Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 6

Floor Speech

Senator Durbin has done remarkable work for years advocating on the issue of immigration, and he knows exceptionally well what a difficult issue this is. He has been involved in countless debates and negotiations dealing with this issue, and there is certainly not 100 percent agreement on a House bill that passed in 2019 on how to solve immigration.

So it is not going to pass. I certainly will object in a moment to this

This bill far exceeds just dealing with DACA. As this body knows very well, there were four separate votes dealing with immigration in February of 2018. At that time, three of those dealt with the issue of DACA, and none of those actually were able to get 60 votes to be able to pass.

The Trump administration was very engaged in those negotiations, and the White House itself brought a proposal to deal with DACA and multiple other issues with immigration. It failed to get 60 votes to move it in 2018, and the Court at that time swooped it up and said they wanted to be able to look at it.

Now 2 years later, the Court finally responded, putting it back into the administration's hands and, quite frankly, back into Congress's hands.

I will tell you, I wish the Court had not engaged in 2018 because there was a lot of engagement from the Trump administration, from the Senate, and from the House to be able to come to a point of resolution, but that has to begin again with bipartisan negotiations through a very complicated issue.

President Trump has stated numerous times in public interviews and in private conversations that he wants to do something to take care of those kids in DACA, but that is not what this particular bill does. This particular bill far exceeds just the DACA population. In fact, the DACA population is defined as the group that was 16 years old and in the United States before June 15, 2017. This bill deals with 18-year- olds in the United States just 4 years ago and before, greatly increasing the population in the conversation. So this is not just a DACA conversation; this is a much larger bill than just a DACA bill in that sense.

While I do agree we do need to continue bipartisan conversations--and President Trump has expressed a desire to engage in that--I think this is something the White House, the House, and the Senate should work out and not try to have all 100 Senators agree on something that comes to the floor today that has not gone through the proper debate and does not have all three bodies engaged in the process.

With that, I would object.

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