Floor Statements

Mr. President, last week, I came to the floor in support of Senator Scott's bill pushing back on what many of us consider the unconstitutional COVID vaccine mandates. I used my floor time to describe the lack of transparency of our healthcare Agencies by talking about the information that our healthcare Agencies, the media, and the news media are not providing the American public. I come to the floor today to expand a little bit on that information.

Now, last week, I presented this chart, which shows the daily number of new cases. Those are the blue lines. You actually have daily deaths--the tragic deaths--very thin red line. But you also have this line showing the percent of fully vaccinated Americans.

Now, I pointed to this chart because this is not what I would expect to see if we had 100 percent effective vaccines. Now, let me again state, I was a big supporter of Operation Warp Speed. I am not an anti- vaxxer. I have had every vaccine up to this one because I had COVID.

So I had hoped and prayed that the COVID vaccine would be 100 percent safe and 100 percent effective, but this chart is not what I would expect to have seen with a vaccine that was highly effective and what we all were hoping would happen once we had a high percentage of Americans vaccinated, together with those who already had COVID, like myself, with natural immunity.

You can see, prior to the vaccine even being able to take effect, as the first major surge of the pandemic was winding down, I would have expected to see a continued winding down, but that is not what we saw. We have seen this surge in Delta, and we have seen additional deaths, and the tragedy continues.

Now, back on September 9, President Biden said: This pandemic is of the unvaccinated.

And he also said: This is not about freedom or personal choice.

No, this is exactly about freedom and personal choice. President Biden also said in July of this year--on July 21, he said: If you are vaccinated, you are not going to be hospitalized. You are not going to be in the ICU unit. You are not going to die. You are not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

Today, I received an email from a constituent in Wisconsin. I am going to read an excerpt. I am not going to identify the individual because he fears reprisals. He has seen what happens to people that tell the truth about COVID and COVID vaccines, so I will keep his name anonymous.

But let me quote from his email: Both my parents were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine in the spring. Yet, in August, my mom became infected and then gave it to my dad. They became so sick that my sister, fully vaccinated with Moderna, moved in with them to care for them. She used PPEs and was careful, and she caught COVID too. Hence, my family, three of us, caught COVID while fully vaccinated. They spread it while they were fully vaccinated, from vaccinated to vaccinated. My mom and sister recovered. Dad died in a week at home after a 3-week stay in the local hospital.

Now, that is a tragedy. I wish what President Biden said would have been true, but it is not. That talks to the vaccine's efficacy.

Let's talk about vaccine safety. I have heard so often from who I refer to as the ``COVID gods''--the healthcare Agencies, the media, the news media--that vaccine adverse events are rare, and they are mild. Well, they are rare, and they are mild until they happen to you.

Here is a chart that compares the number of deaths reported on the VAERS system. Now, this is the CDC's own vaccine adverse event reporting system. And I charted this all the way back to 1990, at the beginning of the VAERS system, and I got deaths associated with the flu vaccine there in blue. You can barely see them. But the largest year, the peak year for the VAERS-reported deaths associated with the flu vaccine was--in 2010, there was 162 reported deaths.

Now, again, I understand that the VAERS does not prove causation. I have got that. But if you compare our experience since 1990 with the flu vaccine--by the way, it is generally about a third of the number of doses for an annual flu season versus what we have experienced with the COVID vaccine.

So you compare that very low level of deaths reported on VAERS to what we now experienced with COVID, for just this count here, and it is 15,737 worldwide for the 3 vaccines that have emergency use authorization in the United States. In total, it is 15,937 deaths reported on the VAERS system.

Now, again, I realize that does not prove causation, but I do need to point out that 5,272 of those deaths occurred on day zero, 1, or 2 following vaccination. Now, if I were in the CDC or FDA, those Agencies that in October of 2020 touted the VAERS report, their early warning safety surveillance systems--before the vaccines ever got the emergency use authorization--they were talking about how they were going to rely on these to provide the safety signals. I remember one member of the CDC saying: We are going to take adverse events so seriously that if somebody loses a couple of days work, lost work time because of an adverse event, we are going to get a CDC representative on the phone with that individual, and we are going to look into it.

That simply has not happened.

Now, one thing that the FDA has done is they have ridiculed some of the early treatment drugs. I don't have it on the chart here, but I just want to put things in perspective. So, now, again, 15,937 deaths in about 10 months with the COVID vaccine. Ivermectin, since 1996, over 25 years, has 379 total deaths. That is 15,937, COVID vaccine; Ivermectin, 379 in 25 years; Hydroxychloroquine, about 1,039 deaths over 25 years; Remdesivir, which appears to be the drug of choice for hospitalized COVID patients, 1,499 deaths. Again, that is information our Federal Agencies aren't providing the American public, but this is information people need to know.

Now, why am I giving you this information? Well, first of all, on social media, this is suppressed. This is being censored. People like me that would even broach the subject of VAERS have been attacked.

So I think it is important to come to the Senate floor so the American people understand what is happening. But the main point I am trying to make is, those individuals who believe in their own health autonomy, believe in their own personal freedom, many of whom have already been infected with COVID, are reading the science and believe, based on what they are reading, that their natural immunity is probably as, if not more, effective than the vaccinated immunity and have chosen not to get the vaccine. That is their right. You may not agree with that, but it is not your body. It is not your right to impose on someone else a mandate to take the vaccine or take away their job, take away their livelihood, and take away their healthcare.

By the way, I am not the only one that thinks this. President Biden, back on December 4, said: I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it be mandatory.

The Press Secretary said: The vaccine mandate is not the Federal Government's role.

And yet here we are, nurses being fired. What do you think that is going to do to our healthcare system? We already have a severe healthcare worker shortage. We are going to exacerbate that problem.

These mandates are unconstitutional, but they are going to be incredibly harmful for military readiness and for our healthcare system. They are also going to be incredibly corrosive to our society.

I have been inundated--even well before President Biden announced his ill-advised and unconstitutional mandate, I have been inundated with emails and letters and phone calls from people who are so concerned about being coerced, being forced to take a vaccine under duress. It has had an incredibly corrosive effect on our society.

But I want to quote from one particular letter. I got this letter from a nurse. She has a master's degree. She is also a professor of nursing. She is describing what happened inside a meeting of their faculty as they were deciding how to handle mandates in their nursing school.

She writes: Some of the biggest issues today are the conversations occurring behind closed doors. Our nursing department faculty got together to decide how to handle the nearly 50 percent of students that hadn't yet received their COVID-19 vaccination and faced being dismissed from their nursing program unless they complied. The students were referred to as ``ignorant,'' ``uneducated,'' ``killers.''

This name-calling, although deeply inappropriate, is becoming the cultural norm against the masses of those who decide that it is within their right to attack the personal choice of others.

But if I were a student or a parent of a student who heard that interaction that I am about to share with you, you would be beyond furious.

When it was determined by consensus of the faculty group that we were not going to allow any special accommodations--in other words, switching of clinical assignments or sites--to allow for the unvaccinated students to progress, and that will be the standard practice in all other nursing programs soon, one faculty member exclaimed to the group: ``Good luck finding a new career.''

And the group responded with laughter.

This nurse writes: Let that sink in for a moment. They laughed. They laughed at the thought of someone's dreams being crushed.

That's the effect these unconstitutional, coercive, freedom-robbing mandates are having on our society. There is no need for them.

As the previous email from my constituent that I received today proves, even if you have been fully vaccinated, you can catch COVID. You can transmit COVID. You can die from COVID. Now, it is a tragedy. I wish it weren't so, but it is true.

When are we going to start following the science? When are we going to reclaim the freedom that has been lost in this pandemic?

There has been enough harm done during the course of this pandemic. I am begging this body; I am begging the President, do no further harm.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Scott's bill. I want to make a few different points. First of all, I don't believe this administration or people who support the mandates are really thinking the process through as to how devastating these mandates are going to be on our economy.

Well before the President even announced his unlawful regulatory initiative, I was hearing from truckdrivers; I was hearing from nurses and doctors who have already had COVID, who had natural immunity, who are looking at, for example, the reports, are looking at some of the data and science saying that natural immunity is 13 to 27 times more effective than the vaccine, and they have chosen not to get it.

President Biden promised the American public he wouldn't mandate this. He said: ``I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory.''

His Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, said it is not the Federal Government's role.

I agree. The President also said: ``This is not about freedom or personal choice.''

No, this is exactly about freedom and personal choice.

