Homeland Security Improvement Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. RUTHERFORD. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Alabama for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, we have a crisis at the border. Finally, our colleagues across the aisle have recognized that this is not a manufactured crisis.

Just this month, over 800,000 illegal aliens have now crossed our southern border in 2019. That is two times more than crossed in all of 2018.

These numbers are at historic highs in large part due to our broken immigration system that incentivizes illegal crossings, and H.R. 2203 does nothing to fix it.

This bill does nothing to stop children from being used as pawns by traffickers to cross our border. This bill does nothing to support law enforcement officers, which as a lifelong enforcement officer myself, I take particular issue with. This bill does nothing to hire more immigration judges, which are desperately needed in order to decrease the growing and historic backlog of cases that we have now seen. This bill does nothing to alleviate the pressure on our detention facilities.

In fact, this bill will make these problems worse; worse, Mr. Speaker.

Requiring the release of all migrants after 72 hours in detention will incentivize even more people to cross our southern border, because they are guaranteed to be released into the interior of our country.

This bill negates the positive steps that President Trump has taken to secure our southern border.

A bipartisan majority in the House and Senate did not support these ideas before when we passed the border supplemental in June, and they will not support them now.

Instead of giving law enforcement the resources they need to keep our communities safe, House Democrats are tiptoeing around real solutions, and are more interested in obstructing our President than solving problems for the American public.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage my colleagues to vote ``no'' on H.R. 2203.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source