Providing for Consideration of H.R. Secure the Border Act of Providing for Consideration of H.R. Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it is now after 4 o'clock in the afternoon. We were scheduled to be on the floor today around noon, but when I came to the floor prepared to debate this rule, we were told first to wait and then that the House would recess so the Republicans could go back behind closed doors to negotiate among themselves.

This is becoming a pattern in this Congress. For the second session week in a row, the Rules Committee met far into the night and reported out completely closed rules that allow no amendments on the floor.

Now, after Speaker McCarthy realized that he couldn't pass his own bill, he spent all day negotiating in secret to twist people's arms to get enough votes from his own party to get this bill or the rule passed on the floor.

No one has seen what is coming out of the backroom deal today and allegedly moving to the floor under this very rule.

This isn't how you run the people's House, although it is apparently how the new House majority runs the people's House--backroom deals that prioritize politics or policy over people.

Turning to the matters at hand, this rule moves two bills to the floor. The first bill is H.R. 2, although, as mentioned, we still don't know what the final version of that bill will be.

We should all be able to agree that immigration and border security present vast and complex issues. Despite my colleagues' pronouncements to the contrary, we all want a secure border that protects our national security, but we also need to address the realities of migration, the forces that are driving families, even young children, to flee their homes, and the serious workforce shortages confronting businesses in our country and elsewhere.

Given the complexities of these issues, they require comprehensive and nuanced solutions. H.R. 2 is neither. It is a great example of the old adage: For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, clear, and wrong.

During my legal career, I spent decades working on immigration cases and within our immigration system. I know it is underfunded and dysfunctional and has been for many years. We also know that American businesses, small and large, are asking for immigration reform so that they can hire the healthcare, agricultural, research, and food service workers they need.

Solving these issues is not simple, but I am extremely disappointed that my Republican colleagues want to create more chaos by bringing an extremist, cruel, and completely unworkable bill to the floor today.

The truth is, this isn't responsible or serious governance. Without any real proposal, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle resort to conspiracy theories, fact-free rhetoric, and political theater designed to stoke fear and chaos to distract from their lack of real solutions.

We have seen how the failed and inhumane immigration policies of the prior administration weakened our economy, undermined our moral standing in the world, inflicted unimaginable cruelty upon defenseless migrant children, and did not make us any safer.

However, Republican extremists want to take us back there again. Once more, they would rather fixate and waste American taxpayer dollars to build a wall that the experts, including Customs and Border Patrol, agree will not solve the issue.

I must call out the dishonesty of claiming that families seeking legal asylum are a source of the very real scourge of fentanyl and other dangerous drug trafficking. We know from Customs and Border Patrol data that over 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur at U.S. ports of entry in trucks or cargo ships, not in areas that a border wall might cover.

Despite this fact, the bill fails to provide needed resources at ports of entry to fight fentanyl smuggling where it is actually happening.

Just last month, House Republicans voted to cap nondefense discretionary funding, which, according to DHS, would result in the cutting of 2,400 Customs and Border Patrol officers and agents that do this work fighting the scourge of fentanyl.

How can we begin to craft measures to address either the fentanyl crisis or humanitarian issues at our border if our Republican colleagues insist on starting from a place of misplaced blame and misguided policies?

Additionally, this bill, or at least the most recent version of it that we have seen, enacts a nationwide E-Verify system without providing other reforms that give meaningful pathways for undocumented workers to legalize their status, which employers across this country are screaming for.

In doing so, this provision has the potential to wipe out half of our agricultural workforce, cause huge disruptions in our Nation's food system, allow a mass offshoring of jobs, and sink American farms from California to Pennsylvania and throughout States across the Nation.

This isn't the first Congress in which Republicans have tried to move forward on this E-Verify proposal. In every Congress, it faces opposition from the small business community, civil liberties groups, religious organizations, agricultural organizations and growers, privacy advocates, libertarian think tanks, and immigration reform groups because it fails to address our broken immigration system in a meaningful way. This time around is no different.

H.R. 2 also bans Department of Homeland Security funding for critical nonprofit and religious partners that provide shelter, food, legal assistance, and other aid to vulnerable immigrants.

That means a faith-based NGO that helps an Afghan refugee to find housing or gives support to a woman here on a U visa, a special status set aside for victims of crimes, will no longer get assistance to do that important work.

How can our Republican colleagues say this bill is only about border security when it clearly and cruelly rips resources away from those in the country legally, too?

When it comes to this bill, the immoral policies do not stop there. This legislation puts children in harm's way--the very ones the other side of the aisle claims they want to protect.

Children come or are brought to the U.S. because the conditions in their home countries are so horrific, whether due to poverty, violence, corruption, or climate change and how it is destroying their way of life.

This is a situation that has been building for decades, and H.R. 2 does nothing to address it.

During my legal career, I represented many of those children, those who were orphaned, those who were fleeing gang violence, starvation, or abuse.

