Laken Riley Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to S. 5.

We have all these fine speeches and all these fancy parties with billionaires and Congressmen in tuxedos; all these executive orders for Big Oil and tech broligarchs; all these complete and unconditional pardons for Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and violent extremists who chanted ``Hang Mike Pence'' and smashed, swarmed, and wounded our police officers in this building with steel poles, baseball bats, American flags, Confederate battle flags, and bear mace--all this sound and fury on day one and week one, but nothing to bring down grocery prices; nothing to bring down the cost of rent, as they promised; nothing to improve our healthcare system or build on our success in the last Congress in reducing prescription drug prices; nothing to get health insurance coverage for millions of people who don't have it; nothing to bring down the cost of housing or build new housing; nothing to combat the nightmare of climate change, other than the full-scale retreat of withdrawing from the Paris climate accord; nothing to address the real problems faced by the American people.

Today, they want to change the subject from the indelible and shocking public safety disaster of the President releasing hundreds of convicted felons, specifically violent, cop-beating felons caught on tape in the act, whom he had incited on January 6, 2021, back into the population with no plan for protecting the American people or the public safety.

What do they want to talk about today in their wisdom? Public safety and immigration. Great. Let's do it.

This bill does nothing to address the major problems we face in the immigration system or to secure the American border, nor does it do anything to address the major problems we face in public safety, such as the central and overriding problem of out-of-control gun violence, which takes tens of thousands of American citizens' lives every year and is the leading cause of death among American citizen children up to the age of 18.

Mr. Speaker, it may surprise a lot of Americans, but we actually know how to solve these problems, how to make substantial progress on both immigration and public safety. The roadblock is that the majority completely lacks the political will to do it.

Why? Well, the Republicans are divided between two extreme positions: the big business tech oligarchs who bankroll their party and who love cheap foreign labor under the current regime, and the inflamed, nativist, MAGA element who want to shut down all immigration, including legal immigration, and believe in rightwing conspiracy theories like the racist great replacement theory.

Congress could pass bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform this week. Senate Republicans and Democrats reached a powerful and painstaking compromise with President Biden last year to fortify our border with more border agents and more enforcement, more detection technology, more asylum judges, and more funding, but President Trump told House Republicans to tank this popular bipartisan agreement, to sink it.

He didn't want a bipartisan border solution to improve things in the real world. He wanted a permanent border crisis to run against on TV.

Not doing anything means that Trump doesn't offend his big business supporters who want cheap foreign labor under the current regime, but it allows him to pander indefinitely to his MAGA base with nativist rhetoric and tiny, little messaging bills that move a few words around but don't fundamentally change anything.

We should add to the tough border measures already negotiated last Congress a meaningful pathway to citizenship proposed for Dreamers, TPS holders, and other law-abiding, productive immigrants.

If we move from demagoguery to deliberation, we can flesh this out, and we can make immigration work for America, a nation built on immigrants.

We have huge job shortages in agriculture, manufacturing, retail, seafood, nursing, hospitals, and many other areas. We should not be plunging America into chaos to deport millions of people when we already need millions of new people to work here.

If the GOP plan of deporting 12 million people were really to happen, it would plunge us into another Trump economic crisis like the last one under COVID-19 but maybe even cause a depression this time.

The vast majority of Americans know what common sense dictates. We must make it a lot harder for people to get into our country illegally, but we must make it a lot easier for people to get into our country lawfully.

Today, only 2 percent of people seeking admission lawfully are admitted, and Donald Trump, in his first administration, crippled legal immigration into the country. He banned many legal immigrants unable to prove that they have high incomes. He banned immigrants from 13 specific countries. He banned most visa applicants and most skilled temporary workers, deeming them an economic threat. We must reform our system consistent with our values as a nation.

Similarly, when it comes to public safety, we could arrive at a commonsense, bipartisan agenda right now to make our communities a lot safer if we were serious about it.

Let's take the central problem of gun violence, for example, which now takes more than 48,000 American lives a year and is the leading cause of death for children and young people in America up to the age of 18.

