LIVE: Sen. Blackburn and GOP Members Speak on Border Security 2024-05-22 15:24

Good morning. I want to say thank you to each of you for being here today and as you all know we are here to talk about this border bill that is not a border bill and it is not a border security bill. This is an election year political stunt designed to give our democratic colleagues the appearance of doing something about the problem without doing anything at all. Why would Senator Schumer choose to bring forward legislation that has already failed once and he knows has no chance in the House? Well, Senator Schatz actually gave us the answer and I'm quoting him. We are tired of being on defense about this end quote. So there you've got it. That is the Democrats reason. Not we can't allow another American to die at the hands of an illegal immigrant or we're finally ready to uphold the rule of law. The truth is the Democrats are the party of open borders and they intend to keep it that way. We are a nation of law and order and yet the Biden administration has allowed over 10 million illegal aliens to flood our border. That's higher than the populations of seven major U.S. cities. Boston, Chicago, Dallas, L.A., Knoxville, Memphis, Nashville combined. Under this administration every town is a border town. We saw it firsthand last week in Nashville where an illegal alien was arrested for allegedly attempting to sexually assault and kidnap a woman at an ice cream shop. There is a distinct difference between Republicans and Democrats when we're talking about border security. The left means release and resettle. When Republicans talk about border security we mean deny and deport. Chuck Schumer's bill has some supposed limits on how many illegal immigrants can break the law and illegally enter this country every day. But even those limits aren't clear. In reality what this bill does do is give Joe Biden the license to make permanent his open border agenda. There is a solution to this catastrophe. The one that takes border security seriously. The Secure the Border Act on H.R. 2. On May 15th last year H.R. 2 was received by the U.S. Senate from the House. That is 373 days. A border security bill has sat here in this chamber and they will not take it up. If Democrats were serious about this issue they would have started on H.R. 2 last year and have done something about it. What they're doing right now is a political stunt. We know it. Senator Marshall. Well Senator Blackburn I'm honored always to join you fighting for our nation. As I was contemplating last night Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer bringing this bill to the floor I was He goes back to the fire station. Sounds the alarm. Shows up with the fire truck. But then instead of showing water on the problem he's throwing gasoline on the problem and then expects praise for it. That's exactly what Chuck Schumer and what the White House are doing in this case. Look the border never closes. The border never closes. I didn't say that. The discussed their half baked border bailout. And I say bailout because that's exactly literally what this is. It's a bailout. Folks it's six months out now from an election and Democrats are in crisis mode. They've seen the polling. They're going to have to answer for the 11 million illegal aliens that have crossed this border now. They're going to have to answer to the 300 fentanyl deaths occurring every day. That's over 100,000 a year. Two or three times the number of people that we lost in Vietnam. They're going to have to answer to the increase in human trafficking and the crime uptick that we're seeing everywhere across the country. This is a crisis that the Democrats have spent three years making. So where we were last night and again we are offering solutions. H.R. 2 is a great solution. It was offered on the floor last night for unanimous consent. We just we just asked for unanimous consent to take up the bill. Senator Cruz and I led that last night. But they're not even willing to take it up. If they don't like something in it we can amend it. We can make it better as well. But tomorrow they're going to jam us with the bill that remember the Democrat architect of this bill says themselves never closes the border. And coming here this week we're coming here this week to sit up stick a bandaid not on just a puncture wound. This is like like the femoral artery hemorrhaging and they want to put a little bandaid over it. Again last night we offered a knowledge grant to the Senate Democrats with a solution that could go into a law immediately. It can help secure the border immediately. It's been passed on the House. The president can sign it significantly. It ends catch and release. It builds the wall. It hires more border patrol agents and ends the abuse of parole and asylums. If Democrats were serious about securing our borders and enforcing the law and protecting our nation's sovereignty they would have taken us up on that particular offer. And I'll close with this. The American people are smarter than this. They see this for exactly what it is. They see the blood on Democrat hands. Joe Biden's numbers are in the sink and all the Senates are up for re-election. The Senators, Democrat Senators, their numbers are going down as well. And again Americans know that the blood of these people is on their hand, is on the hands of the Democrats. Thank you. First of all thanks Senator Blackburn for hosting this and for leading this effort. So in Florida it's the number one issue in the state. People are worried about the border. People worry about fentanyl deaths. Last week I did a fentanyl roundtable and I had parents there that lost their kids. And they know who did it. They know Joe Biden did it. They know Joe Biden's policy of open borders killed their family member. I talked to one mom that her son came home to surprise her for Mother's Day. He