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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, one of the benefits of sitting in the chair, as the Senator from Maine is currently, is you get to hear a wide variety of views from our colleagues. And I have had the opportunity over the past several weeks, while sitting in the chair, to hear my Republican colleagues talk about their concerns regarding the lifting of title 42. They are concerns that are very often shared in many respects by Democrats as well.

But it is really important that we level set the facts when we are talking about what is happening at the border right now, as the pandemic authority to stop people from applying for asylum is--as required by law--being lifted.

It is really important that we understand that in this debate, there are a lot of spinning; there are a lot of myths; there are some just outright mistruths that are being spread about what is happening at the border and what has been happening at the border.

And so I am down on the floor just for a few minutes today to try to talk about a short list of those myths and untruths that are being spread, sometimes on this floor, but very often on social media and on cable news, so that we can find a way to have a functional conversation between Republicans and Democrats of good faith who actually want to make progress.

First, my sense is that there were a lot of conservatives out there and a lot of haters of President Biden who were kind of rooting for chaos at the border, who were hoping that there was just going to be this overwhelming flood of crossings and apprehensions at the border when title 42 was lifted.

Here is maybe the most important thing to say: It didn't happen. In fact, if you look at the number of people who were showing up at the southwest border right before title 42 expired-- and I will admit that number was elevated--we have seen half as many people crossing in the last 4 days as were crossing right before title 42 expired.

Four thousand, five thousand people--that is still a lot of people per day who are being apprehended at the border, but it does not match the doomsday predictions that many on the right were making.

So I think it is just important to acknowledge that fact. Because if you read the newspapers, if you paid attention to cable news, you would have thought that the minute that title 42 ended, there was going to be a doubling, a tripling of the number of people who showed up at the border. That didn't happen, in fact--52 percent less people are showing up.

Now, that may not hold. I can't promise that that is the future trajectory. But I am going to tell you a story today about why that happens, and it is connected to things Joe Biden did.

The second level-setting exercise I want to engage in is this idea that we should be in just lockdown fear of all these people who are coming to the United States at the southern border, that there is something uniquely dangerous about immigrants writ large, but, more specifically, undocumented immigrants.

Now, this is a trope that has been around for as long as the United States has existed, that we should fear immigrants coming to this country. But we now have data to tell us whether or not people who are coming to this country as immigrants or people who are even coming to this country as undocumented immigrants are a risk, a threat, to the United States compared to natural-born citizens.

This is a study that Donald Trump's Department of Justice released. This isn't Joe Biden; this isn't Barack Obama. This is Donald Trump's Department of Justice that released a study that found that ``undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.''

That is the truth. It is Donald Trump's truth that, in fact, people who come to this country, whether they are legal immigrants or without documentation, are not committing crimes at a greater rate than natural-born Americans.

That doesn't excuse our broken system. That is not an argument to continue to allow so many people to come to this country without documentation. It just means that we shouldn't set on fire these arguments that we have something unique to fear.

Why? Because these people are coming to the United States for a better life, because people are coming to the United States to flee terror and torture, persecution, violence, and economic destitution.

There are criminals amongst their midst. There are individuals who end up committing crimes but at no greater rate of offense than people who are born in this country. It is just important to acknowledge that.

I want to talk about four of these myths very quickly.

The first one is that President Biden had the authority to keep title 42 in place. That is just not true. For the better part of the last 2 years, Republicans, conservatives, and the broader right have been pillorying President Biden for not lifting COVID authorities fast enough: The pandemic is over, the right says. Why do we still have restrictions on our movement? Why are there still restrictions on air travel?

Interestingly, the only restriction Republicans wanted to keep in place was the one at the border to stop people from coming into the United States who looked different from them.

The pandemic is over. Title 42 can't stay in place. The President doesn't have the legal authority to continue to turn people around and deny them the right to apply for asylum. So it is just not true that this is President Biden's choice. And if you are a constitutionalist, if you are somebody that believes that the President cannot and should not exceed his constitutional statutory authority, then you have to support the lifting of title 42. Now, we could change the law, and there are proposals to do that, but President Biden cannot keep title 42 in place any longer than he declares a public health emergency.

