Border Act of 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, as though with the voice of God, I have been recognized. And I rise to address what just happened here. Senator Schumer's failed attempt to resurrect a failed immigration bill in a bipartisan beatdown.

But, first, let me recite some numbers: In fiscal year 2021, there were 387,000 known ``got-aways.'' In fiscal year 2022, there were 606,131 known ``got-aways.'' In fiscal year 2023, there were 670,000 known ``got-aways.''

Because of Joe Biden's disastrous border policies, there are nearly 10 million people who have crossed our border illegally, dispersed throughout the United States--many of whom we have no idea who they are, where they are from; some given court dates. We hope they return sometime in the 2030s.

Thousands and thousands of Chinese nationals have illegally crossed our border since Joe Biden took office. The DEA has stated that the most ruthless Mexican cartels now operate in all 50 States. The American people are more at risk now from a terror attack than they have been since 9/11.

How did we get here? The answer is pretty simple: Joe Biden reversed nearly every successful Trump-era policy that was working to secure our border. We had a 45-year low in illegal immigration at the end of 2020.

That has all changed. His administration reversed the ``Remain-in- Mexico'' policy. His administration attempted to sell border wall materials that had been sitting and rusting at an extreme discount. He paused deportations. He took nearly a hundred actions in his first hundred days to weaken our border security and signal to the cartels that our border was open for their business, a deadly business.

I said from the beginning that Joe Biden has all the authority he needs to shut the border down right now. He could have shut down the border as illegal immigration numbers shattered record after record; but he didn't. And he won't. And now the American people are seeing the absolute carnage caused by Joe Biden's policies.

Democrats are attempting to give Joe Biden cover by wasting our time on this vote that we just saw that went down on a vote for a bill that had already failed. Why? I think some people actually believe in open borders. They have no real problem with this. They believe that borders are arbitrary lines on a map. But the risk for Americans are real.

And what happened on this floor--I try to draw some analogy. Seinfeld was a great show--great show--and it was famously cast as a show about nothing. This week was a show about nothing: no vehicles, no amendments on anything substantive that could help the American people--just this kabuki theater that we just witnessed.

My criticisms of that bill--that we won't hear now, thankfully--are the same as they were in February. This bill would have changed the jurisdiction from immigration law related cases from Texas to Washington, DC.

This ``break glass'' emergency authority is a disaster. This bill would have only potentially shut down the border if there were 5,000 illegal crossings per day. That is over a million people per year. Somehow we would normalize the idea that a million people can come here illegally before we would take this seriously. That would be a step backwards in our law.

The law currently is--and it has been across Republican and Democratic administrations--that if you come here, you are apprehended, and you are sent back, unless there is some special reason for you to stay, like asylum. And 9 out of 10 of those claims are, typically, bogus.

But what else did this bill do? It created more asylum agents to create an express lane in a path for citizenship at the border, outside of the normal judicial process we have where it is an adversarial hearing. Those wouldn't exist anymore under this bill.

And, most importantly, this bill gave the architect of the border invasion, Joe Biden, unilateral authority to terminate the bill's meaningless trigger I just mentioned.

This bill failed for a reason. Now it has failed twice for a reason. It took us backwards. But I think it is very important for us to remember that we have an executive branch right now that isn't interested in executing the law. Joe Biden has every authority under the Sun to close this border; he just doesn't want to.

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