Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act--Motion to Proceed--
Floor Speech
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Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, earlier today, we heard a very convincing case laid out by the House managers of why the Senate should fill its constitutional duty and proceed to a trial on the impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas.
If we were to hold that trial--and we should do so--this chart that I have been developing since I became chairman of Homeland Security in 2015 would basically be the irrefutable DNA evidence of the crime.
What I have tried to lay out in this chart is the cause and effect of an ongoing set of illegal immigration crises faced by the last three administrations. What I would like to do briefly here on the Senate floor is to go through that history dating back to 2012 and show the impact of certain actions, certain court decisions, certainly the lack of faithfully executing the law in this administration that has now resulted in an invasion of our country.
Let's go back to 2012. That is where this chart begins. Even before that, I had developed a chart just showing on an annual basis the number of unaccompanied children coming into this country. It averaged for many years somewhere between 2-, 3-, 4,000 a year.
Then, in June of 2012, President Obama issued his what I would consider lawless, unlawful deferred action on childhood arrivals. That is what has sparked all the succeeding illegal immigration crises, is that unlawful order, which, by the way, was a complete misuse of prosecutorial discretion, which is supposed to be meted out or administered on a case-by-case basis. For the first time, President Obama and his administration granted prosecutorial discretion to hundreds of thousands of people, and the world took note.
What happened over the intervening years is that people realized America's law has changed. We have reports. When people come to this country illegally, they would get their notice to appear before an immigration court. Well, that was used by human traffickers down in Central America. They called that their ``permiso''--their permission slip--to come to this country.
A couple of years after that unlawful order--deferred action on childhood arrivals--President Obama faced his border crisis. He actually called it a humanitarian crisis when, in May and June of 2014, they averaged about 2,200 encounters per day--2,200. That seems like the good old days. That is that little bump in comparison to President Biden's crisis at the border.
President Obama actually took action. He started detaining family units with children who came across the border, and it worked. He brought down the number of people crossing into our country illegally because there was a consequence to it.
Unfortunately, in February of 2015, pro-immigration groups--pro- illegal immigration groups--took the Obama administration to court under the Flores settlement, which was basically--back in the 1990s, there was a court case with a young immigrant girl named Flores, and the result of that settlement said that DHS could not hold an unaccompanied child for more than 20 days--again, an unaccompanied child.
The Obama administration interpreted that as, well, we can certainly hold a child when they are detained with their family. Again, these pro-illegal immigration groups took the Obama administration to court, took Secretary Jeh Johnson to court, and they reinterpreted the Flores settlement and said: No, you can't detain a child even if they are accompanied by their parents.
So the Obama administration faced a real decision: Should we detain the parents and release the child into HHS custody? They chose not to do that except in some situations where they felt that wasn't a real family unit and those parents may be a danger to that child. You can see the result of that. Basically, catch-and-release is what that resulted in. You can see the numbers started increasing prior to President Trump taking office.
If you remember, President Trump, during his election, made the open border--that catch-and-release--a huge issue in the campaign. When he got elected, again the world noticed. They felt there was going to be a real crackdown on illegal immigration, and they stopped coming. There was a huge reduction from the end of the Obama administration to when President Trump first took office.
Unfortunately, the law didn't change. That Flores reinterpretation stood. So President Trump was faced with trying to figure out how he could utilize what laws existed, what authority he had, with no help from Congress, to address this situation. He wasn't able to address it immediately. As a result, you can see the increase of not only single adults but family units exploiting that provision, and unaccompanied children, to the point where, in May of 2019, he hit his high point: almost 5,000 people per day.
You will notice that President Trump did something about it. He enacted the migrant protection program. He instituted safe third country agreements with countries in Central America. He had to threaten the President of Mexico with tariffs so the President of Mexico would cooperate with us in securing our border.
Over the next 12 months, President Trump by and large secured the border, to hit a low point in April of 2020, when a little more than 500 people per day were trying to come into this country illegally.