was given a drug that his friend bought online. He was dead. I talked to law enforcement. They're dealing with an unbelievable amount of crime. Criminals are coming in. As we know Venezuela, Maduro's emptied his prisons and sent all the criminals here. I talked to family members. They're scared about their neighborhoods. So this is what Biden has created. He's created a country now where we don't have borders. Drugs are flowing in. Terrorists are flowing in. Criminals are flowing in. And what Chuck Schumer's worried about is he's only worried about the election. He's not worried about solving the problem. This is not a bill that secures the border. This is a bill that codifies what Biden has done. And we're not going to do it. We're all fed up with what they've done. They've made this country less safe. Each of us had a variety of amendments. Mine is going to be that simply says we're not going to keep funding all these people coming across and getting all these freebies. Stop all these not-for-profit groups that are just getting all this free money to bring more and more and more illegal immigrants here with drugs that might have a criminal background and might be terrorists. This has got to stop. Thanks Senator Blackburn for hosting this press conference and your leadership on the issue. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that existing law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, exudes deference to the executive. It was that authority that President Trump used to secure the border. It was that exact same authority that President Biden used to open it back up and create this catastrophe. So he has the authority. He's just not willing to use it because he wants open borders. But when you hear Democrats say they want to secure the border, what they really mean is they want to make it more efficient to encounter, process, and disperse illegal immigrants who do not have a valid asylum claim throughout America. That's what this bill does by the way. It spends 20 billion dollars to not secure the border but to more efficiently encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants. The worst part of this bill is the threshold set at 4,000 migrants coming in that grants the President discretion to secure the border. It doesn't really describe how he's going to secure the border, but that discretion basically implies that Congress doesn't think he has the authority. Even worse, after three years, they take that discretion away. So that's why I've been saying this bill is worse than doing nothing because it reduces the authority of a President that was serious about securing the border. To talk about what a political ploy this is, what a charade is, I'm going to use Leader Schumer's own words to prove the point. After that bill failed, and it failed not because Trump wanted it to fail, it failed because it's an awful bill. Leader Schumer was quoted by Politico saying, we were playing chess, they were playing checkers, and we end up with a crane bill. That's what he wanted. He didn't want to secure the border, he wanted 60 billion dollars to help secure Ukraine's border. Now, let me ask you a question. Is that what somebody that you're negotiating in good faith would say after your negotiation failed? Rub your nose in the fact that, hey, we're smart, we were playing checkers, or we were playing chess, these guys are only playing checkers. It just shows how disingenuous the leader is. Then he went on to say, we also end up in much better shape on the border than we were three months ago. Again, they didn't pass the bill. So, they don't have this bill that's supposed to secure the border, why are they in better shape? It's because they got the political cover, which was the only thing they wanted out of a border security bill. They just wanted political cover. This quote proves it. Thank you. Thanks, Senator Blackburn, for your leadership and to my colleagues up here who have been fighting this fight every single day. Look, this is not rocket science. You just heard Senator Johnson say it. The executive has a broad discretion to enforce our border laws. Now, we have to remember that three and a half years ago, Joe Biden came into the Oval Office, and what were they doing? They were bragging about undoing the previous administration's border policies. They were bragging about expanding catch and release. They were bragging about ending remain in Mexico. They were bragging about changing the asylum enforcement laws in this country. And every single one of us said, what you're going to get is a crisis at the southern border. And after three and a half years of them bragging about a policy change and then seeing the predictable results, we now have a historic crisis, I would say historic invasion at our southern border. And now, all of a sudden, six months before an election, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have got religion on border security. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't even pass the smell test. Joe Biden opened the southern border. Joe Biden can close the southern border, and it's really that simple. Now, there are a whole host of problems with this legislation, but I think the most significant, I just want to echo again something Senator Johnson said. The problem with this legislation is that it doesn't solve the problem now, and it prevents a future administration from solving the problem in the future. It doesn't solve our crisis now, and it prevents a future president from doing exactly that. It is the worst possible combination of immigration policy, and that's why we're going to keep on fighting. You have to ask yourselves, after bragging about opening our southern border, why do Democrats care about this issue? Is it because they haven't seen the wreckage and the carnage of the last two years? No. It's because they've seen the polls, and they know what's coming, and we got to make sure that happens so that we never, ever have a crisis like this in this country again. Thank you. This bill is on the floor because their poll numbers are showing them that after months and months of throwing the border open to anyone who wants to come in, that the public doesn't like the policy. So with five months left to go until the presidential election, this cynical attempt to bring legislation to the floor to address an issue that they themselves created, exacerbated, and turned into a self-inflicted policy gunshot wound. Now they want legislation to pass. This is cynical. It's a sham. They have let 20 times the population of my state come into this country illegally. 