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Floor Speech
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Mr. MORENO. Mr. President, today marks the fifth time that Republicans have asked to end debate and allow us to discuss funding the Department of Homeland Security.
So for the people at home that don't keep up with Senate procedures, what the Democrats have actually done again, for the fifth time, is not even let us get on the bill and actually debate it. They have refused to allow us to consider the bill, which is a pretty remarkable scenario when you think of the effects.
For those who aren't as familiar, the Department of Homeland Security was created right after 9/11, the attacks of 9/11. I don't know about you, Mr. President, but I know exactly where I was when that second plane hit the tower, because that is when we knew we were under attack.
We took a bunch of the Agencies that are charged with protecting this country and put them into this very, very large Agency that today employs 260,000 Americans. If this was a private company, it would be absolutely a Fortune 50, maybe even a Fortune 25 enterprise--huge, huge organization.
The one part of the Constitution that is crystal clear is that our responsibility is to fund the government. Yet, for the third time, we now are in either a full or partial government shutdown that the Democrats have initiated because they refuse to do the basic work-- funding the government.
Now, you will see a lot of noise from the Democrats when they say: Well, we have--they acknowledge that they have not funded the entire Department, so they will say: But we want to fund this Agency or this Agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
What they won't tell you--because obviously then they would have to admit what it is they really want--is they don't want to fund Customs and Border Patrol and they don't want to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
So you think, well, what do those two Agencies do that would make the Democrats not want to fund them? So let's talk about the first one-- Customs and Border Patrol.
All of us who have ever flown in from a foreign country, you see the person that greets you--that is somebody from Border Patrol, Customs.
Why would you not want to fund that Agency? I think what is interesting is the way the Senate is set up, the appropriations process is meant to allocate money, and then we have committees whose job it is to set the policies for those. But they don't want to do that. They are tying both together. We just don't want to fund--typically, when you don't want to fund an Agency, it is a way of saying we don't want that function any longer.
So they don't want to have Customs? They don't want to have people inspecting packages? We are in the middle of deep hostilities with a very savvy adversary, and you don't want to have somebody guarding our border, checking our ports, making sure these containers don't have hazardous materials?
We have all seen the movies. Those are people from Customs and Border Patrol. I haven't heard one rational explanation from my Democratic colleagues why on earth they would not want to fund Customs and Border Patrol.
Now, of course, it is no secret to anybody that the Democrats have been held hostage by the extremists in their base who want to both either abolish ICE or defund ICE.
So what is ICE? Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is basically broken down into two organizations. You have something called Enforcement and Removal Operations. Now, what do they do? A pretty straightforward mission. If somebody enters the country illegally, a judge gives them a hearing and says: You have a final order of deportation. It is the job of that Agency to remove that person from the country. Is that what they are looking not to have happen any longer?
Then the other one is Homeland Security Investigations. What do they do? I am going to read you the mission statement. It says: Criminal investigations targeting transnational criminal organizations and terrorist networks that exploit U.S. customs and immigration laws.
It seems like a decently important function. You can see it here on this chart. It is 7,000 special agents.
So I wish we would just have a more honest debate here and that my Democrat colleagues would stand up and say: Look, we just want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We want to abolish the Enforcement and Removal Operations. We do not want--they do not want to take people out of the country that are here illegally; it is that simple. Instead, what they are doing is they are keeping 260,000 people without a paycheck.
I said, and I will say it again today: I find it deeply ironic and, quite frankly, I will use the word ``disgusting'' that we here in the U.S. Senate are getting paid while 260,000 people aren't getting paid because of political shenanigans from the other side.
It is just morally reprehensible. We need to do our job. We need to get the Department of Homeland Security funded. I am going to end with one difference between what we are seeing now and what we saw during the Biden era.
I think by any metric, by any standard during Mayorkas' term as the Secretary of Homeland Security, it was a total abject disaster. We allowed tens of millions of unvetted migrants to enter this country. We had no idea who they were, where they came from, what their intent was, or, quite frankly, where they were going.
Border Patrol was a total disaster during the Biden years, total and complete failure. But you know what we understood as Republicans? It wasn't the fault of the Border Patrol agents; it was a fault of policy. And yet Republicans still funded the Agency.
Because when we are not happy with the executive, we have a few other tools that we should be using. We could have impeached Mayorkas; Democrats unanimously fought against that. By the way, we passed no new laws, and yet our border went from the most open in American history to a border that is now completely zero. Zero illegals entered this country in the last 10 months--zero, not 1. During the Biden years, there was 10,000 a day. Yet Republicans funded Customs and Border Patrol because we knew it was not the fault of the agents; it was the fault of a Commander in Chief and a Cabinet Secretary with Democrat enablers here in Congress that allowed that to happen. Just keep that in mind as these arguments get made.
It is Friday. People should be thinking about March Madness and which their favorite team is, what they are going to do for the weekend, and millions and millions of Americans are doing that. But 260,000 American families are wondering how they are going to pay for that barbecue, how they are going to make the rent, how they are going to pay for the car payment, how are they going to pay for that vacation that they had planned because they have now missed three paychecks.
I hope to get to a point in time where our Democrat colleagues find their humanity because this is what it is about, their humanity, to do the right thing, fund the Department of Homeland Security, and then let's have a robust argument around oversight and how we do it.
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Mr. MORENO. Thank you. Thank you.
Are all of your Democrat colleagues here, because, by our count, there are nine missing.
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Mr. MORENO. So we are willing to call our Members back. Are you willing to call your Members back from the California fundraiser that they are doing this weekend?
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Mr. MORENO. Will you yield for another question?
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