Republican Senators hold a press briefing to address Democrats' border legislation.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 I want to say thank you to each of you for being here today.
00:07 And as you all know, we are here to talk about this border bill that is not a border bill.
00:15 And it is not a border security bill.
00:19 This is an election year political stunt designed to give our Democratic colleagues the appearance
00:27 of doing something about the problem without doing anything at all.
00:33 Why would Senator Schumer choose to bring forward legislation that has already failed
00:39 once and he knows has no chance in the House?
00:45 Well, Senator Schatz actually gave us the answer.
00:49 And I'm quoting him.
00:51 "We are tired of being on defense about this."
00:57 So there you've got it.
00:59 That is the Democrats reason.
01:02 Not we can't allow another American to die at the hands of an illegal immigrant, or we're
01:10 finally ready to uphold the rule of law.
01:14 The truth is the Democrats are the party of open borders, and they intend to keep it that
01:22 way.
01:23 We are a nation of law and order, and yet the Biden administration has allowed over
01:28 10 million illegal aliens to flood our border.
01:34 That's higher than the populations of seven major U.S. cities, Boston, Chicago, Dallas,
01:41 L.A., Knoxville, Memphis, Nashville combined.
01:46 Under this administration, every town is a border town.
01:50 We saw it firsthand last week in Nashville, where an illegal alien was arrested for allegedly
01:57 attempting to sexually assault and kidnap a woman at an ice cream shop.
02:03 There is a distinct difference between Republicans and Democrats when we're talking about border
02:09 security.
02:10 The left means release and resettle.
02:15 When Republicans talk about border security, we mean deny and deport.
02:22 Chuck Schumer's bill has some supposed limits on how many illegal immigrants can break the
02:29 law and illegally enter this country every day.
02:35 But even those limits aren't clear.
02:37 In reality, what this bill does do is give Joe Biden the license to make permanent his
02:45 open border agenda.
02:47 There is a solution to this catastrophe, the one that takes border security seriously,
02:53 the Secure the Border Act on H.R. 2.
02:56 On May 15th last year, H.R. 2 was received by the U.S. Senate from the House.
03:04 That is 373 days.
03:07 A border security bill has sat here in this chamber, and they will not take it up.
03:15 If Democrats were serious about this issue, they would have started on H.R. 2 last year
03:24 and have done something about it.
03:26 What they're doing right now is a political stunt.
03:30 We know it.
03:31 Senator Marshall.
03:32 All right.
03:33 Well, Senator Blackburn, I'm honored always to join you fighting for our nation.
03:38 As I was contemplating last night, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer bringing this bill to the
03:44 floor, I was trying to think of analogy.
03:46 And what I came up with, this is like a firefighter who starts a fire in a building.
03:53 He goes back to the fire station, sounds the alarm, shows up with the fire truck.
03:58 But then instead of showing water on the problem, he's throwing gasoline on the problem and
04:04 then expects praise for it.
04:06 That's exactly what Chuck Schumer and what the White House are doing in this case.
04:12 Look, the border never closes.
04:15 The border never closes.
04:16 I didn't say that.
04:18 The Democrat architecture, this bill says this when he discussed their half-baked border
04:23 bailout.
04:24 And I say bailout because that's exactly, literally what this is.
04:28 It's a bailout.
04:29 Folks, it's six months out now from an election and Democrats are in crisis mode.
04:34 They've seen the polling.
04:36 They're going to have to answer for the 11 million illegal aliens that have crossed this
04:40 border now.
04:41 They're going to have to answer to the 300 fentanyl deaths occurring every day.
04:46 That's over 100,000 a year, two or three times the number of people that we lost in Vietnam.
04:52 They're going to have to answer to the increase in human trafficking and the crime uptick
04:56 that we're seeing everywhere across the country.
05:00 This is a crisis that the Democrats have spent three years making.
05:05 So where we were last night, and again, we are offering solutions.
05:08 H.R. 2 is a great solution.
05:12 It was offered on the floor last night for unanimous consent.
05:15 We just asked for unanimous consent to take up the bill.
05:18 Senator Cruz and I led that last night, but they're not even willing to take it up.
05:22 If they don't like something in it, we can amend it.
05:24 We can make it better as well.
05:27 But tomorrow they're going to jam us with a bill that, remember, the Democrat architect
05:31 of this bill says themselves never closes the border.
05:36 And coming here this week, we're coming here this week to stick a bandaid, not on just
05:41 a puncture wound.
05:42 This is like the femoral artery hemorrhaging and they want to put a little bandaid over
05:46 it.
