balance to this conversation. On the one hand, it is not true that this issue is completely unimportant. It is not true. It is important.

Why is it in our national interest? There are a number of issues why we should care about what is happening in Ukraine beyond just feeling sympathy for the people there. And there is a reason why, for example, what we give--let me begin with one of the reasons why we care.

The first is because if the Russian Federation would have been successful, if Putin had been successful in taking Ukraine or dividing Ukraine in half, it would completely unravel what is going on in many other parts of the world.

You see, for better or for worse--and I think for better--for the better part of the last 20, 30, 40 years, there has been a general acknowledgement, for the most part, that you can't just invade another country and take land away from them because you want it.

That is what started World War II, as an example. You can't do that. And what regulated that was a series of things: NATO in Europe, our alliances in the Indo-Pacific, the ability of countries to defend themselves, the condemnation of the international community. No one wanted to be a pariah.

The bottom line is that for much of human history--up until, you know, the last 80 years--but for much of human history, it was basically defined by leaders who decided: We really like that land; we really want that land; and we are going to take that land, because our army is more powerful than yours.

In fact, if you just sit down and read history at all, all of the great historic figures--Alexander the Great, Napoleon--they were all conquerors. They were all people that basically--their greatness came not necessarily because of something great they did for the world or some extraordinary advances in their society--although, some of them did have advances in their society--but, largely, their fame, their repute--they are judged by empire-building, by a desire to conquer as much land and territory as possible.

And it defined, virtually, all of the famous and great civilizations, for the most part, that we know about in human history. But after the Second World War, the world sort of got together and said: We don't want to live in a world like that anymore. And we created not just rules and laws at the international stage to govern it, but we also created defense alliances to prevent it.

But what would happen now if, suddenly, Russia was able to go in, take Ukraine, just because, carve it up into a rump state--maybe there would be a little sliver of Ukraine left, but the core of the country would have been pulled into the--imagine they would have been able to do to Ukraine what they did to a part of Ukraine and Crimea. Other countries would be watching.

There are dozens of territorial disputes going on in the world right now as we speak. And they range from disputes between China and India on their border, disputes with China and its claims on Taiwan. It ranges from that to in our own hemisphere, where even as we are here gathered now late at night talking about these things, Venezuela and its Maduro dictatorship has decided that land that belongs to Guyana actually belongs to Venezuela.

Now, obviously, there are some rare minerals there and some really important materials, and they discovered a lot of oil. And Venezuela is threatening those oil rigs. They are threatening that exploration. But that is a territorial dispute right here, right in our region.

So if we live in a world where you can just go in and invade a country, take it, and nothing happens--except maybe a resolution condemning you at the U.N.--and you get away with it, other countries are going to do the same. And before you know it, we are going to be living in a world in which war is literally breaking out in every corner over territorial disputes.

So that, in and of itself, is of concern. The United States is too powerful, too big a country. Our economy, our daily lives are deeply intertwined with things that are happening all over the world.

We may not realize it; we may have taken it for granted. But things that are happening halfway around the world have direct impact on our everyday life.

Right now, the Houthis--a band of, basically, rebels, guerillas, pirates, religious zealots--but, unfortunately, Iran has provided them guided munitions and weapons and long-range rockets that are able to hit tankers.

And so today--and people are going to start to feel it soon--you will be paying more for a lot of things, particularly, potentially, oil and fuel because the insurance rates on shipping through the Red Sea is skyrocketing, particularly for vessels flagged by America or American allies.

So the insurance rate on the shipping goes up, prices go up for you-- what is happening halfway around the world. That is just one example.

So what happens around the world does matter. And if war starts to break out in different parts of the world, you

will feel it in your pocketbook; you will feel it in your security; you will feel it in migration threats; you will face it in all of this. We should care just because of that.

Imagine, for example, if you are sitting in Beijing right now, you are watching Ukraine very closely. What happens when the United States--and much of the rest of the world--says to you: We are warning you, do not do it, and you do it? What happens? Do they sanction you for a few months? Do they maybe provide weaponry for that country, but then after a few years, sort of give up and become fatigued and walk away? Because, if Russia, with an economy a fraction of the size of China, is able to weather sanctions and military support for Ukraine, China is calculating: We can certainly weather whatever the United States and other countries are going to throw at us the day we decide we are going to invade Taiwan. It is a very dangerous situation. So it matters because of that.

The second reason why it matters to us--and I will talk more about this in a moment--is our reputation does matter. And it doesn't matter as a matter of pride. It matters as a real consequence.

So right now, the Chinese, in particular--but others--go around the world and are openly saying the following--openly. I mean, obviously, I am paraphrasing for purposes of understanding this. But, basically, the Chinese message to the world is: America is a once-great power in decline. Their society is hollowed out. Don't you watch television? Don't you see the videos and the images of everything terrible going on in America right now? And their government is dysfunctional. And their society has turned upside down. And their kids are killing themselves, and people are drug-addicted. America is falling apart, and America is unreliable. America is unreliable. Didn't you see what they did in Afghanistan?

And, suddenly, if we decide we are done with Ukraine, they will point to Ukraine and say: This is what happens to American allies: They are with you until they lose interest, and they will walk away.

And so it begins to undermine a system of alliances, which really is the one big advantage we have over the Chinese. The Chinese don't really have any global alliances. The Chinese have no alliances anywhere in the world. The United States has an alliance system whose value cannot be quantified. You can't put a dollar figure on it. It is so valuable you can't even quantify it.

That alliance system would be deeply threatened if, all of a sudden, the United States, after about 2 years, decided: We are done with Ukraine; we are walking away; we are done with it. The damage would be quite significant. So it does matter. It matters. There is a national interest involved in Ukraine.

Now, I also heard some hyperbole. Because I think, when you make public policy, you have to balance things. You have to determine to yourself: OK, if this matters, how much does it matter? And your investment and commitment must be commensurate to your national interest.

I love to believe in ideals. I love to believe in idealism. But, frankly, foreign policy is the work of pragmatism. Rarely in foreign policy do we get a choice between the perfect and the terrible. Oftentimes in foreign policy, we get two very bad choices, and we are trying to figure out which one of the two is the least worse for our country.

And so it is important to have a little balance here. And I am very confident in everything I am about to tell you, based on the amount of time I spend on these things and so forth.

The first is, no matter what, if tomorrow we were to walk away--and I am not arguing that we should--but if tomorrow we were to walk away and give Ukraine not a dollar more, not a penny more, not a weapon more, the Russian Federation would not be able to take all of Ukraine. They couldn't from the very beginning, and they can't now.

Would they be able to make gains beyond what they hold now? Maybe, probably, a little bit. But they would never be able to take the entirety of the country. If they couldn't do it back before we were helping Ukraine, if they couldn't do it back when their military still had capabilities they no longer possess, before they had to start begging the North Koreans for weapons and using Iranian drones and all these other things, they most certainly could not do it now.

I think it is also hyperbole to believe that the Ukrainians are going to completely crush the Russian military; not because they don't have the will to fight, not because they are not brave enough, but because the size advantage is extraordinary.

The Russians, at the end of the day, have an existing military industry that can produce weaponry. They are just a bigger country with a lot more people that they can conscript. They have more weight to bring, and they have more leverage on the international stage, primarily because they have a veto at the Security Council, and they have nuclear weapons--the largest nuclear stockpile in the world.

Another hyperbole is, if we don't stop this now, next, Russia will move against NATO. There isn't a single NATO country that Russia could defeat right now in a war. If they couldn't take Ukraine--they couldn't take Ukraine, who is not a member of NATO, who did not have a military that was well-resourced, whose territory they had already penetrated, whose intelligence services they had already deeply penetrated before this--if they couldn't do that and they can't do it now, how are they going to take any of these other countries?