If we really want to protect child victims of trafficking or children separated from their parents who arrive at our border, we don't limit their access to representation, as this bill does. We give them the tools to make the case that they are eligible to stay in this country, which a child simply cannot do unless they have a qualified attorney with them.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I have seen up close how important representation is to anyone trying to navigate our immigration system, but especially kids.

When our colleagues say they want to send unaccompanied children home to safety, they are turning a blind eye to reality. The reality for most of these kids is there is no safe home. Their parents are dead or otherwise unavailable, and country conditions are so dangerous that the journey to our border is a safer alternative.

This bill would expose children to the very harms and exploitation my Republican colleagues hollowly insist they want to prevent. In addition to limiting children's access to counsel, the bill allows them to be jailed. It guts the protections of the Flores settlement agreement, which has governed the conditions of children held in government custody for 26 years.

In doing so, the bill upends a carefully crafted system to minimize the detention of children due to the grave impact that it has on their physical and mental health. The evidence is clear: No amount of detention is safe for kids. Even a short period can cause long-term harm like psychological trauma and mental health risks.

Despite knowing this, my Republican colleagues wrote a bill that allows the long-term detention of minors who arrive in the U.S. and that jails kids and their families indefinitely.

I want to describe for a moment a tragic situation this bill creates. A mother and her child fleeing violence or starvation at home come to America in search of safety and legal asylum. When she finds the ports of entry are closed, which this bill would do, that mother takes her child and crosses between them. She then follows the rules and applies for asylum.

To be clear, she is not a risk for flight or violence. Even so, this bill requires that she and her young child could be jailed for what could be years if she is prosecuted for the misdemeanor of unlawful entry, a result that is prohibited by current law and the Flores litigation.

This legislation falsely states it is consistent with the Flores decision; although, it is clear that it is not, and that the Court has already ruled on that precise point.

If my colleagues want to come together and meaningfully work on immigration reform, it can't start from a place of cruelty against the most vulnerable. Instead, we need to recognize both the horrific conditions that cause migrants to flee their homes and the meaningful contributions that immigrants make to our country and, critically, we must provide functioning pathways for people to enter the U.S. lawfully.

Mr. Speaker, the second bill here is H.R. 1163. In addition to their misguided immigration plan, today House Republicans are bringing up a harmful bill that hinders antifraud programs, opens up new pathways to fraud in unemployment insurance programs, and opens workers up to surprise bills through no fault of their own.

My colleagues want to attack unemployment insurance, a benefit that helped millions of Americans stay afloat during the depths of the pandemic. Of course, it is important that we prevent fraud in our public programs and instances of fraud in unemployment insurance absolutely should be addressed and prosecuted.

In fact, just this morning, we learned that a Republican Member of this Chamber was indicted in New York on charges that, among other things, he allegedly stole public funds by fraudulently collecting pandemic unemployment benefits.

I hope all my colleagues agree that stealing public funds, especially during a global pandemic when so many working people lost their jobs and needed the support to keep their families healthy and fed, is unacceptable and absolutely should disqualify someone from serving in the United States Congress.

However, although my colleagues across the aisle claim that they want to fight fraud in unemployment insurance, their leadership continues to welcome the votes of this alleged fraudster in order to push a deeply unpopular and extremist agenda and they want to pass a bill that makes it harder to catch the kind of cross-State fraud that their colleague has allegedly committed by slashing $400 million in critical funding for Department of Labor antifraud programs.

It opens up opportunities for fraud in UI programs by halting the roll out of new identification verification systems and the legislation allows States to send surprise bills to workers for accidental overpayments of unemployment insurance benefits made during the pandemic.

These overpayments were made to workers who did nothing wrong and did not know they had been overpaid. These people spent their unemployment insurance on necessities like food for themselves and their children. They returned to work as soon as they could, but now Republicans, with this bill, want to send these working people a bill and punish them for an error that they didn't commit.

Ultimately, both of these proposals from my Republican colleagues are unserious and unworkable. They will wreak harm on America's economy, especially businesses unable to find workers to grow or even survive. They will wreak harm on working families, law-abiding immigrants, and terrified refugees who have the right to seek asylum at our borders.

These bills are political stunts to stir up extremist supporters, not serious solutions to complex problems, problems that require comprehensive and nuanced solutions. We are eager to work with responsible legislators from any party on an immigration bill that truly secures the border, protects Dreamers, and solves the workforce challenges we are seeing from farms to pharmacies. Such a bill would grow our economy, help our communities combat crime, and stem the flow of illegal drugs into our country.

We firmly believe that we can reach an agreement that secures our border and reforms our immigration system in a way that reflects fundamental American values, and we are ready to work on that now. We welcome assistance in that from the House majority.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I do find it a little hard to credit the expressions of concern for the migrants who are crossing our border when yet again, today, the Governor of Texas sent a busload of migrants from the border after announcing he was providing free transportation to them.

He refuses to tell the cities where they are headed, but the migrants are on their way. So as has occurred multiple times over the last year, people were dumped in Philadelphia at 6 o'clock in the morning. Thank God that the weather has turned because when they were dumping them on New Year's Eve, it was pretty darn cold. So please spare me the crocodile tears for the humanitarian concerns when you are not willing to help ease that process.

