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Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate my friend and colleague, the Senator from Alabama, for leading this discussion today. This is an important one to have. And I am honored to be here to be part of it.

You know, the situation at the border, across our southern border, is, by any standard, a humanitarian crisis and nothing short of that. Vice President Kamala Harris, appointed by President Biden as his border czar, publicly declared that she would focus as border czar on addressing the root causes of immigration.

However, now that Kamala Harris is the Democrats' nominee for the Presidency, she and the legacy media want to pretend that was never the case. Axios even reported that Vice President Kamala Harris ``never actually had''--that is a direct quote--``never actually had'' the title of border czar.

That is funny because that is a claim that contradicts the reporting that we have seen from Axios itself on this. In fact, we can see that right here in this chart.

On April 14, 2021, Axios reported that ``Harris, [who had been] appointed by [President] Biden as border czar, said she would be looking for the `root causes' that drive migration.''

Moreover, a tweet from her official Twitter handle further emphasized her role:

@POTUS asked me to lead our diplomatic work with Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. To address the situation at the southern border, we have to address the root causes of migration. It won't be easy work--but it's necessary.

I agree; it is necessary. She took on this role. She acknowledged the role, and she failed.

Since Biden and Harris's inauguration a little more than 3\1/2\ years ago, over 10 million undocumented immigrants have entered the United States and have done so illegally. This figure exceeds the population of 36 States. Meaning the overwhelming majority of our States, 36 out of 50 have populations smaller than the total number of persons entering the United States illegally on the watch of border czar Vice President Kamala Harris, thus creating a crisis that has been met with a troubling combination of silence and inaction from this administration--the executive branch of government responsible for enforcing our border laws and the border itself.

Now, if the Biden-Harris administration were serious about addressing the crisis at the border and addressing the issue and ensuring, in the process, that the real victims of government persecution in other countries would receive asylum here, then they would support reforming our broken asylum process. And, sadly, they are not. We are still encountering over 100,000 illegal immigrants at our southern border each month.

Now, since President Biden took office, there have been almost 10 million illegal immigrant encounters nationwide. Keep in mind, this doesn't reflect the sum total of those who have crossed into our country. These are just the documented immigrant encounters throughout the country. Though, there are more. That is a subset of the total flow of illegal immigration. Over 360 individuals on the Terrorist Watchlist have been stopped while trying to cross the southern border.

And, shockingly, 27,583 Communist Chinese nationals have been encountered at the southwest border in the last year alone. That is a lot of people. And China is not close to the United States.

By any metric, the Biden-Harris administration has shown no interest in securing our border. In fact, the data suggests this administration wants as many illegal immigrants to enter this country as possible.

My Democrat colleagues want to pretend that Republicans are somehow responsible for this crisis. Why? Well, it is obvious why. They don't want to own it given that their party owns the crisis, as their party is running the administration and it is responsible for making decisions that has allowed this in.

What argument did they use in order to blame Republicans who are not in control of the administration, do not occupy the White House, or control the majority in this Chamber? What is their argument as to why we as Republicans are to blame? Well, because we were unwilling to pass a bad immigration bill that would have normalized thousands of illegal entries across our southern border each month--and particularly in the hands of the Biden administration, it could have and inevitably would have made the situation much worse.

But today I am offering a smaller bill, a narrower bill, a more focused bill that would help alleviate the crisis by closing loopholes in the law. These would be helpful. They are not necessarily things that represent a complete loophole such that President Biden would be powerless to enforce the border without them, but they would make it harder for President Biden to justify the massive loopholes that he has manipulated.

This isn't the entire answer. This bill wouldn't necessarily solve the whole problem. But if my Democratic colleagues can't agree that these commonsense reforms need to be adopted, then how can we take their concern about the border crisis seriously?

My bill, the Stopping Border Surges Act, would address loopholes in our immigration laws, which have helped create some of the perverse incentives for illegal immigration. It made it easier for the Biden administration to facilitate this flow of 10 million illegal immigrants into our country over the last 3\1/2\ years.

The bill would clarify that an adult cannot bring a child into this country expecting that child to be his or her ticket to avoid detention. This would help eliminate the disturbing practice of what is sometimes referred to by the Border Patrol as the practice of recycling children and babies by coyotes and cartels.

People will bring in a child, and sometimes that same child will be brought in under similar circumstances over and over and over again as the ticket into the United States--the ticket thus making it less likely that they will be detained and ultimately deported.

It allows all unaccompanied children to be returned to their home countries, thus ending the incentive for the parents to send their young children here alone, leaving them vulnerable to abuse.

Sadly, we see what is happening to those children under the supervision of the Biden-Harris administration and Secretary Mayorkas. They are trafficked either into child slavery, sex slavery, or as drug dealers.

My bill would require that the Department of Health and Human Services provides DHS with biographical information about the persons to whom children are being released so that they know something about them, rather than just ``This is the person to whom you are going to release the child.''

