Immigration

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, there is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days: ``suicidal empathy.'' It is a term I have used myself on more than one occasion. It means, more or less, exactly what it sounds like: Tolerance, taken to its most extreme and destructive end.

This is not the classic Republican tolerance you find in the Federalist Papers or the writings of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It is a tolerance of anything and everything which overpowers all reason and undermines all distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, order and anarchy.

It is an attitude summed up by the famous slogan of the French student radicals in 1968: ``It is forbidden to forbid.''

That is what the phrase ``suicidal empathy'' is meant to describe. We open our borders and import millions of unvetted refugees because we can't bear to turn a single asylum seeker away. We empty out our prisons because we just can't stomach the thought of keeping anyone behind bars.

We let violent criminals off with a slap on the wrist because we see them as victims of socioeconomic conditions beyond their control. We turn a blind eye to rioters who loot, steal, and burn their way through our city streets because a riot is just the language of the unheard.

But as I watch what is happening in the cities like Minneapolis and I listen to the pundits and politicians on the left openly cheer on the agents of chaos, I am increasingly convinced that suicidal empathy is not the right description of the disease that inflicts our body politic today. I think that phrase is actually far too generous.

These radicals on the streets of Minneapolis and their comrades in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland are not driven by ``empathy'' in any meaningful sense of the term. These are not bleeding-heart humanitarians paralyzed by an overwhelming concern for the welfare of mankind--quite the opposite. Their sphere of moral concern is vanishingly small, and it is reserved exclusively for those who can be used as instruments for their political goals.

They don't care about what is just; they just care about what is useful. They wield the language of decency and compassion as a political weapon. If this was about empathy, they would have wept with the parents of Jocelyn Nungaray, the 12-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by two illegal aliens in 2024.

If this was about compassion, they would have mourned for the five young children of Rachel Morin, an American mother who was ambushed, raped, and murdered by an illegal alien on a hiking trail in Maryland in 2023.

If this was about justice, their hearts would have broken for the family of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was brutally murdered while out for a jog nearly 2 years ago this day, beaten and strangled to death by a Venezuelan illegal because she fought back when he tried to rape her.

The two illegal aliens who murdered Jocelyn had been stopped at the border, processed, and then simply released into the interior just weeks before. The illegal alien who murdered Rachel was a fugitive with a warrant out for his arrest for the murder of a different woman back home in El Salvador. He had been deported three times in that year alone, only to waltz back in across our open border.

The monster who murdered Laken had been illegally released into our country under the Biden administration's humanitarian parole program. He had been arrested in New York for endangering a child and released; arrested again for shoplifting and released again without citation.

Time and time again, the people in power in this country were given the chance to stop them as if God Himself was begging them to do something. Time and time again, they refused. And now, another American family will have to live the rest of their lives with the pain most of us cannot even begin to comprehend.

These are stories that most of the people on my side of the aisle know; American mothers and daughters whose memories we have the duty to keep alive. But most of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle won't even say their names.

We never read their stories in glossy front page cover essays or saw their names plastered across wall-to-wall coverage by the national press. When their families were honored by President Trump in his address to Congress last year, many Democrats refused to even applaud.

If the left does acknowledge their existence at all, it is only to accuse us of weaponizing their deaths, but their deaths are not a weapon; they are a fact, a bitter and unshakable reality, a stubborn reminder of the gruesome trail of American victims that mass immigration has left in its wake, and they are not alone.

For every Laken Riley, there are thousands of Americans whose names have never been spoken, whose stories have never been told, whose loved ones have suffered in silence.

There was the 14-year-old girl in Louisiana who was brutally raped at knifepoint by an illegal alien from Honduras and the man he stabbed in the face during an armed robbery just months after being released into the country by the Biden administration in 2023.

There was the 16-year-old cheerleader in a small town in Texas who was found dead in a bathtub by her own mother that same year, stabbed to death by an illegal alien from Mexico.

There was Travis Wolf, a 12-year-old boy from my home State of Missouri who was killed in 2024 by an illegal alien from Honduras who slammed into his family's car while driving drunk.

There was Kayla Hamilton, a 20-year-old autistic woman who was tied up, raped, and murdered in her own home in Maryland in July of 2022. Her murderer, a 16-year-old known MS-13 gang member, had been processed and released into the country despite his criminal record and gang ties. After he murdered Kayla, he left her on the floor, and he went to Target with his half-brother to spend the $6 he stole from her. Then because he was a minor, the Biden HHS proceeded to place him in a group home with other children and enrolled him in a local public high school without telling the high school that he was the prime suspect in that murder case.

Where were the angry protests on the streets for American daughters like Kayla? Where were the general strikes and school walkouts and tearful TV monologues for American sons like Travis? Where were CNN and MSNBC? Where were the New York Times and the Washington Post? Where were the armies of journalists and camera crews to tell their stories, to interview their grieving parents, to regale us all with stories about their kindness and their decency and their innocence?

Where were Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries? Where were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Where were the morally righteous speeches on the floors of Congress, the indignant press releases, the red carpet celebrity cameos? Where was the campaign to shut down the entire Federal Government on their behalf?

These questions answer themselves, so, you know what, spare me.

To the media, the pundits, and the talking heads, to the protesters on the streets and their political friends here in the halls of power, we know who you are. We know what you care about. It is not humanity or empathy or compassion; it is raw power. And we know what you do with that power, and we have seen what you do with that power. The empty chair at the Riley family dinner table is the cost of what we paid for your power, and it is our patriotic duty to ensure you never get close to power again.

