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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, we are at an inflection point in this country, and what happens over the next few months will ring onward, far into the future.

We have all seen the scenes in Minneapolis--the riots, the violence, the bitter chaos. You have seen the headlines, the TV monologues, the nightly news reports, and the pundits' spin. If you weren't paying close attention, it might seem like all of this noise just exploded out of nowhere, a month or two ago.

But the story of what is happening in Minneapolis didn't begin last month. It didn't even begin last year when President Trump took office. It began on January 20, 2021, the day Joe Biden became President. The Biden administration did something that has no precedent in American history. They intentionally opened our border to a full-scale invasion and actively sought to block any attempt to fight back.

Millions upon millions of illegal aliens entered our country illegally, flooding in from some of the most violent places on Earth, in direct violation of constitutionally enacted immigration laws passed by multiple Congresses and signed by Presidents of both parties. It was the most egregious betrayal of Federal law in American history.

Trump ran and won on fixing this. It wasn't some minor footnote in his platform; it was one of the most fundamental defining policies of his 2024 campaign. If you went out in the street and grabbed 10 Americans at random in November of 2024 and asked them what Donald Trump was running on, just about every single one of them would give you the same exact answer: the economy and illegal immigration.

Here is the thing: He won. Donald Trump won. Let me repeat that for my Democratic colleagues. He won. He won the electoral college. He won the popular vote. He swept all the battleground States running on the promise to end the invasion and send the illegal immigrants back home. The promise was one of the key reasons the American people sent him back to the White House. That was democracy in action.

You know, we hear a lot of talk from the other side about democracy. Well, if democracy means anything at all, it means that this administration must be allowed to carry out the agenda the American people voted for--enforcing our immigration laws, securing the border, and deporting immigrants who are here illegally.

This is not a new concept, by the way. Democratic Presidents for the past 20 years have done this. But the other side never had any intention of letting this happen. President Trump moved forward with his agenda. They were never going to let us enforce our immigration laws against those who had broken them.

Why is that? Well, because mass migration is not just one policy preference among many of today's Democratic Party; it is the policy priority, the fundamental organizing principle of their entire agenda. It is the foundation of their platform and the final end of their world view.

Not one single Democrat has called on leftists in the streets to stop impeding law enforcement with their cars or to stop physically attacking law enforcement--not a single one. They have zero interest in lowering the temperature. At this point, it is so obvious, it almost feels silly to say.

In Minnesota and here in DC, Democrats are actively and intentionally adding fuel to the fire.

The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, has claimed his city is ``invaded, under siege, occupied.''

The Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan, declared that ``our neighbors are being disappeared. . . . It is just called kidnapping'' and publicly called upon Americans to ``put your body on the line'' and ``not go silently into the night.''

Governor Tim Walz compared the ICE presence in Minnesota to a Nazi occupation and likened residents of Minneapolis to Anne Frank. On Monday, Walz published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal declaring that the ``Trump administration's assault on Minnesota is a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state.'' Just last week, he stood behind the metal gates of the Governor's mansion with a bullhorn and told the crowd of protesters outside to go and cause ``trouble.''

These aren't unique examples; they are par for the course. Over the last month, we have heard similar things from just about every powerful Democrat in this country. I don't know what is in each and every one of their hearts. I don't know that. I don't know if they really believe that we are at war or that ICE is the Gestapo or that Minneapolis is under Nazi occupation. But whether or not they believe it, many of the people who hear them and are listening to them do. Now, many of those people are taking these ideas to their final, logical conclusion. That is exactly what the people in power on the left actually want. They want the confrontations. They want the chaos. They want their conscious political strategy. That is what this is, their conscious political strategy. They have decided that leaning in and ratcheting this up as far as it can go serves their political and ideological interests, so they are all in.

By the way, might I just point out that they are about ready to shut the government down again. They shut it down the first time because they wanted healthcare for illegal immigrants. Now they are willing to shut the government down, including FEMA funding and TSA funding, because they want to stop deportations of illegal immigrants. It is the single organizing principle of their party right now.

Think about that for a moment. Really sit with this. Think about what it says about the kinds of people we are dealing with at this point.

In a better era of American politics, we used to say things like: We all want what is best for the country; we just have different ideas about how to get there. When you hear statements like the ones that I just rattled off, it seems harder and harder to believe that right now.

These radicals are people who fundamentally do not believe America deserves to be a sovereign nation, a nation that gets to decide who comes here and for how long and when you have to leave. These radicals have opposed the efforts in Minnesota and across the country to take criminals off of our streets--criminals like Kou Lo Vang, a criminal illegal alien from Laos convicted of first-degree murder; Phuc Trong Nguyen, a criminal illegal alien from Vietnam convicted of possession of a weapon and rape; Pedro Ornelas, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico convicted of sexual assault and rape; Abdi Gelle Mohamed, a criminal illegal alien from Somalia convicted of sexual abuse of a minor. That is just a small sample of the last few weeks of arrests in Minnesota.

These radicals are people who will cynically wax poetic about democracy in one breath and then deploy organized mob violence as a weapon to undermine the express will of the people when democracy doesn't go their way.

My colleagues on the left are currently threatening to shut down our government, shut down the Department of Homeland Security, if they don't get their way.

What is their way?

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Mr. SCHMITT. No.

