Bob Goodlatte

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to file a supplemental report on the resolution, H. Res. 928.

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I claim time in opposition to the motion to recommit.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this effort to distract us from the major problems that we are attempting to address in our country. This motion to recommit deals only with a red herring. It fixes nothing, but rather ensures that catch and release will remain in effect. The American people want a holistic approach to reforming immigration laws that focuses on enforcement first before legalization. The motion to recommit simply does not do that. H.R. 6136 helps solve the problem with a surge of people coming illegally into the United States by funding the border wall construction and other infrastructure at the border, and it closes the loopholes that require catch and release of aliens who have entered illegally. The bill begins the process of reforming the way U.S. green cards are allocated. And it provides a path to legalization for the DACA-eligible population. H.R. 6136 addresses the areas that need to be addressed in immigration: enforcement, including a true fix to the issue of separation of children from their parents; it includes border security, legal immigration, and legalization for DACA-eligible individuals. The motion to recommit does none of that. I urge my colleagues to oppose that motion. I also want to call to everyone's attention the Statement of Administration Policy issued by the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget just this morning. It says in part: ``The administration strongly supports House passage of H.R. 6136, the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2018. . . .'' ``H.R. 6136 would end the visa lottery program and would begin moving toward a merit-based system for admission. H.R. 6136 would also reduce extended-family chain migration by removing family preference categories for siblings and adult married children. . . .'' ``Overall, the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2018 would support the administration's goals of securing the border, closing legal loopholes, moving to a system of merit-based immigration, and providing a responsible solution to DACA. ``If H.R. 6136 were presented to the President, his advisers would recommend that he sign it into law.'' But, you don't have to listen to his advisers. You can listen to the President himself, because he tweeted this morning: ``House Republicans should pass the strong but fair immigration bill, known as Goodlatte II, in their afternoon vote today, even though the Dems won't let it pass in the Senate. Passage will show that we want strong borders and security while the Dems want open borders equals crime. Win.'' That is what we need to do today. We need to win by defeating this motion to recommit and passing this important legislation that brings America forward in addressing our immigration issues, is an appropriate fix for the DACA population, secures our borders, and moves towards a merit-based immigration system that this country needs. That is what we are about today. Mr. Speaker, reject the motion to recommit, pass this bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me this time and for his hard work on this issue as well. Mr. Speaker, this is a very good bill. It is not something that was cooked up overnight. This bill was introduced 6 months ago. It is based upon legislation that has passed out of the Judiciary Committee in previous Congresses, and some of it in this Congress. It is a good effort to make sure that we are addressing all three aspects of immigration law that need to be addressed. It has a very good proposal with regard to the DACA recipients. They get a legal status permanently for the rest of their lives, renewable every 3 years, as long as they don't commit a crime. And that is a statutory protection. That is not something that is subject to court challenges. That is not something that is subject to the whims of any President, past, present, or future. It is something that allows them, then, to avail themselves of existing pathways to citizenship, and it is something that will allow them to work in the United States, live in the United States, own a business in the United States, and travel in and out of the United States. I think it is a good first step in addressing this situation. Secondly, the President has made it very clear, and people watching the news coverage know, the difficulties that the administration--any administration, this administration, the Obama administration, the Bush administration before it--has with laws that need to be corrected to make sure that loopholes are not followed at our border. We have, now, a waiting list of 600,000 people applying for asylum. Historically, asylum, which is a very good part of our immigration law, has been granted to 5,000--some years, maybe as many as 10,000--people. