Secure America Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. BALINT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the Republican reconciliation bill.

While American families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, and groceries, Republicans are proposing to spend more than $150 billion on immigration enforcement, roughly $59 billion for detention and deportation operations.

Working families right now can't afford a doctor's visit, and Republicans are worried about multiplying our budget for detention facilities--not lowering healthcare costs, not giving relief to families who are struggling with obscenely high insurance premiums, but instead giving even more money to ICE and Border Patrol.

This bill says that while American families pay nearly $27,000 a year for health insurance costs, Congress should prioritize spending even more on ICE detention beds. Healthcare costs are rising faster than wages for many Americans, and this is what we are focused on? It is incredibly screwed up.

This administration wants you to believe that people who don't look like you or don't sound like you are the source of your financial struggles. Trump and his allies do this so you don't see that their policies benefit billionaires and greedy corporations that have hollowed out the middle class in this country. Don't believe them, not for a minute.

We should be lowering healthcare costs. We should be investing in the working families in our communities across this country.

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Ms. BALINT. Mr. Speaker, we should be lowering costs and investing in the working families and communities across this country, not weaponizing our government to go after the most vulnerable.

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