Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, 2\1/2\ weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans--the House, the Senate, and the White House--agreed to reopen the government for 3 weeks to be able to continue negotiations on border security.

A very simple statement that was made by my Democratic colleagues was this: Reopen the government for 3 weeks. We will negotiate on border security and come to an agreement, but only if the government is open, and it would be limited to border security.

It was a pretty straightforward conversation.

President Trump said: We trust you on this.

We agreed to reopen the government for 3 weeks to focus on border security.

Now it appears that based on the negotiations that are happening right now in this building, this has become a Lucy-and-the-football- type negotiation because this doesn't seem to be about border security anymore.

My Democratic colleagues have said: Now we want to add one thing. We will vote for fencing at the border as long as you agree to defund a section of ICE.

The whole negotiation now is this: Yes, we will add border fencing, but you have to agree to defund ICE.

Here is the way that works. Their agreement is this: You will have to limit the number of people that ICE can detain.

Now, to our credit, this Congress has always allocated funding to say: Here is x amount of dollars for detention facilities and for bed space for ICE, knowing that if somebody is picked up at the border, when they are picked up at the border as they cross, the Border Patrol does not house them. They are not detained by Border Patrol. They are arrested by Border Patrol, and then they are turned over to ICE.

So the plan is not to allocate enough dollars for ICE detention but to create a new arbitrary cap for the number of people that ICE could actually detain, so that ICE could only hold x amount of people. That is what they want to get a negotiation--for the first time ever to have a maximum cap of the number of people that ICE could detain.

Why does that matter? One is to allow funding for it, and another one is to have a cap. A cap is very different, and my Democratic colleagues know it.

In real life, here is what it would look like. If ICE, at any point, already had the number they have in custody at that point and they arrest someone else, they would have to choose to release someone currently in detention before they could arrest someone and put them in detention.

Let me give an example.

Coyotes now try for any adult who is coming to try to have them bring a child with them because they know if a child travels with the adult, they are going to get a special lane into the country, as if they are coming as a family. They get their own fast lane into being released into the country.

If you have this ICE detainer cap, coyotes will know: Bring people in mass migration because ICE can't release enough people at once. So if you come as a thousand across the border or 500 across the border, they have to be released into the country because ICE can't quickly release 500 people from detention to add the new 500 people who are coming through.

My Democratic colleagues also know that it currently takes about 41 days for someone who is in detention to go through the whole process to get a hearing and get finished. This would accelerate the process of getting those people out and released into the country, rather than getting them through the actual hearing.

The better solution on this is to add judges and actually get people to go through the process and get due process faster, instead of releasing people into the country. Once someone crosses our border illegally and they are released into the country, the vast majority of those individuals never get deported because they either don't show up for the hearing at all or, when they do show up for the hearing and they are told, no, you can't legally stay, they disappear.

This cap negotiation that is going on right now is exactly the wrong direction to go. It is not about border security. It is about releasing people into the country.

Several years ago, there was a young lady named Sarah Root. She was in Iowa. It was graduation night from college, and she was hit by a drunk driver and killed. Sarah Root's loss drew the Nation's attention for a moment to the issue of not only drunk driving but illegal immigration, because the person that hit Sarah was illegally present in the country and had a blood alcohol level three times above the legal limit.

Local law enforcement, at that time under the Obama administration, asked ICE to detain them. ICE said they didn't meet the minimum qualification that had been set by the administration to detain them. So they released this person on bond. Sarah later died from her injuries, and they have never been able to find that guy again. He is gone. He is somewhere in the United States, or maybe he is running internationally. We don't know, but he is on our most wanted list instead of being held.

That was a decision made by a previous administration just on priorities. My Democratic colleagues are trying to force ICE to make those kinds of decisions every single day now--to determine who needs to be released and who needs to be kept based on an arbitrary cap that they want to put in on the maximum number of people that ICE can detain.

There is no State in the country that sets an arbitrary cap, other than the bed space that they have available. But this conversation is that we have enough bed space to hold someone, but you can't use that bed space because we want to limit the number of people that ICE can detain.

This is the current debate on border security. It is not about border security anymore. It is not about fencing anymore. It is now about giving ICE a maximum cap they can detain and, literally, forcing ICE to release people illegally present into the United States. That is not border security. That is the opposite of border security, and we should not go for a deal that puts a cap on ICE that is an arbitrary number.

I hope this administration rejects that. I hope we can finish negotiations. I hope the American people see this for what it is. This is no longer about border security. This is about trying to force this administration to release people into the country who are illegally present and prevent ICE from doing its job. Enough is enough on this. Let's allow the ICE folks to be able to do their job--they are Federal law enforcement--and not put a cap on them, saying: You can only enforce the law this far, and then after that, you cannot enforce the law anymore because we have an arbitrary cap. That needs to be rejected, and that is not a serious offer in negotiations.

The reason we don't already have a deal that is already done right now, with this body debating it, is that debate about capping ICE detentions got added into the conversation last weekend and blew up the whole negotiation.

This is not the White House blowing up negotiations. This is not Republicans blowing up negotiations. This is my Democratic colleagues saying they want a cap on ICE detentions and allowing coyotes to be able to rush large quantities at the border or forcing ICE to have to make difficult choices about which gang members they are going to release and which they are going to hold, literally getting a briefing every morning saying: We can't arrest anyone today because we don't have enough detention space, so today we have to look the other way.

That is an absurd proposal, and we should reject it.

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