The second myth--and I have heard this from some of my colleagues here--is that everything was great under President Trump and it exploded under President Biden. In fact, sometimes you hear this stat: that crossings were at a historic low under President Trump.

Well, that is true to the extent that gas prices were at a historic low under President Trump, because crossings were at a historic low for 1 year, for 2020, when we were in the middle of the teeth of the pandemic, and nobody was going anywhere. Yes, during that period of time, when we shut down the border, when nobody in the United States was moving, when nobody in Mexico was moving, we did have a relatively low number of crossings. But just before the pandemic, when President Trump was in office, we had a historically high number of crossings.

In 2019, 800,000 people showed up at the border. That was twice the number for the previous decade, on average. During President Obama's time in office and the first few years of President Trump, 400,000 people were showing up. Then, in 2019, the numbered spiked to 800,000. They go down for 1 year, but they came back up as soon as the worst of the pandemic abated.

So it is just not true that this problem was a creation of President Biden's swearing-in. Numbers were abnormally high right before the pandemic, and they started jumping back up once the pandemic started to lessen in its severity.

The third myth is that President Biden didn't prepare for the end of title 42. That is also not true, and I gave you that statistic to show that. In fact, crossings right now are half what they were right before title 42 expired. I can't define all the reasons for that and maybe those numbers are temporary, but it is definitely true that President Biden has taken extraordinary steps to be ready for this moment.

Even while Congress refused to act and give him any help, President Biden surged thousands of troops to the border. He put more asylum officers there. He moved Border Patrol. He signed agreements with Mexico in which Mexico agreed to take a certain number of individuals who were coming from countries like Venezuela and Cuba. And he implemented a really tough new asylum rule--a rule that, frankly, many people on his political left say went beyond his statutory authority. That rule says that you actually cannot apply for asylum at the border unless you have applied beforehand in a safe third country or you made an appointment. That is a really innovative, tough new approach to try to reduce the number of crossings and presentations at the border--a step that, frankly, President Trump didn't even entertain.

So it is just not true to say that President Biden hasn't done anything. In fact, he has taken extraordinary steps to try to be as ready as he can, which leads me to the fourth and final myth, which is that this is all President Biden's problem. It is not. It is our problem. We haven't significantly updated the immigration laws of this country since the 1980s or 1990s. It has been 30 years since we have changed the law in this Nation to reflect the changing nature of migration globally and the changing nature of migration to the United States. We, through our inaction, have left President after President, Republican and Democrat, with a mess because our laws don't work; our immigration system is broken. Yet we blame the President for failing to be able to work miracles out of a system that has been fundamentally rendered ineffective.

Let's be very clear. Republicans have had ample opportunity to fix the laws of this Nation. In 2013, when the Presiding Officer and I got to the Senate, there was a deal on the table to fundamentally and comprehensively reform our immigration laws. Republicans in the Senate joined with Democrats to get that done, but the Republican Speaker of the House refused to have a vote on it in the House.

Since then, there have been a number of efforts to reach out and try to find compromise with Republicans, and it has generally been the Republican Party writ large that has decided that there is too big a political cost for them to take in trying to find common ground on immigration reform.

Now, I say that this is a position from the Republican Party writ large because I do know and believe that there are individual Republican Senators in this body who do want to find compromise, who do want to recognize that this cannot be solved by any President so long as the laws of this Nation don't provide resources to move asylum claims faster, don't give Border Patrol what they need, don't allow enough people to come into this country through legal pathways.

Part of the reason that I am down here on the floor today trying to correct these myths and untruths is because I think it is a necessary predicate in order for us as a body, Republicans and Democrats, to sit down and talk about solving this problem.

The lack of action in Congress has left President Biden an impossible task. He has done the best that he conceivably can with a set of broken laws. But instead of spreading these myths and often outright lies about what is happening at the border and the consequences of lifting title 42, we should, as body, instead, do our job and fix our broken immigration laws.

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