Providing for Consideration of H.R. 5230, Secure the Southwest Border Act of 2014; Providing for Consideration of H.R. 5272, Prohibitions Relating to Deferred Action for Aliens; and Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendment to H.R. 5021, Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2014; and For Other Purposes
Floor Speech
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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I want to address the underlying rule, and I appreciate the gentleman from Maryland's efforts to get clarity as to what is in this rule.
As you know, Mr. Speaker, we saw this rule for the first time late last night. We saw the bill for the first time late last night. I believe the underlying bill was dropped shortly after 8 p.m., and Rules Committee convened after 10 p.m.
We are still in the process of trying to understand what is in this rule and this bill. I know that there are legitimate questions with regard to how it changes the rules of our entire House of Representatives, as well as what this bill actually does.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to both the process of the rule and the underlying bill. The bill, of course, prohibits certain actions with respect to deferred actions for people who are already in our country.
This provision was added at the last minute in the midnight hour to restrict the deferred action for the childhood arrivals program, which is a form of prosecutorial discretion, which is used by all prosecutorial and administrative agencies.
When you have a situation where 10 or 11 or 12 million people have illegal presence in our country, clearly, with our limited enforcement resources, we need to have prosecutorial discretion and priorities. Whom should we be going after and in what form, given that it is not possible with the limited resources they have, to in any way address the entire issue?
Mr. Speaker, I would like to think that it makes perfect sense, with regards to the deferred action program, that we focus our limited enforcement resources on criminal aliens. Those are people who, in addition to having unlawful presence here, have committed some kind of crime. It might have been a DUI. It might have been an assault.
We need to focus on promptly bringing people who have committed crimes to justice and deporting them under our laws. So whom does it make sense to not focus on, given our prosecutorial discretion?
I think the deferred action program is a perfect example, and this bill, in our understanding, even recognizes that, that many of the people that grew up in our country, that know no other country, that came when they were 2 or 3, that were cheerleaders or high school football players and know no other country than the United States of America and owe their loyalty to us, of course, should not be the enforcement priority of laws that are broken until we can fix our immigration system.
It makes sense that the President work--any President, Democrat or Republican--to identify additional groups that we can use with our prosecutorial discretion and offer some kind of deferred action to, so that we can further focus our limited enforcement resources on those who would do us harm or represent a threat to our safety or our economy.
If there is a way, for instance, to include the parents of American children who are here unlawfully and are not violating any criminal laws of our country, it would make sense that their enforcement should come after those who have committed criminal violations in our country. That is a customary aspect of prosecutorial discretion ranging from any DA to the Attorney General to the President of the United States.
Mr. Speaker, under the language of this bill, it would further restrict the ability of the President to focus our limited enforcement resources on criminal aliens who would do us harm, reducing the security of the American people.
Now, we all know the real answer here is to replace our broken immigration system with one that works. The answer is not to have 10 million, 12 million, who knows how many million people here illegally and just focus on which group we can actually enforce the law on. We need to have a law that we can enforce universally.
There should not be people that are here illegally in our country. We need to secure our borders, we need to reunite American families, and we need to grow our economy. Later on today, if we defeat the previous question, Mr. Garcia will offer a bipartisan bill that will do just that.
Instead of even allowing amendments on these controversial bills, including amendments that are extremely commonsense, we have a closed process that, as Mr. Van Hollen pointed out, changes the very rules of the House, in the name of preventing the President from focusing on deporting criminal aliens.
Look, Republicans and Democrats alike acknowledge that there is a crisis on our southern border. Unaccompanied minors are fleeing from El Salvador,
Honduras, and Guatemala, fleeing horrific situations. I had the opportunity to visit the border the weekend before last, along with many of my colleagues, and got to speak to some of the kids, as well as the Customs and Border Patrol and HHS officials, and hear some of those stories firsthand.
We had this discussion yesterday in Rules Committee. Action means a bill passing the House, a bill passing the Senate, and the President signing it. Instead of taking action to address the crisis on our southern border, the House is considering a House-only bill that the President has said he would veto, that the Senate won't likely even bring up, and then promptly going home for a 1-month vacation. We wonder why Congress has a 12 percent approval rating.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The House Republican proposal includes a provision that would roll back our bipartisan antihuman trafficking protections that have been in place for 20 years and that were most recently reaffirmed unanimously by Congress in 2008. This is a debate to maintain our due process laws under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which this bill strips, that help promote the safety of unaccompanied minors.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, 58 percent of children fleeing to the U.S. from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico may have valid claims to asylum or other legal protections. Our existing laws ensure that these children receive due process. Many of them are victims of human trafficking, of sexual violence, or of other persecution, and they need to have the meaningful opportunity under a law to present their protection claims before an immigration judge. The underlying bill would, according to the UNHCR, drastically weaken the due process protections by subjecting Central American children to an inadequate screening process.
We have had our additional speaker arrive to offer our PQ, Mr. Speaker; and if the House had taken up the Senate immigration reform bill, the current influx of migrant children from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala may never have even become the humanitarian crisis that is facing us today. That is why today, Mr. Speaker, I am proud to give the House a second chance.
If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up H.R. 15, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, so the House can finally vote on a broad, long-term solution to overhaul our country's immigration system and to address the border crisis. At the same time, it addresses the systemic causes rather than simply trying to apply Band-Aid, after Band-Aid, after Band-Aid. The House will soon find there are not enough Band-Aids made. We need to address the health of the patient.
To discuss our proposal, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Garcia).
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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.
In our last week--on our last day--before this House adjourns for a 5-week recess, we have an opportunity with Mr. Garcia's previous question in that, if we can defeat the previous question, we can actually address these issues with a bipartisan bill, H.R. 15, comprehensive immigration reform, nearly identical to the Senate bill. I am confident that, if this body passes that bill, Senate Majority Leader Reid will promptly act on it and send it to the President's desk so that we not only can address this border crisis but can prevent future border crises from arising by securing our border and restoring the rule of law to our Nation. The American people expect this body to act in a way that is consistent with our values. We have that opportunity today.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question to bring up H.R. 15, the House's bipartisan immigration reform bill.
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