I have written so many oversight letters to the healthcare Agencies. I completely agree with Senator Scott. I was a big supporter of Operation Warp Speed. I have gotten every vaccine until this one because I have had COVID, but the Federal Agencies have not been transparent. They have not given the American public information that we need to make that informed choice.

We need to recognize people's health autonomy. This is their body. They should be able to make these choices.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the information we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies that people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are looking at. And it is not disinformation. This is real information. It is just being withheld from the public by our healthcare Agencies, by the media, and the social media.

The first thing I want to show is a chart that I put together. Again, this is real data. This comes from the CDC in terms of the number of new cases per day, as well as the number of deaths per day. The deaths are down here in a very thin red line. But you can see by this chart that in terms of the surge of the initial Alpha variant of COVID, it pretty well peaked late December, early January.

The vaccines got the emergency use authorization about mid-December. The orange line shows the percent of Americans vaccinated, fully vaccinated. You can see the initial surge, the initial pandemic, was winding down before the vaccines even could take effect.

Now, again, we all hoped and prayed that the vaccine would be 100 percent effective and 100 percent safe. But when you look at this chart, as the pandemic is winding down, the percent of fully vaccinated individuals are going up, you would think--again, you would think what you would see is just a complete winding down of the pandemic. But that is not what we have seen.

We have seen this new surge, this new surge of a variant called Delta. So what are we to make of this? Again, I am not a doctor; I am not a medical researcher--but I look at this, and I am going, well, it certainly doesn't look like the vaccine has been particularly effective against the Delta variant.

But let's look at some data, the type of data that we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies. So we have to look, unfortunately, to England and to Israel that are more transparent. I don't expect anybody to be able to read the figures here. I will give you the highlights, but I am showing that this is from Public Health England. This is one of their Federal healthcare Agencies. This is from their technical briefing No. 23, dated September 17, 2021. It covers cases for about 7\1/2\ months, from the beginning of February to February 12. What the data shows is that during that 7\1/2\-month period in England, there are about 750,000 new COVID cases. A little under 600,000 of those were the Delta variant, about 80 percent. The number of deaths associated with those 600,000 Delta cases was 2,542, which gives us a case fatality ratio of about 0.4.

Now, again, case fatality is higher than infection fatality because these are actually registered cases, and there are all kinds of infections that never get registered. So to put this in context, an infection fatality rate for a bad flu season is slightly under 0.2, half of this. Again, put things in perspective.

Now, President Biden--and this has been parroted by media, news media--said that what we are currently experiencing is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. They don't give us, really, any data to back that up; they just proclaim, pronounce, that 99 percent of people with COVID now are unvaccinated, but they don't give us the data.

We have data from England. And here is the data. So of the 600,000 cases in England, 43 percent were with the unvaxxed; 27 percent were with the fully vaxxed; another 30 percent were partially vaxxed or just undetermined. But I think what is interesting--here is another quote from President Biden--President Biden said: If you are vaccinated, you are not going to be hospitalized; you are not going to an ICU unit; you are not going to die; you are not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

Well, maybe that is true in the United States. I kind of doubt it because in England, of the 600,000 new cases of Delta, of the over 2,500 deaths--63 percent of those deaths--1,613 people were fully vaccinated. Twenty-eight percent were with the unvaxxed.

This is information the American people probably never heard. It is information, by conveying it, I will get attacked. I will be vilified. I will be

censored. I will be suppressed. It is one of the reasons I come to the floor of the Senate to reveal this information that the American people need to know.

Let me close with something else that certainly nurses know, nurses who were our heroes. They had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients. Many got infected; some tragically died; most survived. Now, many of those nurses are treating the vaccine injured.

Let me just quick quote a couple of figures from the CDC's own safety early surveillance system--the VAERS report, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Worldwide, from a couple of weeks ago--these numbers are pretty fresh--there have been over 15,000 deaths reported on VAERS. Now, I realize VAERS does not prove causation. But of those 15,000 deaths, over 5,000 of those deaths have occurred on days 0, 1, or 2 following vaccination.

Now, again, it doesn't prove causation, but if I were working at the CDC, I would be looking at that very closely and analyzing those cases. The final number, total adverse events, on the VAERS system in 10 months, since the COVID vaccines have been under emergency use authorization, over 725,000 adverse events. So, again, I was hoping and praying this vaccine was 100 percent effective, 100 percent safe, but that does not appear to be the case.

And I believe this administration, I believe our healthcare Agencies need to be honest and transparent with the public. They have not been. The American people have the right to choose. It should not be mandated. We should respect their personal choice. We should respect their freedom.

And I will just close on--I will be bringing more information as we discuss other ways to push back on these mandates over the next few days, so stay tuned.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Scott's bill. I want to make a few different points. First of all, I don't believe this administration or people who support the mandates are really thinking the process through as to how devastating these mandates are going to be on our economy.

Well before the President even announced his unlawful regulatory initiative, I was hearing from truckdrivers; I was hearing from nurses and doctors who have already had COVID, who had natural immunity, who are looking at, for example, the reports, are looking at some of the data and science saying that natural immunity is 13 to 27 times more effective than the vaccine, and they have chosen not to get it.

President Biden promised the American public he wouldn't mandate this. He said: ``I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory.''

His Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, said it is not the Federal Government's role.

I agree. The President also said: ``This is not about freedom or personal choice.''

No, this is exactly about freedom and personal choice.

I have written so many oversight letters to the healthcare Agencies. I completely agree with Senator Scott. I was a big supporter of Operation Warp Speed. I have gotten every vaccine until this one because I have had COVID, but the Federal Agencies have not been transparent. They have not given the American public information that we need to make that informed choice.

We need to recognize people's health autonomy. This is their body. They should be able to make these choices.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the information we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies that people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are looking at. And it is not disinformation. This is real information. It is just being withheld from the public by our healthcare Agencies, by the media, and the social media.

The first thing I want to show is a chart that I put together. Again, this is real data. This comes from the CDC in terms of the number of new cases per day, as well as the number of deaths per day. The deaths are down here in a very thin red line. But you can see by this chart that in terms of the surge of the initial Alpha variant of COVID, it pretty well peaked late December, early January.

The vaccines got the emergency use authorization about mid-December. The orange line shows the percent of Americans vaccinated, fully vaccinated. You can see the initial surge, the initial pandemic, was winding down before the vaccines even could take effect.

Now, again, we all hoped and prayed that the vaccine would be 100 percent effective and 100 percent safe. But when you look at this chart, as the pandemic is winding down, the percent of fully vaccinated individuals are going up, you would think--again, you would think what you would see is just a complete winding down of the pandemic. But that is not what we have seen.

We have seen this new surge, this new surge of a variant called Delta. So what are we to make of this? Again, I am not a doctor; I am not a medical researcher--but I look at this, and I am going, well, it certainly doesn't look like the vaccine has been particularly effective against the Delta variant.

But let's look at some data, the type of data that we are not getting from our healthcare Agencies. So we have to look, unfortunately, to England and to Israel that are more transparent. I don't expect anybody to be able to read the figures here. I will give you the highlights, but I am showing that this is from Public Health England. This is one of their Federal healthcare Agencies. This is from their technical briefing No. 23, dated September 17, 2021. It covers cases for about 7\1/2\ months, from the beginning of February to February 12. What the data shows is that during that 7\1/2\-month period in England, there are about 750,000 new COVID cases. A little under 600,000 of those were the Delta variant, about 80 percent. The number of deaths associated with those 600,000 Delta cases was 2,542, which gives us a case fatality ratio of about 0.4.

Now, again, case fatality is higher than infection fatality because these are actually registered cases, and there are all kinds of infections that never get registered. So to put this in context, an infection fatality rate for a bad flu season is slightly under 0.2, half of this. Again, put things in perspective.

Now, President Biden--and this has been parroted by media, news media--said that what we are currently experiencing is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. They don't give us, really, any data to back that up; they just proclaim, pronounce, that 99 percent of people with COVID now are unvaccinated, but they don't give us the data.

We have data from England. And here is the data. So of the 600,000 cases in England, 43 percent were with the unvaxxed; 27 percent were with the fully vaxxed; another 30 percent were partially vaxxed or just undetermined. But I think what is interesting--here is another quote from President Biden--President Biden said: If you are vaccinated, you are not going to be hospitalized; you are not going to an ICU unit; you are not going to die; you are not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

Well, maybe that is true in the United States. I kind of doubt it because in England, of the 600,000 new cases of Delta, of the over 2,500 deaths--63 percent of those deaths--1,613 people were fully vaccinated. Twenty-eight percent were with the unvaxxed.

