James Lankford

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to be able to use a prop during this speech.

Mr. LANKFORD. In about an hour, this body will gather. There will be 100 Senators here to make a decision about what we are going to do to take a step on border security. It is an issue that has bedeviled, quite frankly, this body for decades. It has been three decades since we passed anything into law to be able to change border security. In the meantime, administration after administration has pieced together broken pieces of law in the disjointing pieces and tried to make regulatory actions to see what they can do to be able to change the direction of the country. We have seen just over the last 10 or 15 years what really happened to that. This is just an encounter number from CBP; and we can look back to 2009, and we can see the numbers stayed about half a million or so for multiple years. This is through the Obama administration. They struggled because the numbers were lower than this even before. They struggled with half a million numbers. We see during the Trump administration how the numbers bump up and jump up here almost to a million in a single year, twice as many as it was during the Obama time period. Then we see COVID time period, it dives back down. Then right there is the transition in President Biden's time, and the numbers have skyrocketed. They doubled from the Biden administration to this year in the Trump administration, but then they tripled even from the highest year of the Trump administration during the Biden administration. It wasn't a single bump year like it was under the Trump administration. It has been year after year after year. By the way, this little one is this fiscal year. That is just since October--which by the way, you will notice in the last 4 months is higher than any year under the Obama administration and almost as high as the peak year under the Trump administration, and that is 4 months so far this year. Americans feel it. We feel it in our cities. We feel it in our schools and our communities. We see the television, and we see all of the chaos on our southern border. Cities around the country have said: Do something. Make this stop. Americans, whether they are Republican, Democrat, or Independent, are all unanimous on this issue: This is a problem that needs to be solved; do what you can. Today, we get to decide if we are going to do that or not; if we are going to do nothing or do something. The bill that has been put together has been a bipartisan effort. Welcome to the U.S. Senate. That is what we have to do. While I have people from around the country and back home that say: Do a Republican-only bill; just get all of our priorities and none of theirs. I smile at them and say: Welcome to governance. You can do a partisan bill in the House, but in the Senate, we have to look at each other across the aisle and then figure out a way to be able to solve this. Sometimes it is in committees; sometimes it is a gathering; sometimes it was like this time: Get Members together--Republican, Independent, Democratic--to be able to sit down and hash out the issues; to say this is a problem, we all agree. We are not going to agree on the solutions, necessarily, but we all agree this is a problem. But we have to figure out what the solutions might be. That has been the process for the last 4 months--4 months--to sit down and hash through the very difficult, very technical issues of border security in our Nation with one goal: Let's make progress. We understood from the beginning we are not going to solve everything. We are not. We knew from the beginning it is not going to be perfect. But we also knew the status quo is untenable. We have to do something to be able to make the status quo better. So that is what we worked towards--to be able to change where we are now. The product we put out this past weekend allowed everybody to see it. Quite frankly, I had some of my colleagues that said: I will need weeks to evaluate it because it is so technical. And it is. But some, literally within minutes, said: No, I don't agree. Fine. But after time to be able to review it, the National Border Patrol Council--the group that is actually on the ground trying to manage the chaos--they read through the bill and evaluated it. And the National Border Patrol Council gave this statement: [The Border Patrol Act of 2024] will give U.S. Border Patrol agents authorities codified, in law, that we have not had in the past. While not perfect-- And I will agree with them on that. --the Border Patrol Act of 2024 is a step in the right direction and is far better than the current status quo. This is why the National Border Patrol Council endorses this bill and hopes for its quick passage. I understand this: In this building and in the 202 area code that is Washington, DC, border security is a political issue. But if we leave the 202 area code, everywhere else in the country, this is not a political issue; it is a national security issue. And when you actually go to the Border Patrol Council, those that see the chaos day-to-day, they are saying: Send us some help; send us anything. Quite frankly, Americans are frustrated and angry because our borders are open. They have seen the record numbers in the last 4 months. They know full well what is happening. The ``60 Minutes'' story from this last weekend was about Chinese nationals using TikTok to be able to find the holes in the fence and to be able to navigate it; how to be able to connect with Mexican cartel members to be able to navigate in through Mexico to be able to get through. Why is that such a big story? Because we used to rarely have Chinese nationals come across our border. But yet, last year, we had 37,000 Chinese nationals come across our border--37,000. Americans watched the story of a group of migrants in New York City ruthlessly beating up a police officer this past week. And then see they were released again. They are angry. They are frustrated. The stories that have come out in the news recently of three child sex traffickers who had attempted reentry back into the United States make Americans go: Hold on. Just a few days ago, there was a story coming out of an al-Shabaab-- terrorists on our Terror Watchlist--that had come across our border and had been released just early last year. They then picked them up while they were in Minnesota just a few weeks ago. We have had 50 people that have been identified on the Terror Watchlist that we did apprehend in just the last 4 months. We have had tens of thousands of people in the last year that were identified by this administration as individuals who were what they call special interest aliens. By definition, they are a national security risk. There are tens of thousands that we didn't know their name, in particular, but we know that where they live is in an area of high national security risk because the high terrorism rate is coming from that area. We have no criminal history on them to be able to identify them on our Terror Watchlist, but we know there is a high chance they are a national security risk. Those individuals were released into the country. Americans feel it. They want something different. The Americans that I talk to, the Oklahomans that I talk to don't mind legal immigration. In fact, they celebrate legal immigration. They just don't want illegal immigration. They want an orderly process. They want to know that the rule of law still matters in America. That is what they want to know. They want to know their American way of life is protected, and that should not be too much to demand. This very divided Nation brings to us a very divided Congress. Currently, we have a Republican two-vote majority in the House of Representatives and a Democrat one-vote majority in the U.S. Senate. It doesn't get much closer than that to being equally divided in two bodies. But that means, if we are going to solve something, we have to sit down together and solve it. That is how it works when you make law. You can do press conferences without the other side, but you can't make law without the other side in the U.S. Senate. So we have to sit down and work things out. In October, when Israel was ruthlessly attacked with a terrorist attack by Hamas, the President of the United States came to Congress and said: We need additional funding to help Israel, to help Ukraine, to help with the threats in Taiwan, and additional money for our southern border. Republicans responded by saying: We are not going to help give money to the southern border--by the way, especially for some of the funding that they asked for on the southern border, like safe migration offices to be able to help facilitate greater traffic to the United States. We said: We are not going to do that. We are not going to give additional money to the southern border unless we get a change in law and policy. That is not a radical concept, quite frankly. The House of Representatives, last year, passed a very comprehensive bill on border security that they call H.R. 2. It was one of their priorities. Do you know why? Because the House of Representatives, at that time, said: We need a change in law. So they brought a bill to change the law for that. We said the same thing: We need a change in law because it is significant what has occurred, and we need to address it. The frightening thing is, since we started meeting in a bipartisan way in October, October was the highest number of illegal crossings of any October in our history. November was the highest number of illegal crossings of any November in our history. December was the highest number of illegal crossings of any December in our history and the highest single month in history of illegal crossings, including having the highest single day ever in the history of our country in illegal crossings: Over 12,000 in a single day. That is what has happened just since we have been negotiating this bill trying to be able to get to a solution. The problem has not gotten better. It has gotten worse during that time period. We need to solve this. The worst-case scenario is the status quo. We need to solve it. So we came up with a bill. It doesn't have everything in it I wanted. It doesn't have everything in it my Democratic colleagues wanted. But it definitely makes a difference. What is in this bill? Well, here is what the bill includes. Let me just walk through some of the high points of it. It includes more border wall construction, under the 18-foot, 30-foot bollard-style definition, in locations, actually, that were set by President Trump in those locations to actually build a wall. It has 50,000 detention beds. So it ends our catch-and-release issue. So especially single adults, as they are coming across, the vast majority end up being held while they are being screened there, rather than just released into the country as they are now. We doubled the deportation flights. We added money for DNA testing. We added money for additional State, local, and private law enforcement that we are partnering with along the border to be able to help with the enforcement process there. We have a tremendous increase in the number of ICE agents, the number of Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, more immigration judges. We added detection equipment at our ports of entry to interdict fentanyl, one of the biggest threats to our Nation right now. And we increased the sanction authority for the U.S. Government to be able to sanction those ruthless cartels and members of cartels and those that facilitate them to be able to go after the fentanyl issue in the United States. It has a pretty radical change in asylum law in it. It strengthens significantly the standard of evidence for declaring asylum. Today, people who are crossing the border can literally cross and say: ``I have fear in my country.'' When they say those magic words, they are released into the country--the vast majority of them--for up to 10 years, while they await their screening or hearing. That would end under this bill. We increase significantly the standard for evidence. We add three new eligibility bars at the beginning of it so we get to a faster screening process and, for those who are not eligible, a faster deportation. It is somewhat of a ``Where's Waldo?'' game on a day-to-day basis on our southern border, as we have