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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, just over a year ago, Los Angeles County fell victim to the worst natural disaster in my lifetime. The Eaton and Palisade fires were unthinkable tragedies--lives taken; livelihoods incinerated; old photographs, family heirlooms, childhood homes gone forever; the homes of more constituents, friends, staff gone, along with the place where my wife and I got married; whole blocks of neighborhoods razed with indiscriminate and random destruction.

In the year since, alongside Senator Padilla, I have worked to help the families impacted by these fires in every way I can. I visited recovery efforts in the earliest days of the fires, meeting with survivors and lending a hand where I could to help families grieving what these fires took from them.

My team and I have facilitated Federal, State, and local connections for these communities, trying to ensure they have the resources they need to recover. I have introduced legislation to help families better protect their homes in the future and to bring down insurance rates.

But so much work remains. It has been more than a year since the fires, and Congress has yet to move forward on much needed Federal disaster aid for L.A. County. We have urged the President to act. We have called on Congress to act--just as we have with fires, hurricanes, and floods of the past in States red and blue--to pass a supplemental that gives us a fighting chance at building stronger than before.

Yet, for the first time, disaster relief is being apportioned not on the basis of need but on the basis of political affiliation, as if these fires discriminate between homes that voted for the President and those that did not. We have called on the President and this Congress to drop discrimination against California or other States based on no more than its political leanings, and we continue that call today.

But the lack of disaster aid for California and other States is not the only place where this Congress is failing to meet the needs of the American people. Right now, the very Federal Agency we call upon to facilitate disaster recovery, FEMA, is shut down. The Agency whose job it is to provide financial assistance to families and aid the recovery process until houses can be rebuilt and families can move back into their homes has no money from Congress to operate. As a result, this critical Agency, already understaffed, has an even more diminished capacity to help do these critical jobs.

This has gone on for weeks and is unacceptable, and that is what we are here today to change. With this legislation, we can reopen FEMA today. We can give paychecks to the people whose job it is to get Los Angeles and communities across the country back on their feet. We can remove unnecessary slowdowns in the approval processes, in recovery applications, because of the lack of staffing. We can put ourselves on a pathway to finally passing a disaster aid package.

Now, this is not the first time we have tried to reopen FEMA. Senate Democrats have tried to call up and pass legislation to open this Agency multiple times in recent weeks, but we have been told no. And why? Because my colleagues across the aisle continue to insist that this Agency and others--like TSA, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Coast Guard--cannot reopen until we pass another multibillion-dollar infusion of resources for ICE and CBP.

Senate Democrats have been clear: not another dime for these immigration enforcement Agencies until we see real reforms, until they take off the masks and put on the body cams, until they are held to the same standard as the neighborhood cop on the beat, until their standard of ``no judicial warrant, no problem'' is torn out of the training manual. That is not too much to ask.

In the aftermath of Americans watching DHS storming city apartment buildings like they were behind enemy lines or ICE dragging citizens from their homes or CBP gunning down Americans in cold blood in the street, this cannot be too much to ask. We are seeing families torn apart, citizens detained without medical care, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, children detained because of the color of their skin or the language they speak or where they work. We have seen DHS spending $140 million on assault weapons, Glocks, and tasers and countless more on building massive new detention centers.

So we are insisting on reform. We reject the false choice the majority would give us that we cannot reform ICE until we agree to give ICE billions more. These cannot be the only two choices.

Let's pass this commonsense bill and reopen FEMA today. Let's get disaster recovery efforts moving forward. We can do both. We can help Californians in need and others across the country.

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