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, who wrote ``The Gulag Archipelago,'' got political asylum in the United States. But when everyone who is apprehended coming across the border illegally trying to avoid detection, when they are apprehended then says, ``Oh, I am here for political asylum,'' and you create a backlog 600,000 people long and then they are released into the interior of the country and don't return for their hearings in many, many, many instances, that is a very flawed aspect of our immigration system. This bill addresses that, as it does the problem with unaccompanied minors. Children 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 years of age, mostly young boys, coming across all of Mexico and then through the desert or across the Rio Grande River and then thinking that this is an acceptable thing for them to do to enter our country, they need to be returned safely home, and the laws need to be reformed to accomplish that. We need to reform many other aspects of our border security laws, close these loopholes. We need to have greater technology. We need to have, along some segments of our border, improved wall technology. We have fences and some walls already. The fences have big holes in them. People come with chain cutters and cut holes through them in a matter of seconds and go through them when it is foggy there in San Diego or other times when they have that opportunity. We need to have a more secure border both with technology and with a wall in some places and with the necessary personnel to handle this, including not just Border Patrol, but the judges and other officers who are necessary to process people when they are apprehended. This is a very serious problem, and it is addressed in this legislation. We also need to move toward a merit-based immigration system. We have, as the gentleman from Texas has repeatedly noted, the most generous immigration policy in the world. We have tens of millions of people who come to visit this country every year: some to work, some to go to school, some to conduct business. For more than 75 different categories of reasons they come here. We also have more than a dozen immigrant visa categories that allow people to come to the United States, and we give out, on average, about 1.1 million green cards a year to people who go through the process lawfully. That is the most generous system in the world. We need to recognize that as we do that, we have to move toward a system where we are meeting the needs of American citizens, as well, as we do it. Areas where we have shortages so that we can keep businesses in the United States rather than having them move elsewhere in the world where they can find the workers they need is an important part of this. So eliminating things like the visa lottery, where we give 55,000 green cards out for no good reason at all other than the pure luck that people attain from that and instead use those to have a new system where we have the opportunity to move towards a merit-based system, which is not in this bill but should be the successor to this bill, is an important thing to do. I think that all of those measures are contained in this legislation. I think it is very, very good legislation. But this bill contains two important provisions that are not in the second bill, and I want to particularly address those. First, we have in this bill the E-Verify program. This is a program, a very fine program, that exists today. More than 800,000 businesses use it. Many large businesses use it. I would bet that probably a majority of the people who process job applications today utilize it. But it is certainly not utilized by everybody. As a consequence, it is not being totally effective, because the people who aren't using it either don't want to know whether somebody is lawfully present in the United States, or they think they are unlawfully present and don't want to have a system that uncovers that. But this bill, applying prospectively only--you don't have to apply it to your current employees--works 99.7 percent of the time. It is very, very accurate. And most importantly, it has a safe harbor for both the worker and the employer. So that if you get a false positive, and if you are getting that three-tenths of a percent of the time--that is still a significant number of people when you use the E-Verify system--the new law actually gives them a way to work out the catch-22 situation that workers and employers find themselves in. Because under the current law, we use the I-9 forms. Oftentimes, someone will look at it and say: I am not sure these are genuine documents. But if they refuse to hire the individual and it turns out that they are genuine documents, they can be sued for discrimination. And on the other hand, if they hire the worker and it turns out they are unlawfully present, they can be prosecuted for hiring someone unlawfully present in the United States. And so the safe harbor says, you can go ahead and hire that person until we work out whether it is a false positive or a false negative without that consequence, and only until we know that, will you then have to not employ that person. You will face no consequences in doing that. That is good for the worker and it is good for the employer as well. When you do that--there is no doubt that there are sectors of our economy where we have a lot of people who are not lawfully present in the United States working. And by far, the number-one sector that is affected by that is our agricultural workforce. There are some estimates that as many as 80 or 90 percent of people working in agriculture, beyond the actual family members who own a farm, are not lawfully present in this country. Some estimate that more than 1 million people who are working, are not lawfully present in this country. Wouldn't it be great if we could turn that workforce into legal workers where they have the opportunity to go back and forth across the border, to go home to where their family is without the fear of being apprehended and prosecuted? That is what this bill does. It gives farmers a much more reliable workforce. It gives them a much better program where they can self- certify, where the worker can come in for up to 2 years at a time. And in the dairy industry where they have no program at all today, or in processing plants, raw-food processing plants, they have no program at all today, we have the ability to help those farmers. This is an area of our economy that is very much affected by international competition. It is exceedingly important that we pass this legislation to move immigration in the direction it needs to move, and this is an enlightened way to do it. It is not a bad bill. It is a good bill for the American people.