thousands of people coming through. Some of those individuals do qualify for asylum, but most of them do not. So our goal was to be able to filter through quickly, identify those who qualify, and deport all of them who do not. We have a faster structure to process aliens when they cross the border, in detention or nondetained, either one, so they don't end up in the 10-year backlog awaiting their decision--both for those who qualify for asylum, so they don't wait 10 years, and those that everyone knows, from the beginning, they don't qualify for asylum, they are turned around and deported immediately. This ends the abuse of parole that is happening on our southern border today. Today, the administration will identify 1,500 people, will give them parole authority at one of our ports of entry and a work permit the first day they come. They don't have to qualify for asylum. They don't even have to apply for asylum. It is literally an open invitation for anyone anywhere in the world to get a work permit if you will just tell us in advance you are coming. It is not lawful. It is just happening. This bill would end that. This bill also has a short-term, 3-year authority to quickly stop the flow of people coming into our country right now. I had a lot of my colleagues on the Republican side that said: Whatever we pass will never be implemented by the Biden administration. We have got to do something, though, right now, to be able to get things to change, because everyone knows this is occurring not because of some migration trends around the world but because right there, President Biden announced, ``I am not going to build any more wall,'' and he dropped all the authorities that had been used not just by President Trump but by Presidents Trump and Obama. He dropped them, and we saw this skyrocket. So everyone said: Whatever we pass, President Biden will never use. So whatever you can put in there to be able to actually make sure this occurs, please do. So we did. We included a border emergency authority that said if we ever exceed 5,000 people--which, by the way, is every day but 7 in the last 4 months--if we ever exceed 5,000 people and we are at chaos level, the border shuts down completely. It is not optional; it is mandatory. And when I say ``shut down,'' it is pretty simple. What happens for the first 5,000? Let me make it clear. For the first 5,000 people who are coming across, they are detained, they are screened, and then deported. If you get above 5,000, we are in such a chaotic moment that we don't have time. So we just detain and deport them. There is no screening at all because we have run out of time. We don't have the manpower to do it. That is the shift that occurs. It is not that the first 5,000 are released. That is ridiculous. The first 5,000 we detain, we screen, and then we deport. The second, if we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport. And when the border is closed down, it is closed down for weeks, where we are not even screening for weeks until we get caught up. It was something that we could implement right now and to be able to make a difference. We also changed the funding process on this. There are items that the President really wanted on some of the funding. So we said: We are fine on that funding, as long as you don't get that funding until you actually get more detention beds, get more deportation flights, hire more ICE officers, hire more Border Patrol, and actually implement the new policy. When you do that, then you get all of the money that you are actually looking for in the other areas. We wanted to make sure that, actually, this was going to be implemented. So we included that in the bill today. That is what we have on the floor today, and I am afraid of what I have heard some people say: It is not enough. So we will make a decision soon. Let me just say this. I have listened to a lot of my colleagues in the last several days, as well I should. I have listened for months. Some people legitimately want more time to read the bill. I will tell you it is 370 pages. It is incredibly technical. And I have had several colleagues say: I started to read it, and it makes my head hurt to read it because immigration law is very complicated. So they are going through it, and they said: Hey, I am interested in supporting this. I just need more time. Some of those folks are going to vote no today because they legitimately need more time. I completely understand that. There are some folks who are voting no today because they have policy differences on the bill. We have asylum officers that are empowered to make decisions; they want immigration judges to make it. OK, that is a policy difference on it. Some folks don't like that we have visas that are in this. That increases legal immigration--not illegal, legal immigration--in the country. There are some folks that don't want any immigration of any type. Well, fine, we can have that policy difference. I don't mind legal immigration. I just don't want illegal immigration. Some of them may have policy differences. Some of them have been very clear with me that they have political differences with the bill. They say it is the wrong time to solve the problem, or let the Presidential election solve this problem. In fact, I had a popular commentator, 4 weeks ago, that I talked to, that told me flat out, before they knew any of the contents of the bill--any of the contents, nothing was out at that point--that told me flat out: If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this Presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the Presidential election. By the way, they have been faithful to their promise and have done everything they can to destroy me in the past several weeks. There are other folks that read the Facebook posts and the Twitter posts and saw different facts that they thought might be true, but I have personally told them over and over again they are false. And it has been hard to overcome. For some reason, we still believe everything we read on the internet, and it has been hard to be able to break through. A few weeks ago, I posted one of my favorite quotes from Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who was a preacher from England in the 1850s, where he once said: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. And it couldn't have proved to be more true than this. I have seen posts like, ``There is amnesty in this bill,'' so that people are adamantly opposed that there is amnesty in the bill. I would say that some of my Democratic colleagues wanted to have some amnesty in this bill, but there wasn't, and there is not anything on amnesty in this bill. I have heard folks say it weakens our asylum laws, when it actually does the opposite. It far strengthens our asylum laws, so we can get to actual asylees faster, and those who are gaming the system are turned around. I have had folks say it takes away the ``Remain in Mexico'' policy so they can never come back. It does nothing of that at all--nothing of that. I have had folks say it gives away work permits the very first day, which will incentivize more people to come, when it actually does exactly the opposite. It actually removes the 1,500 work permits that are passed out every day and says we are not going to do that. And my favorite one has been: It lets 5,000 aliens in every single day from here on out forever. And I have just said that is completely absurd. Why would anyone-- anyone--sign a bill, approve a bill, or present a bill that locks us into this chaos. That is what we have now. The 5,000 piece was very simple. If we get to 5,000 a day, we can't process that many people anymore. It is a critical emergency. We break glass and say we are not even going to try to do hearings anymore. Everybody has got to turn around. Everything is shut down so we can make sure that we can actually legally process people. We are detaining, screening, and deporting until we get to a break-glass moment, and then we are not even screening anymore. We are just detaining and deporting because we can't manage the numbers. But that is not what has been told. What has been told has been false day after day. And then, as I have mentioned, I have had a few folks that have said: If I can't get everything, I want nothing. I don't find most Americans are that way just in their day-to-day life. We have high goals and aspirations as Americans, and, quite frankly, I don't blame Americans for being really angry and frustrated about where we are at the border--really angry and frustrated. But what I hear from most Oklahomans is: Do something. Don't just sit there. Do something. Make progress. But don't allow this to keep going. Stop it where you can. So that is what we worked do. Now, to be clear, President Biden has authorities he could have used that he has chosen not to. Authorities that President Trump used, authorities that President Obama used, President Biden has chosen not to use. There are a lot of them. And for whatever reason, he has turned his head away from the chaos that America is focused on, and he needs to do what he can to solve this problem. But we also need to make changes in law. Our asylum law is weak. Everyone knows this. In fact, when President Trump was President, he even made the statements about how weak our laws are on asylum. When President Trump was President, he said, ``We do a very good job considering the laws are so bad. They are not archaic; they are incompetent. It is not that they are old; they are just bad.'' Well, guess what this bill does. Fixes that because the laws have a gap, and we should actually fix those things. What the President cannot do is change the asylum laws. He cannot change the faster deportations for people crossing. He cannot add an emergency authority like this. He cannot conduct faster hearings with limited appeals so we can get to deporting people who are not legal here and addressing those who are. We can't do that without a change in law, so we need to change the law. I am going to vote yes to be able to move on to this bill. So we need a change in the law. I understand we have differences, but we have got to sit down together, figure out how we are going to solve problems because the American people sent us here to do that. This is the pen that I was handed at that desk when I was sworn into the U.S. Senate, and I signed a book that was at that desk with this pen because I was becoming a U.S. Senator because the people at home sent me here to get stuff done and to solve problems. There is no reason for me to have this pen if we are just going to do press conferences. I can do press conferences from anywhere, but we can only make law from this room. And to do that, you need one of these pens, and there are 100 of them in this room, and 60 of us have to agree to solve a problem. And I am determined to sit down with anyone who wants to solve the problem, regardless of what side of the aisle that they are on, to figure out how we solve these things because Americans are ticked off that this is not resolved, and they expect us to get things done. So why don't we do that? I have two staff members named Sarah Seitz and Jacob Stubbs, who have worked their tails off for 4 months. They gave up Thanksgiving; they gave up Christmas; they gave up New Year's to work on this. They are remarkable leaders. But it is not just about the time they gave up and the wisdom that they have as leaders, their focus on that was to solve a problem that at the end of this day, may still be a problem unsolved. And tomorrow, we will probably have 6,500 people illegally cross our border just like what is happening right now, today--6,500 people. Americans want that stopped. So let's actually sit down and figure out how we are going to stop it together. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, on vote No. 32, I voted no, but my intention was to vote yes, actually. I would like to ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote, since it will not affect the outcome.