[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.

                          ____________________