Providing for Consideration of H.R. Securing America's Future Act of 2018

Floor Speech

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Ms. PELOSI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding and for her leadership on America.

I had the privilege of traveling with her, under the leadership of our colleagues Juan Vargas and Susan Davis, to their districts earlier this week to see firsthand what was happening at the border.

So I come to the floor now with that fresh information. And I come to the floor as a mother of five children, grandmother of nine, who knows, as many of you here who are parents know and all of you here who are children know, the importance of the bond between parent and child and how breaking that bond is outside the circle of civilized human behavior.

Mr. Speaker, I want to quote a favorite President, I am sure of yours and many in this body, President Ronald Reagan.

In his final days of the Presidency, President Ronald Reagan said: ``And since this is the last speech that I will give as President''--my colleagues, I want you to hear this because this is about Ronald Reagan. Maybe you don't want to hear it. Okay. They don't want to hear it.

President Ronald Reagan said: ``And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love.''

President Reagan went on to say: ``Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world.''

President Reagan went on to say: ``For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond.''

These are the words of President Ronald Reagan in the final days of his Presidency as he said in the ``last speech that I will give as President.''

Beautiful values.

Today, we are considering two Republican bills that insult our Nation's values and tarnish our heritage, as the President said, ``as a beacon of freedom and opportunity.''

Both do absolutely nothing to solve the heartbreaking and horrific situation for children on the border. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, both bills ``perpetuate child detention and undermine existing protections relating to such detention.''

That is from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Both of these bills fail to provide a permanent legislative fix for our Dreamers, selling out their American Dream to build the President's obscene border wall.

Both are loaded full of every anti-immigrant provision imaginable, dismantling legal family immigration, slamming our doors to millions who have followed the rules and have been waiting for years for a visa, and cutting off the lifeline of asylum to countless vulnerable refugees.

In terms of those refugees, in testimony that was given at the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee meeting that the Democrats had--the Republicans didn't come--the National Association of Evangelicals testified that the United States Refugee Resettlement Program is the crown jewel of American humanitarianism.

And, yet, it is horrible what they do in these bills to cut off the lifeline of asylum to countless vulnerable refugees.

The Speaker's bill carries out the President's family deportation agenda. It paves the way for long-term incarceration of families in prison-like conditions and the denial of basic health and safety protections for children.

The Republican plan is a family incarceration plan. It replaces one form of child abuse with another, and it brazenly violates children's human rights. Why do Republicans think traumatized, terrified little children at the border do not deserve the same basic respect that their own children do?

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, family detention poses serious dangers to children's health and can result in ``lifelong consequences for educational achievement, economic productivity, health status, and longevity.''

Congress should be working day and night to protect vulnerable children. We should be working on legislation that protects Dreamers, keeps families together, and respects America's heritage as a land of newcomers, as spelled out by President Reagan in his last speech as President of the United States.

These bills will not go anywhere in the Senate. Yet, a vote for these bills is a vote to destroy the queen-of-the-hill discharge petition, destroying the best chance this Congress has to provide a bipartisan, permanent legislative fix for Dreamers.

Republicans need to walk away from these bills. They need to call on the President to rescind his family incarceration policy, which is as much a stain on our Nation's history as is his family separation policy, tearing children away from their parents.

Democrats reject this outrageous legislation and reject the Republicans' attack on Dreamers, vulnerable children, and families, and we reject your zero policy. It has no place.

I urge a ``no'' vote on both of these bills in this rule and any subsequent rules that come up.

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