05:47 Again, last night we offered a knowledge branch to the Senate Democrats with a solution
05:52 that could go into a law immediately.
05:54 It can help secure the border immediately.
05:56 It's been passed on the House.
05:58 The president can sign it significantly.
06:00 It ends catch and release.
06:01 It builds the wall.
06:02 It hires more Border Patrol agents and ends the abuse of parole and asylums.
06:06 If Democrats were serious about securing our borders and enforcing the law and protecting
06:11 our nation's sovereignty, they would have taken us up on that particular offer.
06:15 And I'll close with this.
06:16 The American people are smarter than this.
06:19 They see this for exactly what it is.
06:22 They see the blood on Democrat hands.
06:25 Joe Biden's numbers are in the sink and all the senators are up for reelection.
06:29 The senators, Democrat senators, their numbers are going down as well.
06:33 And again, Americans know that the blood of these people is on their hand, is on the hands
06:38 of the Democrats.
06:40 Thank you.
06:41 Senator Scott.
06:42 First of all, thanks Senator Blackburn for hosting this and for leading this effort.
06:47 So in Florida, it's the number one issue in the state.
06:50 People are worried about the border.
06:51 People are worried about fentanyl deaths.
06:53 Last week I did a fentanyl roundtable and I had parents there that lost their kids.
06:58 And they know who did it.
06:59 They know Joe Biden did it.
07:00 They know Joe Biden's policy of open borders killed their family member.
07:04 I talked to one mom that her son came home to surprise her for Mother's Day.
07:10 Got it, you know, was given a drug that his friend bought online.
07:14 He was dead.
07:16 I talked to law enforcement.
07:18 They're dealing with unbelievable amount of crime.
07:20 Criminals are coming in.
07:21 As we know, Venezuela, Maduro's emptied his prisons and sent all the criminals here.
07:26 I talked to family members.
07:27 They're scared about their neighborhoods.
07:29 So this is what Biden has done.
07:30 He has made, he's created a country now where we don't have borders.
07:35 Drugs are flowing in, terrorists are flowing in, criminals are flowing in.
07:39 And what Chuck Schumer's worried about is he's only worried about the election.
07:42 He's not worried about solving the problem.
07:43 This is not a bill that secures the border.
07:46 This is a bill that codifies what Biden has done.
07:49 And we're not going to do it.
07:51 We're all fed up with what they've done.
07:53 They've made this country less safe.
07:56 Each of us had a variety of amendments.
07:57 Mine is going to be, this simply says we're not going to keep funding all these people
08:01 coming across and getting all these freebies.
08:04 Stop all these not-for-profit groups that are just getting all this free money to bring
08:07 more and more and more illegal immigrants here with drugs that might have a criminal
08:11 background and it might be terrorists.
08:13 This has got to stop.
08:14 Senator Johnson.
08:15 Thanks, Senator Blackburn, for hosting this press conference and your leadership on the
08:20 issue.
08:21 In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that existing law, the Immigration and Nationality Act,
08:26 exudes deference to the executive.
08:30 It was that authority that President Trump used to secure the border.
08:34 It's that exact same authority that President Biden used to open it back up and create this
08:38 catastrophe.
08:39 So he has the authority.
08:41 He's just not willing to use it because he wants open borders.
08:45 When you hear Democrats say they want to secure the border, what they really mean is they
08:48 want to make it more efficient to encounter, process, and disperse illegal immigrants who
08:54 do not have a valid asylum claim throughout America.
08:58 That's what this bill does, by the way.
08:59 It spends $20 billion, can not secure the border, but to more efficiently encounter,
09:05 process, and disperse illegal migrants.
09:08 The worst part of this bill is the threshold set at 4,000 migrants coming in that grants
09:15 the president discretion to secure the border.
09:18 Doesn't really describe how he's going to secure the border, but that discretion basically
09:21 implies that Congress doesn't think he has the authority.
09:25 And then even worse, after three years, they take that discretion away.
09:27 So that's why I've been saying this bill is worse than doing nothing because it reduces
09:33 the authority of a president that was serious about securing the border.
09:38 And to talk about what a political ploy this is, what a charade it is, I'm going to use
09:42 Leader Schumer's own words to prove the point.
09:46 After that bill failed, and it failed not because Trump wanted it to fail, it failed
09:51 because it's an awful bill.
09:55 Leader Schumer was quoted by Politico saying, "We were playing chess, they were playing
10:00 checkers, and we end up with a crane bill."
10:04 That's what he wanted.
10:05 He didn't want to secure the border.
