Protecting Our Communities From Failure to Secure the Border Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the legislation. I am disappointed that today we once again are discussing the continued Republican insistence that immigration is a Federal land emergency.

I will continue to dispute this claim because instead of focusing on the root causes of our Nation's immigration crisis and challenges, my colleagues have chosen to double down on a distraction.

I oppose this bill because it is a political stunt that will invite even more hateful anti-immigration rhetoric from the extreme MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

The case of Floyd Bennett Field does not represent a threat to our public lands. Rather, it encapsulates the humanitarian crisis that we are facing caused by failed immigration policies from the past administration and from the failure of Congress to take any action to reform a broken immigration system.

The crisis can be solved but only with real comprehensive immigration reform.

Madam Chair, former President Trump, as I understand it, is still the frontrunner for the Republican Presidential nomination.

News flash: Nothing has changed. He has stated that he intends to return to the White House with his supercharged plan that one of his closest confidants and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller described as a ``blitz.''

Miller went on to say that, ``Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of Federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.''

Madam Chair, I include in the Record The New York Times article, ``Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump's 2025 Immigration Plans.'' [From the New York Times, Nov. 11, 2023] Sweeping Raids and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump's 2025 Immigration Plans (By Charles Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan)

Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025--including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.

Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim- majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims--though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.

To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

In a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: ``Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.'' The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur--``Operation Wetback.''

The constellation of Mr. Trump's 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Mr. Trump is eyeing.

In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.

Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.

And Mr. Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents--by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy's legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Mr. Trump's plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.

In interviews with The New York Times, several Trump advisers gave the most expansive and detailed description of Mr. Trump's immigration agenda in a potential second term. In particular, Mr. Trump's campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump's first- term immigration policies who remains close to and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team's daunting array of tactics as a ``blitz'' designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.

``Any activists who doubt President Trump's resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,'' Mr. Miller said, adding, ``The immigration legal activists won't know what's happening.''

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy group that repeatedly fought the Trump administration, said the Trump team's plans relied on ``xenophobic demagoguery'' that appeals to his hardest-core political base.

``Americans should understand these policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life--tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,'' Mr. Schulte said.

Since Mr. Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is re- elected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.

The ebbing of the Covid-19 pandemic and resumption of travel flows have helped stir a global migrant crisis, with millions of Venezuelans and Central Americans fleeing turmoil and Africans arriving in Latin American countries before continuing their journey north. Amid the record numbers of migrants at the southern border and beyond it in cities like New York and Chicago, voters are frustrated and even some Democrats are calling for tougher action against immigrants and pressuring the White House to better manage the crisis.

Mr. Trump and his advisers see the opening, and now know better how to seize it. The aides Mr. Trump relied upon in the chaotic early days of his first term were sometimes at odds and lacked experience in how to manipulate the levers of federal power. By the end of his first term, cabinet officials and lawyers who sought to restrain some of his actions--like his Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff, John F. Kelly--had been fired, and those who stuck with him had learned much.

In a second term, Mr. Trump plans to install a team that will not restrain him.

Since much of Mr. Trump's first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.

The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration.

DACA is an Obama-era program that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. Mr. Trump tried to end it, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.

Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump would try again to end DACA. And the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court that blocked the last attempt no longer exists: A few months after the DACA ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Mr. Trump replaced her with a sixth conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Mr. Trump's rhetoric has more than kept up with his increasingly extreme agenda on immigration.

His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants--pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists--fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel's, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants' skin.

As he has campaigned for the party's third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their ``insane asylums'' to send the patients across America's southern border as migrants. He said migrants were ``poisoning the blood of our country.'' And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying; ``That's what's coming into our country right now.''

Mr. Trump had similarly vowed to carry out mass deportations when running for office in 2016, but the government only managed several hundred thousand removals per year under his presidency, on par with other recent administrations. If they get another opportunity, Mr. Trump and his team are determined to achieve annual numbers in the millions.

Mr. Trump's immigration plan is to pick up where he left off and then go much farther. He would not only revive some of the policies that were criticized as draconian during his presidency, many of which the Biden White House ended, but also expand and toughen them.

One example centers on expanding first-term policies aimed at keeping people out of the country. Mr. Trump plans to suspend the nation's refugee program and once again categorically bar visitors from troubled countries, reinstating a version of his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim-majority countries, which President Biden called discriminatory and ended on his first day in office.