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, no one reads the boring stuff better than Senator Booker from New Jersey, so I want to recognize his capability to be able to go through the details. I have a staff member who has served with me for 11 years. His name is Derek Osborn. He is a remarkable gentleman. He came onto our team as an intern. He is leaving as an attorney, as a professional, as a patriot, as a friend, as a brother in many ways. He served in just about every location we have as far as our office space. He started out in Oklahoma City. He served there; he served as an intern. We brought him on here in Washington, DC, to be able to work on Indian affairs issues and immigration--what he affectionately called his forced deployment to Washington, DC. He eventually wore us out that he wanted to be able to return back to Oklahoma, which I don't blame him, and he returned to Tulsa and has led our Tulsa office and has been our deputy State director. He is a person who is incredibly whip-smart, but he is also so warm in how he interacts with people. People love to be able to spend time with Derek just as a person, and then they ask him the hard policy questions, and he answers them because he is knowledgeable. But he is passionate first, not about issues but about people. He is also exceptionally funny, although please don't tell him so because that would just encourage him to do it even more. We have a lot of memories and a lot of travel--across several years of traveling and working together because I have given him some of the hardest assignments to be able to work on in our team because he was capable of taking every one of them on each time. I will never forget, though, a moment that--we were actually under the Trump administration at the time. We were heading out to Camp David for a weekend because he was doing immigration at the time, and we were going to do a working weekend on immigration at Camp David that weekend. So we headed out, headed over, got on an Osprey, and then headed out to Camp David to be able to land there and to be able to head in, and it wasn't until later that he told me he is terrified of helicopters and has been terrified and has never been on one. I got to assure him that an Osprey is actually an airplane, not a helicopter, although I couldn't convince him of that, actually, especially when the back door was open during the whole flight and he was staring right out into the abyss below us. It is a good moment for him to get a little therapy to be able to work on his fear of helicopters. (Mr. BOOKER assumed the Chair.) He has been great about mentoring young staff. He is great about being an encourager and somebody who is passionate about his faith and someone who really wants to be able to help our State and help our Nation. He is the kind of staff member whom every one of us wants to have on our staff all the time, and I have a fantastic team. But in the United States, there is only one Derek. And he has proved exceptionally capable on our team and in our State, and he will be sorely missed in the position he is in. I will still connect with him in the days ahead because he knows every barbecue place in the State, and he is a great guy just to be able to spend time with and be able to listen to. I will still continue to be able to push him in his faith, as he pushes me in mine, and I will check in on him. And, hopefully, at some point, I will be able to attend his wedding because the boy needs to get married, and I will be there to be able to celebrate. In the days ahead, I look forward to maintaining a friendship with someone who has been an employee and a partner in this work in this State. So I just want to be able to say thank you to a great staff member, Derek Osborn, and I thought you should know a little bit more about him before we end this day. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, it is January. It is cold outside. In fact, it is snowing outside here in Washington, DC, today and tomorrow. It is late January, which means what it has meant for the last five decades: Pro-life Americans will gather by the hundreds of thousands in Washington, DC, and will converge on this city to say: We think every child is valuable. Now, I have to tell you, every march I have been to--and I have been to a lot--they are all cold. They don't all have snow. This one will, but it won't dampen the spirits for a lot of students, leaders, moms, dads, and little ones who will come just to be able to say: We are in America, and we think life is valuable. We think children are precious. We think this is an important issue. We haven't always had a March for Life. We had one for 50 years, actually. Interestingly enough, when Nellie Gray and some other pro- life leaders organized the March for Life starting after 1973--after the Roe v. Wade decision--they were recognizing an anomaly in American law. Our Nation has been a nation almost 250 years, but abortion was only mandated in every State and every place just during that short time period under Roe v. Wade. For the other two centuries of our Nation, this issue about the value of life was decided in every State and among the people. That is what has occurred again. We still have abortion in America. It is happening all over the country. But individuals are rising up and saying: Our State, our leaders, and even this Congress needs to have a conversation about when is a child a child and when does a child become valuable in our culture and when is a child disposable in our culture, and which child can be disposed of and which child is celebrated. I love this side-by-side picture here. I don't know if you can really see it. This is an ultrasound that is actually happening in the womb, with this baby in this position with arms up over her head. And a baby sleeps like that. In fact, both of my daughters often slept like that. We called that the ``touchdown position,'' when their hands were raised over their head. It is funny to be able to see this picture and ultrasound of this child in the womb sleeping just like the same way they would later sleep in the crib. Do you know why? Because there is no difference between these two babies. That is a baby then, and that is a baby then. The only difference is time. The only difference between myself right now and myself 9 months ago was time--9 months of time. The only difference between this child in the womb and that child lying in a crib is just a little bit of time. There are literally millions of Americans who have this very simple perspective. We should--as the march says this year--march with every woman, for every child, and we should stand up for those individuals and to be able to honor those families. We march in support of pregnancy resource centers, those folks who are walking with women through very difficult decisions and through very hard moments. There was a recent study done on pregnancy resource centers in just 2022 that found that $359 million were donated to individuals through pregnancy resource centers all over the country. Those are diapers and wipes. Those are baby formulas. That is car seats. That is free ultrasounds. That is free pregnancy tests. That is after-abortion support. And, sometimes, it is strollers and clothes. A vast majority of those individuals who work at these pregnancy resource centers are heroes, volunteers who give their time. They have full-time jobs, tasks with families and in other places, but they value every single child, even the children they don't know and love. They would donate their time and their money and their effort just to be able to say that child is just as valuable as that child; and that, in America, we shouldn't pick and choose which child is precious and which child is disposable. We should just say we all are. This administration has been exceptionally aggressive on taking on this issue of life, pushing back from the very beginning. For instance, there is a nurse who was in the process of dealing with her employer because this nurse had informed the hospital that she worked with that she was personally opposed to abortion--morally, personally opposed to abortion. She was told: You won't have to participate in abortion. You have a conscience-right protection under U.S. law that individuals can't be compelled to have an abortion. She worked at this hospital until one day she had a doctor and a nurse who actually compelled her to participate in an abortion or she would lose her job. She was not allowed to be able to have her conscience without losing her job. That was in the course of litigation. In the earliest days of the Biden administration, that litigation was just dismissed, saying: We understand. It is Federal law that you should have conscience protections. But we don't agree with your opinion, and so you don't get conscience protections, only people we agree with. That is wrong. In my State, funding from this administration was cut off in my State for AIDS testing, for screenings, for breast cancer evaluations. That money was Federal dollars allocated to my State to help in healthcare in rural communities. That money was cut off by this administration. Do you want to know why? Because our State would not promote abortion. And the determination was made that you won't get Federal assistance for AIDS testing or for breast cancer screening or for assistance in your county health departments. We are going to cut your funds off for that if your State chooses not to promote abortion. Our State stepped up and said: We believe every child is valuable-- both of those kids--and we will find a way to do it on our own. In the meantime, this administration is cutting off funds for AIDS testing because they don't like people in our State, our opinion about the value of life. This administration has just proposed to cut off temporary assistance for needy families to pro-life centers. As I mentioned before, some of these pregnancy resource centers give out food, clothing, and assistance. They have been a part of the TANF Program for years and years and years. This administration proposed to be able to cut them off to say: If you assist families but also don't promote abortion, you can't actually assist families. You are not one of us. They are literally telling to those Americans that you don't agree with the administration. So you don't count because you are actually trying to protect life. We won't help you do that. This administration is currently trying to use the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to force doctors to provide abortions, even though that law that they are using specifically and explicitly protects pregnant moms and unborn children. But they are currently trying to be able to twist it the other way. This administration is currently fighting an issue on chemical abortions--chemical abortions that have been around for years. That is a two-drug cocktail where the first drug actually disconnects the child from the connection in the womb and starves them. The second pill causes that delivery. It causes the contraction of the uterus, and they have an abortion at home. It is a do-it-yourself kit for at home. For years, that has been a very specific issue. There was only a certain specific time period that you could actually use that drug cocktail, knowing that if the child was just a few weeks older, it causes a real danger to the mom. Or if this was an ectopic pregnancy, it could actually take the life of that mom. Or if the mom has the wrong blood type, it could cause the mom not to be able to have children in the future. In the past, a physician would have to connect with that mom before they would get this drug cocktail. This administration has continued to fight to say: No, they don't need to see a physician. They can just get it mailed to them. And in a situation with an ectopic pregnancy, literally, the side effects from having the do-it-yourself abortion at home may look similar to the side effects of an ectopic pregnancy, but there is no way to know unless you get that ultrasound. And they will never know. Listen, I am fully aware that this administration is aggressive about trying to provide more abortions in the country. Why would they put women's lives at risk to be able to make it more convenient to be able to have an abortion? It is January. We are talking about this issue of abortion because the March for Life is happening. But there are literally millions of Americans all around the country who are going to continue to be able to talk about this issue of life in every way that they can because they look at these two children--literally, a few weeks apart--and they think both of them are valuable. I don't think that is a radical concept. We live in a culture in America that is committed to tolerance, acceptance, and diversity, but it seems to be so for every area except for that child. That child doesn't get to have tolerance, acceptance, and be welcomed into a culture. That child is sometimes determined to be disposable. I want to say to the millions of Americans who see both of these kids and who think both of them are valuable: Continue to be able to love people, to be able to walk alongside those moms, to be able to encourage in every way that you can because, as a culture, as we keep talking about this issue, more and more people will look at these two pictures and will say: You are right. They both look like children to me. Why don't we treat them equal? That is what we should be all about as a country, and that is why we march every cold January. