[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 20 (Thursday, February 5, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S810-S811]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY FUNDING

  Ms. HIRONO. Madam President, I rise to urge my colleagues to pass a 
clean appropriations bill that funds the Department of Homeland 
Security, DHS. Listening to my friend the Senator from Utah, it is very 
clear that the Republicans' position on this bill that is before us 
today is totally dependent on their assertion that the President's 
recent actions on immigration are illegal. Democrats do not concur with 
that. In fact, I thought illegality of any actions should be determined 
by courts of law. What the President did recently is no different from 
like Presidential actions taken by Presidents Reagan and Bush, I might 
add. So we must fund DHS and resist the temptation to govern though 
manufactured crises and political games. Our national security is at 
stake.
  Surely my colleagues remember when DHS was created in direct response 
to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Just 11 days after 9/
11, DHS started to take shape. President George W. Bush named Gov. Tom 
Ridge to lead an office to oversee and coordinate a comprehensive and 
national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism and 
respond to any future attacks.
  DHS's mission is to protect our homeland, as its name makes perfectly 
clear. DHS is responsible for border security and immigration 
enforcement. It is tasked with keeping our airports safe through TSA, 
with emergency management response through FEMA, and protecting our 
coasts through the Coast Guard.
  As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate 
Select Committee on Intelligence, I know how important the work DHS 
does is in keeping our Nation safe. Let's take a step back and remember 
why DHS was created in the first place and what their mission is. Why 
should we play politics with the Department that exists to protect 
America?
  DHS's funding runs out at the end of this month. The clock is 
ticking. The nearly 200,000 who work for DHS do not want us spending 
valuable time scoring political points; they want the certainty that 
their important work will be funded by Congress. If the Department is 
not funded by the end of the month, we probably will once again resort 
to passing a continuing resolution to keep the Department going. A 
continuing resolution is only a stopgap; it is a waste of time and 
money.
  DHS Secretary Johnson said: Operating in a stop-and-go cycle of 
continuing resolutions is like trying to drive a car across the country 
on no more than 5 gallons of gas at a time and without knowing the 
distance to the next gas station.
  Of the nearly 200,000 DHS employees across the country, 2,000 are 
based in Hawaii. Nobody will get paid if DHS gets shut down. Some will 
be furloughed, while many others will be forced, as essential 
employees, to continue showing up for work without pay. We count on the 
Coast Guard, the TSA, Customs, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration 
Services--which are all part of the DHS--to be on the job every day.
  Some of my Republican colleagues insist that before we fund the 
critical work of Homeland Security, we must first undo the President's 
commonsense immigration actions that helped millions of families across 
the country. The House bill before us holds DHS funding hostage to make 
political points against the President. This is a manufactured 
standoff.
  The House bill attacks undocumented persons who have American-born 
children. Those are U.S. citizen children. The President's actions 
enabled these families to step out of the shadows, pass background 
checks, pay their taxes, and work in the open without the daily threat 
of deportation.
  The House bill attacks DREAMers, the students who have been helped 
through the DACA problem for nearly 3 years. Just yesterday President 
Obama met with six DREAMers in the Oval Office who represent some of 
the very

[[Page S811]]

best our country has to offer. The House bill says to these DREAMers: 
You, too, like the parents of U.S.-born children, should live under the 
daily threat of deportation. There are 600,000 DREAMers in the DACA 
Program throughout the country.
  The House bill reverses longstanding enforcement priorities and 
directives that DHS has implemented. These directives tell immigration 
enforcement officers to focus on the bad guys rather than on the moms, 
the dads, and other contributing members of our communities. The House 
bill, in removing all administrative discretion on who should be 
deported, in effect says that all 12 million undocumented persons in 
our country can be deported. This is totally unrealistic and 
unnecessary.
  I stand with my colleagues who are ready and willing to come together 
to pass bipartisan immigration reform. We did that last Congress with 
68 bipartisan votes. As Republican Senator Heller said recently, the 
House bill that is before us ``only includes language that complicates 
the process of finding a solution when it comes to immigration 
reform.''
  This House bill emphasizes a policy of mass deportation that would 
harm our economy, costing trillions in economic loss, not to mention 
the devastating impact on the people. Economists have told us that 
comprehensive immigration reform will provide an enormous boost to our 
economy, helping all workers across the country.
  The House bill does not reform our system. The House bill does not 
help millions of students and families come out of the shadows. It does 
not provide more resources to our hard-working Border Patrol agents. It 
does not help those who have been stuck in our visa backlog for 
decades.
  Rather than debating comprehensive immigration reform, the House has 
once again ducked the issue, this time holding DHS hostage so that a 
small minority of their colleagues can have their way. This is like 
``Groundhog Day''--a repeat scenario that brings us continuing 
resolutions to keep government going in a stop-and-go fashion and 
indeed a scenario that brought us the government shutdown in 2013. We 
do not have to keep repeating failed scenarios. Let's bring a clean DHS 
funding bill to the floor. Let's get that done and then move on to a 
debate on comprehensive immigration reform that is long overdue.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.

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