20 times the population of Wyoming into this country illegally, and now they bring a piece of legislation. This is cynical, and we need to shut it down. The American people are smart. They understand hypocrisy when they see it. They understand cynicism when they see it. Senator Schumer and President Biden thinks the American people are stupid. They think they can pull the wool over their eyes and somehow after three and a half years of open border policies claim that they are now the party of border security. There is no state in the country that has suffered more under the Biden open border policies than the state of Texas with 1,200 miles of common border. But here are just a few of the numbers. We don't really know how many people have come across the border, but best estimates are maybe 9 million, 10 million people. Best estimate of the number of gotaways, people who evade law enforcement, roughly 1.8 million people. We know there are 108,000 people who died of drug overdoses last year. 71,000 died from fentanyl. Now the Democrats are claiming that they care about fentanyl poisoning after three and a half years of doing nothing other than facilitating the distribution of this poison to our kids all across the country. And then there's the least talked about casualties of this policy, which are the 400,000 children who have been placed with sponsors in the interior of the United States. The New York Times has done an investigative piece documenting how many of these children have been forced into labor. You can only imagine how many of them have been sold into sex slavery, how many of them have been abused, recruited into gangs. And the Biden administration takes the position it's not their responsibility to follow up on these children. And they simply don't know where they are, what's happening to them, whether they're going to school, whether they're getting the healthcare they need or not. And they just don't care. Let me just mention one last problem that is caused by the Biden open border policies. I think it was last January, there were some published reports of people connected with ISIS, the successor terrorist organization to Al Qaeda operating out of the We don't know, and can't perhaps can't talk about here publicly, the intelligence reports that have been gathered that report on the number of these people connected with the terrorist organization that have been released into the United States. And frankly, I don't think it's a question anymore. Will there be a terrorist attack in the United States? It's a question of when that terrorist attack occurs. This is just another aspect of what has turned out to be a horrific policy by the Biden administration. But now they want to claim that they're the party of border security after three and a half years. Give me a break. Thanks, Marcia, for your leadership on this. I wish I had the foresight to have a Ron Johnson chart up here. But if I did, I was thinking about this. If there was a Venn diagram of a lawless administration, open borders, and Trump derangement syndrome, at the center of that Venn diagram would be Biden's border policy. In a reflexive move when they came in, J.D. mentioned it, they bragged about undoing all the successful executive orders and policies of President Trump, because Trump did it. Well, here's what we're left with now. 10 million people here illegally, fentanyl streaming across our border. Lives lay in that wake. The cost for states to pick up the tab for this reckless, reckless policy. I want to make two points. First of all, this bad bill is on a collision course now for a bipartisan beatdown, because people see how terrible actually the legislation is. It doesn't move us forward. It moves us backwards. It codifies catch and release. It removes jurisdiction for Texas to actually handle some of the challenges that surely would come. There's a number of problems with this bill, including deputizing more asylum agents who will fast track in an express lane illegal immigration on a path to citizenship in five years. They will make that decision on the border without an adversarial proceeding outside of our judicial system. That's what this bill does. It's a terrible bill. Outside of that, we all know what the real solution is. Joe Biden can undo his 90-plus executive orders he had in the first 100 days that undid the successful policies that we had under President Trump, a 45-year low in illegal immigration. It is not any more complicated than that. If Chuck Schumer wanted to be useful with his time, which he's not good at, he would spend that time over at the White House begging Joe Biden to undo the madness that he created in those first 100 days. But they don't really want to do that because they believe in open borders. This is just to give them some political cover. All right. Questions? Yes, Julie. To that point, the Biden administration has reported that they are using executive authority to put some kind of border shutdown authority in place next month. What is your response to that? What they're trying to do is nuance this situation so that they can say, we are shutting down the border. What we know