Tom Rice: “I would also like to thank the minority leader, Ms. Pelosi, for her plea on behalf of the DACA recipients. She certainly…”

“I would also like to thank the minority leader, Ms. Pelosi, for her plea on behalf of the DACA recipients. She certainly showed great passion and stamina. I do wonder, however, why she is so concerned now. This is not a new problem. All of these people who qualify for DACA today had to be here by the year 2007. They were here illegally in the United States during those 2 years when Ms. Pelosi served as Speaker of the House and Harry Reid was the leader of a supermajority of Democrats in the Senate and Barack Obama was President, yet she took no action then. They could have passed a law, rather than having President Obama sign an illegal executive order, and given the DACA kids a pathway to citizenship, but I guess it wasn't a priority then. Last month, my home county, Horry County, South Carolina, settled a claim brought by the United States Department of Justice. It seems the Department determined that Horry County wasn't doing enough to accommodate students who couldn't speak English. One would think that wouldn't be much of a problem in South Carolina. We are a long way from our southern border. But as it turns out, according to the Horry County independent newspapers, 5,511 out of the 44,700 students in Horry County Schools spoke English as a second language only. That is 13 percent of the student body in Horry County, South Carolina. So the school system agreed to pay a claim by paying $600,000 to accommodate those students who couldn't speak English.…”