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 954, I call up the bill (H.R. 4760) to amend the immigration laws and the homeland security laws, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 4760.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I introduced H.R. 4760, along with Michael McCaul, Martha McSally, and Raul Labrador, to provide an equitable and permanent legal status for unlawful aliens who grew up in America after their parents brought them here as children. Just as importantly, we want to strengthen our borders, close gaping loopholes, curtail endemic fraud, and enhance interior immigration enforcement so that our Nation won't face the same dilemma in a few years. President Trump did the right thing and tried to end President Obama's blatantly unconstitutional DACA program. As a Federal court ruled in enjoining DACA's sister program, DHS cannot ``enact a program whereby it not only ignores the dictates of Congress, but actively acts to thwart them. . . . The DHS Secretary is not just rewriting the laws; he is creating them from scratch.'' President Trump also did the right thing by immediately turning to us, asking Congress to fix the problem. As he asked for, H.R. 4760 solves the DACA conundrum. It provides DACA beneficiaries with an indefinitely renewable legal nonimmigrant status allowing them to live and work in the United States without worry and travel abroad as they choose. It also allows them to receive green cards on the same terms as any other intending immigrant around the world. As I indicated, the bill will help ensure that the distressing DACA dilemma does not recur. It ends catch and release at the border, battles asylum fraud, and ensures that unaccompanied minors caught at the border will be treated equally, regardless of their home country. It will ensure that the law no longer tempts minors and their parents to make the dangerous illicit journey to the United States and to line the pockets of cancerous cartels with hundreds of millions of dollars. The bill will also take away the other magnet that draws millions of persons to come to the United States illegally: the jobs magnet. Through the inclusion of Lamar Smith's Legal Workforce Act, it makes E- Verify mandatory. After two decades of constant improvement, E-Verify has become an extremely effective, reliable, and easy way for employers to ensure that they have hired a legal workforce. Three-quarters of a million employers currently use E-Verify, which almost instantaneously confirms the work eligibility of new hires 99 percent of the time. The bill will also allow DHS to deport members of MS-13 and other virulent criminal gangs and allow it to detain dangerous aliens who cannot be removed. It will combat the public safety menace of sanctuary cities in multiple ways, including by allowing the Justice Department to withhold from them law enforcement grants. The bill makes significant reforms to our legal immigration system. It puts an end to extended family chain migration and terminates the diversity visa green card lottery, which awards green cards at random to people with no ties to the United States or any particular skills. In addition, it replaces the dysfunctional H-2A agricultural guestworker program. The H-2A program is slow, bureaucratic, and frustrating, often forcing growers to leave crops to rot in the fields. They also must pay an artificially inflated wage rate, along with providing free housing and transportation. In doing the right thing, H- 2A users are almost always repaid by being placed at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace. The bill provides growers with streamlined access to guestworkers when sufficient American labor cannot be found. It finally provides dairies and food processors with year-round labor needs with access to a guestworker program. It avoids the pitfalls of the H-2A program, and it will remain at its core a true guestworker program. As growers learned the hard way after the 1986 amnesty, illegal farmworkers will leave en mass and flock to the cities when provided with permanent residence. The Agricultural Guestworker Act contained in this bill is supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the dairy industry, and over 200 distinct agricultural organizations from across the United States. Following introduction of this legislation, I have sat down with my colleagues for months to learn of any concerns and to strive to improve the bill. The product of this intensive work is better legislation. While I am disappointed that the rule did not allow me to include all of the improvements made possible by the input of so many Members, I am gratified that I could include the refinements to the H-2C agricultural guestworker program. To give just one example, the bill now clarifies that the Department of Homeland Security will issue documents to unlawful alien farmworkers who have been sponsored by growers to join the program, authorizing them to return to the United States without the need for visas after completing their initial touchbacks. This will create certainty for growers, allowing them to receive pre-approval of their H-2C petitions for current workers before they leave the country and precertification of the workers' admission back into the United States before they leave. Congress has a unique opportunity to act before the country ends up with another large population who crossed the border illegally as children. Let's take this historic moment to come together and support vital legislation that provides commonsense, reasonable solutions. