[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 95 (Friday, June 8, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H5013-H5016]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IMMIGRATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr.
King) for 30 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to address you here
on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.
I would say, first of all, I want to compliment the gentleman on the
selection of his tie--the nice Washington Capitals red tie that he has
on. Everybody behind me who is dressed in red and up there dressed in
red, Mr. Speaker, has to be celebrating the jinx being broken and the
Washington Capitals winning the Stanley Cup last night. The streets
were full of people celebrating.
By the way, it was fairly calm, considering the exhilaration that
drove all of that. A few people came here a little tired today, but
with a big smile on their face. So a lot of happy, tired people in
Washington, D.C. My congratulations goes out to them.
I came here today speak about a topic that has been essentially
consuming a lot of our time here in these debates, Mr. Speaker, and
that is this topic of immigration.
We had a 2-hour conference on Thursday morning from 9 a.m. to 11
a.m.--it may have gone after that a little ways--to try to reach a
resolution. It seems as though we got about the same kind of conclusion
with our effort to reach a resolution as they did in the United States
Senate when they debated on the floor of the Senate for 4 days on
immigration issues, trying to get a consensus to bring any single bill
out of the Senate that could get enough votes to pass. They fell short
and nothing passed. That was February. I think some people have a sense
of a consensus from the meeting yesterday, but I do not believe that we
have anything that gets to 218 votes.
So, generally, Mr. Speaker, the conservatives and Republicans would
agree with four of the five pillars that President Trump has laid out.
I don't know if I will get them exactly right, but one is to build the
wall. Another one is to secure the border. Another one is to end chain
migration. Another one is to establish merit-based immigration, instead
of having it be the chain migration that we have experienced.
I recall witnesses before the Immigration Committee years ago who
testified that between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration in
America--the legal immigration in America--only between 7 and 11
percent is based upon anything that we have control over, which
presumably would be merit.
The balance of the legal immigration, then, is really not in the
control of the American people or in the control of the United States
Congress. It is in the control of the people who are, I will say,
utilizing the current policy that we have, that we can't find the
consensus to reverse. And those who are coming in the country sometimes
by hook, by crook, and shenanigan, and sometimes just simply exploiting
the laws that we have.
So it has always been very simple for me, Mr. Speaker; that is, we
need to secure the border. Without a border you don't have a nation.
Any sovereign nation has to secure its borders and has to control those
borders. That goes for any sovereign nation all over the world,
including the Vatican.
I look at that big, 30-foot-tall wall around the Vatican and
understand that they don't have an open borders policy there. Neither
do other countries around the world, except for the United States of
America, who, under the 8 of years of Barack Obama, watched the rule of
law be so eroded that it has clouded the minds of a lot of Republicans
here in the House of Representatives.
There was a question asked yesterday that I wrote down here that I
think is really important to contemplate. I hadn't put it in those kind
of words before, although I had thought about it and I actually did
research on it. And the question is this: I'll put it this way--this
discussion, by the way, on immigration, the sticking point is about
DACA, Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals.
So the question that was posed was this: We stopped the entire
political world for these people, DACA recipients. So the question was
posed: Who are they? Who are they?
We hear continually they are valedictorians or they came across the
border on their mother's arm when they were 3 years old. They know no
country but this one. They only speak one language: English. They don't
have a memory of any other country. They study hard and work hard and
get good grades. Some of them even say that they are as fine a group of
people as we can select out of American citizens.
So I began asking some of those questions of our bureaucracy. I had
actually begun asking those questions as far back as last September and
intensified the request in January and focused on it very hard.
With a lot of work to try to get to the bottom of it, I found out a
number of things about who are the DACA recipients. First, I want to
characterize, just a little bit, about how we got here.
Barack Obama made DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,
made it his tool for an unconstitutional amnesty. We should not forget,
Barack Obama, on at least 22 different locations and times, said on
videotape that he didn't have the constitutional authority to create
this DACA policy.
He said at a school here in Washington, D.C., not that long ago,
before he left office, before he implemented the DACA policy, he said:
You are smart students here; you understand this. He said: I can't
write the laws. Congress writes laws. The President and the executive
branch carry out those laws, execute those laws, and the court
interprets the laws. So it is up to Congress to change the policy.
