[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 84 (Thursday, May 18, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1724-S1726]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Border Security

  Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, one of the benefits of sitting in the 
chair, as the Senator from Maine is currently, is you get to hear a 
wide variety of views from our colleagues. And I have had the 
opportunity over the past several weeks, while sitting in the chair, to 
hear my Republican colleagues talk about their concerns regarding the 
lifting of title 42. They are concerns that are very often shared in 
many respects by Democrats as well.
  But it is really important that we level set the facts when we are 
talking about what is happening at the border right now, as the 
pandemic authority to stop people from applying for asylum is--as 
required by law--being lifted.
  It is really important that we understand that in this debate, there 
are a lot of spinning; there are a lot of myths; there are some just 
outright mistruths that are being spread about what is happening at the 
border and what has been happening at the border.
  And so I am down on the floor just for a few minutes today to try to 
talk about a short list of those myths and untruths that are being 
spread, sometimes on this floor, but very often on social media and on 
cable news, so that we can find a way to have a functional conversation 
between Republicans and Democrats of good faith who actually want to 
make progress.
  First, my sense is that there were a lot of conservatives out there 
and a lot of haters of President Biden who were kind of rooting for 
chaos at the border, who were hoping that there was just going to be 
this overwhelming flood of crossings and apprehensions at the border 
when title 42 was lifted.
  Here is maybe the most important thing to say: It didn't happen. In 
fact, if you look at the number of people who were showing up at the 
southwest border right before title 42 expired--

[[Page S1725]]