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join President Trump and support H.R. 4760, and I reserve the balance of my time. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, Washington, DC, June 20, 2018. Hon. Bob Goodlatte, Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, DC. Dear Chairman Goodlatte: Thank you for the opportunity to review the relevant provisions of the text of H.R. 4760, the Securing America's Future Act of 2018. As you are aware, the bill was primarily referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, while the Agriculture Committee received an additional referral. I recognize and appreciate your desire to bring this legislation before the House in an expeditious manner. Accordingly, I agree to discharge H.R. 4760 from further consideration by the Committee on Agriculture. I do so with the understanding that by discharging the bill, the Committee on Agriculture does not waive any future jurisdictional claim on this or similar matters. Further, the Committee on Agriculture reserves the right to seek the appointment of conferees, if it should become necessary. I ask that you insert a copy of our exchange of letters into the Congressional Record during consideration of this measure on the House floor. Thank you for your courtesy in this matter and I look forward to continued cooperation between our respective committees. Sincerely, K. Michael Conaway, Chairman.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith), who is the author of an important provision in this bill related to electronic verification of employment, and he is the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to respond to some of the false charges that we are hearing here. First of all, with regard to E-Verify, unfortunately, there is a misconception that it is our intention to implement the new H-2C program and mandate E-Verify for agriculture simultaneously. This could not be further from the truth. The AG Act, under that act, E-Verify would not be mandated for agriculture until the H-2C is properly up and running and no sooner than 24 months after enactment of the legislation. In addition, E- Verify will only apply to future hires. Secondly, I want to respond to those who complain about what we are doing for the DACA recipients in this legislation. I want to make it very, very clear we are going to do something that is legal, something that is constitutional for them instead of something that was illegal and unconstitutional, and it is going to be superior in this bill to what was done for them there, because they will be allowed to remain in the United States permanently, renewing every 3 years. They are only excluded if they do not meet certain criteria. The fact of the matter is we will have an opportunity for them to avail themselves of existing pathways to citizenship. If they are married to a United States citizen, as it would be logical that a great many of these DACA recipients are because of the fact that they have grown up here, they will be able to benefit from that. They could not do that under the Obama executive order. So this is much better than how the Democrats have treated the DACA recipients. Lastly, whether the labor workforce status quo is sustainable for American agriculture, under current law in California and other States, farmers are facing chronic employee shortages. Last fall, the California Farm Bureau announced the results of an informal survey of its members. The survey showed that 69 percent of those surveyed were experiencing labor shortfalls. Despite all the efforts California farmers and ranchers have made to find and hire people to work on their operations, they still can't find enough willing and qualified employees. California Farm Bureau President Paul Wenger said: ``Farmers have offered higher wages, benefits, and more year-round jobs. They have tried to mechanize operations where possible and have even changed crops or left ground idle, but employee shortages persist.'' The labor force status quo is simply unsustainable for American agriculture. Clearly, this is not a situation that is going to be solved by granting permanent resident status to farmworkers. In fact, that is the opposite of what is needed. Granting permanent resident status to illegal farmworkers will not do anything to ensure that farmers and ranchers have access to the labor they need for years to come. It is shortsighted and does nothing to relieve employers or legal farmworkers of the unnecessary burdens and competitive disadvantage they face under the outdated H-2A program. Americans' food can be grown in other countries where land and labor are far cheaper. To ensure that our meat and produce continue to be grown in America and that our Nation's agricultural industry thrives in the global marketplace, the U.S. needs a flexible, workable, and fair guest worker program like the H-2C program established in the AG Act and contained in the legislation that we are debating right now. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining on each side.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Labrador), the chairman of the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton).