But just a couple of months after that statement, President Obama
implemented by executive edict a DACA policy that no thinking
constitutionalist can really take the position that it is anything
other than utterly, blatantly, and self-confessed by Barack Obama
unconstitutional.
Yet, we have had a couple of Federal Judges who say that President
Trump, who was elected to end the DACA policy--and we all expected that
January 20, 2017, at noon, when President Trump took his oath of
office, he would have already had the order ready to go that would have
ended the DACA policy and stopped any new permits from being issued and
stopped any renewals of existing permits, and perhaps even cancel the
existing ones that were there, but that didn't happen.
Five to six weeks later, Mr. Speaker, we learned that the Trump
administration was still issuing new DACA permits in just as
unconstitutional a fashion as Barack Obama was. He just wasn't the
author of it. He wasn't the creator of it. President Trump wasn't the
creator of it. He was the continuer of the unconstitutional DACA policy
created and established by Barack Obama.
So there were extensions, renewals of existing, and there were
creations and new permits handed out for DACA. We all knew it was
unconstitutional.
Then, as we went along, I want to really thank a number of States,
but in particular, Texas, who put together a lawsuit, to file a
lawsuit, on the unconstitutional policy of DACA, which is costing Texas
taxpayers money and opportunity and every other State in the Union, as
far as I know, money and opportunity.
[[Page H5014]]
Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, prepared a lawsuit that he
had, I believe the number were 12 states that agreed to join with that
suit, and they were prepared to file that suit last September 5, was
the date.
Yet, they negotiated with the White House. So, President Trump agreed
to end the DACA policy. He took this action last September 5. Part of
that negotiation was so that the lawsuit would not be filed by Texas
and other states. Because clearly, they would prevail. DACA is
unconstitutional.
President Trump conceded, apparently, that point and ended the DACA
policy effective in 6 months, which would be the 5th of March this
year.
{time} 1400
Then he challenged Congress to pass legislation that would resolve
the DACA issue and resolve the balance of the immigration issues that
we have. That deadline, presumably, was March 5.
However, there were a couple of Federal judges who decided that they
were legislators, and they came to a decision, an order, that said that
President Trump couldn't cancel the DACA policy, that he is compelled
to continue it, to issue new permits, and to extend existing permits,
for no constitutional reason that I am aware of and no statutory reason
that I am aware of, just activist judges who are seeking to legislate
from the bench and impose their personal policy preference on the rest
of America.
Well, that can't stand, Mr. Speaker. We know that can't stand. It has
got to get to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, in nobody's
imagination, is going to come down with a decision that says that a
preceding President can implement a blatantly and clearly and, I said,
self-confessedly--that is a word, I hope, ``self-confessedly''--illegal
policy, unconstitutional policy.
Barack Obama established that policy.
No Supreme Court is going to say: And by the way, every succeeding
President has to accept the executive actions of his predecessor no
matter how unconstitutional they are; that he can't end, by executive
action, something that was unconstitutionally implemented by the
executive action of his predecessor, Barack Obama.
But that is the decision that we have right now before the courts.
Thankfully, Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas ramped this back up
again, and they are going back to court now. This goes before Judge
Hanen, who has been a stellar constitutionalist, an originalist, and a
textualist.
I appreciate the work he has done in the past. I can't speak to his
decision coming up on this, except this, that we have the rule of law
sitting here hanging in the balance. That is what has been pushed into
the middle of the table. That is the bet, the rule of law, up or down.
And if the court is allowed to resolve this issue, whether it is
before Judge Hanen's circuit court or whether it goes on to the Supreme
Court, which I expect it would, the Supreme Court will come down with a
decision that allows and recognizes that the Chief Executive Officer of
the United States of America--right now, President Donald Trump--has
the authority to reverse any executive action of any of his
predecessors.
That is how our Constitution is structured. And if it is any other
way, if a President can, by executive action, visit a horrible policy
on the American people and we don't have a way to undo that, our
Founding Fathers didn't serve us up a document like that. They gave us
a document with checks and balances and the authorities to be set up in
a proportional way.