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, there has been a big conversation in this body that actually matches the conversation that is happening around the country right now. If you ask any random person on the street what are the key issues that they are thinking about right now, almost every poll that I have seen for the past several months has said people are concerned about the economy and they are concerned about border security. Just about every poll you have seen everywhere, that has been the one and two. Sometimes border security has been the top issue, sometimes it has been the second issue, but it has been in those top two over and over and over again. It is not just border States, and it is not just Republicans; it is Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike. They see what is happening on the border, and they just want to know: What is the plan? Because the news came out that last September was the highest number of border crossings ever in the history of the country for any September. Then October was the highest number of illegal crossings of any October. Then November was the highest number of crossings of any November in our Nation's history. Then December came, and it was not only the highest number of illegal crossings of any December in our history; it was the highest single month ever, for any month in our history. Typically, December is a lower month, but instead, it was the highest month in our history, with the highest single day in our history and an average of 10,000 people a day who illegally crossed the border--right at 300,000 people in a single month. Just to put that in perspective, if I go--during the Obama administration, what we had in December and November exceeded any single year in the Obama administration--just those 2 months. During the early days of the Obama administration, we had 21,000 people a year who requested asylum--21,000 people a year who requested asylum on our southern border. We had that in 2 days in December. That is how things have shifted. That is why this is not a partisan issue; this is a national issue. People understand the national security implications of this, that we literally have thousands of people crossing the border every day, and we have no idea where they are. They cross the border, and I can tell you quickly how. They cross somewhere in the desert in Arizona, either through a gap that has been cut in the fence or in areas where there is a gap in the fence and they just go around it. They are given a couple different options. One is a parole authority. It is called 236 parole. You are just released in the country--take off. There is another one called a notice to appear. You will hear the common term ``NTA.'' There are just so many people crossing right now, we don't have time to be able to go through all the paperwork, so we are going to give you a piece of paper that says show up at an ICE office--and you can literally go anywhere you want to go in the country to do this--go anywhere you want to be able to go in the country, hand them this piece of paper and turn yourself in, and then get a hearing date set after that. It may be shocking to everyone: Not many people are actually showing up at ICE offices and turning themselves in. They are just disappearing into the country by the hundreds of thousands, month after month. In addition to that, if you come to our ports of entry and you are going to do an orderly entry, well, that has shifted, actually. Since earlier this year, this administration has started using a parole authority that is termed ``humanitarian parole,'' but they are using it in a way that no administration has ever used humanitarian parole in the history of the country. You see, earlier this year--actually, I should say ``last year'' now that it is January. Earlier last year, this administration announced to the world that if you will tell us ahead of time that you are coming, when you come to a port of entry, we will give you a work permit when you arrive--that day. So 1,500 people a day come to their appointment at the port of entry, from all over the world. They show up. They are given a parole document called 212(d), and they are given a work permit that day and released into the country. We just ask the question: How does that slow down immigration across the country? Because parole is actually not a status. Parole is actually listed in our law as a nonstatus. It is that you are actually here, but humanitarian parole was designed for a situation like what we had in Ukraine or it was designed for a situation where an individual has a funeral that they have to get to, but in their country, it takes too long to get a visa, and they couldn't get to the funeral, so they get humanitarian parole to be able to come in and get to that funeral. It is not designed to say ``You all come.'' It is not designed to be ``Anyone from anywhere in the world just show up, and I am going to hand you a work permit when you get here and release you into the country at 1,500 people a day.'' Americans see this. This doesn't make sense to people. They just want to know what we are going to do to get order where there is chaos. They are not asking for a political solution; they are just asking for a solution. This shouldn't be something that we don't address here. For 2\1/2\ months now, my colleague Senator Murphy, my colleague Senator Sinema, and a whole bunch of folks around the three of us--our other colleagues in this body and their staff--have worked together to try to get to a solution on how we can address this in a bipartisan way. This body requires bipartisan solutions. We have to have 60. So we have to work on hard issues. I would tell you, the House of Representatives did a very good bill called H.R. 2 that addressed a lot of issues dealing with immigration, but unfortunately the House didn't have any Democrats on board. In fact, they didn't even have all the Republicans on board that particular bill. They passed a very comprehensive set of solutions to be able to deal with border security. That is what they passed. This body has not passed anything to be able to respond. The House noticed a long time ago that this is something that needs to be addressed. This body has been allergic to working on how to be able to solve the border crisis. So for the last 2\1/2\ months, we have met in a bipartisan way to hammer out how do we solve this because it can't be ignored. The worst- case scenario is for Americans to say, ``Who is going to do something?'' and for this body to say, ``Not it.'' We have to come to some solutions. Some of the issues are obvious. The vast majority of people coming in across the border will say, ``I have fear in my country'' because the cartels have told them, ``If you say the magic words, you will be released into the country because that puts you on a track for asylum,'' when actually what it does is it puts you into a 10-year backlog of claims that are out there. And people know, if I cross the border and just make a statement, I can be in the United States for the next 10 years. It is the greatest country in the world. There are billions of people who would like to be able to be here. That is a pretty easy entry--to be able to just come across, say the secret word, and you are in. We have to be able to resolve that. We as a nation should be able to filter through the people who are coming and to identify who actually qualifies for asylum and who is just wanting to come to be a part of the greatest Nation in the world. If you want to just come for economic reasons, there is a way to be able to do that, to go through the legal process. We allow about a million people a year to legally naturalize into our country. We are one of the most generous countries in the world in our legal naturalization process. We should continue to be able to do that, as we have for decades and decades. But for people who want to game the system, we are lawmakers. Why would we ignore people who are abusing the law? If we ignore the abuse of the law, what are we doing making law if it is not going to actually be enforced? So let's get back to identifying those who actually qualify for asylum. And those who are just gaming the system--turn them back around and say: Go through the legal processes. Don't run through the desert. Don't swim across the river. Don't come to a border agent and lie to them. Let's figure out a legal way to be able to address legal immigration and turn around illegal migration. We should be able to solve this issue. It is obvious to everybody. We should be able to bring immediate consequences when someone has actually violated our law. Currently, if someone crosses the border, it may be 10 years before it is addressed. If we can't deal with immediate consequences--as I have heard over and over again from parents and from every individual, a delayed consequence is a nonconsequence. So if the consequence is delayed 10 years, that is not really a consequence, and everyone knows it. So we have to be able to have immediate consequences, and we have to have solutions to this issue about just paroling 1,500 random people from anywhere in the world. If the standard to get into America is literally just fill out a form and tell them that you are coming first, and you are released into the country with a work permit in a nonstatus of parole, literally, that is an executive authority that could be taken away at any moment-- literally. The next President comes in, they can waive every single parolee on the first day, and it would be entirely legal because parole is not a status; it is just a release into the country. If we can't figure out how to be able to solve that when the mayors of Chicago and of New York and of Denver are saying: Why is this administration releasing people into the country between ports of entry and this other parole process or an NTA with no work permit and just releasing them by the hundreds of thousands, why is this happening--if we can't answer that question, then we need to be able to sit down at the table until we do. The Senate is where hard things get worked out. This is a hard thing. This is something that has not been resolved in more than 30 years. I understand we have differences of opinion. So does America--except in this one issue. They want this solved. America wants a resolution on this. So I encourage us, as a body, to keep negotiating, keep working at it. We are not going to solve everything; we never do. But we need to solve as much as we can because this is one of the biggest issues in the country. And I will tell you, this is one of our greatest threats. In the past year in the flood of people crossing our border, tens of thousands of people who came across our border, this administration declared as a national security risk. The term they use is ``special interest alien.'' Tens of thousands of people who crossed were given that designation, ``special interest alien,'' and then released into the country. We have no idea where they are. These were identified at the border as a national security risk. But because we are not managing our border and we are overrun with capacity, the option they have is releasing them. For the sake of our Nation's national security and our future, let's actually go back to following the law. Let's actually create a process where when we pass law, we expect it to actually be enforced and to be done. We can do a hard thing. That is our job. I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD. Yes, I would.

