On the recordFebruary 24, 2015
I rise today to talk about the funding for the Department of Homeland Security and the continuing need for immigration reform. We need to fund the Department of Homeland Security and we should pass a clean DHS funding bill. That is the only bill that can pass the Senate, and that is the only bill that should pass the Senate. Once that bill has passed the Senate and the House and becomes law, then we can and should move on to consider immigration legislation. Republican leadership in the Senate has wasted a lot of time over the past month politicizing immigration and mixing it up with the issue of funding this Federal agency that helps to protect the United States from terrorists and other threats, and those threats are real. Just this past weekend, the terrorist organization al-Shabaab issued a threatening video suggesting that the Mall of America in my State of Minnesota could be a target for a terrorist attack. Look, this issue is not something we should be politicizing. We should enact into law a clean funding bill for DHS, and we should fund the Department for the whole year and not make the Department run for a short time on a continuing resolution and just revisit the issue in the near future. That is not what we want. And then we should and can debate immigration. I have always believed the best way to accomplish meaningful and sustainable immigration reform is through congressional action. In the last Congress, the Senate took such action.…