Gun violence costs us, costs America, an astonishing $557 billion a year, Mr. Speaker, more than half a trillion dollars a year because of gun violence.

Mass shootings with an AR-15 or other assault weapons have become a terrifying feature of gun violence in America, although they account for just over 1 percent of the tens of thousands of lives we lose generally to gun violence, with old-fashioned handgun homicides, suicides, and accidents continuing to cause the vast majority of deaths.

Here are some policies that the vast majority of Americans support that we could pass this week if they would allow us to do it, Mr. Speaker.

Congress could close the loopholes in the Brady legislation, like the internet loophole and the private gun show loophole. We could pass universal violent criminal background checks on all gun purchases, something supported by upward of 90 percent of the American people, vast majorities of people of both political parties, independents, conservatives, liberals, gun owners, and non-gun owners. Almost everybody supports it.

We could pass a military-style assault weapons ban, which more than 60 percent of Americans support. We could crack down on the proliferating danger of ghost guns. We could expand red flag laws nationwide.

Alas, our colleagues refuse to do any of it because their well- advertised compassion for the American victims of violent crimes committed by undocumented aliens, which they base their entire argument on and which we all share, apparently does not extend to the far larger class of American victims of violent gun crimes committed by other American citizens, even though we have not just 48,000 Americans killed every year but 115,000 American citizens wounded and maimed trying to survive this gun violence debacle handed to us by the NRA and their followers in Congress.

They argue that the Second Amendment prevents all these commonsense gun safety measures, even though the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld them, including an assault weapon ban, criminal background checks on gun buyers, and so on.

When a white supremacist gunman bearing an AR-15 assassinates dozens of American citizen schoolchildren in Connecticut or Florida, dozens of citizen and noncitizen Walmart shoppers in El Paso, Texas, supermarket shoppers in Buffalo, worshippers at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, or worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, our colleagues extend only thoughts and prayers. They say nothing can be done. Alas, there is just evil in the world, and the Second Amendment keeps them from acting. We just have to accept this as the inescapable human price and sacrifice paid for the Second Amendment, even though that is not what the Supreme Court says.

At least today shows they think something can be done to stop violent crime in America. Will they take their newfound sense of moral outrage and compassion and apply it not just in one case but to the tens of thousands of victims of gun violence in America? America is waiting for an answer.

What is the majority proposing today? S. 5 is a bill to subject to mandatory detention not just undocumented people who have been convicted of theft, shoplifting, and other criminal offenses, which has been the law supported unanimously by both parties since 1996, but people who have been simply charged with such offenses or arrested for such offenses, even if the charges are dropped or even if they are never filed in the first place.

It is an odd way to fix the border because it has nothing to do with the border, and it is an extremely attenuated and constitutionally dubious way to protect public safety.

The vast majority of serious crimes committed in America are committed by American citizens, not aliens, and the vast majority of aliens don't commit crimes at all.

However, this bill doesn't even focus on the culpable class of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. That the law already does. It focuses on those who are arrested even if they are never charged or those who are charged with crimes even if they are never convicted or even if their charges are dropped.

A young person in DACA who is with a group of friends when one of them is arrested for shoplifting and then all the kids get charged will be subject to mandatory detention and deportation even if the child was not shoplifting and the charges are dropped.

The bill is likely to pass, no doubt, because of the profound sympathy we all share for the parents and family of Laken Riley who have suffered an unthinkable, totally shocking, and profoundly unnecessary trauma. This should not be a partisan issue, and it should not be demagogued for partisan purposes.

Nevertheless, when we get serious about comprehensive threats to public safety in our immigration system, we will have to address the mass crises staring us in the face, like the gun violence epidemic, which takes the lives of tens of thousands of American citizens every year at the hands overwhelmingly of U.S. citizen gunmen.

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Mr. RASKIN. Ocasio-Cortez).

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Mr. RASKIN. Tlaib).