It also requires asylum seekers to apply for and be denied asylum in at least one safe country on their route from their country of origin to the United States. It would combat the Biden-Harris administration's obliteration of the credible fear standard by heightening the burden of proof.

The correct application of this standard is pivotal to the operation of our asylum system and making sure that it is there for those who need it and not subject to rampant abuse by those not eligible for it.

It has been corrupted over the years. But this administration has destroyed it entirely--manipulating it to the point where it is now beyond recognition. We must fix it.

It is sad that we have to fix it, but we have to fix it in large part because it has been so distorted and abused by this administration, profiting international drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year, leaving a huge--huge--wake of human suffering in its path.

It would close loopholes and restrict asylum to aliens who present themselves at an official point of entry. We must eliminate these loopholes and not allow the Biden-Harris administration to make more of them.

Congress needs to take back the authority to establish law. We can start today by passing the Stopping Border Surges Act.

Ending the ambiguities in our current asylum law will help to mitigate the situation at the border and prevent unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats from acting with utter impunity to enforce their own policy preferences, culminating inevitably in open borders with more than 10 million people coming into this country in a space of only 3\1/2\ years. So I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

685 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the thoughtful remarks from my friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from Illinois. He and I have worked together on many issues. We don't agree on everything, but when we do agree, it is a lot of fun. We are able to do a lot of great things together. I appreciate his leadership on the Judiciary Committee and the fact that he has always been friendly toward me.

I also appreciate his reference to our sort of civics aspect of what we do. The notion of how a bill becomes a law is always, always instructive. It is always helpful to bring that up. You know, we have lost some of that in our system, and people get confused as to how laws are made.

Of course, the very first operative provision of the Constitution-- article I, section 1--has only one clause, so it is clause 1. The very first language after the preamble says that all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.

Remember, legislative powers are lawmaking powers, meaning all power to make law--to make Federal law--is vested in this body and the body with which we share the legislative power just down the hall, the House of Representatives.

Article I, section 7 elaborates on this function and makes clear yet again that you cannot make a Federal law without following this formula. The formula prescribed by article I, section 7 is bicameral passage followed by presentment to the President of the United States. You have to pass the same legislative text down the hall and also pass it here. It doesn't matter in what order unless it is a revenue bill, but that is not relevant here, but it does have to be the same text passed by both bodies. Then and only then can you present it to the President for signature, veto, or acquiescence. That is how you make a law. That is what the Constitution requires.

Now, on top of that, we have a number of other procedures that we have added by Senate rule, precedent, procedure, common practice. Those are not required by the Constitution, but those rules and practices are acknowledged as legitimate by the Constitution. Yes, most of the time, we pass those, but it is ultimately up to us to decide when, whether, to what extent, and in what ways to follow all of our procedures.

And I agree with the Senator from Illinois--it does make sense whenever we can do it--that we always should follow our own procedures. It generally works out best if we can move something through committee, if we can have a full committee hearing and we can have what is called a markup, where we introduce and entertain amendments to proposed legislation, pass it out of committee, and then bring it to the floor ultimately.

I think we generally have much better legislation when we do it that way, and I would love to follow that procedure with this particular bill. If what the Senator from Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is offering is for us to have a full committee hearing and a markup on this bill, I would love that, and I would gladly entertain that.

Tragically, in the Senate, we have seen a deviation from that same practice--that same practice to which he attributes great significance, understandably, today. In fact, fully 94 percent of all legislative matters passed by this body are passed by this same procedure that I am attempting to utilize here today--by unanimous consent.

The way it works is, essentially somebody makes a request, and they ultimately come down to the floor like I have done today and say: Let's call up and pass this bill.

Why would we do that? Well, in many instances, committee chairmen have become somewhat stingy with what bills on which they are going to hold hearings and markups. We have been unable to get a hearing or a markup set on this bill, and so this bill, like so many others--in fact, like 94 percent of all legislation passed by this body--comes to the Senate floor today without the benefit of having had either a hearing or a markup.

Well, that doesn't stop the 94 percent of the legislation from moving forward. In fact, in addition to that 94 percent of the legislative proposals that are passed by unanimous consent, an additional number of them--I am not sure what the number is; it probably varies a little bit from year to year--but an additional number of them are brought to the floor and passed not unanimously but by rollcall vote without having had the benefit of either a full committee hearing or a markup. This, too, is unfortunate. Sometimes it is necessary and unavoidable, and other times, it is not.

The point is this: Neither the Constitution nor the Senate rules prohibit passing legislation this way. Sometimes it becomes necessary when the other path has been made unavailable to us by the majority party and the committee chairman.

In this circumstance, there is an additional reason why we need to bring this forward. We talked a minute ago about the legislative process required by the U.S. Constitution to pass a law to make or change any statute that is Federal in nature. You have to go through that article I, section 7 formula: bicameral passage in Congress, followed by presentment to the President for signature, veto, or acquiescence.