Mr. LANKFORD. I don't run into many people who call the Canadians extreme. Not a derogatory statement towards the Canadians, but they have a pretty consistent system on it. If you crossed from the United States into Canada and ask for asylum, they would first ask you: Did you cross through the United States of America before you came into Canada? And if your answer was yes, they would turn you around and immediately return you back to the United States and say you can't request asylum here in Canada if you haven't requested asylum in the places you have already traveled through. That is the law in Canada.

Mr. LANKFORD. Senator Tillis, that is correct that during the past several administrations, we had millions of people who have actually crossed our border, have either never requested asylum--at the border, they declared they were going to ask for asylum but, literally, never did, never filled out the paperwork, never even tried because they knew they weren't eligible--or they travelled through multiple countries on the way, never requested asylum because they wanted to come to America, which I don't blame them. It is the greatest country in the world. But that is not what asylum is. ``Asylum'' means I have fear in my entire country. There is no safe place in my country, so I fled to the next safe place. That is what the international definition of ``asylum'' is.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, 12,080, it is not just a random number; it is the highest number of crossings ever in a single day across our southwest border. That is the record, 12,080. We have never had a day more than 12,080 crossing our southwest border. You might ask: What day did we set the record for the most number of crossings across our southern border? And my answer would be yesterday. Yesterday was the highest number of illegal crossings in the history of the country. September was the highest September ever in the history of the country for illegal crossings. October was the highest October ever in the United States in the history of illegal crossings. November was the highest November ever in the country in the history of our Nation for illegal crossings. And there is the highest number ever in the history of the country-- yesterday. What is really happening? The numbers continue to be able to skyrocket. If we look at what is actually occurring with the number of illegal crossings, they continue to accelerate day after day, month after month, unchecked. We face very real threats in our Nation, and it is not just me saying that. People may recognize the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, who just this week in a hearing was asked about the threats that we are facing in the United States after October 7. He was asking what he saw with that, and his answer was, ``I see blinking red lights everywhere.'' ``The threat level has gone to a whole other level since October 7,'' in the United States. Yesterday, of those 12,080 people who illegally crossed the border, the vast majority of them were released into the country today. They had no criminal background check. They didn't have to prove their ID of what country they were from because right now the soft-sided facilities that are housing migrants all along our southern border are currently running at 400 percent occupancy. So the goal is, get them through and into the country, hand them a piece of paper, and--literally--ask them to promise to turn themselves in, in the future at some point, just go because we need your space because there are more people coming. At the same time the FBI Director is saying, ``I see blinking red lights everywhere,'' we are literally releasing thousands of people, day after day, no criminal background check, no evaluation of their history--many of them we don't even know what country they are from-- and releasing them into the country. In the last 2 years, this White House has designated on our southwest border 70,000 people they designated as what they call ``special interest aliens.'' These are individuals who are coming from areas known for terrorism, but we had no background information on these individuals. What happened to those 70,000 individuals? They were released into our country with a piece of paper saying: Please turn yourself in, in the days ahead, because we have no room to be able to house you here. That is what is happening. Am I the only one who noticed this? Well, let's see, the mayor of El Paso has said that ``the city of El Paso only has so many resources and we have come to . . . a breaking point right now.'' The mayor of New York City is talking about this, and he said that ``this issue will destroy New York City,'' as they are over capacity in every spot that they have got. The mayor of Chicago has called this an ``international crisis'' that he is actually experiencing in Chicago to try to be able to manage this. As the stories come out on this over and over again, this is a New York Times story that came out: Migrant-smuggling is now a $13 billion business. Mangled limbs. Raped women. Congressional inaction is a boon to bad actors. From the New York Times. So my question is, What are we going to do about this? Currently, it has been nothing. So what are we going to do about this? About 6 weeks ago, the White House sent over a request for supplemental funding. They labeled it a national security supplemental. They asked for funding for Israel, for Ukraine, for the Indo-Pacific, and for border security. In fact, what is interesting is the second highest request they put in the entire piece was actually for border security. And then literally within days, the administration put out an op-ed that said the funding request for border security is a tourniquet. What we really need is a change in policy. That same day, Ali Mayorkas from Homeland Security, President Biden's Homeland Security Director, was in front of a hearing that I was in. I asked him some very specific questions during that: What are the things that need to be able to change [in our system]? He said: Senator, we need . . . the ability to remove individuals who do not qualify [for asylum] with efficiency and [with] speed. Secretary Mayorkas went on to say: The asylum system needs to be reformed from top to bottom. I asked him again: [Are] policy changes needed? Secretary Mayorkas said: Yes, policy changes are needed. The issue is not is the need there. The issue is not is there a problem in our immigration system. The issue is not is this a crisis at our border. Everyone knows that it is a crisis that literally the people working on our border have no tools in their hands to be able to stop this issue. This needs a solution from Congress, and it requires all of us having the determination to say: 12,080 people that crossed our border yesterday is not sustainable. So what is the request? It is pretty straightforward. It is what anyone would look at and, quite frankly, what DHS has talked about for years--not just this DHS; the Trump DHS, the Obama DHS have all asked for these issues. They are looking for some very basic things. They want to know how to be able to manage the asylum requests. That accelerated and took off during the late half of the Obama administration. If I can take us back in history to ancient history, in 2010, there were 21,000 people who asked for asylum a year on our southern border-- 21,000 people a year in 2010. That is now every 2 days of what we are facing now. What the request was, at the end of the second term of the Obama administration, was that we have got to reform our asylum system. We have got to be able to process people at the border. We have got to be able to not change the rules of what asylum means but change when we actually do the screening--do it right there, to be able to manage those issues, so that people who qualify for asylum under our law are able to come into our country lawfully and people who do not qualify for asylum cannot come into our country unlawfully. We all know it is happening. Every administration has identified it. So far, this body has been unwilling to be able to act on it. We also know that, every day, the cartels actually run our southern border. They are a ruthless criminal organization that we have experienced firsthand in my State. There is drug smuggling. There is human trafficking and what they have done to literally millions of people whom they have trafficked from around the world. We need to take control of our border, not give control to the cartels. I would challenge anyone in this body to be able to go to our southwest border and ask any Border Patrol agent: Do we have control of our border? Most every one of them will respond the same way, because I have heard it over and over. There is situational control of our border. It is just on the south side, not on the north side, because the cartels are managing who is actually coming in, in what order, and how it is actually done. And they are paid, as the New York Times article detailed, billions of dollars to be able to traffic people into our country. They are the ones who are managing it. So the simple, straightforward issue is, As the United States of America, are we going to manage our border or are the cartels going to manage our border? Are we going to be able to have a system where we allow people who qualify for asylum to actually get a hearing on a timely basis or are we going to take people and push them into the country? And then real, legitimate asylum seekers don't get a hearing for years, and people who don't qualify for asylum--and we all know it--disappear into the country and live underground. This is the decision that we have got to come to. President Biden asked for a national security supplemental and included into that border funding and then a request for policy changes. It is time to be able to address this issue. And I will tell you what I will vote later on today. Republicans are going to speak clearly to say: We will not move to a national security bill that does security for other nations and ignores our own. We will not do it. And we believe the American people, regardless of party--I don't find many people who want chaos on our southern border. They want an orderly process. I also don't find people who are opposed to immigration. They are just opposed to illegal activity on our border, unchecked activity on our border. So let's get back to an orderly process. Let's have a system that actually works for everybody in the process, and let's not put the national security for other nations ahead of the national security of Americans. Let's do it together. