-9999
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I know there is another unanimous consent request to be made, so I will be very brief.
I have always taken Senator Graham's concerns about parole at face value. In fact, the last 30 days of the negotiations over the bipartisan border bill were dedicated to this question of reforming parole.
In fact, the bill we are going to vote on in a matter of minutes involves the most significant, most serious reform of parole likely in the history of the country.
We entered that conversation at the urging of Senator Graham. He was intimately involved in the negotiations over the reform of parole.
The reforms are significant: an elimination of 236(a) parole, the parole that is used between the borders; a substitution for that process with a new rigorous examination of every individual who is arriving credentialed for asylum; major reforms to the humanitarian parole program to make sure that it is truly used only for humanitarian purposes.
So the irony of the complaints that are being made about the overuse of parole is that the bipartisan border bill--negotiated with Senator Graham--involves the most significant reforms to parole, the most significant restrictions to the President's parole authority, that anyone here in this Senate has likely ever negotiated.
That is why it is regrettable that we are debating unanimous consent agreements instead of coming together to vote on a proposal that addresses many of the concerns raised by my colleagues.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MURPHY. I would yield.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MURPHY. I would.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MURPHY. Thank you for the question, Senator Durbin.
As I mentioned, we negotiated this bill in good faith. We negotiated it with the appointed representatives by the Republican conference. Senator Graham was amongst those in those conversations.
We thought we had achieved a product that could get the broad support of the Republican conference because they ticked off to us their priorities.
And they were legitimate priorities. We heard them loud and clear. They said: We want to reform the asylum system. We want to raise the standard for a credible fear. We want more detention beds. We want to reform parole. We want to give the President a new authority to shut down the border at times of emergency.
Obviously, Democrats came to that conversation with priorities as well. We wanted to expand the number of family visas and work visas. We wanted to make sure that immigrants can exercise their legal rights.
We achieved a compromise, an old-fashioned compromise.
The night we released that bill, Senator Durbin, I thought that we were on a path to passage. But it was President Trump who intervened and said, plain and clear, as Senator McConnell has admitted: I want nothing to pass before the election. He said I want nothing to pass before the election, because President Trump's team decided that it would be better for the border to be a mess to help his political prospects instead of solving the problem.
I hear Senator Graham when he says: Well, we don't trust the Biden administration. Well, we didn't trust the Trump administration. That is a road to nowhere.
If we don't pass reform legislation when the other party's President is in power, we will never do the business of the people. We had a chance to do that until the intervention of President Trump.
I wish--I wish--that instead of choosing his political prospects this November, we were choosing to secure the border in a bipartisan way.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MURPHY. That is correct. And, of course, this is a motion to just proceed to debate.
So this isn't final passage. If Members think there are imperfections in this bill, if they want additional restrictions on parole authority, they could vote to proceed, and then we could get into a process by which we could try to solve any remaining differences that have arisen since the announcement of the bipartisan bill with Republican leadership with their designated negotiator.
I wish we could just get onto this bill so we could try to sort this out instead of allowing this issue to become a perpetual political football, as seems to be the interest of many of my Republican colleagues.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source