Let me say this also to my friends and colleagues in my party: Don't give these people an inch. Don't fall for their moral blackmail. Don't let them negotiate or squirm their way into killing the President's mass deportation agenda. The American people support it. Don't let them talk you into believing that this is about justice. That is not what they care about.

Do you know what I care about? I care about Americans. I care about the people who are risking their lives in the freezing cold to enforce our laws, rather than the ones who are hell-bent on breaking it.

I care about the people who are trying to get these kinds of monsters who rape and murder our daughters out of our country, rather than the ones who want to put their bodies on the line to keep them here.

I care about the thousands of Federal agents who have been targets of malicious, coordinated, doxing campaigns that explicitly and intentionally are designed to put them and their loved ones in danger.

The ICE officer in Minnesota who opened his voicemail to hear a caller tell him:

I hope your wife dies. . . . I hope you get hit by a bus and you're paralyzed and your wife leaves you.

The FBI agent in Minneapolis who received a voicemail promising to kill him, his wife, and his daughter, stating ``I am coming for you. . . . [Y]ou, your wife, and your dead damn effing daughter are dead,'' after his personal information was stolen from a government vehicle last month.

The numerous ICE officers whose wives have received calls telling them that their families will be killed.

The ICE agent in Los Angeles who was followed home and doxed by stalkers who live-streamed his address and urged their followers to come to his house.

The DHS families in Portland whose names, addresses, and pictures of their children have been plastered on posters all around their neighborhood by antifa activists with ``NO PEACE FOR ICE'' in all capital letters.

I care about the Federal agents in Maine, Florida, Los Angeles, Portland, and countless other places who have been surrounded, boxed in, and run over by American protesters and illegal aliens alike seeking to use their cars as deadly weapons.

The ICE officer in Chicago who was severely injured after an illegal immigrant struck and dragged him behind his car in an attempt to escape arrest last year.

The agents who were fired upon by an antifa sniper at the ICE facility in Dallas, killing multiple people in the process.

The officers who were ambushed by an antifa terror cell armed to the teeth with semiautomatic rifles, Molotov cocktails, body armor, and encrypted radios in North Texas.

The cop who was struck in the neck and critically wounded while racing to respond.

I care about the pastor and his flock in St. Paul whose church was invaded by a screaming mob during Sunday service last month because they believed one of the pastors was a field director for ICE. The mob cursed, threatened, and terrorized not just the pastor but the young children in the congregation, screaming in the faces of crying children that their parents were Nazis who were going to burn in Hell. They blocked the stairs to the childcare area so that the parents couldn't reach their kids, and as parishioners tried to flee the chaos, they followed them into the parking lot, surrounded their cars, and attempted to trap families inside.

One child told his father:

Daddy, I thought you were going to die.

When the ringleader of this invasion was arrested, Mayor Jacob Frey called for her ``to be released immediately'' and said that it was a ``gross abuse of power'' that she had ever been arrested in the first place.

These are the kinds of people who want to lecture us about morality.

There is a war on immigration enforcement right now in our country. There is a war on the rule of law itself. It is the ``mobocratic spirit'' that Lincoln spoke of in 1838.

Some of the Democratic Party politicians in this city might want to pretend that is not what is going on here, but their friends on the streets out there are very clear about what is going on here.

This war is organized. It is coordinated and actively aided and abetted by local and State authorities across this country.

Since January 2025, there has been a 1,347-percent increase in assaults on ICE officers, a 3,200-percent increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000-percent increase in death threats against them and their families.

This is not the time to play defense or seek some kind of negotiated surrender; it is time to go on offense.

We have two goals: Deliver mass deportations and crush the violent, lawless campaign of leftwing sabotage that stands in our way.

That is why I am introducing the Protect America Act. This bill does four things:

First, it doubles the criminal penalty for assaulting Federal law enforcement, and for the first time, it makes it a Federal crime to ``inhibit, stymie, hamper, or interfere with'' Federal law enforcement operations. That means the people blowing whistles and erecting roadblocks on streets in Minneapolis, not just the ones who physically attack ICE and Border Patrol.

Second, it dismantles the corrupt NGOs that are funding and coordinating these attacks, enabling us to revoke the nonprofit status of organizations which incite or fund domestic violence against law enforcement.

Third, it turns illegal entry into a felony with mandatory detention--no more catch-and-release--and it establishes a 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for those who try to illegally reenter this country after they have been deported.

Finally, it ends sanctuary cities. Under this legislation, all Federal funds are conditioned upon full cooperation with ICE. If a city refuses to enforce America's laws, it has no right to another dime of American money.

It goes further too. It mandates full information sharing about illegal aliens in our prisons so we can deport them immediately upon release.

There are some States right now that refuse to provide this information--criminals being released in our streets as a political statement so they can't be deported.

It creates a private right of action so that Americans who are harmed by a removable alien in a sanctuary city can sue for damages.

It bans student visas in sanctuary jurisdictions. You do not get to continue profiting off of importing foreign students if you won't even deport the dangerous illegal aliens on your streets.

We are at a crossroads. We can surrender our country to mass migration or we can steel our spines, plant our feet, and fight to defend our home. I have made my choice. I urge my colleagues to make theirs.

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