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, there has been a lot of conversation about this body--quite frankly, around the Nation--about border security. Rightfully so. It has been top of mind for a lot of cities, States, for a lot of families, school districts, businesses, especially along the border States as they have had a disproportionately large number of people who have come, many of them from all over the world, many of them non-Spanish speakers, not from Central America and South America but literally from everywhere. The Wall Street Journal had a piece just this weekend where it detailed how hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over the world are making their way to the southwest border which is causing a surge in apprehensions, but it is especially people from Asia and Africa. Human smuggling networks, it says, are widening their reach around the globe. Arrests at the Southwest border of migrants from China, India and other distant countries, including Mauritania and Senegal, tripled to 214,000 during the fiscal year that ended in September. That was up from 70,000 just the year before. That is tripling that number. What is happening is on our southern border, the cartels are finding it more profitable to be able to move people in from farther. So they are organizing flights for people to go through seven or eight countries to be able to then arrive in Mexico, and they are moving them through in what they affectionately call ``donkey flights'' to be able to reach farther for the cartels to be able to make more and to exploit our laws. America has always been open to people and immigration. We are a nation of legal immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. And what we are finding at this stage is those laws are being exploited and being exploited dramatically. Let me give you just an example. There has been no change in the asylum law since 2010, but, in 2010, we had 21,000 people request asylum on our southern border for the year-- 21,000 the entire year of 2010. That wasn't an anomaly. That was about a normal amount of people requesting asylum on our southwest border. Now, we have that many requests of asylum on our southwest border every 3 days. So it has gone from 21,000 in a year to now every 3 days. Everyone knows this is an issue. Last week, Secretary Mayorkas was in front of the Homeland Security Committee, and I asked him about this in a public hearing. I asked him whether there were policy changes that were needed. His answer was very direct. He said: Yes, policy changes are needed. I asked him specifically on reforming the asylum system, knowing that it has been exploited. His exact answer was: The asylum system needs to be reformed from top to bottom. I asked him about the issue of withholding of removal, which now about 55 percent of the people who were released into the country were actually released under something called withholding of removal. I asked him about that. His response was: [Withholding of removal and] the companion element is the convention against torture our system needs to be able to work efficiently and expeditiously while not compromising due process. I asked him about repatriating individuals in difficult countries that are called recalcitrants. He said: Our ability to repatriate individuals to the countries of origin when they do not qualify for relief under our laws is of vital importance. Why am I bringing this up? Because it is not just me saying we need to reform the asylum process. The head of Homeland Security is saying we need to reform this process. And it is just not the head of Homeland Security saying we need to reform the asylum process. It is the administration. Two weeks ago, the administration requested additional dollars for the border to be able to put in the supplemental. They asked for funding for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, and for border security. But then, after they put that request out, Homeland Security released an op-ed in the Washington Post, which said this: To be clear, this supplemental funding is like a tourniquet--urgently needed and critical in the short-term, but not a long-term solution to a deep-seated problem. Our national immigration laws, having gone through major revisions by Congress in 1996, are severely out-of-date, and our system is completely broken. On this, everyone agrees. The administration itself, just this past March, put out a release dealing with what they call ``circumvention of lawful pathways.'' In it, they did a Q&A back and forth to ask people questions on how it would function. This is one of the answers from the administration talking about what is happening currently at our border. They said: [Such a high rate of migration] risks overwhelming the Department's ability to effectively process, detain, and remove, as appropriate, the migrants encountered. This would put an enormous strain on already strained resources, risk overcrowding in already crowded [U.S. Border Patrol] stations and border [ports of entry] in ways that pose significant health and safety concerns, and create a situation in which large numbers of migrants--only a small portion of whom are likely to be granted asylum--are subject to extreme exploitation . . . by the networks that support their movements north. I would be glad to have written that myself. The administration sees the same thing that everyone else who looks at the border sees. If you take an honest assessment of what is happening, our system is being exploited by cartels, and people from around the world are answering ads that are on TikTok and messaging services saying: I can get you into the United States if you pay me enough money. That is why 45,000 people from India came last year requesting asylum in the United States--because it is easier to get in and to pay the cartels than it is to go through the legal process. We are incentivizing illegal activity, and this body knows it. We are a nation of laws. We should prioritize the law. We should be open to legal immigration, but we should be opposed to illegal immigration and what is happening to enrich deadly, dangerous criminal cartels in northern Mexico. Again, the administration in their public statement made this statement just a few months ago: The current asylum system--in which most migrants who are initially deemed eligible to pursue their claims ultimately are not granted asylum in the subsequent [immigration court] proceedings--has contributed to a growing backlog of cases awaiting review by asylum officers and immigration judges. What are they saying? The system is broken because it is packed with people who do not actually qualify for asylum coming in to flood the system and request asylum. We all see the challenge. Now the question is, Are we going to do something about it? Republicans in the Senate, this past weekend, released a very simple proposal to deal with what we all know are the problems--closing the loopholes in the law that have been exploited. And, yes, it deals with asylum, and, yes, it deals with withholding because those are the areas that are being exploited. We see it. The administration sees it. The question is, Do Democrat Senators see it? That is really the issue now. Everyone else seems to see it and admit to it. So what did we propose? We proposed some pretty straightforward things. One is what is called ``safe third country'' transit. These are individuals like the 45,000 people who came from India last year. They fly through four or five countries--including dangerous countries like France--to be able to land here and to be able to cross the border and say: I need to find asylum. Almost everyone sees that as an exploitation, and it is not just us. There is almost no other country that does what we do. This whole issue about picking and choosing where I want to request asylum is not how asylum really works. You see, asylum under international law--and most people in this body know it--``asylum'' and ``refugee'' have the same definition under international law. A refugee doesn't pick nine different countries and then pick the one that they want. They flee to the next safe place. That is the same international rule for asylum. If you were to request asylum right now in Canada--cross the border into Canada and request asylum--do you know what is the first question they would ask you? The first question they would ask you is: Did you just cross from the United States? If you answered yes, they would then say: Did you request asylum there, and were you denied? If they say, ``I didn't request asylum,'' Canada will turn you right back around. And that is not just Canada. That is most of the EU. If you went to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, the UK--if you went to any of them, they would ask: What country did you transit through before you got here, and did you request and were you denied asylum before you came in? If you said, ``I didn't request asylum in the places I transited from,'' they would turn you around because that is not an unreasonable thing. When you go through five other countries and then request asylum in the last one, you are actually trying to emigrate to that country, not requesting asylum under international law. You are trying to pick the place. And, by the way, I don't blame them for picking America. It is the greatest country in the world. But that is economic opportunity, that is not asylum. So the question is, Can we incentivize those individuals to not try to run a loophole through our system but to actually go through the legal process and request to come here as a legal immigrant? We love to see people from all over the world, as we always have, come into the United States legally, just not exploiting a loophole in the asylum law. That is the wrong way to be able to do it. The bill that Republicans have proposed also deals with streamlining the process. Right now, it can take up to 10 years just to get a hearing with an immigration judge under a standard that most people know, and the administration has admitted, people won't qualify for asylum at the end. Why is that? Because, when you come across the border, you encounter Border Patrol or CBP or an asylum officer. They do an initial screening, and the screening is far lower than the actual standard. So you may qualify under the screening standard, but everyone knows you are not going to actually qualify for the actual standard for asylum. So there are two simple things that can be done here. One is to make the screening standard equal to the actual standard--to say: We all know this is what you have got to achieve. So screen for that. Is it reasonable? Is it even a 51-percent chance that you are going to get to that standard? If it is, then you come in. If you are not, then you are screened out. The second is that we actually have three different screenings. Many people don't know this. We screen for asylum, and then we separately screen for what is called withholding, and we separately screen for Convention against Torture. Those three different screenings are made at three different times--sometimes across a decade of time. Everyone knows, if you don't qualify for the first one, you are likely not going to qualify for the other two, either. But you can request it, and you can run that loophole, and then you are in the United States. And the cartels literally teach people exactly what to say in their last step so that they can exploit that loophole. So let's actually have a screening standard that is the same standard you have to get to, and let's screen for all three of those things at the same time. That actually sounds like government efficiency. I know we are not good at that as a nation, but, if we screen all three of those things at the same time, it allows somebody to have due process. We don't want someone not to have due process. If someone is a victim of torture, we want to make sure they have an opportunity to go through that process. But why wouldn't we go through all three of those at the same time, rather than across 10 years, waiting for multiple different hearings? Republicans also proposed something pretty simple. Right now, the law says that if you committed a felony, then you are not eligible for asylum. But the problem with that is, there are some crimes that are not considered a felony at the earliest days, and we are still allowing them in. Let me give you a for instance. What if you had three DUIs? What if you are dealing meth? What if you are a member of a gang and you show it? What if you have a domestic violence conviction? If you have a domestic violence conviction, you can't own a firearm in America, but you could get asylum in America. We literally invite people to be able to come in whom we already know have domestic violence convictions. So we are making it pretty simple. We are saying: Hey, listen, let's keep the standard where it is for a felony, but let's actually prevent the loopholes. Why would we invite someone into the country whom we know has had multiple DUI convictions? Why would we do that? It is not safe for our