The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“IMMIGRATION” mentioning Mitch McConnell was published in the Senate section on page S5028 on July 22.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
Senators' salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
IMMIGRATION
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, with COVID-19 cases ticking up all across the country, with some bureaucrats and elected officials actually talking about reimposing various measures on the American people, the Biden administration continues to let illegal immigrants pour across our southern border, and reportedly, they are considering loosening our border security even more.
Remember when the Biden campaign's rhetoric and then the Biden administration's early actions led to a rush on the border. They tried to wave it off as a seasonal, springtime surge, but, of course, that wasn't true. The numbers just keep climbing.
Customs and Border Protection had more encounters on the southern border in June than they had in May, nearly 190,000 encounters last month alone--the highest number in 21 years. Law enforcement is coming across huge groups of hundreds of individuals. With almost 3 months still remaining in fiscal year 2021, CPB has already encountered more illegal immigrants than it did in the entirety--the entirety--of fiscal 2019, which was, of course, before COVID. We have exceeded that total with almost 3 months to go.
The Biden administration claims they are addressing the crisis by simply speeding up the rate at which they get migrants out of custody, out of border facilities, as if simply reducing the head count was the goal. Of course, that is no solution at all if the individuals are simply being released into the interior of our country.
Ordinarily, legal immigration is part of the heart of the United States of America, and it always has been, but it simply is not a universal human right for everybody in the Western Hemisphere who would like a better job or to break our rules and turn up at the border. No country, none--no country in the world--could govern itself that way.
In fact, this ongoing crisis is supremely unfair and uncompassionate to the men, women, and children whom it continues to entice into the scorching desert Sun. Border Patrol agents are having to double as humanitarian workers and EMTs. They rescue people who get lost, who are at risk of drowning, who have been simply abandoned by smugglers or traffickers.
Amidst all this, in the thick of this crisis, the Biden administration has spent weeks flirting with ending its title 42 authority, declaring the COVID emergency to be finished and over at our southern border and letting even more people stream across. COVID is already on the rise again, the border is already in crisis, and the President and his team want to end the emergency safeguards at our border? Reimpose COVID precautions on the American people but end the COVID emergency for illegal immigrants? How does that make any sense?
Meanwhile, our Democratic friends here on Capitol Hill say they want to push a massive amnesty plan into the reckless taxing-and-spending spree they want to pass later this year on a party-line vote. As if damaging inflation, soaring costs, lower real wages, and more debt were not punishment enough for the American people, Democrats also want to stuff a massive amnesty plan into their tax-and-spend spree. It is like they have systematically identified the worst idea for American families on every single issue and set about rolling them into one huge, reckless proposal.
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