John Rutherford: “I appreciate the gentlewoman yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, as we move into National Police Week, I rise in support…”

“I appreciate the gentlewoman yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, as we move into National Police Week, I rise in support of two bills that will help make our officers safer out on the street. The first is H.R. 2494, commonly called the POLICE Act, which simply states that an illegal alien that assaults a police officer will be deported. Not might be; will be. Currently, the situation is they can be arrested for assaulting, and in 2021 we had 43,000 law enforcement officers assaulted. I am sure many of those were by illegal aliens. Those numbers are just going to go up. They can be arrested, placed in a 287(g) jail facility where they are held for ICE, convicted of the crime of assault, but they still may not be deported. They have to go through a long legal analysis after their conviction to ensure that they are deported out of this country. H.R. 2494, the POLICE Act, simply says if you assault one of our officers, we are kicking you out of this country. I can't imagine why anyone across the aisle would vote against that. The other bill is H.R. 3091, the Federal Law Enforcement Service Weapon Purchase Act. Mr. Speaker, we have several of our Federal law enforcement agencies right now who are about to go through rearming their agencies to the tune of about 20,000 weapons. They are going to destroy these weapons if officers are not allowed to purchase their service weapon as it is being retired or as the officer may retire.…”