streets. Do any one of you want to sit down with a dad and say: Your daughter was killed in a DUI because we were loose on our asylum rules? I would assume not. We are not asking for something extreme. Again, it is typical for many places around the world that this is how it would be done. All we are trying to do is to be able to fix the loopholes and to be able to secure our Nation. This proposal we put forward keeps families together. I know there is going to be an immediate thing that this is about separating families at the border. Actually, no, it is very explicit that if families travel together, families stay together for their hearing, to be able to make sure that we are protecting that family. But we are also raising a simple question. We all know and we have all seen the stories, and for those of us who have gone to the border, we have seen it with our own eyes: children traveling with adults that--we are all parents, and we can see clear enough that is not really your child-- where children are literally used as a free pass to be able to get into the country and to be able to expedite. We would like to be able to protect those children and make sure children are actually not used to be a free pass into the country. There is a way to be able to prevent that and to be able to protect those families that are actually real families at the same time. We do a couple other things. We also raise just a very simple statement about the Border Patrol. Many people here may or may not know, but the Border Patrol can't actually get overtime if you are at a certain level. If you are other Federal law enforcement, you do get overtime. But if you are Border Patrol, you do not. So these guys may work 100 hours for 2 weeks, but for the additional hours they are working, they don't actually get overtime pay. That is not right. So what happens is, Border Patrol has a hard time with retention, not just because the job is incredibly difficult but, once they get to a certain level, their families encourage them and say: Why don't we do another Federal law enforcement somewhere else--still stay in Federal law enforcement, but we can actually earn overtime pay at that point rather than actually being punished for staying in the Border Patrol and trying to be able to serve? Why don't we fix that? Why don't we fix some of the training issues that have come up? Why don't we actually try to respond to those things? Why don't we provide the opportunity for the Biden administration to be able to lay out a strategy for how to secure the border? We are not writing it. Just give them the opportunity to be able to do it. And here is one thing that has been interesting that I have already heard pushback from. We have a section where we talk about the border wall. What is interesting is, what we have actually proposed is we actually fulfill the border wall portion that President Biden has already said he is going to do. We actually just want to put it in writing so the President can't just say orally, ``I want to do this.'' We have to actually put it in writing to be able to do it. That is a reasonable thing to be able to do. Listen, we are not asking for crazy stuff. We are asking for what Americans are asking for: Just secure the border. We want to be a nation that welcomes immigrants, but we also want to be a nation that honors the law. We can do both. That is what we are setting in front of this body--to say: When we are talking about the supplemental, let's actually talk about not just securing Israel and securing Ukraine and securing Taiwan; let's also secure the United States of America. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, last week the Senate confirmed Mike Whitaker to be the FAA Administrator. I supported this nomination. He is very qualified. He has very valuable experience. Obviously, this body has had a churn being able to look at previous FAA Administrators who came here and then were turned down in the process, and the administration has put forward someone who, I think, is very, very qualified. So I am pleased to be able to see that. But many people may not know Oklahoma has a very special relationship with FAA, and we have for 70 years. For 70 years, the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, which headquarters offices for so many different areas in the aeronautical center, has been in Oklahoma City. That spot has been there, and it establishes things like how to do testing, how to do research, the medical evaluation, occupational health wing, medical certification, a lot of education that happens there for aerospace. Air mobility is being tested there. It is 1,100 acres and 133 buildings, across the airport site there in Oklahoma City, and it is just one of those hidden jewels of the United States that is actually there in Oklahoma City. As each of our States have different aspects and different tasks there, Oklahoma City is very, very proud to be a leader in aviation for the country. There is also a vital component there at the FAA Academy. Now, again, most folks don't think about the air traffic controllers who are in the tower, but when you fly into any airport in the country, the folks who are in that tower were trained in Oklahoma City. It is the academy. It is the first 60 days of training, and it is done consistently the same it is done everywhere in the country because, no matter where an air traffic controller goes, you want them to have the same consistent training in every location that they go to. So whomever they work next to in the tower, they have all been trained the same way in the basics. Now, that academy is important to set the standard for all the basics in air traffic control, and then they advance to the next level. They actually get out on the job and to be trained by folks who are in the towers. It is incredibly important as a task. Now, for years, that academy has trained literally every single person that the FAA could send them. They haven't had a time where they were like: I am sorry. You have to stop. We can't take any more people. They have got gaps and openings. In fact, right now we need more air traffic controllers, but, thankfully, the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center is ready to go. They are ready to take on more students to be able to expand. In fact, they have got room to double in size. If we wanted to double the number of air traffic controllers across the country, let's do it. Our challenge has been getting enough students to actually do it, to get the training, not actually training space or trainers. So I would tell you Oklahoma City is proud of that heritage. We are grateful for Mike Whitaker and the position that he is now in. We look forward to him being back in Oklahoma City. He has been in Oklahoma City multiple times in previous tasks that he has had. He knows full well the value of that facility, and I look forward to training a lot more folks to be air traffic controllers in Oklahoma City, in the days ahead, because our trainers and our folks who are there are ready to put more folks in more towers.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, we have the opportunity to take a really big step today that the entire country would pause and go: Finally. We have the opportunity to end government shutdowns forever. We will say: That is off the table. We, as a nation, don't do government shutdowns. Government shutdowns haven't always been in our system as a nation. They really started in the 1980s, and we have had this repetitive cycle of government shutdowns over and over and over again. The American people and folks in my State in Oklahoma say: How do we make this stop? Well, this is how we make it stop. Senator Hassan and I sat down 5 years ago and just said: Everyone wants to stop it, but we have never figured out a way that is a totally nonpartisan way. Let's figure this out. What is a nonpartisan way to end government shutdowns? So we sat down and worked on some language to try to figure out how to be able to do this. We took input from Members all over this conference on both sides of the aisle. We actually sat down years ago with the Trump administration and worked with their Office of Management and Budget and then have since sat down with the Biden administration, with their Office of Management and Budget, to make sure the process would actually work; that it would actually be effective because we weren't interested in having a messaging bill; we were interested in actually ending government shutdowns--that it would work. The idea is really very simple. If Congress gets to the end of the fiscal year and the appropriations work is not done by the end of the year, we stay in session 7 days a week. We can't move to any bill other than appropriations until we actually finish appropriations. If I can just make it just this simple: If we don't finish our classwork, we have to stay after class. That is all it is. In the meantime, the government continues to run at the previous year's levels. That way, Federal workers are held harmless. The American people are held harmless. The pressure is on the people it should be on: us. Now, I have heard from some folks that this won't work because the House is crazy, and they won't care about staying here 7 days a week because they are crazy. Well, I would respectfully say that House Members, though definitely crazy at times, still love their families, still have responsibilities back in their home district. They also want to be able to get back home. They are not going to stay here 7 days a week forever. We do have other bills to be able to pass--the National Defense Authorization and thousands of other things that we still have to do. So the thought that we would be in continual CRs, both here, House and Senate, 7 days a week and never leave and that we would never do other bills is just not realistic. I have also heard that if we take away the threat of a government shutdown, we would lose the pressure point to be able to do appropriations. Well, again, respectfully, I disagree. I don't think Federal law enforcement and Border Patrol agents, air traffic controllers, HUD staff, and millions of other Federal workers and their families are leverage. They are not leverage to be able to get appropriations work done. They are families. They are families who just want to serve their neighbors and be able to get a paycheck for it. Right now--right now--there are thousands of marines, sailors, and airmen who are currently in the Mediterranean on high alert. They should not have to make contingency plans for their family not to get a paycheck at the end of this month. Right now, in Fort Sill, OK, there are soldiers who are packing equipment to leave and head to the Middle East right now. They should not have to look at their loved ones before they leave and say: In case checks don't get deposited at the end of next month, here is what to do. They should be able to go serve. So as simple as I can say it, we shouldn't say to them: Maybe we won't have a shutdown or probably we won't have a shutdown. We should say: Definitely, we are not going to have a shutdown. Thank you for serving our country. That is what we should do. The hardest thing in this body to change is status quo. It is the hardest thing to change. Today, we have an opportunity to change the status quo and to begin the process of ending government shutdowns forever. I encourage my colleagues to join Senator Hassan and I and so many other folks from both sides of the aisle to say: Let's take a step forward, and let's actually do our business. Amendment No. 1232 to Amendment No. 1092 (Purpose: To provide for a period of continuing appropriations in the event of a lapse in appropriations under the normal appropriations process, and establish procedures and consequences in the event of a failure to enact appropriations.)

