Emergency Security Supplemental to Respond to January 6th Appropriations Act, 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, let me state the obvious: There is a big and growing problem in our country, and the American people are becoming more and more alarmed.

A recent poll found that 60 percent of Americans are worried about crime. The percentage of those who say they are extremely concerned is at the highest point in more than two decades.

And it is easy to see why. Even our former colleague from California, Senator Barbara Boxer, was recently assaulted and robbed in California. But cities across our country have experienced an alarming spike in violent crime and murder rates.

New York City has seen nearly double the number of shootings from 2019 to 2020. Nationwide, homicides are up 25 percent during that same period. That is the largest single-year increase since 1960.

Not only are the American people noticing these increases with growing alarm, they are eager to see solutions that help make things better by improving public safety.

A recent poll found that 90 percent of Detroit residents said they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer. That seems intuitive. It seems obvious but apparently not to everybody because this is the antithesis of the rhetoric we have heard over the past year, as many on the left have called to defund the police and reduce the role that law enforcement officers play in our lives.

A number of major cities took the recommendation of these activists and eliminated funding for their police departments.

New York City, Oakland, Baltimore, are among the many cities to cut police funding. Today, they are among those increasing police budgets to address rising crime rates that I think are directly related to the ``defund the police'' effort.

It is important to note that not all the leaders of our major cities are on board with this trend. Last summer, when I was in Dallas visiting my friend, Mayor Eric Johnson, it was on its way to recording the highest number of murders in 16 years. The city council cut the police department's overtime budget by $7 million. Mayor Johnson pushed back against these irresponsible cuts at the time when crime and domestic violence were already on the rise, and now he is pushing the city to hire 275 new police officers and increase officers' salaries.

The truth of the matter is, Texans, like other folks across the country, are concerned about the increasing crime in their communities. Leaders should want to focus on the needs of their constituents, but a small but loud group of liberal activists who want to reimagine law enforcement--whatever that means--apparently have prevailed on those who would like to see our communities safer.

Well, we are starting to see a response, really a boomerang, from these ``defund the police'' efforts. For example, take a look at the new Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. At this point last year, protesters marched in the streets of New York chanting ``defund the police.'' One year later, the presumed winner is a former NYPD captain who ran on a tough-on-crime platform.

As it turns out, practical solutions to real problems carry more weight than ideological warfare.

Here in the Senate, we are in the process of finding solutions to deliver tangible results. Our friend, Senator Tim Scott, is leading negotiations with our Democratic colleagues. And I know I am not alone in hoping we can take bipartisan action to restore trust and accountability in our police while at the same time having their back. But we have to remember that this crime surge is tied to far more than police departments.

Make no mistake, law enforcement plays a key role in stopping crime, but there is a lot more that can and should be done to prevent crime from happening in the first place. One factor we can't ignore is the crisis on our southern border. Despite the fact that we reached migration levels not seen in the previous two decades, the Biden administration has simply failed to provide law enforcement with the resources they need in order to secure our borders.

Border Patrol agents, who should be on the front lines of this crisis, are caring for children instead of stopping criminals and illegal drugs from coming across our border. They are changing diapers and supervising playtime.

Meanwhile, the drug cartels, that are very sophisticated, understand that when you take 40 percent of the Border Patrol off the border and have them processing unaccompanied children, that that is a prime opportunity to smuggle illicit drugs into the United States, which, unfortunately, contributed to the deaths of 93,000 Americans last year alone just in drug overdoses.

So when our Border Patrol is not adequately funded and resourced, or because of bad policy decisions diverted from their primary tasks, we don't know who is crossing the border and we are creating more risk for our communities across the country. The lack of personnel creates huge gaps; and make no mistake, the criminals and cartels know how to exploit those gaps.

In 2019, a 33-year-old Honduran national was arrested in North Carolina on rape and child sex offense charges. This man had been previously deported, but he illegally reentered the United States. After his arrest, the county jail refused to honor the detainer from ICE--Immigration and Customs Enforcement--and so the man was released. It took 2 months before ICE was finally able to arrest him.

But this type of story is not unique. We all remember the tragic murder of Kate Steinle in 2015. She and her father were walking along a pier in San Francisco when she was shot and killed. The man who killed her was an illegal immigrant who had been deported not once, not twice, but five times, and he had seven felony convictions.

Now, I want to be clear about one point. The actions of these criminals do not and should not reflect on the tens of millions of law- abiding immigrants, period. Any attempt to frame immigrants in general as a threat to our country is completely devoid of facts and detached from reality. But my point in sharing these stories is to show that there are devastating and dangerous consequences to an unfettered flow of people and drugs and other contraband across the southern border. We need to know exactly who and what is crossing our border, and this applies both to people and contraband.

Cartels and criminal organizations are paying very close attention to the state of our border security. They see when gaps are created by fewer officers on the front lines, and they are simply exploiting those gaps.

Fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana are pouring across our border at a growing rate. As I mentioned, there are consequences, with 93,000 Americans dying of drug overdoses last year alone. That is up 30 percent over the previous year.

And the experts tell us there is an association between substance abuse and crime. There are crimes involving the drug users themselves, both who steal to buy drugs as well as those who are under the influence of drugs when they commit their crimes. And we can't ignore the dangers drug dealers and traffickers create for our communities.

Last week, the police chief of the District of Columbia held a press conference to discuss crime increases in this city. He talked about the dangers of marijuana use, saying, ``I can tell you that marijuana is undoubtedly connected to violent crimes that we are seeing in our communities.'

He went on to say this creates a very dangerous ``situation, because those individuals get robbed, those individuals get shot, those individuals get involved in disputes all across our city.''

Those are his words, those are not mine.

But those dangers apply to any type of drug being moved and distributed by illegal channels, whether it is marijuana, heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, or anything else. We have a fundamental responsibility to stop criminals, stop the cartels, stop gang members, stop the drug dealers, and the host of unknown dangers from quietly slipping across our border and infiltrating our communities.

The Biden-Harris administration needs to take these responsibilities seriously. The Biden-Harris administration needs to take their responsibilities for public safety seriously. The only thing worse than the increase in crime and the growing concern among the public is the prospect of things actually getting worse.

If we are not stopping dangerous people and drugs at the border, or handicapping local police departments by defunding them, what do we expect to happen? Do we think there will actually be a positive outcome?

That is detached from reality, of course. The American people are overwhelmingly concerned about the increasing crime in America, and they deserve to have a government that prioritizes the safety of them and their families.

Concerns about crime are shared by both Republicans and Democrats. My friend, the mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson, who I mentioned a moment ago, had to fight with his own city council to get the police adequately funded. He is a proud Texas Democrat. So these are not partisan matters.

This is not the time to pull critical funding from our police or villainize officers or paint such a broad brush that the actions of one taint the reputation and our support for the rest of law-abiding and patriotic law enforcement officers.

This is not the time to relax our enforcement at the border or create even more opportunities for crime, cartels, and gangs to exploit our laws.

So crime in America is a very real problem, and the Biden administration needs to wake up and address this full range of contributing factors before the situation becomes even more dangerous in all of our communities across the States.

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