Leaving aside the NATO alliance for a moment, Russia is in no shape to take or invade anybody for a substantial period of time. Threaten? Yes. Maybe acts of sabotage, maybe, you know, destruction with agents or criminals that they hire, yes. But invade and take a country? The Poles would crush them. The Lithuanians would destroy them. The Germans--any of these countries. That is hyperbole. That is what is next here.

Hyperbole--in some case I have heard this referred to almost like if we are living back in 1939 and the Nazi war machine is pushing forward into helpless countries. That is just--I get it. There is always a desire to live in a historic time and claim, as some have here on this floor, this is a historic moment; the history of the world is going to be determined. No, this is important. This matters. This is a regional conflict with international repercussions that have a direct impact on our national security and our national interest. But it is nothing like the eve of World War II either. So it is important to have this balance.

Now, the greatest geopolitical threat, challenge that we face today is the emerging rise of an axis--a very loose alliance--it is not even an alliance--a partnership between China, Russia, Iran, and then some other junior partners. And their No. 1 interest of all these countries is to create a world--or a world order--that, at a minimum, is an alternative to the Western-led, U.S.-led world order--at a minimum, an alternative--but, ideally, a replacement. And while they have differences--the Iranians and the Russians have some differences--they both want to dominate Syria. They have differences--the Chinese and Russians have differences, historic and otherwise. The Russians do not like to be seen as the junior partner of the Chinese, but they are.

The Chinese have long claimed that Siberia belongs to them. In fact, there are a lot of ethnic Chinese now living in Siberia. So they do have some differences, but they have been able to somehow put that aside because they share a common goal that is important to their national interest; and that is, they want a world in which the world order is favorable to them and unfavorable to us, one in which they have more influence and we have less influence.

They want a world order in which the United States can no longer--and our allies--can no longer sanction Russia by denying them access to the banking system because they have their own banking system. They want a world in which the United States cannot threaten them with sanctions because there are alternatives to the dollar as the reserve currency. That is the world that they all want to live in. That is the world they all want to live in, so they are partnering in this.

(Ms. SMITH assumed the Chair.)

What do they want to see? If you are sitting in Beijing right now, what do their policy leaders--how do they view Ukraine? For that matter, how do they

view what is happening in the Middle East?

Here is how they view it. They view it as, we want America to be drained. We want America to be drained by the money and the attention they have to pour into Ukraine. We want America to be drained by the conflict that threatens to escalate in the Middle East.

The Chinese want America to be drained in these two parts of the world because they know that the more money we spend and the more attention we give to those parts of the world, the less money and the less attention we will have for the Indo-Pacific.

By the way, it is one of the reasons why the Chinese get so annoyed at the North Koreans, because every time the North Koreans launch rockets and give speeches about how they are going to blow something up and all these sorts of things and now partner with the Russians and therefore feel more confident in doing these things, they feel like it is more of an excuse for the United States to pay attention to the Indo-Pacific and deploy military assets to the region. So they want us to be drained.

On the other hand, if we don't commit to these parts of the world, particularly Ukraine, then they are going to go around and tell everybody: You see, we told you. These Americans can't be counted on. They will abandon you. They will turn on you.

So that is their goal--either drain us and if we pull out, hurt us, undermine our alliances so that our allies in Europe will decide: Listen, we are not going to partner with you anymore. You can't be trusted; so the nations in the Middle East will no longer cooperate with us because we can't be trusted, we are unreliable; so the nations in Asia and the Indo-Pacific will cut the best deal they can with China because America can no longer be trusted. That is their goal--drain us or undermine us.

What is our goal? What should our goal be? Our goal should be to remain committed to helping Ukraine so that we are not seen as unreliable and undermined in our credibility but do it in a way that doesn't drain us; do it in a way that does not distract us from our ability to focus on all these other parts of the world that are equally or more important in many cases. That should be our strategy, to retain our credibility and the strength of our alliances through the commitments we made in Ukraine but without being drained. That is the kind of balancing act.

By the way, I do want to say something. Again, of the people who will speak this evening, I may be the only one in support of helping Ukraine, at least at the level I do. Let me just remind everybody that no matter what the House decides to do, this spending can't be zero. The reason why it cannot be zero is because $20 billion of the $60 billion is to buy our weapons for ourselves. That is what a lot of people don't realize.

Part of the aid we have given Ukraine--it is not pallets of cash; it is--yes, we have rifles, we have guns, we have explosives, we have bombs, we have rockets, and we have anti-aircraft capabilities in our stocks that we had for ourselves, and we gave it to them. We gave it to them to use. But now we don't have it, so we have to buy it. We have to restock what we gave them. That is $20 of the $60 billion. At the minimum, it has to be $20 billion because otherwise we remain vulnerable.

Ultimately, people who want that strategy--our strategic objective here is to be supportive of Ukraine but not in a way that makes us incapable of being able to concentrate on the other parts and other matters that matter to us.

As far as how this turns out, you know, I have long resisted-- although I have long believed this be the case, I have long resisted talking about it in this way because I didn't want to undermine the position of Ukraine in any negotiated outcome, but ultimately the conflict in Ukraine will end in a negotiated outcome.

As I have already said, the Ukrainians are not going to wipe out the Russian military, and the Russians are not going to be able to concur half of Ukraine. I think the Russians already fully understand that their objectives the day they invaded are out of reach. What the Russians want now is to negotiate a deal, the best deal they possibly can, holding on to as much Ukrainian land as they can get their hands on, and to force and compel the neutrality of Ukraine.

In essence, what the Russians want at this point is to have enough military success so they can gain a little bit more territory but also force any future Ukrainian Government to be neutral, not to be a member of NATO, not to be allied with the West. That is the Russian goal.

In any negotiation, it is about leverage. Negotiation is about leverage--who has the most leverage, who has the most to give, and who is in the most desperate need of a deal. So part of the reason why we should not abandon Ukraine and give them nothing is because we want them to have the strongest possible negotiating leverage.

If we cut all of Ukraine's money and said we are done with Ukraine, we are finished, Ukraine would have no leverage. Russia would have all the leverage. The Russians would then be able to negotiate a deal that could very much leave us with a Ukraine that looks like Belarus, with a puppet government and with Russia holding significant land. Then multiple countries around the world are going to see that as an example of what they could get away with in their regional conflict. And that would matter, as I have already explained. That would have an impact on us as a country.

That needs to be our goal. You can't stop the help. We want to give them enough help so they have the strongest possible hand in a negotiated settlement at some point.

Here is my problem with what we are going to be voting on here in a few hours. As important as all of this is, as important as what has happened in the invasion of Ukraine is, our country is facing an invasion too.

If I walked out these doors tomorrow, most of the people here will get on airplanes and fly home in the morning after whatever time the vote is here. You reenter the normal world outside the bubble of this place, and the overwhelming--I don't have to take a poll--the overwhelming majority of people would say: OK, I don't have anything against Ukraine. I actually hope Ukraine wins. I don't like Putin. I get everything you just said about our national interests. But how can we focus on that and not at least also focus on what is happening to us in our country at our southern border? Because it makes no sense to people.

It is not just isolated to this instance. When was the last time the Senate met over a weekend--Super Bowl weekend, of all things--for hours and hours and hours, basically said: We are going to stay here until we get it done because it is that important. Other than funding the government, when is the last time you saw Congress and the Senate spend that much time working on something that matters directly--a priority of the American people? It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen.

If I were to summarize what most people out there are going to say, they are going to say: Hold on a second. How can we be so focused on an invasion of another country and do nothing about the invasion of ours?

That is what we face at the southern border. There is no other way to describe it.

I will address some of the points that will be raised in response to what I said, anticipating what they will be because they were already made.

The first is, there was a bill, a bipartisan negotiated bill, and you rejected it.