Mr. Trump would also use coercive diplomacy to induce other nations to help, including by making cooperation a condition of any other bilateral engagement, Mr. Miller said. For example, a second Trump administration would seek to re- establish an agreement with Mexico that asylum seekers remain there while their claims are processed. (It is not clear that Mexico would agree; a Mexican court has said that deal violated human rights.)

Mr. Trump would also push to revive ``safe third country'' agreements with several nations in Central America, and try to expand them to Africa, Asia and South America. Under such deals, countries agree to take would-be asylum seekers from specific other nations and let them apply for asylum there instead.

While such arrangements have traditionally only covered migrants who had previously passed through a third country, federal law does not require that limit and a second Trump administration would seek to make those deals without it, in part as a deterrent to migrants making what the Trump team views as illegitimate asylum claims.

At the same time, Mr. Miller said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would invoke the public health emergency powers law known as Title 42 to again refuse to hear any asylum claims by people arriving at the southern border. The Trump administration had internally discussed that idea early in Mr. Trump's term, but some cabinet secretaries pushed back, arguing that there was no public health emergency that would legally justify it. The administration ultimately implemented it during the coronavirus pandemic.

Saying the idea has since gained acceptance in practice-- Mr. Biden initially kept the policy--Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump would invoke Title 42, citing ``severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.V. and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.''

Mr. Trump and his aides have not yet said whether they would re-enact one of the most contentious deterrents to unauthorized immigration that he pursued as president: separating children from their parents, which led to trauma among migrants and difficulties in reuniting families. When pressed, Mr. Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out reviving the policy. After an outcry over the practice, Mr. Trump ended it in 2018 and a judge later blocked the government from putting it back into effect.

Soon after Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president last November, he met with Tom Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants.

In an interview, Mr. Homan recalled that in that meeting, he ``agreed to come back'' in a second term and would ``help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country's ever seen.''

Trump advisers' vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.

Mr Miller cast such disruption in a favorable light.

``Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,'' he said. ``Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation's laws are now being applied equally, and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.''

One planned step to overcome the legal and logistical hurdles would be to significantly expand a form of fast-track deportations known as ``expedited removal.'' it denies undocumented immigrants the usual hearings and opportunity to file appeals, which can take months or years--especially when people are not in custody--and has led to a large backlog. A 1996 law says people can be subject to expedited removal for up to two years after arriving, but to date the executive branch has used it more cautiously, swiftly expelling people picked up near the border soon after crossing.

The Trump administration tried to expand the use of expedited removal, but a court blocked it and then the Biden team canceled the expansion. It remains unclear whether the Supreme Court will rule that it is constitutional to use the law against people who have been living for a significant period in the United States and express fear of persecution if sent home.

Mr. Trump has also said he would invoke an archaic law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process. That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in ``predatory incursions.''

The Supreme Court has upheld past uses of that law in wartime. But its text seems to require a link to the actions of a foreign government, so it is not clear whether the justices will allow a president to stretch it to encompass drug cartel activity.

More broadly, Mr. Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.

To make the process of finding and deporting undocumented immigrants already living inside the country ``radically more quick and efficient,'' he said, the Trump team would bring in ``the right kinds of attorneys and the right kinds of policy thinkers'' willing to carry out such ideas.

And because of the magnitude of arrests and deportations being contemplated, they plan to build ``vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers'' for immigrants as their cases progress and they wait to be flown to other countries.

Mr. Miller said the new camps would likely be built ``on open land in Texas near the border.''

He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security. While he cautioned that there were no specific blueprints yet, he said the camps would look professional and similar to other facilities for migrants that have been built near the border.

Such camps could also enable the government to speed up the pace and volume of deportations of undocumented people who have lived in the United States for years and so are not subject to fast-track removal. If pursuing a longshot effort to win permission to remain in the country would mean staying locked up in the interim, some may give up and voluntarily accept removal without going through the full process.

The use of these camps, Mr. Miller said, would likely be focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a longstanding court order known as the Flores settlement. So any families brought to the facilities would have to be moved in and out more quickly, he said.

The Trump administration tried to overturn the Flores settlement, but the Supreme Court did not resolve the matter before Mr. Trump's term ended. Mr. Miller said the Trump team would try again.

To increase the number of agents available for ICE sweeps, Mr. Miller said, officials from other federal law enforcement agencies would be temporarily reassigned, and state National Guard troops and local police officers, at least from willing Republican-led states, would be deputized for immigration control efforts.

While a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act generally forbids the use of the armed forces for law enforcement purposes, another law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception. Mr. Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act at the border, enabling the use of federal troops to apprehend migrants, Mr Miller said.

