Police Our Border Act
Floor Speech
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Ms. JAYAPAL.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chairman, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Chairman, while you may not know it from some of the language that is being used today, we are debating a poorly written ``reporting bill'' that will do nothing.
This bill is full of empty rhetoric, it makes no policy changes to address the outdated immigration system, and it provides no funding of any kind.
All this bill does is attempt to produce a onetime politically motivated report on the so-called Biden border crisis, just one report. That is it.
Give me a break.
Even though the entire bill is focused on reporting requirements related to the ``Biden border crisis,'' the bill doesn't even define the term.
It is as if we needed more proof that this is not serious legislation and that it is more about messaging than congressional oversight of the executive branch.
Why are we continuing to waste our time marking up these meaningless messaging bills?
I have said this before, and I am going to say it again because the same resolutions keep coming up over and over again, so I feel as if I need to repeat myself.
The situation at the border is directly linked to the fact that the legal immigration system has not been modernized in 30 years. It has been left in chaos because it has not been updated to meet the needs of our country today.
When the legal process is so outdated that it takes decades for green card holders to get their children into the country, or when employers simply can't get visas for the people that they need to hire because 2 million people are in processing backlogs, or when we have so few immigration judges that asylum seekers wait over 8 years to get their cases heard, then people turn to unscrupulous actors, including the cartels. The cartels promise desperate people that they can escape dangerous situations by paying cartels to get them in to seek safety by crossing the border.
If my colleagues on the other side were serious about addressing the situation, Republicans would work with us to fix the immigration system to provide people with workable ways to immigrate.
That would disempower the cartels. It would ensure the integrity of the border. It would give us what we all want, which is order at the border that is fueled and made possible by a legal immigration system that works and a legal immigration system that provides pathways for people to come to work here, to be with their families, and to contribute to our economy.
That is what we need right now, but here we are. Instead of that, we are defending a bill with no chance of becoming law or solving the problem. Republicans are showing clearly what we Democrats have been saying over and over again, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want to do anything that would help fix the broken immigration system. Instead of solving the problem, Republicans want to continue to weaponize the border as a political issue for this election year.
Rather than debating meaningless bills, we should be exploring how to meaningfully reform the broken immigration system and expand lawful immigration to the United States, given the very clear and documented benefits that that brings.
In 2021 alone, DACA recipients paid $6.5 billion in taxes; refugees paid almost $28 billion in taxes; and TPS holders paid $2.2 billion in taxes. Likewise, in 2021, undocumented immigrants paid approximately $18.6 million in Federal income taxes and $12.2 billion in State and local taxes.
Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services released a study demonstrating that refugees and asylees generated $124 billion in fiscal benefits over 15 years, and the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan entity, recently released a report finding that recent immigrants who joined the workforce will actually add $1 trillion of revenue to our country's GDP between 2023 and 2034.
It is also estimated that putting undocumented immigrants on a roadmap to citizenship would not only increase U.S. GDP by $1.7 trillion over the next decade, but that action would also raise wages for all Americans and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
Unfortunately, Republicans talk a big game when it comes to immigration and border security, but instead of trying to pass thoughtful, bipartisan legislation to address problems in our immigration system, my colleagues waste our time on bills like the ones before us today.
Members don't have to just take it from me. The fact is that the second most conservative Republican Senator in the United States Senate crafted a bill with some Democratic support to put forward before us on immigration reform, and Republicans decided that the majority didn't even want to consider that bill or vote on that bill. Do my colleagues know why? Because Donald Trump told them not to because it would take away what Republicans see as an election issue.
I believe the American people are smarter than that.
Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to oppose this meaningless bill and to see very clearly that Republicans are not interested in solutions, in governing, but are just interested in meaningless messaging bills to try to divide us when we really should be celebrating the tremendous benefits that immigrants contribute to our country every single day.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chairman, this amendment furthers the major drafting problems in this legislation by asking the Attorney General to report on how the so-called Biden border crisis impacted law enforcement recruiting.
As I said earlier, there is no definition for the ``Biden border crisis,'' and this amendment highlights just how unserious this legislation is.
How on Earth is the Attorney General supposed to determine how the border impacts law enforcement recruitment? Are local law enforcement agencies going to have to go to all the candidates who turned down job offers and ask them if their decision was influenced by the border?
This bill is a huge waste of time, and this amendment serves only to make this poorly drafted bill even more incomprehensible. I, therefore, oppose its adoption, and I encourage my colleagues to oppose it, as well.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment, even though I am not opposed to it.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chairman, the Nunn amendment requires the Attorney General to report on how much each State spent on investigating fentanyl trafficked through the border.
I do not oppose this amendment because it does not repeat the same misleading talking points that Republicans often use when discussing fentanyl, and I am grateful to my colleague across the aisle for that.
I did want to make a couple of points on this because I think fentanyl is such an important issue in all of our districts. It is a scourge on all of our districts, all of our communities. We are all seeing the effects of fentanyl that is coming into this country.
We know that fentanyl is being smuggled into our country and that some of it comes through our southern border, but I do want to make clear that fentanyl is seized primarily at the ports of entry.
In fiscal year 2023, CBP seized approximately 27,000 pounds of fentanyl. Less than 10 percent of the drugs were actually seized by Border Patrol. The vast majority, roughly 90 percent of the drugs, were seized by the Office of Field Operations, which is the entity that mans the ports of entry.