Well, first of all, I didn't negotiate it. I didn't even know what was in it until the Sunday that it was released a week ago yesterday. There were some things in it that I think were positive. Generally, I rejected it because when I took the sum of it and I read the details-- and I read the details. I won't spend all the time here tonight discussing all the problems I have with it. I am convinced beyond any doubt in my mind that had we passed that legislation, yes, we would have gotten some improvements on asylum language, which is something we should do, but it had other provisions that actually made things worse in the long term.

One that I continue to point to is that we were going to have in this country thousands of new asylum agents, basically, who would have the power at the border to either, A, give

someone an immediate work permit--today, even if you asked for asylum, you have to wait 6 months to get a work permit. This would give them a work permit on the spot. That would be an enormous magnet for more people to come. You mean I can come to the United States, say the magic words, and I get a work permit right away? You are going to see the numbers spike.

Here is the other thing these asylum agents would have the power to do: These asylum agents would have the power to give them asylum right there and then. It would be more efficient. It is not like asylum--yes, two differences between that and the process today. The first is, the process today would be an asylum judge, and that is taking a very long time. Those agents would make things more efficient, but it wouldn't make it better. It would actually incentivize more flow. Now people realize: We can get in, and we might actually have a pretty substantial chance--30 percent, 40 percent--of being given a work permit or asylum right there on the spot.

Once you have asylum--most people don't realize this--once you have asylum, it is basically the equivalent of a green card. Once you are given asylum, you are 5 years away from being a citizen, which is what many people on the other side of this aisle want. It is what many Democratic activists openly want. They want more citizens who are grateful because they know which party is the one that gave them asylum and citizenship because they will become voters for them. That provision alone would increase the number of people coming to this country.

Today, they come knowing they will be released, have to wait 6 months to get a work permit, and at some point, they are going to have to show up for an asylum hearing. Now, they will come knowing: We have a real chance not just to get released but to get an immediate work permit and maybe even granted asylum on the spot.

That would not make our system better; it would make it worse. That alone was a reason why I could not support that deal.

But I want to be clear. When people go around saying ``We gave you exactly what you wanted and you turned it down; you are not serious about border security,'' you did not give me what I wanted. I can't speak for anybody else. I don't know what other people told you they wanted. I never even said I wanted a bill. I said I wanted the President to reverse the Executive orders that he issued that created the migratory crisis that we now face, that created this invasion.

Let me show you something in this graph, something I really wanted to point to. This is the year. This is the land encounters by month heading into the year at the end of fiscal year 2020. This is January of 2021. This point right here is the election of Joe Biden. Just look at this graph. From the moment he was elected in January, look at this spike and this spike. What happened? What happened between here and here and moving forward? I don't have a big enough board to show you what happened in the last year.

Explain to me this spike right there. What happened there? Something happened there. Look at--the line here was flat. If I went back further, you would see the line was flat, flat, actually down a little this way. What happened here at this moment in time that things shot up? If this was an EKG or some medical test, doctors would point to that and say: Something happened here, man. Something happened.

Look at this jump. I will tell what you happened here. A lot of things happened there.

On his first day in office--Biden gets elected. He issues a 100-day moratorium on deportation. We are not deporting anyone for 100 days.

First of all, throughout the time he campaigned for President, the whole world heard him say: I am going to get rid of all the Trump policies. So already people who want to come into our country were just waiting for the election to go.

I said the other day when I gave a speech that when I talk to you about the issues, this is not something I picked up from some briefing or document I read or experts that came in; I get this from the people who actually came. A lot of them live in Miami, and their relatives live in Miami. Their decisions about coming to the United States illegally are not built on legal interpretations of the law. Most of them don't even know what our immigration laws are. Many of them misunderstand our immigration laws. They come based on what they believe our policies are.

You have traffickers who are telling them things that aren't true, but you also have perception. The perception was that Trump was restrictive. Trump did everything to stop people from coming. Biden was going to do the opposite. He gets elected, and that leads to a spike, just his election did--but not just his election; his policies.

Something else happened in that period of time. Joe Biden became the first President in the modern history of our country who decided we would not detain virtually anyone who came into this country unlawfully.

People love to say immigration law is so complicated, so difficult, so hard to understand. It is. It is complex certainly to practice. But at its core, it is pretty straightforward. Here is what the law says, and I am paraphrasing. It says: Here are the people who are allowed to come into the United States. If anyone who comes into the United States is not supposed to be here, you are to detain them until removal.

Bottom line: You are either allowed to enter the country or you are not. If you are not and you enter illegally, they are supposed to detain you until they remove you.

Now, there have always been exceptions, and there are some very narrow exceptions that have always been applied on a case-by-case basis by every President. Obama applied it that way, and those exceptions for humanitarian concerns and things of this nature were designed for individual cases.

So a well-known figure in China or some other part of the world shows up and everybody knows who they are and they are being oppressed, they let them in--humanitarian. A person is dying; if you send them back and they may die on the flight home, you let them in. There has always been that exception. Biden made the exception the rule. He basically decided it is inhumane to detain anyone, and so we are going to release virtually everyone--85 percent, sometimes 90, in some months.

And so people realized very quickly--forget about the law, forget about the particulars of the law, people realized very quickly, if I can get to the border and I turn myself over to a border agent, my chances of being released into the country are 85 percent or higher. And they know it because they know people that did it. This is how this works.

I have literally had people come up to me and show me, Look at what I Zelle'd. Look at the Cash App payment that I made to some guy. It cost me 5 grand or 10 grand to get my family over here so they could come in. I paid them to bring them in.

They showed it to me. And I asked them, Well, how did you know about this? They say, Because I know other people that did it.

Somebody comes illegally; they turn themselves in; they are released. They are turned over to a nongovernment organization, a charity, and that charity tells you all the benefits you qualify for, depending on the jurisdiction they send you to. They may even give you a plane ticket or a bus ticket. They make it to wherever they are going, and they call home, and they tell everybody, Here is how I did it; here is how I came.

And more people come behind them and follow them. So this spike is easy to understand. Joe Biden changed the way we enforce immigration law through Executive order. He basically announced, We are not going to enforce immigration law. We are going to release everyone.

And people figured it out, and they started coming, and the invasion began. That is what created the problem--not a law. The law today is the same as it was that day right there. The law today--immigration law in America is identical. Our immigration statutes are identical today to what they were on this day, on this day, all those other years.

The numbers don't lie. Put aside the graph for a moment. In his first full month in office, almost 102,000 people were encountered at the border, just in his first month in office. That is double

the highest number of monthly encounters in the last year of the Trump Presidency--doubled in its first month. None of these other excuses people come up with: the end of COVID, climate change--did the climate change that much from one month to the next?

What changed was a new President that said, Come. We want you to come. We will release you.

The year 2021 from here forward, that ended with over 1.7 million total encounters at the southern border. During that 12-month period in 2021 of that fiscal year, the highest month was over 213,000 encounters at the border.

And if you look at the last year of the Trump Presidency, there were 458,000 encounters at the southern border. It went from 458 in the last year of the Trump Presidency to 1.7 million in the first year of the Biden Presidency under the same immigration law. The immigration law did not change. What changed is the President and his policies. And that is what created this crisis, and that is how you fix it.

Now, obviously, the President doesn't want to fix it, doesn't want to change it. There are reasons why he doesn't want to change it. The first is it would be admitting Trump was right. To change it back to what those policies were is basically to admit Trump was right about immigration and the things he did made sense, and he obviously doesn't want to do that.

The second reason he doesn't want to change it is because he has an activist base in his party that will go completely bonkers. He has an activist base in his party that believes we should have borderless countries, that believes people should be allowed to live wherever they want.

I am not telling you it is a majority--I am not telling you it is 30 percent, but it is a big and powerful activist base who will protest and heckle and threaten to vote against you because they believe humans have a right to live in any country they want. They should be able to migrate anywhere they want. They admit it openly; I have heard them say it to my face. And so he won't do it because of them either.

But that is what will fix it. Reverse the policies that happened right in this period of time. That is what would have fixed it. That is what I asked for. That is what I asked for. They didn't do it.