``Bottom line,'' he said, ``President Trump will do whatever it takes.''

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Madam Chair, apparently, the plan that has Mr. Miller salivating includes mass roundups, mass incarceration, permanently ending DACA, and the construction of camps to hold migrants waiting to be processed and presumably later expelled from the country.

This is the leader from the Republican Party--his platform on immigration.

I wonder if MAGA Don thinks that he will build these camps on public lands. I hope not, but who knows, perhaps he even thinks Mexico will pay for it.

Seeking asylum is a human right. We should be discussing how we can best support migrants in this time of crisis by providing additional resources to guarantee safety and well-being during the immigration process.

We should be supporting cities like New York that are responding proactively to this crisis. Instead, we are taking up a bill that micromanages and limits local decisionmaking authority.

If the Republicans wanted to protect our parks, they would have passed an appropriations bill that would not cut nearly half a billion dollars from the National Park budget. Such a cut would result in the loss of 1,000 park staff and will reduce the agency's maintenance and preservation funding.

These extreme cuts are going nowhere in the Senate, and President Biden has promised to veto, so why waste that time.

To protect our parks, we should empower our Federal land management agencies by providing them with the necessary resources to fulfill their mission and the mission to the American people. Instead, this bill would interfere with that work.

Historically, the National Park Service has the authority to lease its property if the agency head determines that the lease will not obstruct the preservation of the property. Well, in the case of Floyd Bennett Field, the temporary lease will have minimal environmental impact.

New York City will be investing millions of dollars to address the deferred maintenance and improve visitor amenities, leaving the site actually better than before. This idea that leasing the field this way will somehow degrade it is a red herring.

The temporary lease will also have minimal impact on recreation. The park at Floyd Bennett Field we are talking about in this instance is the disused runway at an abandoned airport. That is why the site has a long history of leasing for nonrecreational purposes.

It has been used for emergency responses, like during Hurricane Sandy, and even now it is used by NYPD and the New York City Department of Sanitation for exercises, including training their drivers in the use of heavy-duty vehicles.

Madam Chair, New York City is urgently responding to a humanitarian crisis. We need to support that effort. Evicting the migrants at Floyd Bennett Field with no plan for keeping them from being homeless is not a real solution for New Yorkers. It is not a real solution for our national immigration debate. We need real immigration reform, not more unserious attempts to distract from the root of the problem.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Madam Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velazquez), a distinguished member of the Natural Resources Committee.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentlewoman from New York.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Maine (Ms. Pingree).

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I think a soft reminder is important now, as we point to these asylum seekers and those who are seeking refugee status in this country and those who are going through the immigration process.

It is important to note that they are not the first. Almost everybody who speaks on this floor today can trace their lineage to somebody who wasn't here in this country when the indigenous people, the first Americans in this country, were here.

I think we need to be careful not to stereotype, not to be ugly, and not to be abusive about a crisis and human tragedy that we see before us that we should be attending to rather than exploiting.

Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez), a valued colleague.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Garcia).

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Goldman).

Mr. GOLDMAN of New York. Mr. Chairman, boy, you would think this was the Congress of New York State, given how much focus my colleagues on the other side of the aisle put on New York State. I will tell you, as a Member of Congress from New York City, we are doing just fine.

This bill, however, is not at all just fine. It is yet another ploy by the Republicans to score political points without actually addressing the desperately needed reforms to our immigration system.

Immigration is a Federal issue, yet New York City, where both this bill's sponsor and I come from, is bearing the financial burden of this issue.

This bill would make it harder for cities and States to get Federal support for immigrants who, like so many of our descendants, are fleeing horrible conditions in their home countries to seek a better life in the United States.

On both sides of the aisle, we agree we have to fix our broken immigration system. Defunding migrant housing sites is not the solution.

Instead of closing down these sites and sending children potentially into the street and the cold, let's focus on legislation that actually does make our communities safer. Let's focus on fixing the fentanyl trade problem we have and the human trafficking problem that is plaguing our southern border.

That is why, as an amendment to this bill, I proposed my Disarming Cartels Act, that would stop the flow of more than 500,000 American- manufactured guns into the hands of the drug cartels in Mexico, who are responsible for the bulk of the crime that occurs on the southern border.

Over 70 percent of the guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico come from the United States. Hundreds of thousands of American-made guns are sent to Mexico every year because you cannot get a gun quickly in Mexico. That, of course, is too much common sense. That would actually solve the problem. That doesn't score political points.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. GOLDMAN of New York. Mr. Chair, that does solve the problem. This does not solve the problem. This is just a political ploy, a messaging bill, that does nothing to solve our open borders.