This is information the American people probably never heard. It is information, by conveying it, I will get attacked. I will be vilified. I will be

censored. I will be suppressed. It is one of the reasons I come to the floor of the Senate to reveal this information that the American people need to know.

Let me close with something else that certainly nurses know, nurses who were our heroes. They had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients. Many got infected; some tragically died; most survived. Now, many of those nurses are treating the vaccine injured.

Let me just quick quote a couple of figures from the CDC's own safety early surveillance system--the VAERS report, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Worldwide, from a couple of weeks ago--these numbers are pretty fresh--there have been over 15,000 deaths reported on VAERS. Now, I realize VAERS does not prove causation. But of those 15,000 deaths, over 5,000 of those deaths have occurred on days 0, 1, or 2 following vaccination.

Now, again, it doesn't prove causation, but if I were working at the CDC, I would be looking at that very closely and analyzing those cases. The final number, total adverse events, on the VAERS system in 10 months, since the COVID vaccines have been under emergency use authorization, over 725,000 adverse events. So, again, I was hoping and praying this vaccine was 100 percent effective, 100 percent safe, but that does not appear to be the case.

And I believe this administration, I believe our healthcare Agencies need to be honest and transparent with the public. They have not been. The American people have the right to choose. It should not be mandated. We should respect their personal choice. We should respect their freedom.

And I will just close on--I will be bringing more information as we discuss other ways to push back on these mandates over the next few days, so stay tuned.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to speak to my amendment that is completely germane to the discussion of infrastructure. I can't think of more important infrastructure that would actually secure our homeland from a variety of threats.

But as I have always said, coming from a manufacturing background, the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one, and right now this administration is in a complete state of denial regarding the crisis that is on the border.

This crisis has been growing. It is not a seasonal surge; this is a growing problem. This has been a growing problem, and I have my chart here that demonstrates that.

Here is January. This is when President Biden came into office. You can see the enormous surge of the crisis he created. Vice President Harris went down to Central America looking for the root cause of this crisis. She only would have had to walk into the Oval Office and look at President Biden because President Biden is the root cause of this crisis.

It is his policies, the dismantling of successful policies from the previous administration that had stemmed the flow, that had largely secured our border until this President took office and reversed all that progress. It is a real shame.

Let me just give you the numbers because you have to describe the problem. This has been growing. For the last 4 or 5 months, in particular, we have been averaging, first, almost 6,000 and now over 6,000 apprehensions per day--6,000. In June it was 6,249. In July it will probably be over 6,500. There have been weeks we believe it is over 7,000 people per day coming in and being apprehended at the border.

Now, that doesn't even count the 750 to 1,000 known got-aways. DHS is now--or CPP, at least, is now estimating that is going to result in about 269,000 people coming into this country that we know they came in; we just couldn't catch them. This also doesn't even describe or enumerate how many unknown got-aways.

So, again, the fact of the matter is, from January through July, approximately 1.3 million people have been apprehended coming into this country without documentation. About 173,000 of those individuals have been released in the interior, either with a notice to appear or, even worse, a notice to report. If you multiply that times 2, that is 346,000 people dispersed to all points of America.

DHS, this administration, is not notifying the States, not notifying the cities that these individuals, apparently claiming asylum, are coming into communities near you. You add that to the 269,000 estimated known got-aways, that is over 600,000 people just this year. That is larger than the population in the State of Wyoming. It is approaching the population of the State of Vermont.

And, again, this is while we have the title 42 restrictions in place. Probably about 900,000 people in the first 7 months had been returned under title 42. If the administration ends that program, imagine the surge.

Now, there once was a time when securing the border was a nonpartisan issue. Senator McCain led the charge. In 2006, this body passed, on a vote of 80 to 19, the Secure Fence Act, which was going to build about 700 miles of fence. In the end, only 36 miles was double-layer fencing; the rest was pretty ineffective, as we have seen.

But voting for that bill was President Biden, President Obama, Senator Carper, Secretary of State Clinton, Senator Feinstein, Senator Schumer, Senator Wyden, Senator Stabenow. This was a bipartisan effort to secure our border. But somewhere between 2006 and 2021, this has become a partisan issue.

Now, what is absurd is, in the last administration, again, we pretty well solved the problem, had allocated about $10 billion to build the fence. It has all been contracted. It has all been paid for. We have built about 453 miles of the 738 miles that was contracted for; 285 miles remain unbuilt.

An exit report by Senator Lankford shows that we have spent about $2 billion getting out of those contracts--$2 billion to not build the wall. It is costing us $3 million a day just to guard the steel fencing that is lying there not being used.

So my amendment is very simple. It is very common sense. It says, please, let's recognize fences work. Certainly, Congress recognized it when we put a double layer around the people's House for a number of months, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on that security effort.

So let's not waste the taxpayers' money. Let's recognize walls work. We need to complete the 285 miles of wall that will help secure our border, that will help secure our homeland, and that will help keep Americans safe.

It is a very simple amendment. Let's hope it is not a partisan result.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in quick response, the prior administration's--what the good Senator claimed a ``boondoggle'' worked.

During this comprehensive review by this administration--again, this administration is the root cause of this problem; they caused this--the problem is growing worse. It is not getting better.

Congress, by supporting a double layer of fence around this Capitol for months, spent hundreds of millions of dollars keeping us safe and secure, recognizes that fencing and walls work.

Again, this fencing has been paid for. This wall has been paid for. Two billion dollars will be wasted. Three million dollars a day will be wasted. This is just common sense, and it will improve the security of this Nation.

And, again, in 2006, this was a bipartisan type of effort. Building 700 miles of fence was bipartisan: 80 to 19. It should be bipartisan today. I am urging my colleagues, let's finish building this wall. Let's not waste billions of dollars in taxpayer money.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I need to respond quickly.

Mr. President, I need to respond quickly.

Senator Carper was talking about root causes. The root cause of the instability--the primary cause of the violence in Central America is Americans' insatiable demand for drugs. If you solve that problem, you solve the root cause of the problem, and you won't have the violence.

But the root cause of this current crisis--because it was already solved--the root cause of this current crisis is President Biden's policies. President Biden is the root cause. So if you want to fix this, we can fix it. Secure the border. Go back to the policies that worked. We are not going to be able to fix Central America until we end our insatiable demand for drugs.

With that, I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, the sponsors and managers of this bill have made the point that this piece of legislation has followed regular order, and I will admit, versus how things have been passed in the last 10 years since I have been here, this is a little bit better regular order than I have experienced in general. But it still does not even come close to giving Members time to fully consider what we are voting on here. I don't even have a total score on this. I have been told it is approaching a quarter of a trillion dollars.

The history of this bill is on May 13, about 730 pages were reported out of committee. This wasn't exactly the bill that was voted out of committee, though. Somewhere, somehow, the chair modified at least one amendment that was not particularly recognizable to those that offered the amendment.

On 5/19, on September--or May 19, the bill grew to 1,445 pages, and just today we voted on an amendment, 900 pages. So now here we are at 11 o'clock. We come to the Chamber. For the first time, I see what the amendments are in the managers' package.

I am sorry. I don't know what these amendments are. I know what my amendment is. I don't know what the rest of these are. I haven't seen them. I don't even know how many pages this is. I just have a list. So you can claim this is regular order. You can claim this is a deliberative process, but it is far from it.

So I would just ask that the Senator modify her request; that the Senate stand in recess for 3 hours--only 3 hours--to allow us to review this package of amendments.

Would the Senator modify her request?

Mr. President, I mentioned earlier that there is no doubt this bill did go through more regular order than we have been used to over the last decade. But I think we also demonstrated that the massiveness of this bill, close to a quarter trillion dollars, over 2,300 pages, many of those pages dumped on us today, and now this managers' amendment package--we haven't seen it; a few Members have-- does not represent adequate regular order.

I also did not have much participation in the development of that managers' package. I realize that a couple of my amendments did get in there, certainly not my priority amendments. I will talk later about the one that actually got a vote. I only got one vote on one amendment, and that vote was to simply honor the contracts that we have outstanding, about $2 billion worth to build the additional 250 miles of wall to secure our border. But I will come back to that.

Right now I would like to talk about four of my--I probably had about a dozen amendments but four priority amendments that we tried to get in this managers' package. There was no consultation with me personally, maybe a little bit of back-and-forth with staff.

