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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, as has been noted by my friend and colleague from Wyoming, this is National Police Week, and I just want to join in his chorus in saluting the law enforcement officials from his State who are here in Washington this week, as well as those in law enforcement from across the Nation. Many have traveled to Washington in their annual trip to honor those lost in the line of duty and to share their priorities with Members of Congress.

If we want safe communities, we need to support our law enforcement and we need to work with our Nation's children, and that includes addressing our Nation's gun violence epidemic. We know that gun violence is the No. 1 cause of police officer line-of-duty death. Currently, the No. 1 cause of death for American kids and teenagers in America is gun violence--not automobile accidents, not cancer. We need to treat this crisis like the national emergency that it is.

Commonsense gun safety measures are overwhelmingly popular with the American people, even with gun owners, including banning high-capacity assault weapons meant for the battlefield, as well as universal background checks and requiring safe storage of guns.

But we know that making communities safer also requires addressing the root causes of violence. The police that I work with in Illinois and in the city of Chicago have made it clear to me: They can do their job, but we cannot arrest our way out of this situation. We need to do more.

Next week marks 3 years since the tragic school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, TX. On what should have been an ordinary schoolday, 19 innocent children and 2 teachers were gunned down in their classrooms by a man armed with an AR-15.

After that horrific day, Congress came together on a bipartisan basis--a rare bipartisan basis--to pass the most significant gun safety reform in generations. We recognized that too many parents were losing children and too many communities had been irreparably scarred. So when Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, we agreed we must do more to prevent gun violence from happening in the first place.

One of the most prominent provisions of that legislation was Congress's decision to invest in using trained neighborhood and community leaders to break the cycle of violence. With $250 million in funding, we supported community violence interrupters from the South Side of Chicago to Greensboro, NC; to Baton Rouge, LA; to Houston, TX, and many other communities.

Unfortunately, the DOGE committee had a different idea when it came to preventing violence. Last month, the Department of Justice canceled more than $800 million in violence prevention, public safety, and victim services grants. That includes millions of dollars in community violence intervention funding that was senselessly cut.

What does this mean? Organizations I am aware of, like Metropolitan Family Services in Chicago, lost $3.7 million overnight. These funds had been providing mental health training and job skills to hundreds of individuals who are most likely to perpetrate or be victims of violence. We went right to the source.

Because of these initiatives, homicides in the city of Chicago have decreased by 50 percent since 2021. But now, just a few days before the start of summer months when gun violence will be at its peak, neighborhood organizations across the country, including Chicago, have had the rug pulled out from under them.

Does Attorney General Bondi really think that eliminating these grants will stop the violence?

Ignoring reality won't stop the bloodshed that will occur without these funds.

Does President Trump really think that cutting this funding makes America safer?

The next time the President or any of his friends goes to FOX News or some other news source and starts scapegoating Democrats for gun violence in Chicago, they should remember that the President and his billionaire cronies eliminated the successful bipartisan grants.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration doubled down on its decision to rescind another billion dollars in school mental health grants, which were also passed into law in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

There is a detention facility in the city of Chicago for teenagers awaiting trial charged with serious crimes, violent crimes. Some of them are being charged with murder. They wait months, sometimes years, for their trial. I visited that facility. And, of course, it is a detention facility, a correctional institution, but it is also a high school. These teenagers from all across the city of Chicago, waiting for trial, go to school in classrooms, eat in cafeterias, and, of course, stay on the premises.

I asked the teachers and counselors at this facility for teenagers who have been involved in violent crime: Who are these kids? You must get to know them in this facility. What is their background?

Well, one counselor I remember said: Senator, virtually every mental health challenge you can think of, we see in these kids. They came to the Earth in the usual way, but something happened in their lives that changed them. But there is one thing that they virtually all have in common: They are all victims of trauma, witnessing murders, having someone they love lost to gunfire. It is the kind of thing that can change a life for the better or for the worse, and, in this case, many of them are being changed for the worse. And so counseling them and working with them to conquer these haunting experiences in their lives is central to putting them on the right track.

Now, we have a decision by this administration to cut back on school mental health grants. That was part of a bipartisan solution to deal with gun violence. After any mass shooting, many are quick to explain away the tragedy as just a mental health issue, not a result of the fact that America has too many deadly weapons. Yet barely 100 days into this administration, they have dropped any pretense about mental health in dealing with gun violence. Apparently, preventing gun violence by providing treatment to children is just too much for them to take. At one time, this was part of the bipartisan solution.

In Illinois, tens of millions of dollars in school mental health services have now been canceled, forcing students to face the future without this counsel. One program had brought graduate psychology students to low-income elementary, middle, and high schools to provide treatment services to students and bolster the mental health workforce.

Another initiative in Lake County, IL, received nearly $6 million in Federal funds to recruit and train mental health providers to work in the schools. In an outrageous and unsubstantiated justification, the Department of Education claimed that these funds ``violated the letter or purpose of Federal civil rights law'' or ``undermined the well-being of students these programs are intended to help.'' There is no evidence of that.

Where is the outrage from those who joined in this bipartisan response several years ago and took great pride in it? Democrats and Republicans finally agreed on something.

Mental health counseling of children that are most vulnerable is a way to reduce gun violence. I still believe that to this day, and yet the Trump administration says: No, we are not going to invest in that.

Do you know what is going to happen? There will be more gun violence and terrible, outrageous events like we have seen so often. Innocent kids will die. Innocent people will die. And people will say: We just need more mental health counseling.

Keep in mind that this administration just eliminated the funds for it. What are they thinking? Where is the outrage from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle?

I saw the press releases from our Republican colleagues celebrating the funding that was originally created. Now, silence. That silence is shameful.

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