10:06 He wanted $60 billion to help secure Ukraine's border.
10:10 Now let me ask a question.
10:13 Is that what somebody that you're negotiating good faith would say after your negotiation
10:18 failed?
10:19 Rub your nose in the fact that, "Hey, we're smart.
10:23 We were playing checkers, or we were playing chess.
10:25 These guys were only playing checkers."
10:27 It just shows how disingenuous the leader is.
10:30 Then he went on to say, "We also end up in much better shape on the border than we were
10:35 three months ago."
10:36 Again, they didn't pass the bill.
10:41 They don't have this bill that's supposed to secure the border.
10:43 Why are they in better shape?
10:45 It's because they got the political cover, which was the only thing they wanted out of
10:50 a border security bill.
10:51 They just wanted political cover.
10:54 This quote proves it.
10:56 Thank you.
10:57 Senator Vance.
10:58 Well, thanks, Senator Blackburn, for your leadership and to my colleagues up here who
11:03 have been fighting this fight every single day.
11:04 Look, this is not rocket science.
11:06 You just heard Senator Johnson say it.
11:08 The executive has a broad discretion to enforce our border laws.
11:11 Now, we have to remember that three and a half years ago, Joe Biden came into the Oval
11:15 Office, and what were they doing?
11:16 They were bragging about undoing the previous administration's border policies.
11:20 They were bragging about expanding catch and release.
11:23 They were bragging about ending remain in Mexico.
11:25 They were bragging about changing the asylum enforcement laws in this country.
11:30 Every single one of us said, "What you're going to get is a crisis at the southern border."
11:34 After three and a half years of them bragging about a policy change and then seeing the
11:38 predictable results, we now have a historic crisis, I would say historic invasion at our
11:43 southern border.
11:44 And now, all of a sudden, six months before an election, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats
11:48 have got religion on border security.
11:51 It doesn't make any sense.
11:52 It doesn't even pass the smell test.
11:54 Joe Biden opened the southern border.
11:57 Joe Biden can close the southern border, and it's really that simple.
12:00 Now, there are a whole host of problems with this legislation, but I think the most significant,
12:05 I just want to echo again something Senator Johnson said.
12:08 The problem with this legislation is that it doesn't solve the problem now, and it prevents
12:13 a future administration from solving the problem in the future.
12:16 It doesn't solve our crisis now, and it prevents a future president from doing exactly that.
12:21 It is the worst possible combination of immigration policy, and that's why we're going to keep
12:25 on fighting.
12:26 Ask yourselves, after bragging about opening our southern border, why do Democrats care
12:31 about this issue?
12:32 Is it because they haven't seen the wreckage and the carnage of the last two years?
12:35 No, it's because they've seen the polls, and they know what's coming, and we've got to
12:39 make sure that happens so that we never, ever have a crisis like this in this country again.
12:43 Thank you.
12:46 This bill is on the floor because their poll numbers are showing them that after months
12:54 and months of throwing the border open to anyone who wants to come in, that the public
13:01 doesn't like the policy.
13:04 So with five months left to go until the presidential election, this cynical attempt to bring legislation
13:11 to the floor to address an issue that they themselves created, exacerbated, and turned
13:19 into a self-inflicted policy gunshot wound.
13:24 Now they want legislation to pass.
13:29 This is cynical.
13:31 It's a sham.
13:32 They have let 20 times the population of my state come into this country illegally, 20
13:43 times the population of Wyoming into this country illegally, and now they bring a piece
13:50 of legislation.
13:51 This is cynical, and we need to shut it down.
13:55 Senator Cornyn.
13:58 The American people are smart.
14:04 They understand hypocrisy when they see it.
14:07 They understand cynicism when they see it.
14:12 Senator Schumer and President Biden thinks the American people are stupid.
14:19 They think they can pull the wool over their eyes and somehow after three and a half years
14:24 of open border policies claim that they are now the party of border security.
14:30 There is no state in the country that has suffered more under the Biden open border
14:36 policies than the state of Texas with 1200 miles of common border.
14:42 But here are just a few of the numbers.
14:43 We don't really know how many people have come across the border, but best estimates
14:48 are maybe 9 million, 10 million people.
14:51 Best estimate of the number of gotaways, people who evade law enforcement, roughly 1.8 million
14:57 people.
14:58 We know there are 101, 108,000 people who died of drug overdoses last year.
15:04 71,000 died from fentanyl, and now the Democrats are claiming that they care about fentanyl
15:11 poisoning after three and a half years of doing nothing other than facilitating the
15:16 distribution of this poison to our kids all across the country.
