Broader Options for Americans Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I join with many others who are praying for the families in Florida today as they grieve--an overwhelming grief that most parents would never contemplate--because they do not have the opportunity to take their kids to school today because their lives were taken yesterday. I continue to pray for, engage in, and help in any way that we can through this process.

I know so many of the schools in my State have taken active steps over the past many years to provide greater security in the schools, with lockdown access and other things that they have done intentionally to provide greater and greater security. There is no explanation for an individual who is a former student of a school to return to the school with a gun and with who knows what motivation.

So we will continue to pray, engage, and work with schools on security, as we have done from this body in the past, as well as to provide financial resources to help schools and their security systems, to help provide advice and counsel--to do what can be done. We will pray along with the families who struggle deeply, and we will walk with them through their incredible, inexplicable grief.

Mr. President, this is a week that has been set aside for the immigration debate, but today is the first day there has been any real immigration debate on the floor. It is Thursday. All week, this floor has sat mostly empty. For months, there has been the preparation to put immigration bills on the floor, but as of earlier this week, there had only been one bill that had actually been proposed--the President's bill--to be able to say: Here is a middle-ground position.

After months of negotiation and the White House meeting with everybody--both sides of the aisle from the House and the Senate--the White House laid out a proposal and said: Here is a middle ground. I would say that the White House has moved a tremendous amount in this and has dropped a tremendous number of issues. Over the course of the past several months, the White House has moved away from a lot of things.

First, it moved from legal status to saying: OK, let's do citizenship. It is not citizenship for just the 690,000 individuals who are currently in DACA, but the White House opened this up--and I agree--to 1.8 million individuals who are not only DACA students but to those who are also DACA-eligible, those who did not sign up for the process but who could have been eligible for it.

Interestingly enough, the President even moved from President Obama's position. President Obama's position for DACA was that you had to be in the country by 2007. President Trump has moved that and said he will be more open. You will have had to have been in the country by the time President Obama announced the program in 2012. That was a significant concession which has opened up the program for almost 1 million more individuals.

The trade-off was pretty straightforward. He had a long list of items to be able to provide border security--both interior enforcement and border security. Yet, over the past couple of months, the President has backed up and said OK. The Democrats have said they absolutely do not want any interior enforcement of any immigration laws added in any way, so the President backed up and said: Let's start with border security. We want to do interior enforcement in the days ahead, but let's start with border security. The President wanted to address the issue of sanctuary cities, but that is not addressed in this bill. He has dropped that. The President wanted to deal with asylum reform, but he has dropped that issue from his proposal. There is no conversation about refugees and changing how that structure would work. There is no conversation about the H visa programs. He has dropped a lot of issues that were important to the White House and has said: OK. We will deal with those on a different day. Let's limit the issues to this narrow group of four issues, and that is all we will deal with.

He dropped a lot of other issues for it. Border security, dealing with citizenship for those individuals who are in DACA or who are DACA- eligible, dealing with the issue of family migration and how that works together, and then dealing with the issue of the diversity lottery-- that is it. Everything else dropped away.

It is not comprehensive--it is small--but border security had very clear definitions. Border security is not just a wall. I have heard some individuals say, even on this floor today, that a wall will not accomplish anything. I would say the President agrees with that. A wall by itself doesn't accomplish anything. A wall is needed in some sections of the border to slow down illegal crossings, especially in urban areas, where there are urban areas on both sides of the border. It is needed in those areas, but a wall by itself doesn't accomplish anything. You can go around it, and you can go over it eventually. What you need are additional agents. What you need are additional enforcement authorities. What is needed is to be able to break down some of the legal loopholes.

Some proposals that have come out in the last few hours have said they want to strike a bipartisan compromise and say: OK, we will provide for wall funding, and we will allow for the large legalization and naturalization of individuals who are DACA and DACA-eligible. That is a fair trade-off, they say. The problem is when you read the fine print of what that means. I go back to the same statement: If they say a wall doesn't accomplish anything, and all they provide is really a wall and a few technical things around it, then the question remains, What is missing? What would make the difference?

What would make the difference are some very basic things to be able to close legal loopholes. That is what is in the President's proposal-- none of them onerous, none of them out of line. They are just dealing with the basic legal loopholes.

We all have to admit, when you see the records from the Department of Homeland Security and from Customs and Border Protection, that there are individuals who cross the border, both adults and unaccompanied minors, who are coached by coyotes as they move through Mexico: When you cross the border, here is what to say. If you say these things, then you will get access into the government.

They know that if they say certain phrases, they are in. I hate to say that is actually true, and it is unaddressed in any of these bipartisan compromises. I don't think it is unrealistic to say that if you go around one of the barriers or even through one of the gated entrances and cross through and immediately get caught by someone on the other side but say the magic phrases, you are in. We have to resolve that, and there are some basic ways to resolve it.

If you come in and have a credible claim of fear or a claim of asylum and cross the border and immediately speak those words, currently you are allowed into the country for 2 or 3 years while your trial goes through the process. Only about 30 percent of those are actually successful. That 30 percent number is significant.

What do we do to resolve it? Why don't we add additional judges and additional courts, and instead of waiting 3 years before you have that hearing, you have that hearing within 3 weeks? No evidence has changed in that time period. You are still allowed to have counsel, and you are still allowed to have insight. But we actually resolve it instead of allowing people to come into the country for 3 years and telling them ``Here is a court date and a court location to appear,'' and you do not know if they appear. In fact, the majority of them do not appear for their court dates, but they are somewhere, at a location unknown, in the country. It is not unreasonable to resolve this issue; yet it is unresolved in all of these bipartisan proposals.

