Pay Our Homeland Defenders Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. AMODEI of Nevada. Madam Speaker, Mr. Chairman, and Madam minority leader, well, here we are again. It is going to come as a surprise to nobody here that as the chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, I am rising in support of the 2026 Homeland Security appropriations bill. Later today, we will vote on the bill for a third time, and unfortunately it won't be the charm.

This shutdown should have never happened. The Committee negotiated a full bill on a bicameral, bipartisan basis, and then the goalposts got moved at the north end of the building.

Now our colleagues have taken the Department hostage over radical and unachievable policy demands which never would have made it into the original bill. This is a smokescreen for what we are really talking about here: stopping immigration enforcement--stopping immigration enforcement.

Most Americans support removing dangerous criminal aliens from our communities, stopping immigration enforcement. Most Americans support removing those who have final orders of removal instead of stopping immigration enforcement, but apparently there is a new priority on the other side of the aisle.

We are in day 40 of the shutdown with no apparent end in sight, and I find it interesting that we keep hearing about this wonderful discharge petition, which is H.R. 7481.

Well, I have read H.R. 7481, and if it was, as we like to say in the appropriations business, a clean bill, just funded those other ones, you know what, I think my distinguished colleague would have a good point. You know what is not in there--don't ask me why. I didn't draft it--no body-worn camera money. That was one of the things everybody agreed to, but it is not in H.R. 7481. By the way, this is an act of oversight whether you agree with it or not.

Madam Speaker, you know what is not in H.R. 7481, all sorts of the preexisting, previously agreed to oversight provisions. This is about stopping immigration enforcement.

How many of us would miss the paychecks that those folks at TSA have missed and still continue to work? Good question. Who knows what the answer to that is.

Over 400 TSA officers have quit since the beginning of the shutdown. I can't really blame them.

The Democrats' solution is to pick and choose which agencies at DHS get funded to ease the pain they created to alleviate their guilt for the hardship they have caused to our hardworking national security professionals.

No. The right call is to fund the entire Department. We can all vote to do that again today. The time to fund the Department of Homeland Security is now. That is not news to anybody. That is the position.

Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to do the right thing: Vote ``yes'' and end this shutdown.

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