The first amendment really would have codified something we passed twice out of my committee when I was chair of the Homeland Security Committee. It was called the GOOD Act, Guidance Out of Darkness. President Trump issued an Executive order, which basically ordered the Agencies to publish the guidance that they were creating so that the American public would know what the regulations were expected of them, so they understood the rules of the road were--a good piece of transparency in government. It passed unanimously twice out of my committee. For some reason, President Biden on his first couple of days in office reversed that Executive order.

So now we have, literally, executive Agencies pulling down these websites so the American public doesn't even know what guidances they are expected to follow. So that would have been a

very simple amendment. Again, it passed twice out of my committee unanimously. That didn't make it into the managers' package.

One amendment that I had also introduced--actually was voted on during the debate over the Iran Nuclear Agreement--simply stated that any new agreement with Iran that this administration enters into should be deemed a treaty. That is what should have happened in the Obama administration. When the JCPOA was just entered into as an executive agreement but literally was no better than the piece of paper it was written on because the next President could just do away with it, and that is exactly what happened.

So this is a very simple amendment. Quite honestly, this should pass 100 to 0. Every U.S. Senator should demand, when you have an agreement between two nations as significant as the JCPOA, or whatever this administration might enter into with Iran, it should be deemed a treaty, and it should come before this body for ratification by two- thirds of this body. That should have been included in this managers' amendment, but it wasn't.

One threat that this Nation faces--and this relates, I believe, directly to China because China, in their own military doctrine, does not recognize a high-altitude nuclear blast as a nuclear attack. A high-altitude nuclear blast, otherwise known as an EMP, could wipe out our electrical grid. And for as long as I have been serving here, administrations of both parties have not paid adequate attention to this.

So this amendment, vital to our national security, also should have been included in the managers' package, but it wasn't. Why not? This is perfectly suited to this piece of legislation. This is an important national security priority, and this was left out of the managers' packet.

I would like to have a little bit more time working on this legislation to insist that this at least gets an up-or-down vote because I pretty well assumed that this would be accepted by both sides and not objected to, but it wasn't. Again, EMP, or geomagnetic disturbance, could represent an existential threat to this Nation, but it was simply ignored. It wasn't included.

And then the final amendment that was a priority of mine was the SOFA Act. We are all fully aware of the fact that in this Nation, we have a crisis of overdoses--of things like heroin and fentanyl. It is plaguing all of our communities, large and small, every State. No Member of Congress is unaware of this. We have all heard the tragic stories from our constituents.

One of the problems with fentanyl is the way it is scheduled to be illegal. And the problem with that is there are analogs. You can change the molecular makeup of fentanyl very easily, and then all of a sudden it is not scheduled as being an illegal substance.

All this amendment would have done is codified what the DEA has been doing for a number of years, but the DEA regulation has run out

So one more time--this is completely bipartisan. There is no controversy to this amendment whatsoever--completely, directly related to this piece of legislation. It is trying to protect this Nation against China's malign actions. This amendment was left out of this package.

You might get some measure of sense of why I am not happy with the managers' package, why I think this body should take a little bit more time to deliberate; take a few more votes on amendments like this that, again, should be passed unanimously but were overlooked because, I guess, the only people really consulted, in terms of amendments, were those that they felt they could figure out how to get their vote.

And I was pretty solid from the standpoint that I didn't want to vote for a quarter of a trillion dollars to government Agencies that I don't think are going to spend that money particularly effectively.

I would like to talk about one amendment that I did get a vote on. Unfortunately, it was voted down on a largely party-line vote. The Senator from West Virginia--both Senators from West Virginia, but the one who does not caucus with us was the only Senator from the other side of the aisle that supported this piece of legislation.

When I introduced this amendment, I came down to the floor and I talked about there was a time--and that time wasn't very long ago--when border security was actually bipartisan. Securing our border, an imperative to national security, was a bipartisan goal.

Evidence of that was in 2006, the Senate passed a piece of legislation called the Secure Fence Act of 2006. What that piece of legislation would do--was supposed to do--was build 700 miles of double-layer fencing, 700 miles. Now, in the end, only 36 miles of double-layer fencing was built. The other 613 miles was built, but 299 miles of that was just a vehicle fencing. In other words, pedestrians can easily walk right through. Another 314 miles was a single-layer pedestrian fence that, unfortunately, pedestrians can almost hop over, but they can scale and defeat that fence very easily.

Now, again, proving the bipartisan nature of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, it passed the Senate overwhelmingly with a vote of 80 to 19. Twenty-six Democrats joined 54 Republicans in voting yes. In the House, the Secure Fence Act passed by a vote of 283 to 138, with 64 Democrats voting yes.

So, in total, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 passed Congress with a combined total vote of 363 votes for and 157 votes against. In other words, 70 percent of Members of Congress back then voted yes, and 90 Democrat ensured that it was bipartisan support.

By the way, notable Democrats who voted for it were the majority leader of this body today, the Senator from New York. President Obama voted for it. President Biden voted for it. Secretary of State Clinton voted for it. The chairman of Homeland Security, and then my ranking member when I was chairman, Senator Tom Carper, voted for it, Senator Feinstein, Senator Wyden. And Senator Sherrod Brown voted for it as a House Member back in 2006.

We need a fence. Walls work. I think we admitted that fact after January 6, when we put a double layer of 7- or 8-foot-high fencing, concertina-tipped wire, and left it up for way longer than it needed to be left up.

So here in Congress, we are happy to put up a fence, put up walls, as long as it is protecting us. I mean, it is about time that we build a wall to protect the rest of America.

Now, what my amendment did is it simply required the administration to complete construction on the part of the wall that has already been contracted. We build about 450 miles; 250 has been contracted. We are going to have to pay for it whether we build it or not, and that is all my amendment is. Don't waste American taxpayer money, which, if we don't pass my amendment, that is exactly what is going to happen.

I do want to take a little bit of time, seeing as we have a lot of time here tonight--and we intend to take that time tonight--I want to lay out the history of the current problem. So my first chart here is detailing unaccompanied minors that are apprehended at the southern border. And these minors are from Central America, from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Now, I want my colleagues to notice that in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, we never had more than 4,431 unaccompanied children cross our border illegally and be apprehended. As a matter of fact, in 2007, there is less than 2,000 people. In 2008, 4,380; in 2009, 3,288; in 2010, 4,431; and then in 2011, 3,038. So we average under 4,000 unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally and being apprehended in those 5 years.

Then something happened. And what happened was the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals memorandum. When President Obama got frustrated that the deliberative process wasn't delivering him the border security or the immigration reform that he wanted, he used his pen. And he did what I certainly did not believe was constitutional. As a matter of fact, a couple of years before that, he said he didn't have the constitutional authority to do this, but he did it anyway. It has been challenged in the courts ever since.

But the most significant thing about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, other than its unconstitutionality, is what it sparked, what it was a catalyst for. You notice those who passed in June 2012 and, lo and behold--and it is not a coincidence--in 2012, all of a sudden that less than 4,000 annual average became 10,000. The following year, 2013, 20,805 unaccompanied children entered the country illegally and

were apprehended. And 2014 was the crisis year. That is when President Obama even admitted that this was a humanitarian crisis. We had 51,726 unaccompanied children exploiting our immigration laws, our asylum laws, all because of DACA.

By the way, what happened in Central America with the passage of DACA was the coyotes--human traffickers, some of the most evil people on the planet--I will talk about that later. They talked about the fact that America changed their policy. Now, as an unaccompanied child, you can get into America. You get a piece of paper. It is called ``permiso,'' permission to enter the country. That is not what it was at all. It was a ``notice to appear.'' Do you know what? Coyotes lie. They lied to Central Americans. So vulnerable children put themselves in the hands of, again, some of the most evil people on the planet. That sparked that crisis.

Now, the Obama Administration reacted. I remember going down, when I became chairman of the committee, on a bipartisan trip to the border, down to McAllen, TX. At that point in time, Customs and Border Patrol were overwhelmed, but they did what Customs and Border Patrol often do. They rose to the challenge. They dealt with this humanitarian crisis as humanely as they possibly could. They built a facility. They put up chain-link fences to keep the children safe--the young ones from the older ones or from the adults. On a bipartisan basis, we sung Customs and Border Patrol's praises.

Fast forward to the crisis of 2018-2019, and, all of a sudden, that exact same facility, it was actually upgraded. It was better than it was. It was more humane. All of a sudden, my Democratic colleagues started calling that facility one that housed children in cages. What hypocrisy.