So DACA, if it is allowed to continue through the litigation process,
will be thrown out by the Supreme Court. Let's let that happen. Let's
find out. I am willing to take a Supreme Court decision on this,
because if it goes the other way, our Republic is essentially lost
anyway.
So who are these people? Who are they?
Well, Barack Obama made this a tool for his unconstitutional method
of getting people, I will say, quasi-legalized. When that happened,
specifics went out the window. When you read through these documents--
and I have finally gotten my hands on the documents, Mr. Speaker. Each
one of the applications is a 7-page application.
Altogether, there are about 2 million applications. Roughly half of
them are renewals. That means there are 14 million pieces of paper, a
lot of them filled out by hand, in fact, most of them filled out by
hand. They only went electronic in 2015, I believe November 1 of 2015.
So it is hard to pull the data out. That is why we had to work so hard
to get it.
Some other things that came along that we are learning from reading
through the press:
We are finding more and more DACA recipients who are MS-13. We
shouldn't be surprised at that. A lot of them came in as unaccompanied
alien minors. Then they get recruited into gangs, or they came in as a
member of a gang.
They weren't all 3-year-old girls brought across the Rio Grande River
by their mother. A whole lot of them were unaccompanied alien minors.
And some of them who were accompanied went right into the highest gang
areas in the country, MS-13 gang areas.
There is a large percentage of them who are also prime gang-age
recruitment. Out of 817,000 DACA recipients, that universe who are
currently under DACA, there are about 135,000 who were prime gang-age
recruitment from that 13-, 14-, 15-year-old age.
To remind folks, Mr. Speaker, we had the Drug Enforcement
Administration Chief Administrator there, Robert Patterson, before the
Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago. I asked him a series of
questions. Here is one of the things that he concurred on: 80 percent
to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or
through Mexico.
Mr. Speaker, 80 percent to 90 percent of those illegal drugs.
We have had 64,000 Americans die because of drug overdose, primarily
opioid abuse, and at least two-thirds of that are illegal opioids.
The physicians are getting this under control, tightening down their
prescriptions. They addressed this some time ago.
But the illegal drugs are killing Americans, and those illegal drugs
are coming from or through Mexico, 80 percent to 90 percent of them.
It is a matter of note that--I will find this along the way. But over
a period of about 3 years, from 2013 until 2016--and that is the first
year, 2013 was the first year after the DACA announcement--the Mexican
poppy fields tripled in acres. They tripled in size.
We wonder why we have a heroin problem and an opioid problem in the
United States and where it comes from: from or through Mexico, by the
testimony of Robert Patterson.
We also have that the drug crisis is directly related to the growth
of MS-13. That is a statement that was made by Commissioner Geraldine
Hart, Commissioner of Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. That is
some of the information that is in here.
So who are they? Who are the DACA recipients, Mr. Speaker?
As I dug through the records and finally got my hands on the data,
one of the hardest pieces of information I have ever had to work for in
this town--and the nature of this town makes you work for information
that politically they don't want you to have. Well, I have it now in my
hands. And I will say no other Member of Congress has this information,
and it has not been shared outside of a very tight circle in my own
shop.
Here are some things:
The overall number of DACA recipients, 817,798 is the overall
number--817,798.
I began looking down through those records, and of those who even
filled out the form, that they came in too early, that they would be
disqualified because they came in too early or they would be
disqualified because they came in too late, the initial entry dates
disqualify, of the 817,798, 8,964 of them because they didn't fit the
parameters of the dates that they had to have come into the United
States, some for the first time.
Another 2,100, their records are not available. They just simply
don't have those records. If we are going to make sure that they are
getting an education and learning English and working and that whole
list of meritorious things that you always hear about when people talk
about DACA, the least they could do is fill out the form. So there are
2,100 records that are not available.
[[Page H5015]]
Then they transferred the application form into form N-400 about that
time in late winter of 2015, early winter of 2016. They transferred it
over to form N-400. That is a foundational document that can be
transferred into citizenship. So they set up the bookwork to turn them
into citizens clear back then.
