Government Funding
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, my friend from Wyoming, my colleague on the Republican side, just gave a litany of accomplishments of the Trump administration. That is his view of the political world, and he is certainly entitled to it, but the vote results from last night show that America does not agree with what the Senator from Wyoming said. They are not happy with the MAGA movement and what it has brought to America. The results across the board were overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats last night. It doesn't square with the happy talk which we have heard on the floor about the achievements of the Trump administration.
In fact, in one candid moment, President Trump conceded that the shutdown cost him many votes in last night's election across the board, and he is right. The American people have come to understand what this government shutdown is all about. It is about their bottom line, their home budget, their healthcare, their insurance costs.
In my State--typical--people are seeing a doubling of their health insurance premiums as of January 1 and, in some parts of my State, tripling. In other parts of the country, it is even more. Why is this happening? Because of the big, beautiful, budget bill of the Trump administration. It eliminated the tax treatment that helped families pay for these health insurance premiums. As a consequence, their premiums are going through the roof.
What is that going to do to a family that has to make a choice--a choice that comes down to $200 or $300 a month more in health insurance premiums? Some will be able to afford it, I am sure, but others won't, and they will give up on their health insurance coverage. That is a terrible position for any family to be in.
It also creates problems when it comes to healthcare providers-- hospitals, clinics, doctors, and such. They are going to find themselves in a terrible situation when these same sick people, with no health insurance, come to the hospital. Sure, they will be treated--we do that in America--but they are going to end up incurring costs for that hospital that will not be reimbursed. What does that do for the rest of us with health insurance we can afford? We are going to end up paying more when it is all over.
You cannot ignore the health insurance problem in America, as the Republicans hope to do. That is what is driving this government shutdown, and it is time for it to come to an end.
I hope that President Trump, after last night's election results, will see clearly that he is being blamed, rightly, for this shutdown and that it has to come to an end and we have to move forward as a nation--the sooner the better.
The things that are happening across the board here are just indefensible. The President, yesterday, was weaving back and forth between saying he is going to pay all of the SNAP food benefits to hungry families in America and then saying he is going to cut them all off unless we ended the government shutdown--back and forth during the course of the day. It was hard to follow his position. I am still not sure where it ends.
But I worry that families desperate for assistance in paying for food, to put it on the table, are still not certain themselves. The food banks cannot take care of this problem. This program, the SNAP program, known as the Food Stamp Program, is critical to feeding America for over 40 million of our neighbors and friends. It is time to make it clear that the payments are going to be made--no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I hope the President makes that clear today. Operation Midway Blitz
Mr. President, on an unrelated topic, this coming weekend will mark 2 months since President Trump launched his so-called Operation Midway Blitz in my home State of Illinois. The Presiding Officer will remember what it is all about. The President was sending in ICE agents dressed in combat uniforms--with masks on their face and no identification as to who they work for--to arrest what they considered to be would-be robbers, terrorists, murderers, rapists, and the criminally insane who had come across our border in past years.
They set out to do that, but what has happened is exactly the opposite. Instead of taking dangerous people off the street, they are harassing and intimidating people who have no crimes in their background whatsoever. The stories just come tumbling in every single day.
The head of the Department of Homeland Security calls this ICE force her ``dream team.'' Let me tell you, this ``dream team'' has done things that are just unthinkable when it comes to the laws and Constitution of this country.
In those 2 months since the President started sending these workers in, he has achieved what I believe to be his true objective here: not to bring down violent crime but to spread fear in the hearts of our communities, especially our immigrant communities.
In these 2 months, we have seen people thrown to the ground and beaten. This is not speculation; it is videotaped. We have it.
We have seen children ripped from their beds in the middle of the night and zip-tied outside of an apartment complex on the South Shore Avenue of Chicago. And we have seen tear gas canisters deployed against pastors, journalists, and police.
Think about that. It has reached a point that the Federal court is entertaining depositions today from the leader of this effort, the so- called ``dream team'' ICE agents, trying to explain why their violence can be justified.
Innocent people have been caught up in this terror, not just the ``worst of the worst,'' as the President promised and his team has claimed, but American citizens, legal residents, and immigrants who have built their lives and raised their families here. They pose no threat to public safety, and yet they are the targets for these ICE agents.
I want to share a story of one of these people.
Three weeks ago, Omar Huerta Cisneros, a legal resident of the United States, a green card holder, was going for a walk in the South Side of Chicago when masked immigrant agents abruptly pulled him into a red car and drove away. Mr. Huerta Cisneros was detained and disappeared by the Trump administration simply for walking down the street as a Hispanic man.
What makes this case especially troubling, though, is what happened after they arrested him. Mr. Cisneros has a mental challenge. He is schizophrenic, and he lacks ``the mental capacity to reach out to anybody,'' according to his family.
His family only learned of his arrest after footage of the encounter was posted on social media. His family started searching desperately to find him in detention. Now, if this sounds like an extreme case, it is not. It is the usual custom. The ICE agents sweep people off the street, and they disappear sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, sometimes for even longer.