You can see through 2019, once the Obama Administration started detaining families together, they stemmed the tide. But that didn't last for long, as I will demonstrate on my next chart.

On a quick explanation of this chart, the gold bars are single adults. It has been an ongoing problem we are always going to have in some way, shape, or form--single adults coming to this country illegally through the southwestern border. What we never had in the past was this surge, this crisis level of illegal immigration by children and families.

By the way, some are real families; many are not. Many are families of one adult and one child. Sometimes they are a child who has been sold to them. In my committee, we heard testimony of a child being sold for $84. We heard of children being recycled to be used by multiple adults so they can come as a family and exploit our laws.

Let me explain how they exploit them. This chart starts in 2012 with the passage of DACA. Again, single adults are gold, red are unaccompanied children, blue are family units. You can see the humanitarian crisis in 2014. It doesn't look like much of a crisis compared to 2018 and our current crisis, which this administration is completely denying--completely denying.

We had Secretary Mayorkas in front of our committee 2 weeks ago. I can't tell you how surreal it was as he blamed the previous administration for the crisis he created. He talked about how it is getting better: It is improving because we are getting more efficient. We are getting more efficient at processing and dispersing.

That is not solving the problem.

Let me go back because what this chart does is it has the cause and effect. DACA is the catalyst of all of this. It sparked it all. It made citizens of Central America realize that the immigration system was broken and easily exploitable. You can see where President Obama declares the 2014 crisis a ``humanitarian crisis.''

Then President Obama instituted a family detention policy, a consequence. You couldn't just cross into America and get dispersed throughout the country, never to show up for your immigration hearing, move into the shadows, potentially be exploited by human traffickers and their agents here in America. And that actually helped stem the problem. It pretty well solved the problem until a court reinterpreted the Flores decision.

The Flores decision dates back many years, about one little girl who came to this country. It established standards--humanitarian standards--which I don't disagree with. America is a humane nation. We are a nation of immigrants, but it has to be a legal process. The Flores decision dealt with unaccompanied minors and made sure that they could always stay in CBP's, Customs Border Protection's, custody and ICE's custody for only so long before they had to be turned over to Health and Human Services to then find sponsors or parents. But there is a time limit on it.

What the Flores reinterpretation did--and I think incorrectly, as did President Obama's DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who completely disagreed with the decision--that court--that unelected court--pretty much out of plain cloth or whole cloth said: Oh, no, the Flores decision or agreement applies to accompanied children, as well. It didn't, but all of a sudden it did by court order.

That created some real problems for the Obama Administration. They had to choose: Do they continue to detain families as a deterrent, as a consequence to fix this problem, or do they separate them so they could detain the adult while they complied with the law under the court decision? Well, what they decided to do--and I can't fault them for this--is they kept the families together and they dispersed the all. That really instituted the process, the policy--the horrible policy of catch and release, almost open borders.

Now, it took a while for people to understand what was happening. It took a couple of years, but by the summer of 2019, citizens of Central America were well aware of how exploitable our laws were. And guess what. They exploited them.

I certainly learned from the experience of Michael Chertoff back in-- I believe it was--2008. It might have been an earlier year, when we had a surge of Brazilians coming into Mexico and then coming illegally into this country through the southern border. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think it is something like 30,000 in a short period of time. What Secretary Chertoff did at that point in time is he instituted a program called ``Texas Hold'Em.'' Basically, it was a consequence, to apprehend Brazilians and send them right back to Brazil.

Within a month, the flow of illegal Brazilians was cut by about 90 percent. Problem solved. There was a consequence. We didn't have catch and release of Brazilians like we now had, and we have again catch and release of Central Americans coming into this Country.

Based on that experience working with the senior Senator of Arizona, who was on my committee, we proposed something called ``Operation Safe Return.'' The basic premise of that program would be, once apprehended, we would quickly adjudicate that initial asylum claim to see whether there really was a valid, credible fear.

Understand, if adjudicated, most of the people coming into this country do not have a valid asylum claim. As generous as our asylum system is, coming here for economic reasons is not a valid asylum claim. That is the majority of why people come here. What became of Operation Safe Return, to a certain extent, is the Trump administration's policy of migrant protection program, also known as ``Return to Mexico''--a consequence.

Again, I called my program Operation Safe Return: Quickly adjudicate those who don't have a valid asylum claim and safely return them to Central America.

I would have been happy to expend funds to make sure there were centers to accept people so they could be accepted safely. The Trump administration, instead, instituted the migrant protection program, return to Mexico. I realize there are people who don't particularly like that program, but it worked. It is undeniable that it worked. They instituted it right here.

Mexico wasn't particularly cooperating. So President Trump threatened them with tariffs. All of a sudden it got Mexico's attention. Mexico started cooperating, and you can see how the numbers dropped precipitously. We basically stopped the flow of children and children being used to create family units, and we had the problem solved before COVID hit. This is how you solve the problem.

Unfortunately, during the 2020 election, every Democratic Presidential

candidate vowed to stop deportations and also vowed to provide free healthcare.

I don't deny the push factor out of Central America. I don't deny the violence, the corruption. When I went down there on a bipartisan codel, I was surprised talking to the Presidents of Guatemala and Honduras. They talked about corruption and impunity.

I understand corruption. But what do you mean by impunity?

Well, impunity is pervasive in their society because of the drug cartels. Why do we have drug cartels down in Central America? It is because of America's insatiable demand for drugs. That is the root cause. The root cause of this problem, the push factor, isn't the violence. The root cause is our insatiable demand for drugs, which puts billions of dollars in the pockets of the other most evil people on the planet, the drug cartels, the drug traffickers.

By the way, what we did in our drug interdiction, relatively successfully, is we shut down the drug flow from Colombia up to the Caribbean into Florida, and we just redirected it into Central America and destroyed those nations because those drug cartels are untouchable--they are untouchable.

One story I heard is about a new police chief and first day on the job. He gets a DVD, and the DVD is of his wife and children going to church, going into school--a pretty powerful message: Don't mess with us. And they don't.

So that level of impunity from drug cartels becomes pervasive through society. Then you have the extortionists. If you are a cab driver, you had better pay the fee or they will shoot you and burn you in your cab. That is what impunity means. That level of violence is facilitated by our insatiable demand for drugs.

If you are going to fix that root cause, if you are going to solve the problem of violence in Central America, you have to actually fix the root cause, which is our insatiable demand for drugs. I wish we could. I wish it was easy to do. It is not. We want to stop illegal immigration so that we can fix the problem of the DACA kids and so we can establish a legal immigration system that works for all of us.

I mentioned my codel down to Central America. The Presidents of Central America tell me--they beg me: Please, fix your laws. This isn't good for our countries. We are losing our future. We need these people.

The vast majority, I would argue, are hard-working and are coming here to improve their lives. I can't blame them for that, but it has to be a legal process.

That is not working for Central America. It is going to further impoverish Central America. It is not an economic model that works.

It is certainly not good for migrants who come to this country to live in the shadows and who are still under the control of the drug cartels and human traffickers or are in gangs, especially the young men. The 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds are used by the drug traffickers to traffic drugs. The sex trade is the other involuntary servitude.

This is not a good process. We need to solve the problem of illegal immigration and control our borders so we can have a functioning legal immigration system.

What happened? What caused this? Isn't it obvious?

You could see the increase in adults coming into this country illegally during the Presidential debates when the Democratic Presidential candidates were going: Hey, if I get elected President, no more deportations. I am going to give you free healthcare. We will take care of you.

That was a huge incentive, and they came.

Then I think it was the first day, maybe the second day--maybe he waited that long--when President Biden dismantled the successful migrant protection program, ``Remain in Mexico,'' and the rest is a very, very, very sad history.

I will leave that up.

Now, I mentioned that 2 weeks ago we had Secretary Mayorkas come before our committee, and it was surreal the way they denied that they had anything to do with this, that this was an inherited problem. I mean, if it were inherited, yes, it was inherited by the Obama administration in DACA and in an incorrect court decision in the Flores reinterpretation. I will admit it was inherited there. It wasn't inherited here. The problem had been solved. It had been fixed.

What is so tragic about this is that we had pretty well taken the first step to solving the problem, to having immigration reform, to controlling the border. Keep these successful policies in place, and build the fence. Then you can address DACA. Then you can set up a functioning legal immigration system.