15:22 And then there's the least talked about casualties of this policy, which are the 400,000 children
15:28 who've been placed with sponsors in the interior of the United States.
15:32 The New York Times has done an investigative piece documenting how many of these children
15:37 have been forced into labor.
15:39 You can only imagine how many of them have been sold into sex slavery, how many of them
15:44 have been abused, recruited into gangs.
15:46 And the Biden administration takes the position it's not their responsibility to follow up
15:51 on these children, and they simply don't know where they are, what's happening to them,
15:55 whether they're going to school, whether they're getting the health care they need or not.
16:00 And they don't care.
16:02 They just don't care.
16:05 Let me just mention one last problem that is caused by the Biden open border policies.
16:12 I think it was last January, there were some published reports of people connected with
16:18 ISIS, the successor terrorist organization to Al Qaeda, operating out of the Middle East,
16:25 facilitating the travel of migrants to the southern border.
16:30 Now we don't know, and can't, perhaps can't talk about here publicly, the intelligence
16:36 reports that have been gathered that report on the number of these people connected with
16:43 the terrorist organization that have been released into the United States.
16:48 And frankly, I don't think it's a question anymore, will there be a terrorist attack
16:53 in the United States?
16:55 It's a question of when that terrorist attack occurs.
16:58 This is just another aspect of what has turned out to be a horrific policy by the Biden administration.
17:04 But now they want to claim that they're the party of border security after three and a
17:10 half years.
17:11 Give me a break.
17:12 Senator Schmidt.
17:13 Thanks, Marsha, for your leadership on this.
17:17 I wish I had the foresight to have a Ron Johnson chart up here.
17:20 But if I did, I was thinking about this.
17:22 If there was a Venn diagram of a lawless administration, open borders, and Trump derangement syndrome,
17:33 at the center of that Venn diagram would be Biden's border policy.
17:38 In a reflexive move when they came in, J.D. mentioned it, they bragged about undoing all
17:42 the successful executive orders and policies of President Trump because Trump did it.
17:47 Well, here's what we're left with now.
17:49 Ten million people here illegally, fentanyl streaming across our border, lives lay in
17:55 that wake, the cost for states to pick up the tab for this reckless, reckless policy.
18:01 I want to make two points.
18:02 First of all, this bad bill is on a collision course now for a bipartisan beatdown because
18:09 people see how terrible actually the legislation is.
18:11 It doesn't move us forward.
18:13 It moves us backwards.
18:14 It codifies catch and release.
18:16 It removes jurisdiction for Texas to actually handle some of the challenges that surely
18:21 would come.
18:23 There's a number of problems with this bill, including deputizing more asylum agents who
18:28 will fast track in an express lane illegal immigration on a path to citizenship in five
18:33 years.
18:34 They will make that decision on the border without an adversarial proceeding outside
18:39 of our judicial system.
18:40 That's what this bill does.
18:42 It's a terrible bill.
18:44 Outside of that, we all know what the real solution is.
18:47 Joe Biden can undo his 90 plus executive orders he had in the first hundred days that undid
18:52 the successful policies that we had under President Trump, a 45 year low into legal
18:57 immigration.
18:58 It is not any more complicated than that.
19:00 So if Chuck Schumer wanted to be useful with his time, which he's not good at, he would
19:05 spend that time over at the White House begging Joe Biden to undo the madness that he created
19:11 in those first hundred days.
19:13 But they don't really want to do that because they believe in open borders.
19:17 This is just to give them some political cover.
19:19 All right.
19:20 Questions.
19:21 Yes, Julie.
19:22 To that point, the Biden administration has reported that they are using executive authority
19:23 to put the kind of border shutdown authority in place next month.
19:24 What is your response to that?
19:37 What they're trying to do is nuance this situation so that they can say we are shutting down
19:45 the border.
19:46 What we know is that they have no intention of doing that.
19:50 Whether it's 4000 a day, what are they going to do?
19:53 Have Border Patrol stand there with a clicker and count the number coming in?
19:57 And then when it gets to 8500, they're going to say we hit the clicker.
20:02 And how are they going to coordinate that?
20:04 This is not workable.
20:07 It is a political stunt.
20:09 We know that their polls are showing that they are wrong on this issue.
20:15 They are trying to recover.
20:18 But the American people are smart.
20:20 They are living this.
20:22 Every town's a border town.
20:23 Every state is a border state.
20:26 They are seeing the fentanyl, the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the gangs, the gangs
20:31 that are recruiting their kids.
20:34 They are living it and they are fed up with it and they are not having it.