Every single Republican witness that has come before the Homeland Security Committee this Congress has acknowledged that the outflow of American-made weapons of war to the cartels in Mexico is a massive cause of crime at the border.

Why won't you address it? Why won't you join it?

Why won't you even allow the bill to come to the floor?

Is it the gun lobby?

Is it because you just want to use immigration as a political cudgel, and you don't want to find solutions?

Instead of fear-mongering, let's get some solutions together. Let's work together. We are ready. We just need a partner that will stop messaging and start solving problems.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Garcia).

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks), the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chairman, as a reminder, seeking asylum is a human, legal right protected by international law and United States law, period.

Instead of wishing that that was not the case, Republicans should work with Democrats and the administration to move a meaningful response to this humanitarian crisis and dealing with the issue of comprehensive immigration reform. Unfortunately, we are here debating a senseless stunt of a bill instead.

Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Chicago, Illinois (Mrs. Ramirez).

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chairman, yes, elections do have consequences, and one of the responsibilities that elections provide to the United States Congress and the House of Representatives, let me remind my colleagues, is our broken immigration system, and that is a problem only Congress can solve.

We have seen what happens when Republicans try to solve this from the White House. The Trump administration set an unprecedented pace for executive action on immigration. These restrictive policies did not solve the crisis. Instead, they increased the backlog in immigration proceedings, separated children from their families, banned foreign nationals from predominately Muslim countries, and cut refugee numbers to the lowest in decades, among other things. So this is on Congress to fix.

Unfortunately, as long as Republicans refuse to support real, substantive reform that is fair, humane, and equitable for all parties, then we will continue to see immigration-related crises of the makings of Congress and in this particular instance of the making of the House majority Republicans.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, it is interesting to hear my Republican counterparts wax eloquently about their concerns for our national parks during this debate. They didn't say a word about the tremendous damage done to cultural resources by Trump's disastrous border wall along the southern border in Arizona primarily. They did not speak to that issue at all.

In fact, now they want to condition aid to Ukraine and possibly Israel, who are key U.S. allies, on the construction of even more miles of an ineffective and destructive border wall.

It is one thing to have a debate about a basic philosophical difference and policy difference that we have in terms of immigration reform. It is another to use half-truths and disinformation and to be disingenuous in presenting what is a reality. The reality on the southern border in Arizona is serious, and I have not denied and will not deny that it is a crisis.

Nevertheless, this is a crisis that must be worked on humanely and not by stereotyping and profiling people because of their country of origin as the reason that we make the harsh comments that are being heard today.

Pandering is not the solution. Constructive and pragmatic immigration reform is what we need to do. That is not being done, and this bill doesn't do it.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We have heard the argument today, and indeed for years now, that migrants crossing our border are the primary ones responsible for the tens of thousands of American lives tragically lost to fentanyl overdoses each year. It is a tragedy that we can all not only sympathize with but want to do something desperately about.

Nevertheless, that story is simply false. Fentanyl is overwhelmingly smuggled into the United States by American citizens where it is then also consumed by American citizens. That is a fact.

In 2021 more than 86 percent of convicted fentanyl traffickers were U.S. citizens. More than 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur at legal crossing points and interior checkpoints, not illegal immigration routes, and just 0.02 percent of migrants arrested by Border Patrol are found to possess fentanyl.

Mr. Chair, I include in the Record a piece from The American Prospect exploring how customs loopholes allow smugglers to ship fentanyl and its precursor chemical to the United States without inspection or law enforcement. [The American Prospect, Nov. 27, 2023] The Amazon Loophole Is Driving the Fentanyl Crisis (By David Dayen)

One of the more frustrating things about public policy in the United States is how the dominance of corporate interests makes simple reforms that could save thousands of lives impossible. To wit: Here is the story of how Amazon and other retailers are facilitating the epidemic of deaths from fentanyl.

We know that fentanyl deaths rose 279 percent from 2016 to 2022. Two-thirds of the 110,000-plus overdose deaths in America last year were due to fentanyl. It is the leading killer of Americans aged 18 to 49, and it has devastated communities across the country.

Drug enforcement efforts in the U.S. have historically targeted supply through a so-called ``war on drugs.'' But reducing the amount of fentanyl on the street need not involve military-style operations in Central and South America. China is the source of most of the chemical compounds that cartels use to make fentanyl in illicit drug labs. Without these raw materials, much of the fentanyl trade would be stopped.