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I would like to call up my amendment, amendment No. 1232, and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. LANKFORD. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, earlier this year, I was with a bipartisan delegation. I traveled around the Abraham Accords countries. We were in Morocco, we were in Bahrain, we were in the UAE, and we were in Israel, talking about future advancement for peace. There was great optimism and engagement. There was economic activity, tourist activity. There was a lot of interaction with development on healthcare, on cyber protections, and cooperation together for energy and water. Literally, there were families meeting each other, some of them for the first time in generations, to be able to have a conversation about a future in the Middle East based around peace. It was based off of an agreement that started on September 15, 2020, with the signing of the Abraham Accords, and it has continued to advance. In fact, just as recently as a month ago, there was outspoken public support from Saudi Arabia and from Israel about advancing a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel--what people thought would be unheard of just a few years ago. There was an advance of conversation about how we could increase peace. And then, on the 7th of October, 1 day after the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War, a group of terrorists from Gaza penetrated the wall separating Gaza and Israel, and they slaughtered 1,400 Israelis, brutally, many in their bed--children, elderly, disabled--it didn't matter. Whether they were college students at a concert, whether they were people traveling down a highway, or whether it was children, literally, on their playgrounds, they murdered them where they stood. And then they took hostages and retreated back into Gaza, for some reason assuming that Israel and the world would just not notice their barbarism. Well, the world certainly noticed, and, as Americans, we obviously all lived in the shock and horror of the event with the Israelis and the rest of the world. Thirty-one Americans died in that attack, and 13 are missing, presumed to be hostages inside Gaza. Many of those individuals were killed simply because they were Jewish--period. The pain of that has struck all of us over the course of the past several weeks now, and we have watched Israel rightly respond to the acts of terrorism, as we have as a nation, as well, when we were attacked on 9/11. We mobilized our forces. We identified al-Qaida, and we identified those who were harboring al-Qaida in Afghanistan and the Taliban and determined that type of attack would not happen again. And we, as a nation, determined we were not only going to stop the capabilities of al-Qaida to be able to attack us, but we were going to preemptively respond if we were attacked again. Our first goal, though, was to be able to prevent that kind of attack from coming at us again. Israel is entirely right when they have been attacked by a terrorist organization to be able to say: That organization cannot do that to our Nation again and to our people again. The United States has responded by sending two carrier strike groups to the Mediterranean, to literally park off the coast of Israel, to give a clear signal to Lebanon, to Iran: Do not engage in this. We understand fully, as most of the world does, that Hamas is funded by Iran. And while many in the Muslim world, in the Arab countries continue to be able to speak out on behalf of Palestinians, they also understand that 70 percent of the funding for Hamas comes from Iran. The weapons systems that Hamas has right now were fully funded by Iran, and the weapons systems in Lebanon, by Hezbollah, where they have been attacking Israel from the north, were fully funded and created and, many times, shipped directly from Iran. Iran is the destabilizing force in this entire region, and we, as Americans, have made very, very clear that we understand that Iran is the one who funded this, who supplied the weapons systems, who supplied the training and the munitions. Iran is the one who continues to destabilize that region. As Americans, we clearly speak out for the protection of all civilians in every nation around the world and in every conflict in the world, but we were also very clear that Israel did not initiate this battle in the last 2 weeks. Hamas did, and they pulled their hostages back into Gaza, as they continue to be able to hide them among the civilian population. It is a painful peace for us to be able to see internationally. For us in Oklahoma, we are like many others that are in this Chamber as well. It personally affects many families in Oklahoma. Israel is a nation so small that there is no one that has not experienced the pain of a friend or relative, someone whom they work with, they know people who have been directly attacked. But in my State of Oklahoma, we are in the same condition. Many people that I interact with talk frequently about family, friends that live in Israel or that travel back and forth. Quite frankly, last weekend, I worshipped with a Jewish congregation on Shabbat and heard the dialogue from many people about their travels back and forth and family and friends and what they personally experienced as a family based on this terrorist attack. Quite frankly, my State of Oklahoma has a very close bond with Israel, as the United States has a very close bond, close enough that we had many Oklahomans that were currently in Israel during that time of the attacks, and our office actively worked to be able to get many of those out, since many flights have been canceled out of Tel Aviv. So we have actively worked to be able to get many of those individuals back home to Oklahoma, and they have quite a story to tell, as you would assume.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, one last comment just based on news that is continuing to flow out. All of us are absolutely heartbroken--absolutely heartbroken--at a hospital that had a major explosion from a rocket in Gaza. The initial reports came out just immediately: This must have been the Israelis that attacked a hospital. And many countries around the world immediately made statements that the Israelis bombed a hospital. Meetings were canceled with President Biden while he was in the region because the Israelis had bombed a hospital--until the facts and information actually came out. Now, less than 24 hours later, we have overhead that can identify the movement of different rockets that we are able to see. We have information that is now out in the public, and the President has confirmed that was not an Israeli strike on that hospital; that was a rocket that was launched from inside Gaza that went errant and then landed in Gaza directly on the hospital, killing almost 500 people. It was literally a terrorist attack on Israel that, instead of hitting innocent civilians in Israel, it hit innocent civilians in Gaza. It is still just as tragic for all of those families, but I would call on all the nations that immediately condemned Israel for attacking a hospital to immediately turn that to condemn Hamas for attacking civilians and for launching rockets to kill civilians in Israel that actually killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza, that for every nation that falsely accused Israel of this horrible attack, that they would see the evidence and they would instead turn and try to speak to Hamas to stop their terrorist attacks. That is something every nation can do, to stand up for the life and the value of people and of civilians. I would call on them to be able to do that even today. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, the pain of this, though, is also something that we should pay attention to. We, as a nation, not only remember 9/11 and our response, but we also remember 9/11 was instituted by 20 people that were illegally present in the United States. We should not fail to remember that fact as well. Recent statistics coming across our southern border identified in the last 2 years--just the last 2 years--we have had 70,000 individuals that have been identified as what they call special interest aliens. These are individuals that came between the ports of entry, that were running through to try to evade being captured. They are identified as special interest aliens because they have this designation: They potentially possess a national security risk to the United States or its interests. So they are identified as a special interest alien. As I mentioned, we have had more than 70,000 of those that have crossed between our ports of entry just in the last 2 years. These are individuals from Syria, from Iran, from Iraq, from Pakistan, from west Africa, from locations where terrorism is known to exist, and we don't have any criminal history of those individuals. If you are thinking, I am glad we picked them up between ports of entry, well, let me finish the story for you. Most of those 70,000 special interest aliens were identified between the ports of entry and then were released into the country under Biden's policy on how he handles immigration currently. Those 70,000 individuals that were identified as potentially possessing a national security risk to the United States or its interests are in the United States right now. Just in the past week, four individuals from Iran were picked up, multiple Syrians were picked up between our ports of entry and then released, awaiting a hearing in the future. And in current status right now, that hearing will be 8 to 10 years in the future. They are unmonitored. They are wandering around within our borders awaiting a hearing 8 to 10 years from now in the future, after being identified as a special interest alien. We grieve for Israel, but for some reason, there are some in this body and in the White House that will not pay attention to our own national security issues and the obvious exposure that literally everyone in the country can see. I can raise this issue with 100 people on the street outside this building, and all 100 would say, Oh, yeah, that is a risk. But for some reason, we can't get serious in this body to be able to take on the same thing, just to identify what are we going to do with individuals that are considered special interest aliens. Are we really going to just process them at the border and release them into the country? Or are we going to enforce our own sovereignty as just about every other nation does in the world? What are we planning to do on this? I would just say, for the basic function of our national security, we should enforce our borders, and we should not just release special interest aliens out into the country, as has been done for now the last 2 years by the numbers of 70,000-plus. So I would hope this body would get serious about dealing with issues like asylum, parole, and all the different features that have been used to release these individuals into the country, that we could fix that before we have the next 9/11 in our country.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. LANKFORD

Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.