It always was the unconstitutional, lawless plan of Barack Obama to
push this all on us. I will say I thought Republicans were stronger
than they seemed to be. He must have had them judged just about right,
because he thought he could feed this to us, but he also believed that
Hillary Clinton would be the President of the United States.
How many of them traveled out of the United States?
``They are afraid to go back home.'' ``They don't know any other
country but this country.'' We have heard this over and over again. But
775 confessed on the form that they had gone back to their home
country. That should disqualify them.
Of those who already reported that they were too old to qualify, over
age 31 by the closing date, there were 2,464 who were too old to
qualify.
And here is the number of those who were prime gang recruitment age:
135,250 of them. But that also includes boys and girls. Of the boys and
girls, more boys get recruited, of course, by far, but the girls are
being recruited, too. We know how bad that can be.
That is just up to age 16. The legislation that they want to bring to
this floor takes it to age 18, and that adds about another 33,000 or
34,000 for each year. So that number, then, would go to 100--let's see.
Well, 66,000 to 68,000 more on top of that, so just round that up. It
would be 200,000 would be the universe from which MS-13 and other gangs
would recruit while they waited for the younger kids to get a little
older.
They are growing up in these MS-13 neighborhoods. They are being
delivered to MS-13 neighborhoods. We are eroding the culture of the
civilization of America with this policy, and everybody is afraid to
say who they are. Nobody is even asking the question. They are just
saying, ``valedictorian,'' ``3-year-old girls.''
There are a few who are. I found them in this data, too. Actually,
they are a little better represented than I expected they would be, but
that is only my judgment, not the data.
On education: They are supposed to be getting an education. Here is
what I found out from looking at the education: no data available.
We are out of this universe of 817,798, Mr. Speaker. Out of that
universe, there were 564,103 where there was no data available at all
in their application on education.
Were they going to school or weren't they? Did they have an education
of any kind? Where did it take them to? Was it sixth grade? third
grade? 11th grade? No data available.
That is 68.9 percent of the DACA recipients we don't have even a
record that they ever went to school.
I have to believe a good number of them went to school but not long
enough, apparently, to write that down on this form. And most of them
had help filling out the applications. That is those where the records
were not available.
Then they have this mushy question in there that is designed--this
whole thing is designed to grant amnesty, so the questions are asked in
such a way, when you read through there, that it was never designed to
understand and get an honest reporting that came out.
Regardless, those who have no diploma and may or may not be in
school, that is another 179,719, or 21.9 percent. They say, well, they
don't have a degree, they don't have a diploma, they may or may not be
in school, by the way the question was asked.
In any case, if you add together those with no data available and
those with no verification of any kind of educational experience, that
comes to 90.8 percent of all of the DACA recipients without a
validation of their education. Of those who attest that they qualify--
now, remember, there is no verification here. All the stuff on this 7-
page document they attest to, but the verification is almost
nonexistent, although there is a little bit. Of those who attest they
are qualified by education, that is 9.2 percent is all.
So I found myself adding up these things and seeing what is the
worst-case scenario.
Oh, the best-case scenario is believe everything and expect that
there is an excuse for 564,000 not even putting out a number on the
form.
So I began to add this up. I think I left some things out, though,
Mr. Speaker. I will start this way.
Of 817,798, you would subtract from that the 564,103 that they had no
data on for education at all, because they would have been disqualified
by the requirements of the program.
The second group, you can't tell whether they went to school or not.
That is 179,719. Subtract that. They are disqualified, also, because
you can't tell.
Oh, here is a really interesting one. Of those who confessed to being
criminals, 66 percent of those who self-reported that they are
criminals, they received their DACA permit. Two-thirds of those who
said ``I am a criminal'' got their DACA permit anyway.
Those are the initial applications. Then, once their status was up
for renewal, of the group who said they--that was a much bigger group
then, those up for renewal. 31,854 of them were granted. The 94 percent
of the roughly 33,000 or so altogether, 94 percent of them got renewed
even though they said, ``I am a criminal.''
So we are not really cleaning out the folks that we wouldn't want in
this group, and it is getting harder and harder to find the ones you
would want in this group.
