'Bipartisan Beatdown': Eric Schmitt Slams Chuck Schumer's Failed Border Security Vote

7 months ago

During remarks on the Senate floor, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) spoke about the border security bill that failed in the Senate earlier on Thursday.

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Transcript

00:00 To address what just happened here, Senator Schumer's failed attempt to

00:06 resurrect a failed immigration bill in a bipartisan beatdown. But first, let me

00:16 recite some numbers. In FY 2021, there were 387,000 known

00:23 gotaways. In FY 2022, there were 606,131 known gotaways. In FY 2023, there were

00:36 670,000 known gotaways. Because of Joe Biden's disastrous border policies, there

00:45 are nearly 10 million people who have crossed our border illegally, dispersed

00:51 throughout the United States, many of which we have no idea who they are, where

00:56 they're from. Some given court dates we hope they return sometime in the 2030s.

01:02 Thousands and thousands of Chinese nationals have illegally crossed our

01:05 border since Joe Biden took office. The DEA has stated that the most ruthless

01:10 Mexican cartels now operate in all 50 states. The American people are more at

01:16 risk now from a terror attack than they have been since 9/11. How did we get here?

01:22 The answer is pretty simple. Joe Biden reversed nearly every successful Trump

01:29 era policy that was working to secure our border. We had a 45-year low in

01:34 illegal immigration at the end of 2020. That's all changed. His administration

01:40 reversed the Remain in Mexico policy. His administration attempted to sell border

01:44 wall materials that had been sitting and rusting at an extreme discount. He paused

01:49 deportations. He took nearly a hundred actions in his first hundred days to

01:56 weaken our border security and signal to the cartels that our border was open for

02:01 their business, a deadly business. I said from the beginning that Joe Biden has

02:09 all the authority he needs to shut the border down right now. He could have shut

02:16 down the border as illegal immigration numbers shattered record after record,

02:20 but he didn't and he won't. And now the American people are seeing the absolute

02:26 carnage caused by Joe Biden's policies. Democrats are attempting to give Joe

02:30 Biden cover by wasting our time on this vote that we just saw that went down on

02:35 a vote for a bill that had already failed. Why? I think some people actually

02:44 believe in open borders. They have no real problem with this. They believe that

02:48 borders are arbitrary lines on a map, but the risk for Americans are real. And what

02:53 happened on this on this floor, I'm trying to draw some analogy. Seinfeld was

02:59 a great show, great show, and it was famously cast as a show about nothing. This

03:06 week was a show about nothing. No vehicles, no amendments on anything

03:15 substantive that could help the American people, just this kabuki theater that we

03:20 just witnessed. My criticisms of that bill that we won't hear now, thankfully,

03:26 are the same as they were in February. This bill would have changed the

03:31 jurisdiction from immigration law related cases from Texas to Washington

03:36 DC. This quote-unquote "break glass emergency authority" is a disaster. This

03:41 bill would have only potentially shut down the border if there were 5,000

03:47 illegal crossings per day. That's over a million people a year. Somehow we would

03:52 normalize the idea that a million people can come here illegally before we take

03:56 this seriously. That would be a step backwards in our law. The law currently

04:00 is, and it has been across Republican and Democrat administrations, that if you

04:05 come here you are apprehended and you are sent back unless there's some

04:07 special reason for you to stay, like asylum. Nine out of ten of those claims

04:11 are typically bogus. But what else did this bill do? It created more asylum

04:17 agents, to create an express lane and a path for citizenship at the border

04:23 outside of the normal judicial process we have where it's an adversarial

04:27 hearing. Those wouldn't exist anymore under this bill. And most importantly

04:32 this bill gave the architect of the border invasion, Joe Biden, unilateral

04:35 authority to terminate the bill's meaningless trigger I just

04:39 mentioned. This bill failed for a reason. Now it's failed twice for a reason. It

04:50 took us backwards. But I think it's very important for us to remember that we

04:58 have an executive branch right now that isn't interested in executing the law.

05:03 Joe Biden has every authority under the sun to close this border, he just doesn't

05:10 want to. And with that Mr. President I yield back.

05:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]

'Bipartisan Beatdown': Eric Schmitt Slams Chuck Schumer's Failed Border Security Vote

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