President Trump also had, starting in March of 2020, during the pandemic--remember, all of this reduction in illegal immigration occurred before the pandemic, but once the pandemic was in full swing in March and April of 2020, President Trump used his authority under title 42 and used that health emergency to start deporting people coming into this country illegally.
So you see the purple bar is the people expelled using title 42 authority.
Even though the number of single adults was rising--by the way, the reason it was rising is that during the Presidential debate of 2020, every Democrat Presidential candidate said they were going to end deportations and offer free healthcare. That is a signal. The world listens to what elected officials or potential elected officials say, and they believe them. They also believe their eyes when, once people start coming in here, they are either detained and expelled or they are not detained.
Anyway, so people started coming into this country again, assuming that President Biden was going to win the election and the border would be opened up. Of course, that is exactly what happened, because once President Biden took office, he used the exact same Executive authority that President Trump used.
Let me just quickly cover that. Even after the Flores reinterpretation, the Supreme Court, in a ruling in 2018, said that existing law--even though it was weakened by that reinterpreted Flores decision or settlement--that the current law exudes deference to the executive branch. President Trump used that deference. President Trump used that Executive authority and pretty well closed the border.
President Biden came into office and, with literally hundreds of Executive actions, completely reversed President Trump's successful border security measures using that exact same Presidential authority, all that deference.
The point that is important to understand is that President Biden wanted an open border. He caused this crisis. He could end it if he wanted to. He still has the authority. Republicans in the Senate would be happy to strengthen that authority, to overturn this Flores reinterpretation.
By the way, Secretary Jeh Johnson opposed that reinterpretation. He didn't like that Court decision.
We would have been happy to strengthen President Biden's authority, but he doesn't really need us to to secure the border. That is the point.
Again, here is the DNA, the irrefutable DNA evidence of the crime. This didn't have to happen. President Biden didn't have to reverse President Trump's successful border security Executive orders, but he reversed them, and he opened up the border. The result now is that probably more than 6 million people have come into this country illegally and stayed. That is a number greater than the population of 31 States. That is the order of magnitude of the problem.
The impact of this open border policy is devastating. It is a catastrophe. Not only does this open border policy facilitate the multibillion-dollar business model of some of the most evil people on the planet--the human traffickers, the sex traffickers, the drug traffickers--how many hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of fentanyl overdoses?
President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas said that they are reversing all of Trump's border security provisions because they said it was inhumane. There is nothing humane about facilitating human and sex and drug trafficking.
Of course, the migrants come into this country--it is true, Venezuela is emptying their jails, their mental institutions. There are some bad people, there are some criminals coming into this country. Of course, we see evidence with these migrant crimes, horrific crimes--people who no longer are alive because of President Biden's open border policy, because of Secretary Mayorkas executing President Biden's open border policy.
I am not a lawyer, and I am not a prosecutor, but I believe it is a crime to aid and abet other crimes, so from my standpoint, I think the House managers ought to be allowed to make their case. Again, they laid out very compelling--very compelling--Articles of Impeachment today. It is a pretty simple case. It probably won't take that long for them to make their case, to present it for the Senate. Why won't Majority Leader Schumer allow the House managers to make their case? Why won't he allow the Senate to fulfill its constitutional duty to try impeachments?
Listen, impeachments are not that regular. The least we can do is fulfill that constitutional duty and listen to the evidence and allow the House managers to make their case. I think their case is overwhelmingly convincing.
The repercussions of President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas's open border policy will be felt by Americans for years, if not decades, to come.
About the only thing Congress can do when a President or a member of the executive branch is not faithfully executing the laws, when they are completely derelict in their duty, when their dereliction of duty or the lack of faithfully executing the law is resulting in the deaths of Americans--again, the open border policy is resulting in the deaths of American citizens. It is resulting in young women being forced into the sex trafficking trade. It is resulting in higher levels of fentanyl overdoses. That evidence needs to be heard. That case needs to be made. The Senate should hold a trial.
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