Now, of course this would not halt opioid addiction or use by itself; traditional smuggled heroin would likely fill in the gap. But fentanyl is orders of magnitude more dangerous than heroin thanks to its extreme potency, which is a principal cause of the overdose epidemic. The tiniest of measurement errors can lead to an overdose, and black-market drug dealers are not exactly known for their responsible metrology.

Customs enforcement officials have begun to charge Chinese firms that produce and ship these precursor chemicals (and produced fentanyl as well, and President Biden, in a summit earlier this month, pressured Chinese President Xi Jinping on the matter. The U.S. and China agreed in principle to a deal where China would limit the flow of fentanyl in exchange for the U.S. rolling back restrictions on China's forensic police institute.

But while Chinese cooperation is welcome, the bigger problem is that the vast majority of fentanyl chemicals sent from China are not inspected at all. That's because of something called the ``de minimis'' rule.

Section 321 of the Tariff Act of 1930 allows for goods under a certain value to be shipped into the U.S. without tariffs, fees, or inspections. Anyone who has flown on international travel is familiar with this from their declaration card when they return to the U.S.; if you got some trinkets from abroad that are of a nominal value, you don't have to submit them to customs officials.

In 2016, that nominal, or de minimis, value, went up from $200 to $800. There are only two countries in the world that have a higher de minimis value than the U.S.; China's de minimis value is less than $10.

Why did this change happen? Because e-commerce firms, primarily Amazon, wanted to be able to bring in goods from China to their warehouses or even directly to their customers without any taxes or tariffs. In fact, it's often been characterized as the ``Amazon loophole.''

Chinese shippers have been known to package shipments in separate boxes to keep under the $800 threshold, or send goods to distribution centers just outside the United States, where packages are broken up to get under the de minimis threshold and sent into the country.

These small shipments have exploded in frequency. In fiscal year 2018, 410.5 million de minimis packages were sent. By fiscal year 2022, that number was up to 685.1 million. Some experts put that number much higher. One analysis estimates that the official figure for the trade deficit with China last year was short by $188 billion after accounting for de minimis shipments.

While there's practically no information available about these shipments (many have no data at all except for a mailing label), there is mounting evidence that one of the most common de minimis items is fentanyl, as Michael Stumo of the Coalition for a Prosperous America has written. This stands to reason, as fentanyl's potency means it is highly valuable by weight. ``The overwhelming volume of small packages and lack of actionable data,'' the U.S. Office of Customs and Border Protection wrote earlier this year, ``impacts CBP's ability to identify and interdict high-risk shipments that may contain narcotics, merchandise that poses a risk to public safety, counterfeits, or other contraband.'' It's highly likely that precursor chemicals are moving from China to Mexico under de minimis rules as well.

It was not the original intention of de minimis rules to build a parallel, off-the-books customs system, used often for illegal goods shipping. But that's what the Amazon loophole has facilitated. Congress is aware of the problem. A bill from Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) would reduce de minimis thresholds to the level of trading partners (meaning that the de minimis threshold on Chinese goods would fall to under $10). A separate bipartisan, bicameral bill would simply ban de minimis shipments from ``non-market'' economies, as well as countries on a priority watch list for using de minimis, which would target China.

The House Select Committee on China has investigated rampant use of the Amazon loophole from fast-fashion companies using forced labor. One textile industry official described de minimis as akin to ``handing a free trade agreement to China and the rest of the world.'' The chairman of the China committee, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), has expressed optimism that legislation reforming de minimis would pass this year (though passing anything in Congress is incredibly optimistic).

Of course, this is terrible news for the companies exploiting the loophole for tax benefits, like Amazon and other online retailers. So they are firing up their lobby engines. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Foreign Trade Council (a trade group of importers) deny that counterfeit goods or fentanyl enter the U.S. through de minimis shipments at all, while arguing that CBP gets plenty of information about what's in the packages. Lobbyists and their allies are also complaining about higher CBP costs for inspections of small packages, while not mentioning that it would be the importer who would have to pay those charges.

Keep in mind that when indictments were handed down on the companies sending precursor chemicals for fentanyl to drug cartels, they were reportedly packagd to appear as dog food, nuts, or motor oil. The ``benefits of free trade'' are hard to discern in a recently expanded loophole intended mostly to save Amazon money that is now facilitating the fentanyl crisis.