So I can't speak for anybody else, but don't tell me that you gave us what I wanted on the border. You did not. I didn't ask you for a law. The law can be improved, but the law is not the reason why we got that spike. As I told you, the law is the same here as it is here. What changed was those policies, and what will change that back is to go back to some of those policies, for Biden to use Executive orders to repeal the Executive orders that he put in place that created this crisis.

Now, this is where people tell me, Well, why can't we do both? America can help Ukraine and can also deal with the border.

I agree with that. Not only can we do it, we should do it. My problem with this bill is it doesn't do it. It only does one of the two things. The choice we were given was here is this fake immigration enforcement. We are going to call it immigration enforcement, but it is not really immigration enforcement.

Here is this fake immigration enforcement bill, and here is Ukraine money, which is real money. And if you don't take it, then we are going to say that you voted against border security and we get what we want. They get what they want. What they want is to be able to not do anything on the border and be able to blame Republicans for it. It is a political ploy, and that is what we are faced with here today.

The problem I have with this bill, as I said, is we are not doing both. If we were getting from the President real changes in his border policies to bring this under control, we might not even be here tonight. We might have gotten this done already, and I would have been supportive. But we don't.

The other thing I have heard people say is, Now you are holding Ukraine hostage. You are holding up the important Ukraine hostage over our border.

Well, I would say a couple things about that. The first is, you are holding Israel hostage over Ukraine. If you put in Israel's aid bill on the floor right now--if you put a bill on this floor right now that said Taiwan and Israel aid, it would probably pass with 89, 90 votes. But they didn't. They held it hostage until they got Ukraine.

So they say we are holding Ukraine hostage over the border; they are holding Israel hostage over Ukraine. And they held Israel hostage over Ukraine. And so you are now faced with a bill that says, You want to help Israel? You have to do what we want on Ukraine, and you get nothing on the border. They are the ones holding hostage.

The other argument I have heard is, Well, these are just people that are helping Ukraine, and they are just using this as an excuse to kill the bill. I have already explained to you that is not me. You might be referring to other people, but not me. What I wanted us to do was what I said. I wanted us to do something real about our national security, about our invasion, about our border.

Is it leverage? Yes. In this process, in this place, this is the only way you sometimes get things done. The only way you get things done is by holding up something that you might support but the other side really wants in exchange for something that you want.

And in this case, there is no shame in telling you that, yes, it was used as leverage--unsuccessfully, unfortunately. I have no shame in saying that because the leverage of what I was asking for is what our people need, what our country needs. It is a priority for our country. It is important for our country.

What good are we to Ukraine? What good is America to NATO? What good is America to the Indo-Pacific? What good are we as a nation now and in the years to come, to any other nation on earth, if we can't even take care of our own problems here at home?

And this is a problem. This is not a small matter. This is not a seasonal ebb and flow. This is not a transitory issue. This migration, this invasion of the United States, is going to get worse, not better. It is going to get worse in terms of numbers, and it is going to get worse in terms of severity inside of our country.

It already is creating a problem. No. 1, we are being overrun--not by a few thousand people, by over 3.5 million people that have been released in this country that we know about, 600,000 of whom either have criminal records or pending criminal matters.

And they will tell you, Well, we know who a lot of these people are. They don't even interview some of these people, but even if they did, they don't know who these people are--because I know enough about that part of the world to tell you, you can buy fake documents from over a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere where, if you have enough money on you, you can go somewhere and get an official government document that says your name is Jose Alvarez or Raul Sanchez or whatever you want your name to be. And then you show up at the border, and that is who we think you are.

We have no idea who some of these people are. We have no idea if they have criminal records. You think the Venezuelan authorities are producing their criminal records in biometrics to us? You think the Cuban authorities are doing that? You think people coming from Africa, people coming from all over the world, that those places are actually providing that for us?

The only thing we can tell you is are you in our terrorist database. There are a lot of terrorists that are not in the database until they commit terror acts, and assuming they survive it, you get your hands on them. We have no idea who these people are.

People say, Well, but most of them are probably good people, here for hard work. I am sure, but that is not the point. The point is if you let in 3.5 million people, some percentage of them are going to be bad, some percentage of them are going to be criminals, I don't care where they came from. You take a million people from anywhere in the world at any time, some percentage of that million are going to turn out to be bad people at some point and do harm.

And you are already seeing it. We have a migrant crime wave going on in New York and in other major cities. They are not committing crimes because they are migrants; they are committing crimes because they are criminals. They were criminals in their own country. You think these people just got here the other day and learned how to pickpocket?

You think that 15-year-old that fired on the police officers--I don't know if

you heard this story. A 15-year-old went in to shoplift, confronted by a security officer, pulls out a gun, tries to kill a police officer--a block away, fires the gun again. They arrest him.

Another roving gang attacked two police officers at a train station, and those are the ones you have heard about. It is a crime wave, and it is going to get worse.

The Venezuelan community in south Florida has been telling me for the better part of a year that what was coming now are gang members. And I didn't know how to judge their claim or what they were saying. Now, I see they were right. They were right.

Some of them didn't come straight from Venezuela. They left Venezuela, and they were committing crimes in Peru. They were committing crimes in Brazil. They were committing crimes in Colombia. And when they realized they could come to America where you can steal even more, they saw their opportunity because Biden said, If you come, we will release you.

They came. Now, we have a crime wave, and it is only going to get worse. Now, we have cities--I saw the mayor of Denver the other day crying and complaining. He wants more money. Sanctuary cities, these are places that passed laws that basically said, If you come here and you are here illegally, don't worry. We are going to protect you. We are not going to arrest you. We are not going to ask questions. If you are arrested, we are not going to deport you. We are going to give you stuff and benefits.

So, of course, people go there. They go there, and it costs them money. Now, you have to close your schools. You have to spend money on migrant shelters. You have to spend money on all these things, and now, they are complaining about it. You were very proud to be a sanctuary community, and now, in this bill, they tried to get us--hey, we are going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bail them out for being sanctuary cities. Meanwhile, they are not spending that money on the homeless Americans that live in their community.

They are taking that money out of services from the taxpayers of those communities. So people go to work; they work hard; they pay their taxes, and their money is taken and given to people that came into our country illegally.

And what about terrorism? I want to be careful because I don't want to say anything--or divulge--let me just say it this way, and I said this earlier before, so just use common sense. Do you think that terrorists around the world--do you think ISIS and al-Qaida and Hezbollah, do you think they are completely unaware of this?

You think those guys don't know that the most effective trafficking organizations in the history of mankind is operating off our southern border? You don't think they know that? And you don't think they are tapped into that? And you don't think that they would push terrorists into this country that way? Well, I think common sense tells you they would.

In the time remaining, I want to briefly talk about Israel because it is part of this bill as well. You know, it was interesting, the last couple of days, this freak-out over something Trump said about NATO. Everyone is running around, freaking out: Oh, my God, he is going to get us out of NATO.

They forget Trump was already President once, and he didn't pull us out of NATO. In fact, he deployed extra troops to Poland. We increased our troop presence in Poland because Poland was contributing toward

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

Madam President, the Senate will be in session this weekend--including Super Bowl Sunday, which is fine by me--to deal with this bill that now, as everyone knows, is about Ukraine, funding for Ukraine and its war effort, funding for Israel, funding for Taiwan, and some other matters.

I will dispense with the Israel and Taiwan funding because that is a pretty straightforward one that I think has very strong support here. I am for it. I am also for helping Ukraine against Russia. I do believe we have a national interest in helping Ukraine against Russia.