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, first of all, this bill has been mischaracterized and was just again. This bill makes provisions for when the immigration service prosecutes somebody at the border. It doesn't tell them when to do that. So it is entirely incorrect to make that assertion. I see the conflicting news reports about what the intention of the administration is today on that issue, but that does not change the fact that that has nothing to do with the good measures in this bill that correct the problems that we are speaking about. The overwhelming majority of the American people want children to be with their parents, and I have just seen a poll a few minutes ago that shows that the overwhelming majority of them want those children detained with their parents, not to have the parents and the children released into the interior of the country where they never return for their hearing. That kind of open border policy that is supported by the advocates on the other side of the aisle is not good for America, and it is not good for sound immigration policy. We are a nation of immigrants. There is not a person in this room who can't go back a few generations or several generations and find someone in their family who immigrated to the United States. But we are also a nation of laws, and respect for the rule of law and following our legal immigration system is the foundation of our society. So, to me, when you say that it is not good enough to do better for the DACA recipients than Barack Obama did, where do you get that idea from? When you say that we are not a generous country with regard to immigration and that this is an anti-immigration bill when it sustains far more legal immigration than any other country on Earth, they are completely wrong. But at the same time that we do that and we promote that in this bill, good legal immigration policy and something fair for the DACA recipients, we must also have secure borders in our country, and we must give any administration, not just this one, the tools it needs to close the loopholes to secure the border and to end crazy programs like the visa lottery program that gives 55,000 green cards to people just based on pure luck. There are better things to do with those green cards to move to a merit-based immigration system. I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation, reject the negative ideas of the opposition, and move forward with a policy that does both something important for the DACA recipients but also secures America's national security interests and the interests of our citizens. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in opposition to the motion to recommit.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this effort to distract us from the major problems that we are attempting to address in our country. This motion to recommit only--only--deals with amnesty for a far larger population of people than the American people expect to have addressed. The people who are the DACA recipients are people who arrived here as young children before June 15, 2007. This bill does nothing to solve the problem with the surge of people at the border of our country. It does nothing to create a new border security wall and fencing system, technology and personnel who are needed, and judges in courtrooms to process the huge number--the 600,000 backlog--of amnesty cases that we have. This does nothing to close the loopholes that are allowing people to enjoy what is called catch and release. When they come into the country, some of them even turn themselves in knowing that, ultimately, they are going to be released into the interior of the United States. We need to give the administration the tools they need to stop this problem. It is not a new problem. The Obama administration wanted a number of the changes that are in this bill with regard to clarifying things like the terrible Flores decision, which is at the heart of the problem we have with young children being separated from their parents. We fix those things in this legislation, and yet this would substitute all of that for something that is just targeted at what the other party wants to do. And they call upon us to work in a bipartisan fashion. This bill addresses all of the areas that need to be addressed, and they give lip service to the other areas, but they do not address them. This is proof of that by the fact that it only deals with amnesty. We need to have a movement to a merit-based immigration system. We need to end the terrible visa lottery system, which is a national security problem and which is something that does not benefit the American economy. We need to move from chain migration to a merit-based system, and we need to make sure that we treat the DACA recipients better than they are treated under the unconstitutional, illegal Obama process, but not at the cost of not doing the other three pillars that we are seeking to address. We need to address border security and interior enforcement; we need to end the visa lottery and move to a merit-based system; and we need to end chain migration. It also doesn't have anything about E-Verify or helping 1 million agricultural guest workers who want to work in this country legally and the farmers who want to have a system that allows them to do that legally. This is the bill that we need to pass, not this motion to recommit. I urge my colleague to oppose the motion to recommit and support the underlying legislation. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 6136.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, Michael McCaul, Carlos Curbelo, Jeff Denham, and I introduced H.R. 6136 to be a consensus bill designed to bring Members together. It is the product of fruitful negotiations and will offer us a path forward toward true immigration reform. As with the Securing America's Future Act, this bill provides a legislative resolution of DACA, which was imposed through an unconstitutional abuse of executive power by President Obama. But in addition to a renewable legal status, this bill expands relief to those who were eligible for DACA but never applied. Many did not apply because they thought that DACA was simply unconstitutional. H.R. 6136 also creates a merit-based green card program that the recipients of the bill's contingent nonimmigrant status can apply for. This program is the first-ever point system based on education, vocational training, apprenticeship, employment experience, English proficiency, and military service under U.S. immigration law. Aliens with similar life experiences to DACA recipients can also apply: those who were brought to the United States as minors by parents on temporary work visas and grew up in the United States. All other DACA legislation that I am aware of discriminates against such persons simply because they and their parents haven't violated our laws. To be clear, there is no special path to citizenship for DACA recipients or DACA-eligible individuals. Importantly, this bill will help ensure that the DACA dilemma does not recur after a few short years. As with H.R. 4760, it will end ``catch and release,'' battle asylum fraud, and require that unaccompanied minors caught at the border be treated equally, regardless of their home country. As with H.R. 4760, it will ensure that the law no longer tempts minors and their parents to make the dangerous, illegal journey to the United States or to line the pockets of cartels. We must turn off the irresistible ``jobs magnet,'' if we are ever to effectively deal with illegal immigration. While expansion of the hugely successful E-Verify program is not contained in H.R. 6136, I am pleased that the leadership has committed to bringing such legislation to the floor this summer. As with H.R. 4760, the bill will make it easier to deport gang members who are aggravated felons, or who have multiple DUIs. H.R. 6136 modernizes our legal immigration system. It will reduce extended family chain migration and terminate the diversity visa program, which awards green cards by random lottery to people with no ties to the United States. It reduces overall immigration numbers over the long term, and shifts to a first-in-line visa system by eliminating the per-country cap on employment-based green cards. The bill begins a shift to a merit-based system by establishing the new merit-based green card program that I described. As with H.R. 4760, the bill corrects the disastrous Flores settlement to ensure that minors apprehended at the border with their parents are not separated from their parents when the parents are placed in DHS custody. Importantly, H.R. 6136 addresses family separation in light of the zero-tolerance prosecution initiative by mandating that DHS, not DOJ, maintain the custody of aliens charged with illegal entry along with their children. This would only apply to those who enter the country with children and would not permit those charged with felonies, or any other criminal activity, to be detained along with children. The bill allocates funding for family detention space to facilitate this requirement. Congress has a unique opportunity to act now, before the country ends up with another large population who crossed the border illegally as children. Let's take this historic moment to come together and support vital legislation that provides commonsense, reasonable solutions. Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join President Trump and support this important legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time. House of Representatives, Committee on Agriculture, Washington, DC, June 20, 2018. Hon. Bob Goodlatte, Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, DC. Dear Chairman Goodlatte: Thank you for the opportunity to review the relevant provisions of the text of H.R. 6136, the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2018. As you are aware, the bill was primarily referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, while the Agriculture Committee received an additional referral. I recognize and appreciate your desire to bring this legislation before the House in an expeditious manner. Accordingly, I agree to discharge H.R. 6136 from further consideration by the Committee on Agriculture. I do so with the understanding that by discharging the bill, the Committee on Agriculture does not waive any future jurisdictional claim on this or similar matters. Further, the Committee on Agriculture reserves the right to seek the appointment of conferees, if it should become necessary. I ask that you insert a copy of our exchange of letters into the Congressional Record during consideration of this measure on the House floor. Thank you for your courtesy in this matter and I look forward to continued cooperation between our respective committees. Sincerely, K. Michael Conaway, Chairman.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. Handel), a member of the Judiciary Committee.