I will be clear that the evidence does not show in any way that asylum seekers are bringing drugs to our shores. In fact, increasingly, drug cartels are being very smart about this. They are recruiting American citizens to bring drugs across the border through ports of entry. In 2022, over 89 percent of convicted fentanyl traffickers were American citizens.
If my Republican colleagues were serious about stopping the flow of fentanyl, the flow of drugs across the border, then I think we should be giving additional resources to the agencies that are manning those ports of entry.
Instead, all but six current House Republicans voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which provided additional funding to ports of entry to combat the smuggling of people and drugs. All but two current House Republicans voted against providing robust funding for border security operations in the 2023 appropriations omnibus legislation, which provided more than $17 billion to Customs and Border Protection, including funding for an additional 300 Border Patrol agents.
The omnibus also included $60 million to hire 125 CBP officers and $70 million for nonintrusive inspection technology to detect narcotics and firearms at ports of entry. That is exactly the kind of technology that our Border Patrol agents are asking us for.
Republicans have also refused to consider President Biden's emergency supplemental funding request for additional border resources, which included $239 million to hire 1,000 additional CBP officers to stop fentanyl and other contraband from entering the United States. It included $100 million for ICE/Homeland Security Investigations to investigate and disrupt transnational criminal organizations and drug traffickers, and it included $849 million for cutting-edge detection technologies at ports of entry.
This is the work the Democrats have been doing to try to address the scourge of fentanyl that is coming across our southern border and coming into our country by supporting law enforcement and stopping that fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a huge problem in our communities. It is important that we support our law enforcement in fighting against it. This amendment would simply inform Congress about how much States are spending to combat fentanyl and, therefore, I see no reason to oppose it.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment, even though I am not opposed to it.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chairman, this amendment requires the Attorney General to report on how local officers and resources have been reallocated to combat fentanyl trafficked through the border. I do not oppose the amendment because the amendment itself, like the previous amendment, does not repeat the same misleading talking points. I was ready to give my colleague across the aisle some credit again, but, unfortunately, the same misleading talking points were just repeated in talking about the amendment.
Fentanyl is not coming across the southern border because of some failed border policy. It is coming across the southern border primarily carried by American citizens at ports of entry.
This is about providing resources to our law enforcement officers on the southern border to be able to have the technology to detect that fentanyl. It is about providing enough people so that they can actually do the kind of monitoring that they are asking for. It is about providing the resources that Democrats put forward as the answer to this question and Republicans oppose time and time again.
I will be very clear that I appreciate the data that we are getting because fentanyl is a scourge. I have gone out with my local firefighters across Seattle multiple times, and I will tell you that 99 percent of their calls are responding to fentanyl overdoses, to opioid overdoses, and it is heartbreaking to see what is happening.
In fact, in my first year, I worked with Speaker Mike Johnson on a bipartisan allocation of money to provide other ways of dealing with overdoses due to opioids and fentanyl on the streets by actually providing supportive services for law enforcement so law enforcement wasn't having to deal with all of this. I don't think that this is something that the majority of our law enforcement members want to be dealing with in our cities.
I just want to be clear: We should be fighting the scourge of fentanyl. We should be doing it in a bipartisan way. We should not be doing it as part of some legislation that is meaningless, that puts the blame for what is happening with fentanyl on some ``Biden border policy that has failed.''
Combating fentanyl should be a priority for all of us regardless of what side of the aisle we are on. We should not repeat the talking points that are divisive and untrue in talking about this issue.
Fentanyl seizures shot up during the Trump administration and have continued to rise during the Biden administration. It is a bipartisan problem. Fentanyl poisoning is killing so many beloved members of our communities, and we have to do everything to stop it.
Republicans often assert, without any evidence, that asylum seekers are the ones that are bringing fentanyl onto our shores, even though the data suggests otherwise. Once again, I am going to repeat this: The vast majority of fentanyl that is seized coming into this country is seized at ports of entry, smuggled in by United States citizens.
Playing politics about such a deadly substance is extraordinarily irresponsible. Fortunately, the amendment itself is straightforward, and it aims to get more data about combating fentanyl so we can be better informed about how it is impacting our communities.
The underlying legislation, on the other hand, and some of the talking points that are used by my colleagues across the aisle is not that. The underlying legislation is poorly written, and it is misleading. The talking points are misleading, but the amendment is clear, and so because of that, I see no reason to oppose it.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Chair, here I was coming to the floor thinking that I could support an amendment that made sense to me about fighting the scourge of fentanyl, and I do support the amendment because I think data will be good for us.
I just would say to my friend across the aisle: Shutting down the border is not going to fix this problem. By saying that and by continuing to use those divisive talking points, he is moving us away from a solution to the really dire issue of fentanyl that is killing our communities.
Let's work together in a bipartisan way to actually deal with the scourge of fentanyl. Let's not put it on the border and let's not pretend that shutting down the border is going to help because, as I said, fentanyl poisoning rose under the Trump administration, and Donald Trump did try to shut down the border until the courts prevented him from doing that.
The reality here is, we have a real problem. We have a real problem. I was willing to come to the floor and support this amendment because I think the data is important, and I hope my colleague across the aisle will recognize that sticking to the facts, as he did in his amendment, is the most important thing to actually addressing the issue of fentanyl.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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