I would just summarize it this way: If you look at China, which most people would agree is the U.S.'s biggest adversary at this point for global influence, the Chinese are hoping one of two things is going to happen. The first is, they are hoping that we are going to get stuck in Ukraine, along with what is happening in the Middle East, and that we are going to be drained by it and we won't be able to focus on the Indo-Pacific. But if we do become disengaged, then what their hope is-- they will go around telling people: See, we told you America is unreliable and a power in decline. So I believe our goal when it comes to Ukraine is to be helpful to Ukraine in a way that doesn't drain us, in a way that doesn't harm our alliances around the world.

I have my own personal views on this. I have shared it in the past. I have had further confirmation of it over the last 24 hours--that where I think Ukraine eventually winds up is, I don't believe the Russians can ever achieve their initial objectives no matter what happens, which is to take all of Ukraine, all the way to Kyiv. I also think it is going to be very difficult for a country the size of Ukraine, no matter how much help it gets, to completely destroy the Russian Federation, which, no matter how bad they have been militarily, just has a size advantage.

But I do believe that at some point, both of these countries are going to try to figure a way out. The question is, Which one of the two is going to have the most leverage and the best deal possible, and will Ukraine be able to emerge from this as a democracy, as a nation that is not under the thumb of Vladimir Putin--another Belarus, as an example? I think we have a national interest in the outcome. It is not an unlimited national interest. It doesn't mean we spend however much they need for however long it takes. But there is an interest.

I just wanted to say that at the outset. I say that because obviously I am informed by my work on the Intelligence Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and my interest in foreign policy, because I think our job here in the Federal Government--we get involved in a lot of things that are none of our business, but foreign policy and national security are a key part of the Federal Government and what we are supposed to be doing here.

I do believe that in the short and long term, there are things there--I don't think I need to convince anyone about Israel and Taiwan--that involve the national security of the United States and what the world is going to look like in 5, 10, 15 years.

That said, I would imagine--not that I imagine, actually--I know that there are people--if you walked into many places in this country right now and you explained to them what was happening, they would be puzzled. People would say, no matter how they may feel about Ukraine--I think for most Americans, frankly, it is not a priority, not because they like Putin and they like Russia but because we have a lot of problems that people are dealing with in their everyday lives. I think most people would say: OK. But if we are going to do that for Ukraine, if we are going to help Ukraine deal with their invasion, shouldn't we first or at least at the same time deal with our invasion, what is happening to our country?

So you guys are going to meet all weekend. You are going to fight. You are going to call each other names. You are going to drag this thing out. You are going to have this big thing that we never do. We never stay here on Sundays--it is fine with me. But we never do all of this, but when we do it, it is always for somebody else or something that is not as important to us. But for something that is important to us, something that has to do with America, with our country, it never happens.

How, in essence, can you be helping Ukraine with their invasion but not be helping America with its invasion? And it is an invasion, what is happening at our southern border.

These are very conservative numbers, but they are incredibly accurate. They come right from both public and nonpublic--not classified but nonpublic--information. They are products that are produced from the House committee, for example. Let's just say that from January 20, 2021, 3.3 million people have entered the United States illegally and been released into the country. Of those 3.3 million people who have entered the country illegally, 99.7 percent of them are still here. They have not been deported or removed. Of the 3.3 million who have been released into this country, over 617,000 of them--and these are old numbers; these are numbers from last month--of the 3.3 million people who entered the country illegally and were released, 617,000 of them either have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. So we have had at least 600,000 convicted criminals, suspected criminals, enter the country illegally, free to roam the country now.

People ask, well, how did this happen? Because it has never been zero. Let's be clear. It has never been zero. There have never been zero illegal people entering into America. But how did this happen? Well, let's first start with our law.

When people talk about immigration around here, they pretend it is completely unregulated: We need new laws to fix it because the laws are all messed up, and we don't regulate.

No. The immigration laws in America can be summarized. I mean, it is a complex area of law, but at its core, it is quite simple. Immigration law in America says this: These are the people who are allowed to be in the United States of America, and if someone who is not allowed to be in the United States of America enters illegally, you are to detain them through removal, meaning you are to detain them in immigration detention until their case is either resolved or they are removed from the country. That is the law of the United States, and that has been the law of the United States for quite some time.

With that detention requirement that you hold them until they are removed, we have always had exceptions, narrow exceptions. For example, if the Dalai Lama shows up at the border of the United States and says ``Hey, I am here because the Chinese are trying to kill me''-- exception, right? There have always been exceptions.

These are supposed to be narrow exceptions, and they are supposed to apply to individuals case by case--humanitarian, things of that nature. But for the first time in American history, the current President of the United States decided to make the exception the rule--the rule. It became the rule that if you arrived here, we would not detain you. The exception became those we were detaining. I just gave you the numbers of the people who were released. So the exceptions ate up the rule, and that is how this happens.

Why it happens is not hard to understand. I assure you guys--listen, I live in an immigrant community. When it comes to immigration, I have been in the game for 10 years making these things--you know, looking at these things longer. I live it. I live it. My entire family are immigrants. My wife's entire family are immigrants. All of my neighbors are immigrants. I can't drive two blocks and go anywhere and not be-- other than Miami, FL--surrounded with immigrants from all over the hemisphere and all over the world. So when I talk to you about these things, I didn't read about it in a magazine; I didn't see a documentary; I didn't have some briefing; I talk to people who show me. They have shown me. They said: Look, this is the cash-

out payment that I sent to some guy to bring my sister and her husband. Here is the Venmo that I sent to some guy to help my family get from Cuba to Nicaragua and from Nicaragua to the United States.

They don't know what the immigration law is. They don't know about exceptions, asylum. Here is what they know: They know people who have come here, turned themselves in, said ``I am here,'' blah, blah, blah, and they were released. They know people who did it, and those people tell other people, and the traffickers advertise it.

So what happens is that when people figure out--and they figure it out pretty quickly. Human beings are incentive-based creatures. All of us are. That is why we pass laws to punish crime. That is why we raise taxes on cigarettes--we want people to smoke less.

We are incentive-based creatures, and when people know that if you can make it inside of the United States and turn yourself in, your chances of being released are 85, 90-something percent, more people are going to come.

The numbers don't lie. I don't have it with me. I tried to blow it up; couldn't print it on time. But there is a graph that shows--it looks like one of those things, you know, those echocardiograms, except this one goes straight up. It basically says, here is the number in December of 2019, January of 2020. February of 2021, it just spikes right up. Why did it spike?

It spiked because we told people, by the way, if you are a single adult--which was the biggest driver that really changed everything--if you are a single adult and you come into America illegally and you turn yourself in, we will interview you--maybe not even interview you--and we will release you into the country. People figure it out.

And the way you solve it is to reverse that. The law didn't change. The immigration law today looks the same as it did in 2019. No immigration law has changed in America. What changed is this policy by Executive order.

Remember, when we pass laws, it has to be executed. So look what is happening with crime. It is illegal in every jurisdiction in America to shoplift, but the places where you see a spike in shoplifting are the places where the prosecutors have decided we are not going to prosecute those cases.

And when you tell people, yes, it is illegal to do something but we are not going to prosecute it, we are not going to go after it, you are going to get it.

So how do you solve this? You solve it the same way you created it: by reversing what created it. That is how you solve it.

And so a lot of us said: Well, look, if we are going to do all this for Ukraine and all of these other countries--but Ukraine was really-- and this is something that you really want, it is important, can't we also--so that we look, at least, half sane to the people in this country that can't understand how we can spend all this time and energy not helping ourselves before we help other countries--can we at least deal with the border?

So they said: OK, we are going to do something on the border.

And they spent three, four--what, I don't know--8 weeks, whatever, negotiating a deal, and then they produced it. I didn't have anything to do with that deal. I am not condemning the people that did it. I have done immigration negotiations in the past; it is difficult. This is even more difficult because it is in the midst of a mass-migration crisis.

But they negotiated a deal, but I didn't negotiate it. I didn't even know what was in it until Sunday. And I read it--I read it twice, actually--went through it with the knowledge base that I have. But they negotiated a deal that most of us, for the most part, to be fair, had nothing to do with negotiating. And I realized pretty quickly, this is not going to reverse.

