Stop Illegal Entry Act of 2025
Floor Speech
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 3486.
This bill is Republicans' latest attempt to scapegoat and fearmonger about immigrants. With President Trump's poll numbers tanking on immigration due to his kidnapping and disappearing of immigrants and U.S. citizens off our streets, House Republicans are, once again, looking to turn the conversation back to immigration and the border.
I will point out the absurdity of spending this valuable floor time on a bill that has harsh and ineffective mandatory minimums for immigrants while the majority effects one of the greatest coverups of our time, covering up the horrific abuses of Jeffrey Epstein and his network of child traffickers and sexual predators.
Why not spend our time focused on justice for the incredibly brave survivors who have spoken out against the rich and powerful men who abused them?
Why fight a bipartisan discharge petition from Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna to release all of the damned files, not just the ones that the Trump's DOJ allows to be released?
Why not speak out against the cushy deal that Ghislaine Maxwell just got from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to move to a cushy prison instead of serving her time as one of Epstein's main co-conspirators and groomers of young girls to be abused by Epstein and his cohort of rich and powerful men?
Obviously, once again, my colleagues across the aisle want to try to distract us by returning to their tried-and-true playbook of demonizing immigrants. That is not actually what the American people want. We have seen over and over again that the American people actually support immigration, despite all of the lies that come from the other side.
This summer, a Gallup poll noted a record high, 79 percent, of U.S. adults say that immigration is a good thing for the country. A Pew poll showed 64 percent of Americans disapprove of President Trump's suspension of most asylum applications, which was ruled unlawful in Federal court.
The American people now see that the Trump administration has continually lied about what they are going to do on immigration. According to a CBS poll, a majority of Americans believe that the Trump administration is not prioritizing the removal of dangerous criminals and public safety threats, and nearly 60 percent disapprove of how the Trump administration is using immigration detention facilities.
This is not surprising in the least. As the ranking member said, ICE's own data revealed that roughly 65 percent of people in immigration detention have zero criminal convictions--zero.
It is clear that this administration is not targeting the so-called worst of the worst, as President Trump claimed on the campaign trail. Instead, they are targeting everyone that they think they may be able to deport.
Tom Homan, the President's so-called border czar, said that arresting noncriminals is `` . . . our job.''
In Los Angeles, ICE has been racially profiling people, indiscriminately arresting and holding people, causing fear and terror in people of every legal status who simply look Latino or speak Spanish or congregate on certain corners.
Today's bill is just more of the same scapegoating and lying about immigrants. Once again, the majority implies that, somehow, we don't already have consequences for unlawful entry and reentry. That is absolutely false. Current law already includes harsh sentences and are some of the most prosecuted laws in our country every single year. This bill would add ridiculous mandatory minimum sentences, potentially going up to life, onto the crimes of unlawful entry and reentry.
Mr. Speaker, this makes no sense on multiple levels. If the administration is seeking to deport ``the worst of the worst,'' why put them into incarceration facilities? Perhaps this is just another ploy to give private, for-profit prison companies more money so that they can build more facilities, make more profit, and, ultimately, contribute more to the Republican campaign coffers.
In addition, as the ranking member said in his statement, mandatory minimums just do not work. We have actually seen this over and over again. Harsh enforcement is not the answer. I don't know why my colleagues are having such a hard time with this.
The first Trump administration actually tried to weaponize unlawful entry prosecutions by separating over 5,000 children from their parents. The entire country--Republican, Independent, and Democrat--was horrified at this, and the administration, ultimately, had to abandon their family separation policy.
Still, today, over 1,000 of these kids remain separated from their parents. Yet, despite this despicable, absurdly cruel policy, a 2018 study found zero--zero statistically significant relationship between the family separation policy and the number of apprehensions at the border.
These kinds of indiscriminate, harsh enforcement efforts are a waste of taxpayer dollars and detrimental to the kind of country that we are trying to create. The U.S. already has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, and it costs U.S. taxpayers about $182 billion every year, not to mention the social cost to lock up nearly 1 percent of the adult population. This bill would skyrocket that number.
Actually, it was during the first Trump term that Republicans joined Democrats in actually rolling back some mandatory minimum sentences in the First Step Act that was signed by--guess who--President Donald Trump himself in 2018. Yet, I guess all good policy is, once again, falling to the feet of the divisive political rhetoric around immigrants and crime that my colleagues across the aisle have embraced as their salvo to save them from the bleak economic picture that our country faces today: higher joblessness; Trumpflation; a host of reckless policies, including trade wars, that have cost the American people.
The Republican big, bad betrayal bill is unpopular everywhere in the country no matter how you spin it because Americans know that kicking 17 million Americans off of healthcare just so you can give a $7 trillion tax break to the wealthiest billionaire donors and giant corporations is outrageous, and the American people want us to roll it back.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, in just 19 days, government funding expires. Right now, Americans across the country face rural hospitals that are closing, higher prices for back-to-school supplies, and double-digit increases in healthcare premiums. What is the Republican majority spending their time on? This terrible bill.
What a giant abdication of the huge responsibility that the American people put on us here in Congress.
Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this bill.
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