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Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, the Department of Homeland Security has an extremely important mission: to keep Americans safe. Under that mission, the Department is tasked with two critical jobs: border security and disaster response.

Our current Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has failed both. In her short tenure, Secretary Noem has overstepped, underperformed, and endangered the lives of countless Americans. I believe it is time for Secretary Noem to resign or for her to be fired.

Secretary Noem has undermined FEMA's work and, in so doing, endangered disaster victims. Just a few months ago, Secretary Noem said in a Cabinet meeting:

We are eliminating FEMA.

And she meant it. She meant it. We saw evidence of that in what happened not just in Texas but in North Carolina, New Mexico, California, Kentucky, Hawaii, and Vermont, where FEMA is absolutely crucial to helping people in communities and businesses recover from disaster.

We need FEMA. It is only the resources of the Federal Government that can surge resources into affected communities. We can't lose that function and that capacity. When you need safety from a flood, when you need to start the long road to recovery, you need the support of the Federal Government. No State, no community can do this alone.

I have seen from our experience in Vermont that FEMA, in fact, must be reformed. It must not be destroyed, as Secretary Noem has suggested.

In my view, we cannot have a leader in charge of FEMA who is committed to its destruction. We must have one who is energetically committed to its reform.

We have seen the result of Secretary Noem's indifference to FEMA as the catastrophe in Texas unfolded. As the waters rose along the Guadalupe River in Hill Country, it was the people of Hill Country, as my colleague Representative Chip Roy of Texas said, who responded heroically. They were saving lives; they were rescuing stranded children; they were comforting those who lost loved ones; and they provided material assistance and constant support.

As for FEMA, it didn't answer the phone. Secretary Noem had instituted a policy to micromanage FEMA to death. Under Secretary Noem's watch, FEMA instituted a new policy that required the Secretary's signature on any expense more than $100,000, which, at the time of a major catastrophe, is a very small amount.

Secretary Noem had an ``eyes wide open'' awareness that this policy would mean it would take ``a minimum of five days for front office review.'' In a disaster, you do not have 5 days.

Contractors for FEMA answered the vast majority of calls--about 3,000--from flood victims on July 5. But according to news reports, after contracts with those companies were allowed to lapse, that response rate fell to 36 percent on July 6 and then only 16 percent on July 7. When people needed someone to answer the phone, FEMA left 13,793 calls unanswered.

In the aftermath of disaster, people cannot wait for help. Many are homeless or living in very dangerous conditions. Search and rescue teams were waiting to be deployed. Disaster recovery centers were slow to open. Current and former FEMA employees have raised the alarm about how slow the Federal Government was to respond and support Texas. We can reform FEMA in very commonsense ways--and we must--but we cannot risk the lives of countless Americans under the mismanagement of a Secretary who has called for its elimination.

There is a second reason Secretary Noem must resign. She is failing our country on immigration. We have three fundamental issues on immigration: border security, the deportation of criminals, and the status of people who are here without legal status but are working, are paying taxes, in many cases have families, and have no criminal record.

I want to step back for a minute and acknowledge something that too many Democrats have been too slow to state: The United States does need a secure border, and President Trump has largely accomplished that.

In December 2023, there were 249,740 illegal crossing arrests between official ports of entry. That was an alltime high. Last month, that number dwindled to 6,070 illegal border crossing arrests. I give President Trump credit for that change.

The second issue is that undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes should be held accountable. They should be prosecuted, punished, and deported. There is widespread consensus on that.

Yet on the third issue, those who are here without committing crimes, who in many cases were brought here as young people, we are seeing under the leadership of Secretary Noem that her response is an across- the-board embarkation on a massive and far-reaching deportation plan. There is no distinction in her policy among those who were brought here as children, who have families, who have jobs, who pay taxes, and who serve their communities.

But there is a big difference between deporting known criminals and rounding up immigrants--some of whom have status to be here, in fact, are here legally--from work sites, from schools, and from churches. This mass deportation policy is not about serving America and doing what our country needs to be strong and safe. It is, instead, about Secretary Noem accumulating the highest possible head count of deportees. It is hurting those folks, their families, and their communities, of course, but it is also hurting America and, particularly, rural America.

Our farmers depend on labor to milk their cows and to pick their crops. It is weakening our construction industry, where workplace raids are shutting down construction sites, including for low-income housing, which we so desperately need. It is decimating our healthcare workforce, in the hospitality industry in every State of the Union.

We need a Homeland Security Secretary who will help us develop a sensible policy for folks who are here without status but have no criminal record, who work, who have families, and are taxpayers.

There is no restraint. There is no nuance. There is no judgment being applied by the Department leader, the Secretary of Homeland Security, to develop a policy that makes sense, a policy that balances security and our economy, a policy that makes a distinction between law-abiding people who know no country other than the United States of America versus criminals who should not be allowed to remain in the country.

And finally, I have significant concerns about Secretary Noem's fiscal mismanagement and self-aggrandizement as DHS Secretary. This fiscal issue is particularly important in light of the billions of dollars that were allocated to that Department in the recent legislation.

Secretary Noem awarded as much as $200 million for an ad campaign that she started, thanking President Trump for his immigration policy and warning migrants in the United States to leave, a campaign that was reportedly awarded to a Republican campaign consultant.

Secretary Noem spent $21 million to transport 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay--$55,500 per person.

Do we really need to spend that much?

And several of those migrants were quickly transferred out of the facility.

There are also too many instances of Secretary Noem putting her personal ambition ahead of her mission responsibility. She has posed for photos and videos using detained people as props. She has joined television interviews in various uniforms--as a Border Patrol agent. She has treated ICE raids as political theater.

And while in Vermont at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House--it is a library that sits directly on the Vermont-Canadian border--the Secretary jumped from one side of the line in the middle of the library and parroted terrible things about Canada; ``51st State''--and then she jumped back, ``United States''; ``51st State, United States.''

That was deeply offensive to Vermonters who have an enormous amount of affection for our Canadian neighbors, and we have suffered the consequences of dramatic downsizing of our tourism industry--totally unnecessary, totally provocative and wrong.

We have an obligation to protect the safety of the families that all of us represent, and I urge every one of my colleagues to demand better for our constituents and for every American. We need a Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security who puts public safety and preparedness before her personal image or political aspirations.

Secretary Noem must resign.

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