There is no fix to deal with criminal aliens or those individuals who come into the country who are gang members. It is a small minority, but there are those individuals, and there seems to be no fix for those things at all.

There is no dealing with the issue of the hiring process for the Department of Homeland Security. If you are in remote areas on the northern border--there are requests to add additional compensation to some of these areas or to give additional benefits to some of these Customs and Border Protection folks because they work in very remote areas along the border. They ask for this year after year after year, and there is nothing addressed in the bipartisan agreement. It is just the wall and asking: Shouldn't that be enough? It is not.

There is no dealing with drugs like fentanyl and trying to interdict those in the border areas.

It doesn't provide any deterrence for the visa overstays. About 40 percent of the individuals who are illegally in this country right now came on a tourist visa or on some other kind of visa and just overstayed it. We have to resolve those issues as well. That seems to be an obvious issue.

There is no dealing with some of the basic statements. What do I mean by that? Under some of the bipartisan bills that are coming out, you prove yourself to be a DACA-eligible individual by your own verbal statement that you are eligible. No documentation is required. I think that is an obvious loophole. If you are DACA-eligible, even, in fact, under President Obama's proposal, you have to show documentation that you are DACA-eligible. Yet, in these new proposals, you don't. You just have to say that you are eligible, and suddenly you are eligible. That is a major problem.

The structure of how some of the bipartisan agreements have come out has also become a big issue for me because it doesn't really deal with just this 10-year. In one section of the bill, it says it is a 10-year path toward citizenship. I have no issue, if we can do border security, with having a 10-year path toward citizenship. It allows us to have 10 years to deal with the basic border security things. It gives certainty to those individuals who are in the country that they are headed toward citizenship. I have absolutely no problem with that, but the bipartisan agreement that has come out doesn't do that. In one section, it says a 10-year path to citizenship. In another section, it gives the recipients the opportunity to get legal permanent residency--green cards--much faster, which then moves them on to a much faster track. It is a little bit of a sleight of hand that we say 10 years in one part and in another part say that it is actually 5 to 7 years. Say what you mean. Don't try to say two different things and have two different paths.

I was also interested in a change that was slipped in at the very back of the bipartisan bill that makes an enormous change to the status of every single individual in the country. Let me just read this. It is being said that this bill is just about a wall and just about DACA, but let me read this section in the back of the bill: In carrying out immigration enforcement activities, the Secretary shall prioritize available immigration enforcement resources to aliens who have been convicted of a felony, a significant misdemeanor, three or more misdemeanor offenses, pose a threat to national security or public safety, or are unlawfully present in the United States, and--that is an important word in there, ``and''--they arrived in the United States after June 30, 2018.

Do you know what that says? That says the Department of Homeland Security can't go after anyone in the country illegally who arrives here before June 30, 2018. In other words, the race is on. If you can get into the country and across the border before June 30 of this year, you are in, and you have amnesty--for millions. That is not about DACA; that is every single individual in the country unlawfully present. If you are in the country unlawfully present before June 30 of this year, according to this bill, you are in until you commit a felony. As long as you don't do that, you will never have any enforcement of any type. I was stunned to see that slipped into the back of the bill.

This was dropped last night, and we still have the opportunity to go through it, but I am quite surprised at the number of people who have pushed back on the President and have either not read his proposal or have ignored what he put on the table. It is not an unreasonable proposal. It is a straightforward, commonsense proposal. I would encourage those folks who oppose it to read it first and to see what it actually says.

There has been pushback on the issue of chain migration or family reunification. Let me set this in context. Right now, we have a 20-year backlog for individuals coming into the country legally. That is an incentive not to do legal immigration because if you are going to wait in the line 20 years long, many are just not going to go through the process. Unless we reform how we do the family integration, once 2 million additional people are added to this in the 10-year time period, I have no question we will move from a 20-year backlog to a 25-year backlog as family members also reconnect with those individuals coming in. What happens at that point? A bad situation gets even worse in our immigration policy.

The issue of family reunification and the proposals that were laid out have not been partisan proposals in the past, but suddenly because President Trump put it out there, it is suddenly an unrealistic partisan proposal. May I remind everyone that this issue was also dealt with in the 2013 Gang of 8 bill that got around 70 votes in the Senate--this very similar issue of family reunification and how this would work. In 1995, during the Clinton administration, a proposal was made by Democratic House Member Barbara Jordan, leading the Commission on Immigration that made almost the exact same proposal in 1995.

This was just not a partisan issue until now. For some reason, because President Trump wants to propose it, it is an angry Republican issue. It has been a bipartisan, commonsense issue for a long time on how to deal with an obvious issue in our immigration reform.

I would encourage my colleagues to read the bill and see what is in it, not what is being said in the media about it. See what is really in it, and if there is a question and a dialogue about it, let's amend it. Let's go through it because it is a very unique and powerful opportunity to set it right for those individuals who are in the DACA and DACA-eligible population to finally not be in limbo but to finally have permanence and to know they are home in this country where most of them have grown up; that they are not just long-term guests, they are home.

This is the way to resolve this but at the same time do what Americans have cried for, for a long time--actually secure our borders and start the process of reforming our immigration system in a way that makes sense for everybody--for the immigrant, for the born citizen of the United States, for the naturalized citizen, and to make sure it is fair for everyone. That is not unreasonable. In fact, it is a good idea.

If it were only proposed by someone else, I think a lot of folks on both sides of the aisle would agree with it. Take the politics out of it and look at the policy. Let's resolve this for the country.

I yield back.

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