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National Origin-Based Antidiscrimination for Nonimmigrants Act

Floor Speech

Date: April 21, 2021
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: National Security Executive Branch Immigration

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Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, if this bill passes, the President may only act if the Secretary of State allows him to act, and that is backward. The Secretary of State should not be authorized in statute to tell the President, the Secretary of State's boss, that the President may act. It is antithetical to the executive powers as set forth in the United States Constitution.

Let me say that again. H.R. 1333 gives the authority to initiate a suspension of entry not to the President but to the Secretary of State in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security.

But it is the President, in whom all executive power vests, who should determine whether to suspend entry and not just in consultation with or the permission of the State and Homeland Security Departments.

While we are discussing this, we have a crisis on our border, a crisis created by this President. For months, he refused to acknowledge the crisis. When he accidentally slipped and said it was a crisis, we were later told he didn't really mean it was a crisis.

Well, here is the deal. You are housing illegal aliens in hotels. That is the kind of crisis this has become. The situation is so bad that the Biden administration has reopened and expanded facilities to house illegal aliens who have surged across the border.

President Biden inherited a secure border and policies that were working and, instead, has created an inhumane border crisis.

If he wants to solve the crisis, he needs to finish construction of the wall; reinstate the migrant protection protocols; reinstate the asylum cooperative agreements with Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador; and remove the other incentives to come, like $1,400 from the COVID package that was just recently passed.

He can bring it under control, but the best way to bring it under control is to move immigration judges to the southern border to deal with asylum cases that are occurring today, not the backlog. Those people are already in here. Deal with those cases today.

Getting back to this bill, it is representative of an executive branch that is willing to give over and cede Presidential authority to Cabinet members instead of the President himself. This bill should not be passed. It should not even be considered.

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