There is no way to check on their whereabouts. If you think that it sounds like something very unusual, if you have watched all the crime shows on TV on what a warrant for an arrest may be, what your arrest will be, what the Miranda warnings may be, this is totally unusual. The ICE agents are making it all up. They are ignoring the law and ignoring the Constitution.
In the behavior characteristics of the Trump administration, people find only silence when they asked what happened to that person just swept up off the street.
The family had to resort to pleading to the community and posting these missing person posters on social media to try to find Mr. Cisneros. This is the photograph that they were advertising, asking people: Have they seen this man? Can you help us find our member of our family?
They finally did find him, 2 weeks--2 weeks--after the masked Federal agents wrongfully arrested him. Where did they find him? On the streets of the suburbs of Chicago. Family members believed Federal agents just dropped him off, possibly a day after detaining him. But no one contacted the family, and they didn't know where he slept during this time away from home.
Unfortunately, Mr. Huerta Cisneros' case is not isolated. Donald Trump has turned Federal law enforcement officers into his own personal secret masked police force to engage in political theater at the expense of real lives. In that process, the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, including the right to due process and the rule of law, have been trampled.
ICE agents, this so-called ``dream team,'' believe they are above the law and not bound by the Constitution. We are on the slippery slope into authoritarianism. Don't believe me? Listen to the President's own words.
In a ``60 Minutes'' interview this week, he was asked about sending Active-Duty military into American cities. He responded: ``I can bring in the Army, the Marines, I could bring in whoever I want'' and that he could do so ``in a heartbeat'' and that ``no judge can even challenge me.''
He also said ICE raids ``haven't gone far enough.'' Tell that to Mr. Cisneros and his family and every other Illinoisan caught up in these cruel and chaotic raids.
To think that this man is a robber, a rapist, a terrorist, a murderer, criminally insane is just almost laughable if it wasn't such a sad situation exploiting this poor gentleman.
In the face of such ugliness, Chicago and the people who live there have shown up to stand up for one another. We saw it in Mr. Cisneros' case, neighbors helping neighbors trying to find this man who was disappeared by the ICE agents in Chicago.
Over the weekend, we had another example. On Halloween, I joined Governor Pritzker in asking the ICE agents to please lay off the families and kids who are out trick-or-treating. They are being terrorized already. There ought to be one night in the year when you give them a break. They refused. In fact, they mocked us that we would even ask for that.
And then came an incident in Evanston, IL, a suburb just north of Chicago. It was an incident which embarrassed a lot of people and worried them that we were moving to a police state, with the ICE agents going up and down the streets looking for people who were raking leaves, checking on each one of them, in terms of their background and their citizenship and their identity.
They swept up almost everybody who was out in the yard. At this time of year, everybody is out in the yard. That sort of thing really struck a chord in the city of Evanston. They responded, and I knew they would--a strong community.
Over the weekend, hundreds of donors lined the streets near Evanston Township High School to participate in a food drive for their neighbors. The turnout was so overwhelming that the police had to turn off the traffic light at an intersection to accommodate the line of cars waiting to drop off food.
While food was the main draw, Evanston organizers also handed out ``Know Your Rights'' cards and whistles along with the toiletries. Those whistles have been used by community members to warn others when ICE agents are in the area.
This is what an American community looks like: It is organizing to stand together to defend their neighbors. And while no community should have to resort to such extreme, Evanston and other communities across the country have been forced to do it, and they are willingly doing so.
For the first time in our Nation's history, the flow of Federal funds for the SNAP program was halted at the direction of President Donald Trump. To think, this President, in order to put political pressure on Congress, is going to cut off the food to disabled people, elderly people, and children is disgusting.
The Trump administration has the power to issue 100 percent of benefits to working families and kids who rely on this program, but the President and the Department of Agriculture are defying court orders and refusing to flip the switch on these emergency funds for circumstances just like this.
In one moment, the Department of Agriculture says they will send just 50 percent of the monthly benefits to SNAP. The next moment, the President says he will only send out SNAP benefits when the government reopens. When it comes to feeding 42 million Americans, our most vulnerable neighbors and friends, suddenly the Trump administration appears confused and, once again, in disarray.
Who in the world is in charge? But it has no problem remodeling the White House bathrooms with marble and gold, throwing a ``Great Gatsby'' Halloween party for the richest friends, and passing tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires or inviting Senate Republicans down for breakfast as Americans, many of them, struggle to pay for their own breakfast.
It is time for this administration to stop this chaos. Families across America deserve better. I hope that what happened in yesterday's election is a wake-up call that we need to sit down and end this government shutdown that was initiated by the Republican refusal to discuss the cost of health insurance.
We can do something to help Americans. If we can find $20 billion or $40 billion for Argentina, for God's sake, there has got to be money to help Americans pay their hospitalization premiums. I hope we get down to business today.
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