Leger Fernandez), a very distinguished member of the Rules Committee.

Ms. LEGER FERNANDEZ. Mr. Speaker, I have been at the border. I have seen the sadness and faint hope in the faces of the children seeking asylum. Imagine the desperation a mother must feel sending a child across a treacherous path to seek asylum in the United States.

It reminds me of another refugee, a mother who knew that if she did not send her child away, he would surely be killed. She placed her baby in a raft and sent him across the river.

It was the Nile River. The baby was Moses.

Mr. Speaker, the bill we are taking up today would take away important asylum paths for children. I call upon my colleagues to remember the story of Moses, to remember the humanity that must be a guiding principle for the United States in our asylum laws.

Our immigration system is surely broken. H.R. 2, though, does not fix it. Republicans, instead, are creating more chaos. Republicans are creating more chaos at the border. Chaos, not humanity, appears to be their guiding principle.

This bill destroys the asylum seekers, wrecks our agricultural economy, and fails to address the flow of fentanyl into our communities. H.R. 2 even punishes those heroic nonprofits who work to serve the vulnerable asylum seekers.

Mr. Speaker, in the Rules Committee early this morning, I presented amendments from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that would increase security, keep fentanyl and other deadly drugs off our streets, and protect military families.

Republicans voted against funding our fight against fentanyl. They refused any amendments to be heard on the floor today that we would have discussed last night.

Mr. Speaker, we do not have enough farmworkers to harvest our crops or in New Mexico to grow our world-renowned green chile. The provisions in this bill are bad for farmers, ranchers, and for our agricultural economy.

Instead of destroying our agricultural economy, let's pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. Instead of denying our students what they need, let's pass the American Dream and Promise Act.

These bipartisan bills would grow our economy. Let's work together to fix our immigration system.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I just have to push back a little bit on this idea that somehow immigrants coming to this country are taking advantage of our police and different parts of our society. I mean, the Cato Institute, of all places, has recently published a study that shows there is a net economic benefit for several generations when we have immigrants come to this country.

Of course, there is also the continuing inaccurate characterization of these folks coming here illegally when they are applying for asylum.

Mr. McGovern raised a few good points, but one in particular: We haven't seen the bill that we are allegedly supposed to be considering with this rule.

Last night, Mr. Norman, who just spoke, correctly criticized this closed process. He said, ``That's a problem going forward, a huge problem because that is not the process we think is fair to everyone.''

I would simply say to the gentleman that the process has only gotten worse. Reportedly, there will be an amendment offered to this rule that we haven't even seen yet. Although, I guess the fact is we may know why we had to delay the hearing until this point; so that your Member could return from New York.

I wonder when we are going to see the open and transparent process that some of our Rules Committee colleagues have spoken so much about.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I apologize to my colleagues across the aisle. I didn't realize that I needed to delay my remarks until the next round.

1163 would hinder efforts to tackle unemployment insurance fraud, delay payments, and undermine State efforts to modernize and protect the system from fraud.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to provide for consideration of a resolution which states that it is the House's responsibility to protect and preserve Social Security and Medicare for our future generations and reject any cuts to these essential programs.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, Social Security and Medicare are vital to many of our constituents' economic and health security. Many of my Republican friends across the aisle were calling for major cuts to these critical programs but recently some have changed their tune.

If they truly believe in a new position, I am offering my friends the opportunity to back it up with a vote in the people's House. This vote will give Members the opportunity to reassure Americans that the House won't eviscerate these foundational programs that our constituents rely upon.

Mr. Speaker, since the aftermath of World War II, the United States has championed its duty to uphold the international right to seek asylum by providing those fleeing persecution with safe haven here in America.

However, the Republican immigration plan in H.R. 2 and the rhetoric we have heard about it today does nothing more than sow chaos, anger, and fear about this important humanitarian system.

It puts the blame for our broken immigration system on the backs of families and children fleeing poverty and violence, instead of recognizing the complexity of the issues involving immigration and border security and blaming Congress for failing to address our broken system for decades.

It is clear that jailing families indefinitely or sending unaccompanied children back to dangerous and exploitive situations and refusing to provide working legal pathways to residents will not make us any safer; neither will wasting American taxpayer dollars to build a discredited and ineffective border wall, decimating our agricultural sector, or defunding trusted nonprofit organizations that provide support to immigrants.

These are not the comprehensive, multiprong solutions we need, the kind of solutions that Democrats have been imploring our Republican colleagues to come to the table on, solutions that secure our ports of entry, expand legal pathways, and address the root causes of migration.

A long and impactful history of immigration is at the heart of our American story. As such, we should meaningfully fix our immigration system so it works better and can continue making our county stronger. We shouldn't gut it or attempt to destroy it altogether. I want a better future than that for the United States and all of those who call it home.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose the previous question and the rule, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

A recorded vote was ordered.

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