is that they have no intention of doing that. Whether it's 4,000 a day, what are they going to do? Have Border Patrol standing there with a clicker and count the number coming in? And then when it gets to 8,500, they're going to say, we hit the clicker. And how are they going to coordinate that? This is not workable. It is a political stunt. We know that their polls are showing that they are wrong on this issue. They are trying to recover. But the American people are smart. They are living this. Every town's a border town. Every state is a border state. They are seeing the fentanyl, the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the gangs, the gangs that are recruiting their kids. They are living it. And they are fed up with it. And they are not having it. H.R. 2 would secure the border. But Schumer and Durbin don't have the spine to bring that bill forward and actually discuss border security. They're not willing to say, we're going to take it up because we are sick and tired of seeing kids die from fentanyl poisoning. We're tired of hearing about people that are killed by illegal aliens committing crimes. So now a half measure squishes. Yes. Somebody else. Got another question? Yes. Congress has obviously always had problems with borders, but it's been a white whale in the actual legislation. Did this round of negotiations and where this bill has ended up hurt the possibility of negotiating on border in the future, whether it be H.R. 2 or another attempt at legislation? They have had plenty of opportunities. As I said, 373 days. H.R. 2 has been here and it has been at committees. You could have had it taken up by Homeland Security, by judiciary. They have chosen not to take an action. So did you want to respond? The problem with the border isn't because there's a deficiency in the law. I think the best evidence of that under existing law, we had the secure, most secure border we've had in 45 years, just a few years ago. What happened is you have an executive branch who doesn't actually want to execute the law. That is the biggest challenge. So we can kind of go down this road of picking this bill apart. But the truth is he could do it right now. I'm all for good ideas, but you don't need that right now. And I think that sometimes gets lost in this idea that we need more legislation. We don't. I want to quickly respond to your question. What it proves is that even Biden believes he's got more authority than he's been using. So he has the authority to secure the border. The other point I'd like to make is we would be happy to strengthen that authority. We'd be happy to do that. I mean, that's what H.R. 2 would do. But if you wanted to piecemeal it, we'd be happy to sign on to individual pieces of legislation that would strengthen his authority. They just don't want that. They want an open border. They cause this problem. It's the number one issue with the American people. Anything else? Any other questions? Yes. Any half measure that the Democrats take is going to hurt them because the American people are smart. Every town's a border town. Every state's a border state. Joe Biden, in his first 100 days, took 94 actions. President Donald Trump had the most secure border we had had in decades. Joe Biden took 94 executive actions to open the border and to weaken federal immigration law. He chose to do that. He has the authority. He could undo those. He has chosen not to do that. He wants to blame Congress. And we have a homeland security secretary that doesn't believe in securing the homeland who will not answer a question about the security of this nation. The American people have figured it out. And what we need to do is take up H.R. 2. We need to discuss border security and not have a political stunt carried out on the floor of the U.S. Senate. And I would point out too that Jon Tester has already voted against the Lake and Riley Act. He's already voted against deporting illegal immigrants who assault police officers. He's on record. And if he votes for this again, he'll be on record for supporting normalizing a million people a year here illegally through catch and release. So I think their votes already stand for themselves. Yeah. Julie. I will see what the Democrats are going to do. Nobody knows what they're going to bring up. What we do know is this issue today of securing this border, that is the number one issue with the American people. I talk to security moms every single day and they want to have a secure border. Yes. Last question. CPB Chief Owens, who was reported by NBC First, is under investigation internally for attending a party, the birthday party at a Mexican tequila mogul's house in Mexico. Now, he's being investigated along with another sector chief as to whether that misconduct was appropriate or not. Do you think it's appropriate for the top of CBP to be visiting, you know, other officials in other countries over a jurisdiction that he oversees? Is that appropriate or not? I'm not aware of what you're talking about, Ron. Have you heard anything about it? Okay. Let me. Yeah. I just want to kind of wrap up to answer two or three questions at the same time. Whatever Joe Biden is saying in the next week or next month that he's going to do is too little, too late. And just want to emphasize, don't listen to what he says. Watch what he does. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans are on his hands. And whether it's John Tester or any other of the Democrats that are up for in purple states, the American people are going to hold them accountable. And there's nothing they can do now to bring those people's lives back. There's nothing they can do to do it to help those 400,000 children that are missing. Americans realize the problem out there. This is the number one defining issue of this election. And there's nothing Joe Biden can do now to change that. Thanks. Thank you all.