Then, of those based upon the data entry I mentioned earlier, 8,964,
they would be out, disqualified; 2,100 with no data available, they
would be disqualified; And of those who went back home, it disqualifies
them, also, because they knew when they came back in that they were
violating the law. It wasn't through no fault of their own. That is
775.
{time} 1415
Mr. Speaker, I am sure that you have added this up in your head, as I
have run through these numbers, and the conclusion you will have drawn
is that, of the 817,798 DACA recipients on record at the time we pulled
this data off last month, there was 789,851 of them who would be
disqualified on the records because they didn't meet the standards that
were put down by Barack Obama that were designed to give amnesty in the
first place. That is how bad these records are.
I can't believe these people are these bad, but the records certainly
are horrible, and we are here pontificating as if we know what we are
doing. Statesmen and women here are deciding: Oh, yeah, I can give
amnesty to DACA recipients because it is the humane thing to do. It is
the right thing to do for the country. Don't call it amnesty because it
hurts my feelings. And, by the way, we need to do this because if we
don't give amnesty to DACA recipients, we can't get the money for the
wall, and we can't pass the border security, and we can't end chain
migration, and we can't pass Kate's Law, and we can't pass Sarah's Law,
and we can't end sanctuary cities.
Really? This United States of America, this shining city on a hill,
this stellar country that has eclipsed anything that any country has
ever done before, we can't restore the essential pillar of American
exceptionalism called the rule of law? In fact, Mr. Speaker, when
Ronald Reagan spoke of the shining city on a hill, I always thought a
little bit differently. I was always inspired by the image that he
drew, but America is, instead, a shining city built upon pillars, and
those pillars are the pillars of American exceptionalism, and most of
them are in the bill of rights.
You have a pillar for freedom of speech, a pillar for freedom of
religion, a pillar for freedom of the press, a pillar for freedom of
assembly. We have a pillar for Second Amendment rights to keep and bear
arms, and then we have a pillar for property rights and one for no
double jeopardy and a jury of your peers and the enumerated powers in
the Constitution, the framework of the intergenerational contractual
guarantee, which is our Constitution, all of that is there.
It leaves out a couple of things in the Constitution. It doesn't
point out that this is a Judeo-Christian society with a belief and a
moral foundation that
[[Page H5016]]
guides us in our everyday life and a level of expectations of living up
to American standards, that is not there. But it is a pillar of
American exceptionalism. It is a pillar of the shining city on the
pillars. And free enterprise, capitalism, is another component.
All of these things come together to make America great. You know,
you can maybe wound two or three of those pillars, and we would still
be a great Nation. But the central pillar--think of these others that I
have described all around a circle holding up that city, but the
middle, the important one, the central pillar of American
exceptionalism is the rule of law. It is sacrosanct to a free people.
If we don't live by the rule of law, our country collapses, our other
pillars fall, and we fall into the Third World.
And yet, this Congress is in the business right now of negotiating
away the rule of law under some myopic belief that if we just reward
this group of people for breaking the law, somehow the rest of those
folks that are out there in other sympathetic categories are just going
to go away and say: Sorry, I guess I missed the boat; I wasn't DACA; I
was a parent that brought DACA in; or I got in too early and so I was
disqualified; or I got in too late and I was disqualified. These are
all illegal entries, by the way. Or I came into America, had a baby
with an anchor baby. Now I am a parent of an American. How do we split
up families?
You have to draw a line. The only place to draw the line is right
down the rule of law, and we cannot be supporting amnesty. To grant
amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the
objective of their crime.
What nation does that? What thinking nation would do such a thing
when we have got so much at stake; and how this multiplies itself
throughout the generations?
1986 Ronald Reagan made one mistake. He signed the amnesty act of
1986. We have been paying for that ever since because it created the
expectation that there would be other amnesties.
There have been at least six other minor amnesties since then. This
is the big one. This is at least as big as Ronald Reagan, and it sets
the stage for another 10 to 20 million people rewarded for breaking
American law. And what do we tell our children and what will our
descendants think if we can't think any more clearly than we appear to
be doing right now?
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________