What is their way? They demand we defund law enforcement Agencies like ICE and CBP. They demand we force ICE agents to dox themselves so that their families can be harassed and threatened in their homes. They demand that we cripple Federal law enforcement's ability to enforce our immigration laws.

This is not about oversight; it is about paralysis. And the objective is mass amnesty, rewarding those who broke the law and punishing the men and women sworn to enforce it.

My colleagues on the left are smart enough to know about the trail of American victims that mass immigration has left in its wake, but they made a conscious decision to sneer and roll their eyes and pretend like it is all just a hysterical rightwing fantasy to advance their agenda.

What is really going on here? Well, it is a desperate and intentional thirst for power at all costs--padding their numbers by importing new voters and illegally adding people to the census rolls to distort congressional apportionment in the electoral college, even if Americans are less safe and it destroys our way of life in the process.

I want my Republican colleagues in particular to hear me on this. Nobody wants to see American citizens being shot and killed. On a basic human level, it is a tragedy. Every time a life is lost, it is a tragedy. The lives lost in Minnesota have been tragic.

But what we are seeing in the streets of Minnesota--it is not on ICE, it is not on the Border Patrol, and it is certainly not on President Trump. If it were, we would be seeing the same chaos in every city where ICE and Border Patrol carry out these operations, but we are not.

There have been large-scale deportation operations in red States all across the country. Most Americans probably never heard of them because they went off without a hitch. In fact, when we measure ICE arrests in each State last year against the State's share of the national illegal alien population, 21 out of the top 25 States are red. Only 3 blue States, plus Washington, DC, crack the top 26. One of those States was Virginia, which had a Republican Governor who was willing to work with ICE at the time.

A recent analysis found that just nine counties account for nearly two-thirds of all violent confrontations with ICE in America over the past year. The number of violent confrontations in those counties was twice as high as the total instances of anti-ICE violence from the remaining 3,134 counties combined. Anti-ICE violence was 590 times more likely to occur in those 9 counties than in any other county in America. All nine counties are deep-blue sanctuary jurisdictions run by Democrats.

We hear the left tell us that ICE and Border Patrol are agents of chaos and terror. The data tells a very different story. It is not ICE or Border Patrol that is causing this terror; it is the militant leftists and their enablers in the Democratic Party.

Yet, in the face of all of it, the agents of ICE and Border Patrol continue to do their job, courageously carrying out their duty and running towards the fire. They are not villains. They are American heroes. They are on the frontlines of the fight to save our country, and we owe them absolute, unequivocal, unflinching support.

I want to close by reading a message from a DHS agent on the ground in Minneapolis that was shared earlier this month. Here is what he wrote:

It is about negative 20 in Minneapolis right now. Negative 31 with wind chill.

I was leaving the building we are all holed up in. I think we've stacked close to 2,000 people in a building designed for 500.

I ran into a grunt officer who's been sent here from Miami. He clearly had just got back from an operation. Dude looked absolutely exhausted.

We talk a little [smack] about how bad the weather sucks, how tired everyone is from the op[eration] tempo.

We get outside, I ask him point blank how he feels about risking his life going up against arctic temperatures, criminals, rioters. . . . He stops, looks at me, and says ``doesn't matter. We do the job.'' Then he walks off and jumps in the car to get on ANOTHER target.

No less than 10 seconds later, one of the garage doors where teams are staging at opens, and about 15 [to] 25 guys roll out in full kit and hop in cars for a different target set.

Guys are risking it all in [minus] 40 temperatures to grab foreign invaders, getting attacked by the very same countrymen they are trying to protect, with an entire city mobilized against them.

They don't even think of stopping for one second. They don't eat, they barely sleep, they survive on nicotine and black coffee and the occasional MRE. Not one of the dozens if not hundreds of men I've talked to even thinks about quitting.

Everyone, even senior leadership, is out there right now. [The] equivalent of general officers are out there on the ground making arrests and fighting through protesters alongside their guys.

I've never seen commitment like this before. These men are genuine heroes. . . . They're putting it all on the line every second of every day. They know that the political winds can shift and that all the work and sacrifices and danger could be for nothing. They even know they'll probably face serious retribution for doing the right thing. But they don't care, they're still getting after it.

Please, keep these men [and women] in your prayers. They are a force of 20,000 going up against 20 million.

Mr. President, that is courage. That is heroism. It is a heroism that the cowards hiding behind their guarded mansion gates will never understand.

The ICE and Border Patrol agents are risking death every day. The small men who sneer and bark at them from the sidelines are not men of virtue but men who defy our rule of law.

The deportations must continue. Sanctuary cities must end. The era of fake deals is over. There will be no fake ``comprehensive immigration reform'' because a nation does not need new laws to enforce the ones it already has. President Trump demonstrated a basic truth of self- government: Law without enforcement is not law at all.

Congress criminalized illegal entry. The executive branch is obligated to enforce it. And that is exactly what will happen--the systematic removal of those who violated Federal law by entering this country illegally--no theatrics, no apologies, no amnesty, just enforcement.

So protest all you want, but let law enforcement do their jobs-- enforcing the immigration laws that Republicans and Democrats passed. Let our men and women in law enforcement get home safe to their families.

The only way out is through.

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Mr. SCHMITT. Will the Senator yield for a question?

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