You can call it whatever you want. You can call it border security; you can label it anything you want. But this is not going to solve our problem. And, immediately, they said: Oh, the Republicans are a bunch of liars. The first is: These Republicans, they wanted a border deal; we gave them a border deal; and now they want to tank the whole thing. They changed their minds.

I think that was the President: We gave them the exact deal they asked for, and they changed their mind.

You didn't give me the exact deal I asked for. I asked for measures, steps, that would actually solve the migration crisis. This bill doesn't do that. In fact, I never even asked for a bill. I am not against some of the language that is in there. You want to change the standard on asylum? Long overdue; but that alone is not going to stop the migration crisis. That is what I asked for.

I didn't negotiate it. I didn't even know what was in it, like I told you, until Sunday. And so the solution that I want to see and did want to see and continue to want to see, the solution that we could actually go back to people and say: Guys, we did something real on the border. Yes, we are going to help Ukraine with their invasion, but we actually did--something real is also going to happen with our invasion. That was not this bill, despite whatever people may say about it.

We rejected the toughest border deal imaginable, is the other thing that people say. You know, like, if somehow, they figured out a way-- you know, they sprinkled holy water upon a vampire with this thing. Look, I could spell out a bunch of problems in this bill. I don't have time; I am not going to spend the time going through every detail.

This emergency thing they brag about, emergency power to shut down the border, they don't tell you it is limited to 270 days, and the President can suspend it at any time. All the President has to say is: It is not in our national interest. We need to suspend the emergency.

By the way, even in the emergency, you still have to process 1,400 people a day, illegal immigrants a day, even in the midst of an emergency.

But let me focus on what I think is--what I believe to be the most blatant trap that was put in place in this bill. And it is one that people don't necessarily spot right away if you don't understand immigration law and how it has been applied over the last decade.

So there is this thing in the bill--remember, one of the things that people use about immigration is asylum. It takes too long; it takes 8 to 10 years; huge backlog; courts; the like. It is true. And it is one of the incentives, by the way, because people know if you release me pending a hearing, 10 years from now you won't even know where I am, much less show up at a hearing.

So they come back and say: Oh, we are prepared to solve that. How did they solve it? Well, they create what I call the asylum corps. In essence, they are going to go out and they are going to hire thousands of Department of Homeland Security agents--bureaucrats, agents--not judges--to process these claims, potentially right at the border. Right?

So right at the border, these agents will be able to interact with an illegal immigrant, interview them, ask them some questions, and they will have the power, they will have the power right there at the border to do three things.

The first is they could say, no, you don't qualify, you are out of here. Or we are going to detain you, and you are out of here. They could do that. That has not been the history of what has happened until now.

And let me just tell you, from what I know, most of the people who sign up for these jobs and this duty do not sign up to kick people out; they sign up to help people get in. But that is the asylum, so that is the first power.

The other two things are the likeliest one. The first is: We think you might have a claim. We are going to release you pending a hearing before a judge, and you get an immediate work permit.

Right now, you have to wait 6 months for a work permit, even if you are released like these people. An immediate work permit--you want to talk about a migration magnet? When people figure out, if I get there, I have an X percent chance of being given an immediate work permit, that is a migration magnet.

But here is the third thing they can do: They can give you asylum right there and then--not a judge; a member of this new asylum corps can literally give you asylum right there and then.

Now, let me be fair. The law says they can do it under the convention against torture, which is an international treaty.

Well, what is that? Well, let me tell you how that has been applied. How it

has been applied is that the convention against torture isn't just like, we are going to send you back somewhere where they are going to waterboard you.

The convention against torture that has been applied in most of the activists' groups that argue means we cannot remove people from this country if we are going to send them back to a place where they might be kidnapped or where they might be assaulted, not by just the government but by nongovernment criminal gangs.

So, basically, if you come from a country where gangs kidnap people, where gangs kill people, where gangs extort people, where gangs threaten people, where gangs assault people--if you come from a country where that happens, we cannot send you back there under the convention of torture. That is their interpretation of it.

My friends, that is like 100 countries on Earth. That is like almost every country represented in the number of people that arrive at the border. So, basically, what you will have is an asylum corps with the power to grant people asylum right at the border. And let me tell you the difference between the asylum corps and an immigration judge: If an immigration judge makes that decision, the Attorney General can still step in and reverse it. These are irreversible decisions.

And let me tell you what asylum means. Asylum is basically a green card. You are now 5 years away from being a U.S. citizen. That number is not going to be zero. If that law and that provision had been in place today, some of these 3.3 million people would have already been a year or two into their 5-year wait to become citizens and voters of the United States of America. That is in that bill.

And that is what it means when you read past the language and the shalls and the this and that and all of that, that is what that language means. And you want me to vote for a bill so that a year or two from now when the news reports come out that the asylum corps has granted asylum and a 5-year path to citizenship to 500,000 people and everybody here goes: Well, I didn't know that was in that law--that is in the law; that is in that bill; that is there.

And I could go on; there are other things. The point is this was a trap. It was put in there in place, that was the goal. This is not a border--that would actually incentivize immigration, knowing what it is that incentivizes people to come.

The other lie is, whoa, without a law, we can't do anything about the border. I already explained to you how we got here in the first place: We stopped detaining everybody.

Remember, a few years ago it was--again, let's go back and be clear. The children who were being detained was because before we turned them over to some guy who claimed to be their uncle, we had to make sure he wasn't Jeffrey Dahmer; we had to make sure he wasn't some pedophile; we had to make sure it was really their uncle. And in the meantime, you have to put them somewhere. But that was inhumane.

But now it has spread. Now it is the detention of anybody is inhumane. You have people out there saying: By the way, we shouldn't even put ankle bracelets on people who are released; that is inhumane.

But the incentive that drove the immigration was we stopped detaining single adults. And the word got out really fast. And the traffickers-- this is a business for them. They traffic people; they move people; they move drugs. They move contraband, and they move people. And they knew this. And they sell it. They advertise it.

I wish I would have brought some of the pamphlets that they hand out or pictures of some of the things they put up on social media in these countries advertising the service.

You don't need a law to fix that because the law hasn't changed. What you need is to reverse the Executive orders, the decisions of the administration. And the President can do that. In fact, I heard yesterday--I think it was NBC News or something reported the President is now considering executive actions on the border.

So at least they have acknowledged that they have that power. A reporter asked me yesterday, well, you guys are always against executive actions. Well, the executive action I think they need to take is to reverse the executive actions that he has taken which created this crisis.

And there are other things that he can do. He can do the ``return to Mexico''; he can do the ``safe third country.'' By the way, the ``safe third country'' one is an interesting one. I was kind of involved when that was put in place. And initially--because it is counterintuitive. Initially, a lot of people said: Why would these countries agree to that? So let me tell you why Honduras would agree to it, why El Salvador agreed to it. Let me tell you why. Because those are transit countries.

And safe third country basically said: If you come through that country, once you step foot in that country, you are automatically disqualified from getting asylum in the United States.

Now, I have nothing against these countries, but I promise you that the migrants that are going through El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were going through. They didn't go to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, or Nicaragua, for that matter, to stay there. They went there because it was on the way to where they were trying to go.

The minute migrants realized if I go there, if I go to Honduras, I automatically cannot get into the United States, they stopped going to Honduras or they stopped going to El Salvador. The countries figured it out. I bet you we can get many more countries to sign up for something like that, because they are bearing the brunt of being in the middle of the migration corridor. We could return to that as well.

And, yes, we can build barriers. I remember after the horrible events of January 6 here in the Capitol, the first thing that went up around this entire building was a fence with barbed wire and National Guard. The first thing they did to protect the Capitol and themselves was to deputize National Guard from all over America and to put fences around the Capitol, some of the biggest fences you have ever seen. And they went up like that.

