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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. I think we all agree that noncitizens who are convicted of serious violent crimes--who have committed serious violent crimes--should be detained, and they should be subject to removal proceedings.

The good news is that is the current law. That is the current law. This bill is a reiteration of current law.

Let me tell you what current law requires.

Current law requires the detention of any individual with serious criminal convictions, including those who have committed crimes of violence or theft offenses, including murder, rape, and assault. That is the current law.

Furthermore, this administration has given specific direction to the Department of Justice to prioritize the detention or removal of individuals who have committed violent offenses.

And so, as with earlier unanimous consent requests, this unanimous consent request is essentially a reiteration of current law.

I have a great deal of respect for my colleague. We worked together on a number of important matters. But I find myself asking the question, Why are we being asked to simply restate current law when it comes to the detainment or removal of immigrants who have committed violent crimes who right now are subject to removal for those crimes?

And I come to two conclusions: The first is that it is a means of distracting the conversation from the vote that is going to happen in an hour and a half.

We went through a painstaking process to negotiate a bipartisan compromise. That process was begun at the request of Senate Republicans. In the room was their appointed negotiator and representatives of their chosen leader of the conference. It couldn't be more official than that: their appointed negotiator, Senator Lankford, and the leader of their caucus, Senator McConnell, in the room for 4 months negotiating a bipartisan border security bill.

At the end of that process, we achieved a result. We got an agreement with the people that the Senate Republican caucus told us to get an agreement with. Within 24 hours, almost every Senate Republican had sided against that bill.

I submit, everybody probably had different reasons for it, but it was very clear that up until the point where Donald Trump said: Don't do anything; I want the border to be a mess, there were plenty of Senate Republicans who were very invested in that process. Included in that bipartisan compromise are important reforms in the way that we try to make sure that anyone with a violent history never enters the United States.

Under current law, if you have a criminal history outside of the United States or a previous criminal history inside of the United States, that doesn't become relevant to your asylum claim until you present before an asylum judge.

Under the bipartisan bill, that question of whether you have a violent history and whether you should enter the United States happens at the border as part of your credible fear screening. That would be a really important bipartisan reform to make to make sure that anybody with a violent history never enters the United States.

The current law isn't good enough. The bipartisan bill would have made that law better and made this country safer. But Republicans are going to, almost to an individual, vote against that later today.

And so what we are left with are these unanimous consent agreements that don't come close to providing the kind of security that the bipartisan border bill does.

But it also serves a second purpose. It also has a secondary impact. I wish my Republican colleagues didn't care only about crimes committed by immigrants. I know they care about crimes committed by others, but it seems that there is a disproportionate amount of energy on this floor dedicated to crimes committed by immigrants, which gives the impression to the American public that there is a specific problem related to immigrant communities; that they commit crimes at rates that are higher than natural-born Americans, when in fact the opposite is true.

I worry that there is an effort afoot to try to turn us against each other, to make us fear immigrants, when in fact immigrants commit crimes at a rate much lower than natural-born Americans. U.S. citizens are over two times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than immigrants are. Immigrants are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated in this country than natural-born Americans are.

The mass shooter in Las Vegas wasn't an immigrant. The mass shooter at Pulse Nightclub wasn't an immigrant. The mass shooter at Sandy Hook wasn't an immigrant. The mass shooter in Uvalde wasn't an immigrant. The mass shooter in El Paso wasn't an immigrant. The mass shooter in Sutherland Springs wasn't an immigrant. The mass shooter in Lewiston, ME, wasn't an immigrant. The mass shooter in Parkland wasn't an immigrant. And yet there wasn't a rush to the floor by my Republican colleagues after those mass shootings to try to fix the problem.

I grieve for every single victim of crime in this country. And I think we should be all working on ways to better protect our citizens. But I worry that these UC requests are an effort, one, to try to paper over the fact that Republicans are about to vote against a bipartisan border bill that would make this country safer and being in facilitation of an effort--whether intentional or unintentional--to try to make us specifically afraid of immigrants, when in fact the truth is that the people who are coming to this country are fleeing economic destitution, trying to save their children's lives, are coming from places in which they were victims of terror and torture and violence and when they get to the United States are actually less of a threat to our public safety than those who were born in the United States.

For that reason, I would object.

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