What the Constitution does not countenance and certainly prohibits is the making of new law or the modification of existing law by the executive branch of government or by anyone or anything outside the framework of article I, section 7. That is what we have seen with our immigration laws, including and especially with this administration with regard to laws that are relevant here--laws, for example, involving asylum standards.

The asylum standards have morphed over the years, over many decades, and the practice of applying our asylum laws has become so different under this administration than what the law actually says, although this is comparable in many respects to another great frustration of mine that is closely related to this where we outsource de facto lawmaking authority to unelected, unaccountable bodies in the executive branch, allowing them to just make new law. We call them regulations to get around the obvious awkwardness that would otherwise be created by this thing called the Constitution to which we have all sworn an oath, but we allow, in effect, the executive branch to make laws that way under the form of rules and regulations.

But either way, whether it is by the stroke of the Executive pen or whether it is through an administrative Agency, we have seen laws being made and changed entirely outside the constitutionally authorized process recognized by article I, sections 1 and 7.

So it is one of the reasons we are here today because we have had the executive branch making and changing law not authorized by the Constitution, and we have had a lack of access to committee hearings and committee markups. So that is why we come here today and do this.

While it is not ideal, it is how 94 percent of the legislation passed by this body is, in fact, passed. So that kind of matters. That provides some helpful context.

We talked a little bit about asylum and how the asylum laws have been abused and modified. The idea behind asylum is that if you are subject to certain kinds of persecution in your home country, we want to provide people with a place to go.

The problem we had in this administration--the way it is supposed to work is if you show up without documents at the U.S. border and you make the case that you are entitled to stay here as an asylee, well, you are supposed to be detained until such time as they can decide the issue. You don't have a statutory or a constitutional right to be granted asylum. It is a discretionary grant of authority given to the Secretary of Homeland Security. No one has a guaranteed right to it. So you are supposed to be detained while they consider your application, whether or not they are going to grant it.

But instead, what this administration has been doing is just saying: OK. Come in. You claim asylum. And they let you go. And because there are so many people coming in--about 10 million of them; many of them are claiming asylum--they decide that the best thing to do is not deport them because they can't handle all those asylum applications. They can't adjudicate them. They say: Well, let's just let them go--let them go and tell them that at some point you may hear about a hearing that will be scheduled before an immigration judge. We hope you will come to your immigration hearing. At the current rate, many of these people are being told that their immigration hearing may not happen until the mid- 2030s.

This doesn't make any sense. This amounts to a de facto change in law.

It definitely amounts to a de facto change in law when we have got things like what is called immigration parole. Immigration parole is supposed to exist as a discretionary grant of authority, allowing the U.S. Government to let somebody come into the United States either for a specific humanitarian purpose or a public purpose. But it has to be individualized, not generalized by country, not broad categories, and an individual person. The law specifies that.

An example of a humanitarian purpose is somebody is in a foreign country. Maybe their mother lives here. She is about to die, and that person needs to come in and be there for the funeral with the understanding that he or she will probably leave thereafter.

The public use, the public benefit example, would be someone who maybe speaks an obscure language. We don't have adequate interpretation services in that language here. We need somebody to come in and translate for that language. We allow them to come in, be a translator for that trial, with the understanding that they will leave.

Well, this President has granted contrary to what the law allows. He has effectively rewritten the law so as to just grant huge categorical blocks of immigration parole. We are talking to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people who have been admitted in a single year on these things.

That is lawless. That is outside what the law requires. So, yes, that is a change of law, and that is why we need to tighten this law here.

Now, I do want to get to this point about the so-called border bill, the border bill that my friend and colleague from Illinois claims-- mistakenly but very wrongly--was killed only by one man, Donald J. Trump. It is just not what happened, not what happened at all. And I don't agree with his description of the bill either.

The Senator from Illinois and I share a common friendship with and great affection for the senior Senator from Oklahoma. The senior Senator from Oklahoma did a fantastic job. He had done a great job on so many things that he decided that he would try to negotiate this. I think it was done at the request of the minority leader, the Republican leader in the Senate, to try to negotiate something.

The Senate Republican conference wanted legislation that would, in one way or another, tie President Biden's hands so he couldn't continue to abuse and negotiate that system of laws, and so he went in there. He did his best to negotiate that. At the end, most Members of our conference didn't feel comfortable with what he negotiated because it wouldn't adequately tie President Biden's hands.

It is not his fault, and it is not Donald Trump's fault. But the fact is that most of the Members of our conference didn't feel that it did enough to tie President Biden's hands.

Perhaps under the jurisdiction of a different President, that legislation might have worked but not with this President. It certainly didn't tie President Biden's hands.

So it wasn't Donald Trump who killed the bill. It was the fact that we didn't have the votes here.

So, look, this is a big deal. It matters. I reject, fundamentally, the premise that we can't reform any of our immigration laws without so-called comprehensive reform, which is usually code for something else, including allowing large numbers of persons entering illegally to be deemed legal.

So let's make sure we have the facts right, both on the way laws are made and based on what happened with this legislation and why it is necessary to pass the Stopping Border Surges Act.

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