But, somehow, when our country is being invaded and you put up a fence and you send the National Guard, this administration will go to the Supreme Court and try to stop you. So they will do it to protect themselves, but they won't do it to protect America.

My friends, the truth is that Biden doesn't want to stop the border crisis, and the reason why is politics. I know his memory is probably not the best, but I remember that he spent 3 years repeatedly saying-- not just him, all the deputies, people in this Chamber, all these know- it-alls on television: There is no crisis at the border. There is not a crisis. It is being exaggerated, exaggerated by a bunch of xenophobes and racists.

But now it is a top issue in the country to voters. It wasn't a crisis until it became a crisis in New York and Chicago and all these major cities around the country who now suddenly--you know, when it was happening to Texas, when this was happening on the border in Arizona, as if somehow all the people that came here were--3.3 million people were all going to stay in Eagle Pass, TX. But once it got into their cities, once it started impacting them, now it became a problem too. Once you had to start closing schools because you needed to make it a migrant shelter, now it was a crisis. Now when you have a gang of pickpocketers running through New York assaulting police officers, now it is a crisis. Now, when the residents of your own city are screaming at you, ``Why are you spending all this money when we have our own homeless problem?'' now you have a crisis. And voters were saying it too.

And so I imagine--I am certain--that the people involved in the Biden reelection effort came to him and said: Sir, we need to have a plan. We need to have a plan, and the plan needs to be something that, at least, looks like we are trying to stop it but doesn't upset that element of our base who actually believes that anyone who comes here should be allowed to come here.

And that element exists. That element exists. There are people in American politics and in American political discourse who believe that, if you make it across the border, virtually anyone who comes here-- unless, like, the worst possible human being--if you make it across the border, you should

be allowed to stay, even if you came illegally.

They had to come up with a plan. So what was the plan? Here was the plan, and I called this out in December. The plan is: Let's do a border deal. Let's call it a border deal, but let's make sure it doesn't stop migration because we don't want to upset our base. But let's also make sure it is bipartisan. Let's get some Republicans to sign on to it, and then let's get it passed through the Senate. And then when the House kills it, we can say: I, Joe Biden, tried to fix the border, but these Neanderthals, MAGA House members, they killed it. So blame them from now on.

In fact, I am not speculating here. There is nothing that I am just like psychically coming up with. There is an article in POLITICO in which an unnamed source in the Biden campaign was saying: This is perfect. If they pass it, we can claim credit for a bipartisan deal and tell people: Now, be patient. It is going to take time to work, but it is bipartisan. If it doesn't pass, he can blame the Republicans and say they own it.

And those talking points were already being said, including by some of my colleagues here on some Sunday shows that I saw. They were already saying that even before the deal was already out there. That was the plan.

But he will never fix it--one, because there are people in the base that don't want it to be fixed. There are people in American politics, as I said already, who think anyone who comes here should be allowed to come and stay. There are others, frankly, who see a bunch of voters. They see a bunch of future voters.

Do you know what? Let's find a way to get people asylum. Asylum is perfect. It puts them instantly on a path to citizenship. In 4 to 6 years from now, we are going to have a bunch of new voters, and they will vote for us, and they will remember we are the ones that let them in.

So that is another element of it.

But I want to go back to the one about the elements of their base that believe in open borders, whether they admit it or not. And some of them actually do admit it. There are actually people who have told me to my face, ``People should be allowed to live in any country that they want,'' which, I suppose, in a free society, you can have a right to any opinion you want. I assure you, it is not a majority position in America. In fact, I assure you, it is not a majority position in any country. But, somehow, they think it should be our position.

And if you don't think that the elements of a base have influence over our politics, I submit to you what is happening right now with Israel policy. So we have already seen, I would imagine, a small minority--but nonetheless a minority--of radical, anti-Semitic pro- Hamas activists who are out there. They are threatening to vote against Joe Biden. They have said it: We will vote. Do not count on our vote. We are going to vote against you. Your name is ``Genocide Joe''--they call him.

They disrupt his speeches. He tried to give a speech the other day. I think there were like 40 interruptions. They have been in the hallways here. It is not just the weirdos from these CODEPINK communist groups, but it is others, screaming at us: You need to do this; you need to do that--all this stuff that is out there.

But they say: Sir, you have a problem. We have an element of our base in some States that say they are not going to vote for you because you are helping Israel too much.

And that is where you see the leak. The first leak that came out is: Oh, the President hung up on Netanyahu.

Then you see another leak a couple of weeks ago: We are going to have a two-state solution.

Never mind the fact that the two most prominent Palestinian groups, sadly, in the region are groups--one of them is going to wind up in the government of the second state--and these are groups that do things like give cash rewards for killing Jews. The more Jews you kill, the more money your family gets if you are a martyr. Pay to slay--it is real. Groups that, for example, in their schools, when their kids are 4, 5, 6 years of age, their school books, their textbooks teach them: Jews are subhuman, and they are evil--groups that are not interested in a two-state solution. These groups are calling for a one-state solution: ``from the river to the sea''--no Jews, only them.

So let's give them their own country. Now, I would love for that to be possible, but not as long as those people are around. But that is the other thing they threw out there.

And then, yesterday, we read that the White House has sent emissaries. Top aides from the White House went to Michigan to meet with some of these upset activists to see if we can somehow bring them along so they will vote for him in November and stop being mean to Joe Biden over Israel.

Well, do you know who some of these people were? Multiple--more than one of them--were people that have openly--openly--been supportive of both Hamas and Hezbollah and call them ``freedom fighters.'' At least one of them is a guy who has publicly said, on multiple occasions, that the U.S. Government is controlled by Zionist money, by Jewish money. That is who the White House went to meet with yesterday.

And then, last night, we are treated to a press conference by the President of the United States, and in what I imagine was an unscripted moment--maybe not--he said Israel's response to Hamas ``has been over the top,'' which is ironic, because I support Israel funding, but here we are today being asked to pass a bill that has all this money for Israel, which I support.

So what are we funding? We are funding Israel's ``over the top'' campaign against Hamas?

So it doesn't make any sense, except for the politics. That is how politics influences all of this. You know, I would conclude by just taking us back to the original point, which is, the reason why I have voted already to move to proceed to this. I just don't know how you go to people in everyday life, hard-working people, and say to them-- people who are upset because they feel like our country's border is being overrun, and it is--and they say: How come we are not doing anything about that, something real? Like, why aren't we making that a priority? Why don't we ever read that the Senate is staying in through the weekend arguing and fighting and working on something real to stop the border? How come that never gets a priority?

The growing number of Americans who always feel like, when it comes to a major issue and a major fight, they are always second--behind another country, behind another group, behind somebody else--who have been, for the better part of 20 years, told: We have to take care of others before we focus on your problems. Let's send our jobs and our factories to other countries because it is good for the global economy. I know we have homeless veterans committing record amounts of suicides and these tragedies, but let's spend more money housing migrants in this country illegally to begin with.

People who watched the news last week, OK, a roving gang of migrants from Venezuela--I mean, it is interesting because, for a year now, the Venezuelan community in South Florida has been telling me to be careful because some of the people who are coming from Venezuela now are clearly gang bangers. And, you know, you have to prove that. I am not saying it is zero percent, but they were right. They warned me a year ago, and now we are seeing it. And you saw it last week when--what?-- five or seven of them assaulted police officers, were arrested, were released within an hour without any bail, flipped the middle finger to America, and walked right out, back to the migrant shelter, paid for by taxpayers.

You saw it last Sunday, when an illegal migrant of Palestinian descent went to Nassau County in New York, walked up to some guy's house and tore down his Israeli and American flags. When the guy confronted him, he assaulted the guy and started screaming things like: We are going to kill all the Jews.

Those are just two examples. I could give you more, but they are there. People are watching this stuff, and they are angry. They say: Why don't you guys do something about that? Why aren't you staying through the weekend about that? Why aren't those people being deported immediately?