20:39 H.R. 2 would secure the border.
20:42 But Schumer and Durbin don't have the spine to bring that bill forward and actually discuss
20:49 border security.
20:51 They're not willing to say we're going to take it up because we are sick and tired of
20:55 seeing kids die from fentanyl poisoning.
20:59 They're tired of hearing about people that are killed by illegal aliens committing crimes.
21:05 So now a half measure squishes.
21:08 Yes.
21:09 Somebody else.
21:10 Somebody else.
21:11 Got another question?
21:12 Yes.
21:13 Congress has obviously always had a problem with borders and has been a bit of a white
21:14 whale in getting actual legislation.
21:15 Does this round of negotiations and where this bill has ended up hurt the possibility
21:16 of negotiating on border in the future, whether it be H.R. 2 or H.R. 2.
21:17 They have had plenty of opportunities.
21:33 As I said, 373 days.
21:36 H.R. 2 has been here and it has been at committees.
21:42 You could have had it taken up by Homeland Security, by judiciary.
21:48 They have chosen not to take an action.
21:52 So did you want to respond?
21:53 Let me just say also, the problem with the border isn't because there's a deficiency
21:57 in the law.
21:58 I think the best evidence of that under existing law, we had the most secure border we've had
22:02 in 45 years just a few years ago.
22:05 What happened is you have an executive branch who doesn't actually want to execute the law.
22:10 That is the biggest challenge.
22:11 So we can kind of go down this road of picking this bill apart.
22:14 But the truth is he could do it right now.
22:17 I'm all for good ideas, but you don't need that right now.
22:21 And I think that sometimes gets lost in this idea that we need more legislation.
22:25 We don't.
22:26 I want to quickly respond to your question.
22:28 What it proves is that even Biden believes he's got more authority than he's been using.
22:33 So he has authority to secure the border.
22:36 But the other point I'd like to make is we would be happy to strengthen that authority.
22:41 We'd be happy to do that.
22:42 I mean, that's what HR2 would do.
22:43 But if you wanted to piecemeal it, we'd be happy to sign on to individual pieces of legislation
22:49 that would strengthen his authority.
22:51 They just don't want that.
22:52 They want an open border.
22:53 They cause this problem.
22:54 It's the number one issue with the American people.
22:58 Anything else?
22:59 Any other question?
23:00 Yes.
23:01 [inaudible]
23:18 Any half measure that the Democrats take is going to hurt them because the American people
23:24 are smart.
23:26 Every town's a border town.
23:28 Every state's a border state.
23:30 Joe Biden, in his first 100 days, took 94 actions.
23:36 President Donald Trump had the most secure border we had had in decades.
23:40 Joe Biden took 94 executive actions to open the border and to weaken federal immigration
23:48 law.
23:49 He chose to do that.
23:51 He has the authority.
23:52 He could undo those.
23:54 He has chosen not to do that.
23:56 He wants to blame Congress.
23:58 And we have a Homeland Security Secretary that doesn't believe in securing the homeland
24:03 who will not answer a question about the security of this nation.
24:07 The American people have figured it out.
24:10 And what we need to do is take up H.R. 2.
24:13 We need to discuss border security and not have a political stunt carried out on the
24:19 floor of the U.S. Senate.
24:20 And I would point out, too, that John Tester has already voted against the Lakeham Riley
24:25 Act.
24:26 He's already voted against deporting illegal immigrants who assault police officers.
24:32 He's on record.
24:33 And if he votes for this again, he'll be on record for supporting normalizing a million
24:38 people a year here illegally through catch and release.
24:42 So I think their votes already stand for themselves.
24:44 Yeah.
24:45 Julie.
24:46 Another election year issue, the New York Times is planning a vote on codifying contraceptives
24:47 next month.
24:48 What is your reaction to that?
24:54 We'll see what the Democrats are going to do.
24:56 Nobody knows what they're going to bring up.
24:58 What we do know is this issue today of securing this border, that is the number one issue
25:05 with the American people.
25:07 I talk to security moms every single day, and they want to have a secure border.
25:13 Yes.
25:14 Last question.
25:15 CBP Chief Owens, who was reported by NBC First, is under investigation internally for attending
25:16 a party, a birthday party, at a Mexican tequila mogul's house.
25:17 In Mexico.
25:38 I'm not aware of what you're talking about, Ron.
25:59 I'm not aware of what you're talking about.
26:23 I'm not aware of what you're talking about.
26:30 I'm not aware of what you're talking about.
26:39 I'm not aware of what you're talking about.
27:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]