[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 84 (Wednesday, May 15, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3692-S3693]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Border Security

  Mr. President, now on the border, three things are true about the 
southern border: One, the status quo cannot continue. Two, Democrats 
want Congress to take action. Three, the only way we will solve this 
issue is with real bipartisan action, not partisan talk.
  Instead of just making a lot of speeches, pointing a lot of fingers--
blame, blame, blame--we Democrats want to get something done to secure 
our border. Democrats showed we are serious about border security when 
we worked with Republicans to write the strongest border security bill 
in a generation, to hire more border agents and asylum officers, 
enhance drug enforcement, and fix asylum. We had the strongest border 
security bill in decades ready to go here in the Senate, with a lot of 
support from Republicans who, when they saw it, they liked it--they 
said, ``Wow, this is tough stuff''--until Donald Trump killed it to 
keep the issue alive on the campaign trail. He said it. He wanted chaos 
because it might help his election. Then he said: Blame it on me.
  I remember when he said, ``Blame the shutdown on me,'' when Speaker 
Pelosi and I went to his office. I don't think that is a very 
successful strategy, and it is certainly not what is good for America.
  So this bill is such a strong bill. It is a bill that would add more 
than 1,500 new Customs and Border Protection personnel, 4,300 asylum 
officers--a bill Democrats and Republicans spent months negotiating and 
fine-tuning and revising.
  Unlike the vast majority of bills in Congress that are dubbed as 
``border security,'' this wasn't a messaging bill. This was a product 
of months of bipartisan negotiation, written with the goal of reaching 
the President's desk--a bill supported by the people who know, perhaps 
better than anyone else, what it takes to address border security, the 
National Border Patrol Council, a very conservative group. Their 
president called our bill ``a step in the right direction'' and ``far 
better than the status quo.''
  Donald Trump's sabotage of the strongest border bill in decades makes

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it obvious he cares only about this issue so long as he can exploit it 
for political gain, not about solving the problem that Americans want 
solved. If Donald Trump was genuine about wanting to fix the border, if 
he actually believed this was an emergency, he would have supported the 
Senate's bipartisan bill.
  Still, Democrats have not walked away from this debate. We want to 
secure the border. We know it will take bipartisan action in Congress, 
and we call on our Republican colleagues to join us to advance border 
security legislation, bipartisan legislation that the people demand.