How about these people here on student visas? You are a visitor to the

United States of America on a student visa--on a student visa or whatever visa--and you are in the street calling for ``intifada,'' but we can't deport you. They won't deport you. We know who you are. You are not here illegally; you are here on a visa. If you had said all that stuff, we probably wouldn't have given you the visa, but now that you are here, you get to keep the visa? Deport those people. They won't. Why aren't you fighting about that?

Most Americans have nothing against Ukraine. Most Americans want to help Ukraine, but I don't think it is unreasonable for them to say: Well, what about us? What about our country? What about our invasion? What about our border?

And I want to say this with as much respect as I can. There is nobody in the Senate that can lecture me on immigration. This is not a political drive. I have lived it my whole life.

This is not immigration--3.3 million people released into the country. And 5 to 10,000 people a day illegally arrive in the country. That is not immigration. Immigration is a good thing. Mass migration is a bad thing, and that is what this is. This is mass migration, and it is not good for anyone. It is not even good for the migrants, many of whom are raped and killed along the way.

It is good for the traffickers. It is good for the enemies of this country, but it is not good for the migrants. This is mass migration, and it reminds me, well, if you are against this and you want to be strict about immigration, that is anti-immigrant, which is silly, at least if they say it to me.

But I remember, like, I am not anti-rain. I think rain is a good thing. I think we need rain, right? I am anti-flood. I am not against the rain. I am against flooding. Does being against flooding make you anti-rain? No. And being against mass migration does not make you anti- immigration, because mass migration is not immigration.

And beyond the issues of sovereignty and common sense and the costs involved--beyond all of that--do we really think that you can release 600,000 people with either criminal convictions or pending criminal charges into the country and nothing is going to happen? Do you think you can release 600,000 people with criminal histories and they are, all of a sudden, all going to become entrepreneurs and start some tech company? No. The chances are that a lot of them are going to continue to be criminals. You are going to have a crime wave. It is already starting, and no part of this country will be immune from it.

And do you think ISIS and, for that matter, every terrorist organization in the world, no matter what sewer they live in or some cave they are hiding in--you don't think they are aware that the largest, most effective human smuggling operation in all of human history is operating right on the border of the United States? You don't think they are aware of it? Because the guys that were involved in 9/11--those animals, savages--they actually came here on a visa pretending to be flight students.

The next 9/11, God forbid, they don't have to pretend anything. All they have to say is: I come from a country where people are kidnapped and where people are often victims of crime, and you must let me in. And, for all we know, some of them may actually become citizens because they are going to get asylum.

You don't think that these terrorist groups are aware? I can't and won't divulge any intelligence information. So let's just use common sense. Common sense tells you that these groups and these terrorist organizations understand that the largest human smuggling, migrant smuggling operation in the history of mankind operates right at border of the United States. And we don't think anything is going to come out as a result of it?

Something bad is going to happen. Something bad--really bad--is bound to happen, and, when it does, remember this day, because, when it does, when something really bad happens, when we are overrun by a horrible crime wave and multiple cities--guys, we lived it.

I was a child. I actually didn't live in Miami at the time. We had moved away for a few years. The Mariel boatlift brought 200,000--less than 200,000--people from Cuba all at once. It took Miami 10 years to dig out of that. Bill Clinton lost his reelection because he agreed to take in some of those people into a Federal facility in Arkansas, and they set it on fire.

And there are a lot of people who came through Mariel who did fine, and there were a bunch of criminals and sadists and lunatics as well, because you take a lot of people from anywhere, and you are going to have the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Well, we have something just like this happening not once, over a span of weeks, but, literally, every month we have two Mariels. And you think that you are going to allow a flood of people into America and something bad is not going to happen? Sadly, it is. It is just a matter of time. And when it does--when it does--things that might sound extreme to some aren't just going to sound reasonable, they are going to sound overdue. And do you know what they are going to ask us? How could you have allowed this to happen?

So I end where I began. I know that if all you do is spend your time here and watch those networks and read these columnists and newspapers, you may lose this perspective; but I promise you, in the real world, on planet Earth, in this country among everyday people, most of them are asking themselves: Do you want to help Ukraine? We are for it. Do you want to help Israel? Of course. Yes, we should help Taiwan.

But who is helping America? Why isn't helping our country deal with this migrant crisis No. 1 before those other things? Don't they tell you on the airplane, if the oxygen mask deploys, put on your mask and then put the one on your kid? What good are we, how do you suppose-- America, to anyone in the world, to any country on this planet--if we are falling apart inside?

And then, who do we work for? We work for Americans. I am a U.S. citizen, a U.S. Senator. I care about things that are going on in the world. No one has ever accused me of being an isolationist. And those things do matter in America. But you have to start with fundamentals, and that means you have to be strong here at home in order to be strong for our allies.

We are being invaded every single day. Today, 8 to 10,000 people will enter the United States illegally and unlawfully. We don't know who most of them are. Don't let them tell you that they do. You can buy a fake passport. You can buy state travel documents in Brazil. In multiple countries in Latin America, you can buy them. It is an industry.

So I am just telling you, we are going to have something bad happen and people are going to ask: Why didn't you guys fight over that? Why didn't you stay over the weekend about that?

So why are we focused on an invasion of another country--which is important--but not focused on the invasion of our own country?

And it can be solved. The President's executive orders created it, and he can reverse it, but he won't. So here we are.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, as a result of multiple flight delays and cancellations due to the winter storm, I will miss today's votes.

Mr. President, I recognize Paul Michael Edwards, a fall 2023 intern with my Orlando office, for the hard work he has done for my office and the people of Florida.

Paul recently graduated from the University of Central Florida, where he completed a master's degree in legal studies with a minor in criminal justice. He is a dedicated and diligent worker who was devoted to getting the most out of his internship experience.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Paul, and I look forward to hearing of his successes in the years to come.

Mr. President, I recognize Jenny Permetter, a summer and fall 2023 intern with my Orlando office, for the hard work she has done for my office and the people of Florida.

Jenny is a graduate of the University of Central Oklahoma, where she completed a bachelor's degree in psychology. She is a dedicated and diligent worker who was devoted to getting the most out of her internship experience.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Jenny, and I look forward to hearing of her successes in the years to come.

Madam President, I recognize Zhon Keith Butterfield, a fall 2023 intern with my gulf coast regional office, for the hard work he has done for my office and the people of Florida.

Zhon is currently a student at St. Petersburg College, where he is majoring in public policy and administration. He is a dedicated and diligent worker who was devoted to getting the most out of his internship experience.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Zhon for his work with my office, and I look forward to hearing of his continued good work in the years to come.

Mr. President, I recognize Jordan J. Corbett on the occasion of his 101st birthday on November 25, 2023.

J.J. grew up in Pierce, FL, and attended Union Academy in Bartow. In 1943, after a semester at Bethune-Cookman University, he was drafted into the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. He was one of the first African Americans to train as a paratrooper and was a founding member of the 555th ``Triple Nickles'' Parachute Infantry Battalion. The 555th was part of Operation Firefly, tasked with parachuting into rough terrain in the American Northwest to put out fires started by the Japan's deadly fire balloons. Not only did they help protect the homeland and deter future balloon attacks, they pioneered many of the procedures of today's smoke jumpers who help put out wildfires.

After the war, J.J. earned a degree in mathematics from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College where he played football, was editor of the yearbook, and was active in Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Upon graduation, he returned to Bartow, FL, to teach math and coached at his high school alma mater, where he met his wife Ava.

He served 12 years on the Polk County School Board and 14 years on the board of the Citrus and Chemical Bank. He is a two-time Florida Track Coach of the Year and a member of the Florida Athletic Association Hall of Fame.

J.J.'s life of service and perseverance is an inspiration to us all. I extend my best birthday wishes to J.J. and his family.