Unfortunately, I only had one round of questions--only 7 minutes-- with Secretary Mayorkas. Again, as he was dodging responsibility, I didn't get to ask a lot of questions. Here is the list of questions that I wanted to ask Secretary Mayorkas in a second round that I didn't get.

I wanted to ask Secretary Mayorkas whether or not he was aware that human traffickers sell children to adults so they can exploit our asylum laws as posing as a family unit. I wanted to know whether he was aware of that. I am quite sure the Vice President is, because the Vice President was on my committee. She heard this testimony. She should be aware of it. She should go down to the border.

I wanted to ask him: Are you aware that we heard testimony, under my chairmanship, that a child was sold for $84?

I wanted to ask Secretary Mayorkas: Are you aware that children are recycled--that they are sent back over the border to be used by another adult to pose as a family unit and exploit our asylum laws?

I wanted to ask him: How are you verifying that a child belongs to an adult?

In one of my trips down to the border and in having heard that children were being sold, that they were being recycled, that many of these family units weren't real family units, I saw about a 50-year-old man. He was holding, probably, about a 2-year-old little girl. Now, I can't be sure as I don't speak Spanish, and I don't think he would have admitted it, but my assessment was that she was not his little girl.

On that same trip, we heard about a little 3-year-old boy having been abandoned in a hot cornfield, with a telephone number written on his shoe, because the adult for whom he was posing as that person's child didn't need him anymore and just abandoned him.

I wanted to ask the Secretary: Are they doing DNA tests, and, if so, what percentage of family units are being tested?

I wanted to ask the Secretary: Is he aware that human traffickers throw children out of their rafts when they are interdicted by law enforcement?

When we were down at the border with 18 of my colleagues, we saw a floating body in the Rio Grande. The next day, a 9-year-old girl drowned in the Rio Grande. During one of my hearings, I showed a picture--it wasn't a fun picture to show, but I thought it was something we should see--of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 2- year-old daughter, Valeria, face down. They had drowned in the Rio Grande.

I wanted to ask Secretary Mayorkas: Is he aware of the fact that migrant girls are given birth control because they know such a large percentage is going to be raped during the dangerous journey that President Biden's policies are incentivizing?

I wanted to know whether Secretary Mayorkas was aware of the kidnappings, the beatings, the abuse, and the additional ransoms demanded by the human traffickers.

I wanted to know whether he knows how much the human traffickers charge for their human prey and if he is knowledgeable in how they pay off their debt. Some pay in advance. Some don't have the money. Some pay later. How do you think a pretty, young girl pays off her human trafficking debt? How do you think a young minor--a 15-, 16-, 17-year- old boy--who can traffic drugs pays off his debt? I think it is pretty obvious

I wanted to know: Does he know how many young girls are forced into the sex trade and how many young men are forced into involuntary servitude or used to traffic drugs or are gang members? I wanted to know.

I wanted to know if he was fully aware of how President Biden's policies created this crisis and how those policies are facilitating the multibillion-dollar business model of some of the

most evil people on the planet. I wanted to know. I still want to know.

I think this administration and I think Secretary Mayorkas need to be held accountable for this human tragedy. Apparently, these policies are meant to be more humane. They are the exact opposite. The degradations and the inhumanity are untold. They are only growing, and they are continuing.

Again, what is so tragic about all of this, in addition to the human tragedy, is the fact that we were so close. We had pretty well taken that first step in any immigration reform. We had stopped the flow or had dramatically reduced it, and we were building the fence. There are only 250 miles yet to build that we have already paid for. What a waste of the American taxpayers' money if we don't even complete that fence and what a waste of an opportunity that we can't take that first step-- complete that first step--for true immigration reform.

This amendment was voted on and defeated, largely, on a party-line vote. Only the senior Senator from West Virginia joined us, and it is just such a shame.

You know, America hungers for comity. America hungers for bipartisanship. This is the kind of bipartisanship they would appreciate that doesn't mortgage our future and that actually fixes a problem as opposed to the bill we are considering right now. The bipartisanship that always concerns me is a mad spending spree--deficit spending--wherein, over the last 18 months, we have already spent about $7 trillion that we don't have. I am shocked, by the way, by the reports that the President's budget is going to be $6 trillion, to be announced tomorrow, and another $7 trillion in other types of--it boggles your mind. That is not the right kind of bipartisanship. That is the type of bipartisanship that mortgages our children's future and bankrupts this Nation.

I think I have probably had enough time here, and I see that a number of my colleagues would also like to make a few points.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, there was a time--and it really wasn't all that long ago--when securing the border had bipartisan support. It was actually a bipartisan goal--now, I think that made a lot of sense-- but it is not now.

It also wasn't all that long ago that, in 2006, Congress passed something called the Secure Fence Act of 2006. What that piece of legislation did was to authorize 700 miles of what was supposed to be double-layered fencing. In the end, only 36 miles of actual double- layered fencing was constructed. Another 613 miles that consisted of about 299 miles of vehicle fencing--in other words, people could just walk right through it--and another 314 miles of single-layered pedestrian barrier fencing were actually built. I think we have seen that unfortunately the fencing did not fulfill the requirements of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, and it also didn't work.

What is interesting to know about the passage of the Secure Fence Act is that it passed overwhelmingly in this Chamber by a vote of 80 to 19. There were 26 Democratic Senators who joined 54 Republicans in voting yes. It also passed the House by a pretty overwhelming margin as well-- 283 to 138--with 64 Democrats joining the Republicans. So the total count in Congress was 363 votes to build a fence and secure the border versus 157 people who, apparently, didn't have an interest. In other words, 70 percent of the Members of Congress who voted on the Secure Fence Act, who voted for border security, voted yes. Again, that was with the support of 90 Democrats.

By the way, some pretty notable Democrats voted to secure the border by building 700 miles of double-layered fence, including those who are current President Biden; former President Barack Obama; the current majority leader of the Senate, Senator Schumer; former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; my chairman and ranking member of Homeland Security, Senator Tom Carper; the chairwoman of the Judiciary in the past, Senator Feinstein; the current chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Wyden. At the time, the Senator from Ohio, Mr. Brown, was a Member of the House, and he voted for it in the House. Again, that was only 14, 15 years ago when securing the border was actually a bipartisan goal.

What happened? Why isn't that the case now? Why has securing the border become a partisan issue?

Well, politics happened.

I wasn't here between 2006 and 2011, but I know there were multiple good-faith efforts to pass an immigration bill. They often referred to it as ``comprehensive immigration reform.'' I remember, when I got here, that this effort was still going on, and we actually passed, in this body, a comprehensive immigration bill. I remember talking to Senator McCain, who was one of the leading proponents. I did suggest that I would stop using the word ``comprehensive'' and that I didn't think we did a very good job with things comprehensively here and that we ought to take a step-by-step approach. Senator McCain was not really happy with my comment, but I made it anyway. I still think, quite honestly, that the test of time has probably proven me right.

Bipartisanship pretty well ended the efforts when that effort failed in the House. It didn't move it any further. We had a split Chamber. So the Obama administration got impatient. I understand the frustration. I certainly want to fix the problem. I want to take care of--now they are probably adults--those who came here as children through no fault of their own, the DACA kids. I think most Members of the Chamber want to do that, but you have to do it in a legal way, and you have to do it in a step-by-step approach, starting with securing our border.

I will talk about that a little bit further, but let me just talk about what the effect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals had.

It is pretty obvious, by this chart, that you can see this goes back to 2007. The red bar is just talking about unaccompanied children apprehended at the southwest border. You can see, through 2011, that, at most, we had a little over 4,000 unaccompanied children coming across the border illegally and being apprehended. Then, obviously, as Americans, we have to take care of them because we are compassionate.

In June of 2012, the Obama administration issued the DACA memorandum. The result was almost immediate. It was a magnet. It was a pull factor. It was used by the coyotes in Central America. They would tell people who would want to come to America--and let's face it. Who wouldn't want to be in America? I am highly sympathetic with the people who want to come to America and take advantage of this land of opportunities. The coyotes would tell the migrants down in Central America: They changed their laws. Come with us. We will take you up to the border. We will get you across the border, and then you will get slip, called a permiso, which is really a notice to appear.

So they came. They came in such quantities that, in 2014, more than 51,000 unaccompanied children flooded our border, and President Obama rightly declared it a humanitarian crisis, and it was. That humanitarian crisis, at that point in time, entailed about 2,000 people coming and being apprehended at the border--2,000. You can see the result. There were some ups and downs.