There's another beneficiary of the de minimis loophole: digital advertising companies, which benefit from ads from Chinese fast-fashion firms like Shein and Temu that make liberal use of the loophole. Financial Times reporter Rana Foroohar reported recently that one-third of the revenue growth from Meta this year is due to these two fast-fashion firms.

The Biden administration could actually use executive authority to remove certain de minimis exceptions. But in a meeting last week about combating the entry of fentanyl, administration officials actually claimed that reauthorizing the warrantless spying provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was critical to stopping the supply. There isn't much evidence that surveillance dragnets would deal with the fentanyl trade, and Congress is highly unlikely to rubber-stamp government spying once again.

Drug addiction is largely a medical issue, and expanding treatment is likely to pay higher dividends than a loser's game of trying to stem the flow of supply. But the fact that fentanyl is coming in through ordinary shipping services without inspection seems to be the low-hanging fruit here. The process of customs inspection has been almost totally circumvented, to the benefit of two groups: e-commerce companies raking in cheap goods from China, and drug traffickers. The latter may be a universally hated scourge, but the former is quite powerful. And so abuse of the loophole continues.

The question for lawmakers and the White House then becomes: How many Americans are they willing to sacrifice so Amazon doesn't have to pay a little bit in import fees?

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, U.S. citizens are providing both the supply and the demand for fentanyl and other illegal drugs. The organized criminal syndicates on both sides of the borders are the ones profiting off the billions and billions of dollars from the misery and deaths that fentanyl has caused.

Instead of addressing these root causes that have led to the tragic opioid epidemic, Republicans want to lay the blame on migrants seeking a life in this great Nation of ours, being free from persecution and free from hatred and fear.

That is another piece of disinformation. I think it is important to know that we are talking about an issue where that bitter taste and that deadly taste was introduced to the American people by Big Pharma, nice homegrown American corporations that provide pharmaceuticals to this country.

They introduced the habit to the country. Organized crime has taken it over. American citizens are being hurt, and American citizens are hurting other citizens.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, in closing, we are having a debate on a piece of legislation that is not really the intent of the legislation. The intent of this legislation is to begin to continue to develop the narrative anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric that the Republican majority feels is going to be their pathway to electoral success in 2024.

I think the American people are going to be able to see that if you want to talk about our national parks and the public use as being the priority, Democrats are prepared to work with the Republican majority to protect them and to enhance those resources.

If we are going to talk about immigration and we are going to talk in an atmosphere where the dog whistles don't become barks on this issue, Democrats are prepared to do that. We are prepared to sit down and look at the aspects of legalization, security, and fighting the syndicated crime that is causing much hurt in this country and in Mexico. We are prepared to do that, but we are not prepared to deal with this issue as a ruse, as a stunt, as a political performative act leading to 2024.

If they are serious about immigration reform, if we are serious about protecting our public lands and waters, we are serious about it, too.

Mr. Chair, I urge all Members of the House to vote ``no'' on this legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, this amendment is, frankly, completely unnecessary. It would require preparation and submission of an annual report in perpetuity regarding the migrants housed on certain public lands. Yet, the underlying bill would essentially ban any such housing.

It is a permanent requirement for reporting on nothing, paid for by the taxpayer.

Over the years, I have heard plenty of skepticism from my Republican colleagues about some of the reports that Congress requires of the executive branch. Usually, though, I can at least see the argument for those other reports, but I have to say it is interesting to see my Republican colleagues in favor of this one.

That said, I don't think this amendment is worth fighting over either. Having these reports would not be useful, but it would not be actively harmful either. I only hope that House Republicans would change their minds about slashing the budgets of these departments and will instead give Federal workers the funding they need to carry out their missions, which will now also include generating these annual reports.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chairman, again, in our view, this amendment is unnecessary, but it is not actively harmful, either. I hope we can move on. I hope that everybody is satisfied, that they got their little clips done in terms of being strong, hard, anti-immigrant people and got those little sound bites done already. I think it is time that we move on.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Chair, I rise in support of this amendment. This amendment draws attention to the dubious and deceptive strategy of placing migrants on buses under false pretenses and without any coordination or even a courtesy call.

Both Governor Abbott and Governor DeSantis have demonstrated that they are more interested in ginning up the MAGA base on Twitter than finding meaningful solutions to the challenges facing our immigration system, the refugee crisis both nationally and particularly in their States.

Migrants are people, not political pawns. We can have disagreements over immigration policy. That is fair game. However, the dehumanizing games and political stunts need to stop.

Mr. Chair, I associate myself with the remarks of the gentlewoman from New York, the sponsor of the amendment.

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