American Dream and Promise Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia.

I can't help but to be struck here as I reflect on the markup that we had, as we have listened to the Rules debate earlier, plus this debate.

I can't help but be struck by the very notion of this is kind of what happens whenever you start moving the goalposts on what a law should be.

So under the Obama Administration, deferred action was provided for children who were brought into the country by a certain date and time, through no fault of their own, and that number was about 800,000 people applied for that.

Now, the estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of an additional 1 million who might have qualified who didn't file the requisite application. And now, this particular bill, as several of my colleagues across the aisle have said, will apply to anywhere from 2.2 to 2.7 million people.

You can see the number starts creeping as we go forward here, as we change laws, and we acknowledge certain ideas about what the law should be.

So this actually is not about DACA. We left DACA a long time ago. And, quite frankly, there is no age limit here. So even an alien who entered the U.S. illegally 30 or 40 years ago, could be granted a green card under this bill. So we see that it has other problems as well.

So then we start talking about gang members, and we say, Oh, yeah, no, no, this is really tough on gang members.

But in fact, the denial provision is written so narrowly that it will almost never exclude gang members. In fact, it actually prohibits the use of gang databases to establish gang participation in order to deny green cards to gang members.

You got that? You can't use gang databases.

And moreover, only the Secretary of Homeland Security--and he or she cannot delegate that authority to other officials--can provisionally deny an applicant.

And what makes this particularly intriguing is if there is a denial, we are charging a fee, so that free attorneys can be hired on to represent these gang members who are provisionally denied. So they can challenge the Secretary's determination, and that is done by a de novo review.

So this is a real problem. It is too narrowly crafted in this area. And there are some other areas--and some of my colleagues have talked about it--but ultimately, we get to the heart of this, and it is just this: There is a border crisis. This bill does nothing to stop that border crisis. It will do nothing to slow the number of people who are entering this country illegally. In fact, it will do just the opposite, because it provides an incentive.

People respond to incentives. I respond to incentives. You respond to incentives.

We also respond to deterrence. We remove deterrence here. Instead, we buttressed incentives.

And so we will have a year where we are going to apprehend about 1.2 million people, at the low end. We know that a year ago we were getting about half; we were apprehending about half the people.

And we know about 4 months ago, we were getting only about a third of the people. Now, we have no idea what the getaways are.

You can talk to border patrol agents, ICE agents--whoever you want to talk to down at the border--and they will tell you, ``we have no idea the numbers coming in because we are overwhelmed.''

When I was down in Yuma, the Yuma facility is designed for 250 people. A month and a half ago, it held 750 people in inhumane conditions.

No question. Inhumane conditions.

Today, that number is over 1,000, going through that same facility. That is inhumane.

And so we are just releasing them. We are releasing them, and we are saying, Come back in a couple of years.

And you know what? We have got a million people who have absconded from their court dates. We have got another million people with active removal orders.

You think this is going to serve this problem long-term? I am sad to tell you, it won't.

You are going to see more people come because you have got the incentives in place. And they are not just coming from Mexico or the Northern Triangle. They are coming from Venezuela; they are coming from Cuba; they are coming from Africa; they are coming from China.

They are coming from all over the world today. And they are coming because they know that we have no place for them. They will be released into the interior, and we will continue to be overwhelmed.

This bill will contribute to that problem.

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