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry that Representative Collins has left. I was just presented with a tweet that he sent out about the New Jersey-born Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Budde, who performed a service as part of the inaugural ceremonies. Apparently, he was not pleased with what she had to say, and he wrote, ``The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.''

I would have asked him whether he was serious about that. Of course, the Episcopalian Bishop is a U.S. citizen, but, of course, that is very much in the spirit of the times. It reminds me of the period of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 when there was an effort to use the Alien and Sedition Acts, which have been invoked recently by the new President, in order to persecute the political opponents of the administration as well as to chase down and kick out of the country all of the dangerous French immigrants who were spreading revolutionary propaganda in the country. A friend of Jefferson's wrote to him, John Taylor, to say how exhausted he was by all of the political fighting and the demonizing of immigrants and the attempt to shut the borders down and to attack political opponents as enemies of the State, and so on.

Jefferson wrote in this beautiful letter back--you should check it out online, if you can. It is a letter to John Taylor. In it he counseled patience.

He said:

A little patience, and the reign of witches shall pass over, their spells dissolve and the people, recovering their true sight, recover the true principles of their government.

In the meantime, we are suffering all of the horrors and indignities of the hysteria. If the game runs against us at home sometimes, as inevitably it will, then we must have patience because this is a game where principles are at stake.

Our colleagues have spoken up for nothing other than due process. The idea that the bipartisan compromise that has been cemented and lost since 1996 should stand, saying that we want the immediate detention and deportation of undocumented people who actually commit crimes. In an effort to drive a wedge in this body, they now say they want to move from people who have been convicted of crimes, which obviously accords completely with common sense, to people who have just been accused or charged with crimes, even if the charges are dropped even for offenses as small as shoplifting.

In any event, we don't claim somehow that one side or the other is morally righteous and the other is morally wrong. We are trying to have a public policy debate. In the role of public emotion in public policy debates, Mr. Speaker, is an interesting thing. Some people think it is enough to show up and say, there has been a terrible event. There has been a sickening murder or rape, therefore, you must pass our bill without even reading the bill, without even looking to see what is in the bill. Does it make sense as a matter of public policy?

If that were the standard they actually believed in, they would be voting for all of the gun safety legislation they have been rejecting, because every time there is a massacre, whether it is in Connecticut or Florida or Texas or Illinois or any of our communities, we come in and we say, we want what the American people want in public opinion polls: a universal, violent criminal background check. We want a ban on military-style assault weapons.

There is no reason 18 year olds should be bearing AR-15s and showing up in classrooms and churches and synagogues with weapons of mass destruction. If it were enough just to appeal to emotion, they would be voting with us, but, no, they say that conflicts with their public policy understanding.

Well, at the very least you would think they would have the burden of telling us what they do support, but we never hear anything. You don't hear a peep out of them about gun violence because the second amendment, as they misinterpret it, is sacrosanct as well as their NRA support and contributions. That is what they bow down to is the National Rifle Association when it comes to this policy debate because they won't advance anything that conflicts with the NRA, even if the Supreme Court says it is perfectly fine.

We had a ban on assault weapons for a decade. It was perfectly constitutional. We have the Brady act. We have a violent criminal background check, but even though expanding it to make it universal would save hundreds or thousands of American citizen lives every year, they won't touch it.

Don't invoke emotion selectively and say everybody has got to go along with what you are saying without even analyzing the policy implications and the constitutional implications if you are not willing to put anything on the table to reduce the sickening death toll for gun violence in America. There is nothing in the world that approaches what we have got here. It is 25 times higher than the EU countries, dozens of times higher than Japan, Canada, U.K., you name it. Yet, they pretend as if there is no problem and they seize on an opportunistic bill like this to try to drive a wedge within our Congress and within our people.

I hope they do better when we get to the second week of this new administration than freeing violent criminal felons who stormed this Capitol and attacked our police officers than bringing forward a bill like this to try to cover up for their complicity with that sickening violence against our constitutional order.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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