Quite honestly, what ended up happening is the Obama administration started to detain families, for example. They put in a consequence, and it actually had an impact. I can show you this a little bit better on this chart that really just shows cause and effect. This chart picks up in 2012 with the passage of DACA. You can see that President Obama, in 2014, declared it a humanitarian crisis. That is, by the way, when they built that McAllen facility to which we went down as bipartisan Members of the Senate and sung CBC's praises for trying to deal with this crisis in such a humane fashion. Four and five years later, we have the same facility with the same conditions and a bigger crisis, but now that facility is

being referred to as keeping kids in cages.

You can see what ended up happening here. President Obama actually had a family detention policy that kept the families together, but then a court reinterpreted the Flores decision. It interpreted unaccompanied children within the Flores decision, in terms of how you treated children and how you had to hand them over to HHS in a short period of time, and applied that to accompanied children.

So now a tough decision had to be made: Do we actually separate the children so they can be handed over to HHS while we detain the parents who came here illegally?

The decision those in the Obama administration made--and I really can't blame them--was to keep the families together. What I blame them for is they dispersed them into America--most of them never to have an immigration hearing. When you don't have a hearing, you can't have your asylum claim adjudicated properly. We know that a very high percentage of the asylum seekers here do not qualify for asylum. Even as generous as our policies are, they still don't qualify. Of the claims that are adjudicated, the people come here, and they stay. Then they communicate with other people in Central America, and it feeds upon itself.

It takes a while. It takes a few years. It took until 2018, 2019 that the word really got out. When Donald Trump was elected President, he was dedicated to securing the border, and we were going to fix this problem. You could tell immigration really dropped off following his election. People really felt that he was serious about it. By the way, he was, but he had no cooperation either by Congress or the courts of enforcing our laws and securing our borders. So word got out over a couple of years, and we had an explosion of illegal immigration primarily fueled this time by families.

President Trump--again, with no help from Congress and no help from the courts--fixed the problem. You may agree or disagree with the Migrant Protection Protocols Program, otherwise known as ``return to Mexico,'' but there was a consequence. Because of that consequence, combined with the fact that we also made agreements with Mexico and Central America, people stopped coming. We had pretty well stopped the flow. We had reduced dramatically the flow of unaccompanied children and family members coming to the border. We pretty well had had this problem solved before COVID hit. Throw on COVID and the invocation of title 42, and we really had this problem solved until the Presidential debates, and you had all Democratic Presidential candidates say they were going to stop deportations and offer free healthcare.

You can see the number of adults. By the way, we have a colored chart. Gold is single adults. Blue is family units. Red is children.

So we had this enormous crisis, first of all, surging that began with single adults. Then, of course, on his first day in office, President Biden dismantled the Migrant Protection Program. He ended those agreements. He made good on his promise to end deportations until the court said he couldn't do that, but the word was out. The crisis came back with a vengeance. In the last 2 months, there have been, on an average basis--daily--almost 6,000 people per day being apprehended at the border.

This crisis is out of control, but this crisis is also manmade. It is a manmade crisis by President Biden's policies.

Last week we had a hearing with Secretary Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It was actually surreal. First of all, they blamed this on President Trump, said this was an inherited crisis. No, it wasn't. It is the Democratic Presidential candidates who started the spike of single adults. It was President Biden's dismantling of President Trump's successful policies that sparked and was the catalyst for the renewed crisis of family units and unaccompanied children coming here illegally to exploit our very generous asylum laws.

So it was surreal to listen to the Secretary and, quite honestly, the chairman of our committee talking about that this was an inherited crisis but that things were improving. But the only reason they could claim things were improving is--and Secretary Mayorkas said this repeatedly--they are getting more efficient. ``We are getting more efficient''--not at solving the problem; at processing and dispersing the illegal immigrants coming into this country. Guess what that is going to do. It is just going to cause more to come.

This crisis isn't going to end anytime soon until we return to having consequences and we actually have the goal of reducing or stopping the flow, and that is not happening right now.

I was disappointed. Under my chairmanship, we almost always had a second round of questions, but we were denied that. I am sure there were time constraints. But in a second round of questions, this is what I wanted to ask Secretary Mayorkas. I wanted to ask him whether he was aware that human traffickers sell children to adults so they can exploit our asylum laws by posing as a family unit.

Understand, these policies that are being instituted to be more humane do the exact opposite. It leads to all kinds of human degradations, all kinds of inhumanity. I knew it full well. We held hearings on this in 2018. Vice President Harris had to know as well; she was on my committee.

I wanted to ask Secretary Mayorkas whether he was aware that we heard testimony during my chairmanship that a child was sold for $84.

I wanted to ask him whether he is aware that children are recycled, that they are sent back over the border to be used by another adult to pose as a family unit and exploit our asylum laws.

I wanted to ask, are they verifying that a child actually belongs to an adult? Are they doing DNA tests? If so, what percentage of those are actual family units?

I wanted to know whether he was aware of the fact that human traffickers throw children out of rafts when they are interdicted by law enforcement.

I don't have the picture here. I honestly wouldn't even want to show it. I showed it in our committee hearing 3 or 4 years ago. It was hard enough showing it at that point in time. It was a father and his 2- year-old daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande.

I went down to the border with 18 of my Republican Senate colleagues. We saw a dead body floating in the Rio Grande the day after a 9-year- old girl drowned in the Rio Grande. I wanted to know whether Secretary Mayorkas, whether President Biden, whether Vice President Harris was aware of this.

I wanted to know whether the Secretary was aware of the fact that migrant girls are given birth control because they know that such a large percentage will be raped during the dangerous journey when they are put in the hands of these human traffickers.

I wanted to know whether the Secretary is aware of the kidnappings and the beatings, the abuse, the additional ransoms demanded by human traffickers.

I wanted to know whether he knows how much the human traffickers charge for their human prey and whether he is knowledgeable of how that debt is paid off. You realize the border is almost 100 percent secure on the Mexican side of the border. Nobody crosses into America without either paying the human traffickers or being indebted to them. I wanted to know whether the Secretary knew how they pay off those debts.

I wanted to know whether he knew how many young girls are forced into the sex trade and how many young men are forced into involuntary servitude, used to traffic drugs, or become part of gangs.

I wanted to know whether the Secretary--I would like to know whether the chairman of our committee is aware of the fact that President Biden's policies created this crisis, and they are facilitating the multibillion-dollar business model of probably some of the most evil people on the planet.

I wanted to know, but I didn't get a chance to ask those questions.

Beyond the human toll, beyond the human tragedy, from a standpoint of legislation, what is the real tragedy is that we were so close to taking that first step, that necessary step of making America confident that we are taking border security seriously, that we will secure our border, because until we do that, we really can't move on. Without creating greater incentives, we

can't move on to fix the problem of DACA; we can't set up a legal immigration system that works best for everyone.

You know, it is not good for Central America. I have been there. I have talked to their Presidents. They ask us to fix their laws. It is not good that their countries are being depleted of the people they need to rebuild their economies. It is not good for them. It is not good for us. It is certainly not good for the migrants who are put in the hands of the most evil people on the planet and left to their tender mercies.

We were so close. President Trump had stopped the flow, largely, of unaccompanied children, of family units, and he was doing the final step, which was complete the wall. Walls work

Take a look at what happened here after January 6--double layers of fencing, concertina wire tipped. We obviously thought they worked here for us in Congress; they will work at the border as well.

What my amendment would do is simply complete the wall that President Trump started. He wanted to build 800 miles; he built 450. Two hundred and fifty miles of that wall has already been contracted for. It will be paid for whether it is built or not. About 100 miles wasn't contracted.

So, American taxpayer, you need to understand this: You will be on the hook for a couple billion dollars, you know, tens of thousands of tons of steel that has already been produced. All that waste--all that waste, and we won't even get the 250 miles of wall. Isn't that absurd? Isn't that ridiculous? All because securing the border has become a partisan issue, when it was not a partisan issue in 2006.

So my amendment, amendment 1518, is really pretty simple, just two pages. It is very common sense. It just says: Complete the wall that we have already contracted for, that we are going to have to pay for whether we build it or not.

Now, in a rational Senate in reasonable times, this ought to pass 100 to 0. I fear this is going to be decided strictly on party lines, and that is a real shame.

If there is one thing that we ought to be bipartisan about, it is about national security, it is about securing our homeland, and part and parcel of securing our homeland is having a secure border. One element of that, in addition to instituting consequences, like the Migrant Protection Protocol, like something I proposed with the Senator from Arizona, Senator Sinema, Operation Safe Return, there has to be a consequence to reduce or stop this flow.

