-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I have come to the floor, briefly, to talk about two subjects.

One relates to a situation that I have been updated on of a gentleman who has been detained by ICE out in California, and I want to talk a little bit about it. We have to go back to ``Retrograde.''

When we were leaving Afghanistan several years ago, my office spent a lot of time working with various nonprofits and veterans' advocacy organizations to do our very best to get people out of Afghanistan who had served alongside U.S. servicemembers, and we met with a lot of success. Thank God for former special operators and others who were outside of the boundary. We were literally in a network of coordinating the positioning of families to get to the Kabul Airport--HKIA they call it. It was to get them to a specific gate and get them out, them and their families.

Why were we doing that?

It was because the people who helped special operators and forces in Afghanistan had marks on them. They would be murdered if they were found by the Taliban for supporting and working alongside American citizens, which they did, and many of them lost their lives.

OK. I just became informed over the past day about the detention of a gentleman who had worked for the military as an interpreter, I think, for 3 years directly and then had worked with a contractor. Unfortunately, he was not one of the ones who got out. He was in northern Afghanistan at the time. He was not one of the ones who was fortunate enough to get out before the Taliban was allowed to overrun Kabul and subsequently murder and kill a number of people who had worked alongside Americans for many years.

Well, it turns out this gentleman was in Afghanistan, as was his brother, and they had become targets because they knew that they were working alongside American servicemembers. They murdered his brother, so he decided to flee from Afghanistan to Iran, which was not a particularly friendly territory. Think about that. He was willing to go to Iran because it was a safer place to be than in Afghanistan, and then he subsequently got a humanitarian visa in Brazil.

He did find his way to the United States. Unfortunately, he did so illegally. Instead of being in a safe third country, he did come here. He did violate our immigration laws, but he also stood alongside American servicemembers and was getting out of a horrible situation where, I think, anyone--everyone--would agree that he needed to get out of Afghanistan. I believe he used the CBP One app to try to apply for asylum, and he was paroled here under the Biden administration--and he did abuse the parole system while he was in office. At the end of the day, we have got a guy who served alongside American soldiers, who, undoubtedly, saved American lives in the process, and who was in this country illegally but who is now in a detention center in California.

All I am trying to say, folks, is I want you to obey our laws. The majority of the time, if you come to this country illegally, then I want you to potentially be deported, but you can't cast everybody in that same light. He was also trying to apply for a special immigrant visa under the interpreter program.

So all I am saying is things are moving quickly. It just disturbs me that we have got somebody in detention who served, by all accounts, admirably alongside American servicemen, and he probably saved their lives because those interpreters were embedded in the community. I think we owe it to this person to get him out of detention and into some status to determine what country he should go to. I am not necessarily arguing that he should stay in the United States, but I am arguing that he shouldn't be in detention in California after his service, indirectly and directly, to our country.

That is all I have to say on that matter, but we are going to be tracking it very closely, and I thought it was important to say that on the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source