and I will admit that number was elevated--we have seen half as many 
people crossing in the last 4 days as were crossing right before title 
42 expired.
  Four thousand, five thousand people--that is still a lot of people 
per day who are being apprehended at the border, but it does not match 
the doomsday predictions that many on the right were making.
  So I think it is just important to acknowledge that fact. Because if 
you read the newspapers, if you paid attention to cable news, you would 
have thought that the minute that title 42 ended, there was going to be 
a doubling, a tripling of the number of people who showed up at the 
border. That didn't happen, in fact--52 percent less people are showing 
up.
  Now, that may not hold. I can't promise that that is the future 
trajectory. But I am going to tell you a story today about why that 
happens, and it is connected to things Joe Biden did.
  The second level-setting exercise I want to engage in is this idea 
that we should be in just lockdown fear of all these people who are 
coming to the United States at the southern border, that there is 
something uniquely dangerous about immigrants writ large, but, more 
specifically, undocumented immigrants.
  Now, this is a trope that has been around for as long as the United 
States has existed, that we should fear immigrants coming to this 
country. But we now have data to tell us whether or not people who are 
coming to this country as immigrants or people who are even coming to 
this country as undocumented immigrants are a risk, a threat, to the 
United States compared to natural-born citizens.
  This is a study that Donald Trump's Department of Justice released. 
This isn't Joe Biden; this isn't Barack Obama. This is Donald Trump's 
Department of Justice that released a study that found that 
``undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than 
native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony 
offenses.''
  That is the truth. It is Donald Trump's truth that, in fact, people 
who come to this country, whether they are legal immigrants or without 
documentation, are not committing crimes at a greater rate than 
natural-born Americans.
  That doesn't excuse our broken system. That is not an argument to 
continue to allow so many people to come to this country without 
documentation. It just means that we shouldn't set on fire these 
arguments that we have something unique to fear.
  Why? Because these people are coming to the United States for a 
better life, because people are coming to the United States to flee 
terror and torture, persecution, violence, and economic destitution.
  There are criminals amongst their midst. There are individuals who 
end up committing crimes but at no greater rate of offense than people 
who are born in this country. It is just important to acknowledge that.
  I want to talk about four of these myths very quickly.
  The first one is that President Biden had the authority to keep title 
42 in place. That is just not true. For the better part of the last 2 
years, Republicans, conservatives, and the broader right have been 
pillorying President Biden for not lifting COVID authorities fast 
enough: The pandemic is over, the right says. Why do we still have 
restrictions on our movement? Why are there still restrictions on air 
travel?
  Interestingly, the only restriction Republicans wanted to keep in 
place was the one at the border to stop people from coming into the 
United States who looked different from them.
  The pandemic is over. Title 42 can't stay in place. The President 
doesn't have the legal authority to continue to turn people around and 
deny them the right to apply for asylum. So it is just not true that 
this is President Biden's choice. And if you are a constitutionalist, 
if you are somebody that believes that the President cannot and should 
not exceed his constitutional statutory authority, then you have to 
support the lifting of title 42. Now, we could change the law, and 
there are proposals to do that, but President Biden cannot keep title 
42 in place any longer than he declares a public health emergency.
  The second myth--and I have heard this from some of my colleagues 
here--is that everything was great under President Trump and it 
exploded under President Biden. In fact, sometimes you hear this stat: 
that crossings were at a historic low under President Trump.
  Well, that is true to the extent that gas prices were at a historic 
low under President Trump, because crossings were at a historic low for 
1 year, for 2020, when we were in the middle of the teeth of the 
pandemic, and nobody was going anywhere. Yes, during that period of 
time, when we shut down the border, when nobody in the United States 
was moving, when nobody in Mexico was moving, we did have a relatively 
low number of crossings. But just before the pandemic, when President 
Trump was in office, we had a historically high number of crossings.
  In 2019, 800,000 people showed up at the border. That was twice the 
number for the previous decade, on average. During President Obama's 
time in office and the first few years of President Trump, 400,000 
people were showing up. Then, in 2019, the numbered spiked to 800,000. 
They go down for 1 year, but they came back up as soon as the worst of 
the pandemic abated.
  So it is just not true that this problem was a creation of President 
Biden's swearing-in. Numbers were abnormally high right before the 
pandemic, and they started jumping back up once the pandemic started to 
lessen in its severity.
  The third myth is that President Biden didn't prepare for the end of 
title 42. That is also not true, and I gave you that statistic to show 
that. In fact, crossings right now are half what they were right before 
title 42 expired. I can't define all the reasons for that and maybe 
those numbers are temporary, but it is definitely true that President 
Biden has taken extraordinary steps to be ready for this moment.
  Even while Congress refused to act and give him any help, President 
Biden surged thousands of troops to the border. He put more asylum 
officers there. He moved Border Patrol. He signed agreements with 
Mexico in which Mexico agreed to take a certain number of individuals 
who were coming from countries like Venezuela and Cuba. And he 
implemented a really tough new asylum rule--a rule that, frankly, many 
people on his political left say went beyond his statutory authority. 
That rule says that you actually cannot apply for asylum at the border 
unless you have applied beforehand in a safe third country or you made 
an appointment. That is a really innovative, tough new approach to try 
to reduce the number of crossings and presentations at the border--a 
step that, frankly, President Trump didn't even entertain.
  So it is just not true to say that President Biden hasn't done 
anything. In fact, he has taken extraordinary steps to try to be as 
ready as he can, which leads me to the fourth and final myth, which is 
that this is all President Biden's problem. It is not. It is our 
problem. We haven't significantly updated the immigration laws of this 
country since the 1980s or 1990s. It has been 30 years since we have 
changed the law in this Nation to reflect the changing nature of 
migration globally and the changing nature of migration to the United 
States. We, through our inaction, have left President after President, 
Republican and Democrat, with a mess because our laws don't work; our 
immigration system is broken. Yet we blame the President for failing to 
be able to work miracles out of a system that has been fundamentally 
rendered ineffective.
  Let's be very clear. Republicans have had ample opportunity to fix 
the laws of this Nation. In 2013, when the Presiding Officer and I got 
to the Senate, there was a deal on the table to fundamentally and 
comprehensively reform our immigration laws. Republicans in the Senate 
joined with Democrats to get that done, but the Republican Speaker of 
the House refused to have a vote on it in the House.
  Since then, there have been a number of efforts to reach out and try 
to find compromise with Republicans, and it has generally been the 
Republican Party writ large that has decided that there is too big a 
political cost for them to take in trying to find common ground on 
immigration reform.
  Now, I say that this is a position from the Republican Party writ 
large

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because I do know and believe that there are individual Republican 
Senators in this body who do want to find compromise, who do want to 
recognize that this cannot be solved by any President so long as the 
laws of this Nation don't provide resources to move asylum claims 
faster, don't give Border Patrol what they need, don't allow enough 
people to come into this country through legal pathways.

  Part of the reason that I am down here on the floor today trying to 
correct these myths and untruths is because I think it is a necessary 
predicate in order for us as a body, Republicans and Democrats, to sit 
down and talk about solving this problem.
  The lack of action in Congress has left President Biden an impossible 
task. He has done the best that he conceivably can with a set of broken 
laws. But instead of spreading these myths and often outright lies 
about what is happening at the border and the consequences of lifting 
title 42, we should, as body, instead, do our job and fix our broken 
immigration laws.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.