But we also need barriers. Technology alone is not going to work. We can't hire enough Border Patrol agents. They are already being dispirited. We are going to have a hard time hiring enough people just to come up to the quota levels we want to hire. We can't do it with personnel. We can't do technology. We need the fence. We bought and paid for it; let's construct it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask for a minute to respond.

First of all, let me reiterate--the dollars will be spent regardless. The dollars would be completely wasted and no wall whatsoever. Of course, this reconsideration of their policies--we can already see the disastrous consequences of what they have already done. God help us in terms of what the results will be of future policies as well.

So, again, I ask that my amendment be considered.

Vote on Amendment No. 1518

I ask support for it, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President.

Reserving the right to object. One thing that----

I object.

Madam President, let me first say that I wish this Chamber were full of our colleagues who had listened to my Republican colleague's description--the Senator from Pennsylvania--of what this bill is and what this bill isn't. It is not a COVID relief bill. Senator Toomey did an excellent job. I am hoping that people are watching it on their TV screens. They really can't be reading the bill yet because it is not constructed. I don't want to repeat all of the excellent points the Senator from Pennsylvania made, but I wanted to come down because I think we have grown immune to these vast amounts of money.

I always knew we were going to be in big trouble when we stopped talking about hundreds of billions of dollars and switched to talking about trillions of dollars. When we talk about $1 trillion or $2 trillion, it just doesn't sound like as much as $200 billion or $800 billion, which was in the stimulus package under the Obama administration. The fact of the matter is we have already authorized $4 trillion in COVID relief. That is 18 percent of last year's GDP, and, roughly, $1 trillion is yet to be spent. Some of that isn't even obligated, and we are going to be debating, over the next couple of days, $1.9 trillion. So I just wanted to come down here to the floor and try to illustrate what a massive amount of money $1.9 trillion is. You have to use analogies. Again, the human mind really can't contemplate what ``a trillion'' is.

I found this first analogy--my wife talked to me about it--in terms of time. This one is simply talking about, if I would give the Presiding Officer $1 per second, how long would it take me to give her $1 million? You see the chart here. It would take 11.6 days. Again, with $1 per second, how long would it take to give her $1 million? 11.6 days.

The next question: How long would it take you to accumulate $1 billion?

Again, when you do the math, you find out it would take 31.7 years. That was back when the Chinese had their protests in Tiananmen Square.

The next question: What about $1 trillion?

This is what becomes mind-boggling. If I gave you $1 every second and I wanted to give you $1 trillion, it would take 31,688 years to give you $1 trillion. That takes us back to beyond the last glaciation period, a period in time when Wisconsin was under a mile-thick glacier.

By the way, as a quick aside for my colleague, the Senator from Rhode Island, since that point in time, about 20,000 years ago, the water level in the San Francisco Bay has increased 390 feet. Now, that is global warming--that is a rise in sea level--but that is what happened through natural causes. That was an aside.

How long would it take to accumulate $1.9 trillion? Over 60,000 years. Again, put that in context. The human race began to develop language about 50,000 years ago. So that is the time analogy.

Another way of looking at this is through distance and volume. So here is the calculation. I should have brought a $1 bill to just demonstrate its thickness, but the thickness of a $1 bill is 4.3- thousandths-of-an-inch thick. To illustrate how much $1 trillion is, let's start with $1 million. If you stacked a million dollar bills on top of each other, they would stack up to be 358 feet high. You can see the calculation here. That is about a 30- to 35-foot-story building.

How big would a stack of a billion dollar bills be? It would be 67.86 miles.

Now, there is something called the Karman line. I think I am pronouncing that right. That is the point at which the atmosphere ends and outer space begins. That is 62 miles. So a stack of a billion dollar bills would actually exceed the atmosphere and extend into outer space--62 miles.

Then, the next question is: How big would a stack be of a trillion dollar bills? Well, it would be 1,000 times that. So it would be 67,866 miles high. That is an astonishingly large stack of dollar bills that equals $1 trillion.

Again, we are not just talking about $1 trillion. We are not talking just about 67,000 miles worth. We are talking about $1.9 trillion, which would stack up to be 135,732 miles high. The distance to the Moon is 238,900 miles. So that stack of $1.9 trillion worth of $1 bills would be more than halfway to the Moon. That is what we are debating spending--a stack of dollar bills that extends more than halfway the distance to the Moon. This is at a point in time when we are about $28 trillion in debt. That single stack would be

over 1.9 million miles or, if you were to put it relative to the Moon, there would be eight stacks--seven stacks that go directly to the Moon and one further stack that would be 95 percent of the way there.

These are astonishing sums that we are talking about, and the majority party here wants to jam this through using the reconciliation process--no consultation with our side. They want to just blow it through here with 20 hours of debate, a vote-arama, pass $1.9 trillion in spending, and go home, having no consideration whatsoever about the fact that we are mortgaging our children's futures. At some point in time, there will be a day of reckoning--a debt crisis--and it won't be pretty.

My suggestion, at least as we consider this, is to actually have a debate. Let's have a discussion. Let's consider the amendments. Let's not do this in 20, 24, 30 hours. Let's take the time to seriously consider what we are doing to our children in contemplating spending a stack of dollar bills over 135 miles high, extending more than halfway to the Moon.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I send a question to the desk for both parties.

Madam President, on behalf of myself and Senator Tuberville, I call up amendment No. 542 and ask that it be reported by number.

Madam President, in 2006, the Secure Fence Act was signed into law, authorizing 700 miles of double-layer fencing along the southwest border. It passed this Chamber on a vote of 80 to 19, with 26 Senate Democrats voting to secure the border. Among the Democratic Senators voting for it were then-Senators Obama, Biden, Clinton, and current Senators Schumer, Feinstein, Carper, and Wyden.

In the end, only 36 miles of double fencing was actually constructed, which, in the end, combined with a very low bar for asylum claims and DACA, created the catalyst for a humanitarian crisis in 2014 of unaccompanied minors and family units coming in, with the crisis peaking in the summer of 2019. In reaction, President Trump enacted a number of policies, including construction of 700 miles of wall.

Now, we didn't construct all of it, but we contracted 700 miles, completed 450, and, as of today, 250 miles are contracted but not built.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration is now reversing all of these policies.

I have 2 minutes, don't I?

I was told 2.

Well, anyway, my amendment--

--will prevent cancellation of those contracts, saving taxpayers the cancellation costs and securing the borders.

I urge support of my amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I would like to first thank my colleague from Kentucky for his consistent, over the years--consistent fighting, I use that word--fighting for the Constitution. I truly appreciate it, and I appreciate his raising this constitutional point of order in an hour or so.

The issue he raises is one of constitutionality versus unconstitutionality. I have been reading positions on both sides. I understand there are legitimate arguments on both sides of that question. But the fact is, 3 weeks ago, we came together in this body and we collectively decided that it was not wise, it was not smart-- regardless of the constitutionality or the ability for us to do so, it was not smart for Congress to overrule, overturn the wishes of voters and of States that certified the electors. We felt that was not wise.

Again, in a couple of hours, we are going to be voting on--we won't be able to debate, which is why I am rising today or at this moment--we are going to debate whether a trial of someone who is no longer a President, no longer a civil servant, a private citizen, whether that is constitutional or not constitutional. Again, there are good arguments on both sides. Senators will vote differently and have justification for whatever side of that argument they take.

What I would like my colleagues to consider when they decide how to vote on that is not the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of that; I want them to consider, is it wise? Will a trial of a former President, of a private citizen--will it heal? Will it unify? I think the answer is clearly it will not. A trial of a former President is simply vindictive. It will divide. It is like opening up a wound and throwing salt in it. That is not a healing process.

Again, the question when we vote on this in a couple of hours, for every Senator, should be, Is it wise? Is it the right thing to do? I think from that standpoint, the choice is very clear: It will not heal. It will not unite.

Let's put an end to this now. Let's dismiss this trial and rule it unconstitutional.

I yield the floor.

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

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

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

Mr. President, Senate Standing Rule XXVI requires each committee to adopt rules to govern the procedure of the committee and to publish those rules in the Congressional Record not later than March 1 of the first year of each Congress. On February 25, 2019, a majority of the members of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management adopted subcommittee rules of procedure.

Consistent with Standing Rule XXVI, today I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the Rules of Procedure of the Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management be printed in the Record.