Border Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, well, the American people are hurting. Inflation just hit another 30-year record high. Families are paying skyrocketing prices for everyday needs. The murder rate across the country just recorded its biggest jump ever.

But here is what the Biden administration has focused on: handing out six-figure and seven-figure payments to illegal immigrants.

A few years back, liberal interest groups started trying to sue the U.S. Government on behalf of illegal immigrants. They wanted American taxpayers to pay out legal damages because of the conditions some people faced as they tried to break into our country illegally.

As a legal matter, these lawsuits were borderline frivolous. Our government was all but certain to win the suits, but this administration wants to stand down and voluntarily pay out massive damages: ``The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family''--$1 million a family, about a half a million dollars per adult, and about a half a million dollars more per child.

American families are having to anxiously budget for gas and groceries, but President Biden wants to literally make millionaires out of people who have violated Federal law.

What could be more unfair and unjust to law-abiding, tax-paying American citizens?

And talk about yet another massive incentive for more and more people to come here illegally: On President Biden's watch, we have already seen an alltime high in illegal border crossings, combined with a decade low in arrests in the interior.

So Democrats have already created a major border crisis, and now they want to cut seven-figure checks to illegal border crossers?

Democrats are already trying to send monthly welfare payments to people who are here illegally. That is in the reckless taxing-and- spending spree they are putting together behind closed doors.

But who needs $300 a month when President Biden wants to send these folks $450,000 per person?

That is four and a half times the payment that the Department of Defense sends to the survivors of servicemembers who were killed in action. Fallen troops' families get $100,000 from the Pentagon. But the Biden administration wants to give illegal immigrants $450,000?

This is an especially extreme example of a big error that Democrats continue to make over and over again.

The left mistakenly thinks that a compassionate border means a weak border. They think compassion requires weakness--weak security, weak enforcement, weak on upholding the rule of law. And now, apparently, we are a cruel country unless we hand out a million dollars per family to illegal immigrants who sue America.

But the entire concept is dead wrong. It is not compassion to lure people from all over the world through dangerous journeys with the promise of open-borders socialism. In fact, the government paying out six-figure sums that multiply with every additional child in tow will only incentivize the riskiest and most dangerous kinds of illegal immigration. We will be guaranteeing that even more children are dragged along the dangerous journey.

Honestly, this absurd idea feels like a satirical policy proposal that Republicans would have invented to make a parody out of the radical left. Oh, and the next thing you know, they will be sending out million-dollar checks to illegal immigrants. But this is literally what the Biden administration wants to do, according to reports that they have not denied.

Out in the real world, American families already have enough reasons to worry about the administration's spending habits. The inflation kicked off by Democrats' springtime binge has wiped out wage gains and made family budgets even harder to square.

One recent report on soaring food prices included this quote from a shopper out in Indiana: ``You have to pick and choose. Before, you didn't have to do that. You could just go in and buy a week or two's worth of food. Now, I can barely buy one week's worth.''

That is a sobering reality that too many Americans are dealing with, and it isn't limited to the grocery store. Folks in my hometown of Louisville have seen gas prices jump a full dollar in the past year. Feeding a family is getting harder. Filling up the tank is getting harder. Even heating a home this winter is shaping up to be 30 percent more expensive than last year.

Even during a time of calm and prosperity, writing million-dollar checks to illegal immigrants would be an insult to American families, but it is 10 times more insulting at a time like this, when Democrats' policies are forcing so many households to tighten their belts.

These are the same Democrats who are putting finishing touches on yet another multimillion dollar--multitrillion dollar reckless taxing-and- spending spree. So in the days and weeks ahead, when the far left tries to sell America on historic inflationary spending, historic tax hikes, and more micromanaging of American life by politicians, just remember, these are the same politicians who have proposed giving millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to people who broke Federal law to enter our country.

The same people who think that is a great idea want license to transform our entire economy.

Look around. I am not sure how much more of this transformation American families can stomach.

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