On the recordDecember 20, 2022
Mr. President, I first want to thank my colleague Senator Sinema for her comments. I think that she has framed a lot of the challenges that we were seeking to address that are going to persist into the next Congress now. I think one of the things that we have to do, if we are able to achieve bipartisan consensus in the next Congress, is to get more people to recognize, just as Senator Sinema stated in her first few lines of her comments just before me, we have a crisis at the southern border. And it is a crisis where the border States--the southern border States--bear the brunt of it, but it affects everybody in the United States. Every city, every State, every community is being affected by the crisis at the border. I think this administration has to recognize--it is interesting if you watch the news coverage--how suddenly one end of the spectrum says: Now it is time for Congress to act. The crisis at the border--2 million illegal crossings in each of the last 12-month periods, for a total of 4 million people illegally crossing the border. We dodged a bullet this week when title 42, which is a policy that allows expedited removal for a certain group of those crossing the border illegally to be returned--but tomorrow or next week or in the next couple of weeks, that policy is going to come off the books. Then, Border Patrol says, they will no longer have control over the border. They already have said that they can barely keep up.…





