you were dealing with, a negotiating partner not looking to security the border, but for political cover. then, when the elements of the border bill, it wasn't a border bill, it was an immigration bill, when it started leaking out, it became all too apparent that that bill was not going to secure the border. that bill was going to give democrats political cover. it's not talked about much in that bill. there are all kinds of elements that have been very fairly crypt sized. the -- fairly criticized. the main problem with that bill is that the 4,000 discretionary threshold -- a lot of ink has been spilled on the 5,000 threshold that was mandatory, that the president stop processing asylum claims and send people home. in other words, at 5,000 it was

mandatory the president secure the border. at 4,000 it was discretionary. and that authority only lasted three years. what's the problem with that? well, i mentioned earlier that president trump ran into all kinds of resistance from radical left open border groups that challenged just about every action he took. by the way, those court decisions have undermined that authority. we could pass a law to reverse those and restore that authority. that's not what that border bill was about. not even close. but if you sat 4,000 discretionary, what you're implying is the president doesn't have that authority. the congress is now weighing in and they're codifying the fact that the president can act to suspend asylum claims until we reach 4,000 a day, on average,

for seven days. and then that authority goes away after three years. so i certainly can imagine the radical left open-border groups running to court in three years or in one year if we have a new president that actually wants to secure the border, oh, oh, oh, congress has spoken. copping has said that the president cannot -- congress has said that the president cannot stop processing asylum claims even though the court says that it ex-udes preference. if you were to pass that law, we would have neutered that authority. we couldn't allow that. the fact that republican negotiates didn't understand that -- negotiators didn't understand that, a is more than unfortunate. sow gunk ever ever ever ever

d.c. so again, it wasn't people like me criticizing the bill that killed that bill. it was the public. once the language was actually released and people realize that all the rumors were not only true, the bill was actually worse than what was rumored, that bill killed itself. it should offer no political cover. i.t. not a border -- it's not a border security bill. what this chart shows -- again, this shows -- going back here, that is president obama's humanitarian crisis. that's when daily apprehensions we called it back then were a little over 2,000 a day. that's when his secretary of homeland security said that a thousand a day was a really bad day for him. after he left office, he said a thousand a day overwhelms the system. and yet the immigration bill

would have normalized thousands. i can't tell you exactly how many. there were tougher asylum provisions. there were more rapid ajudd indication. there were some great elements there, but the bad overwhelmed the good, and it was worse than doing nothing at all. doesn't say much about a border security bill, does it? this chart with a show. obama's humanitarian crisis, president trump's which he fixed, and then you have this massive inflow from president biden. let's do a little history lesson here and just go on back how we got to this point because one of the problems in the senate bill is it does nothing to president biden's abuse of the parole process. again, understand what parole is. parole should be used on a

case-by-case basis -- let's say somebody has cancer in a different country and they want to come in to one of our premier cancer centers and get treatment. maybe think of they have to attend somebody's funeral. it is for humanitarian situations. the biden administration, there's been 5,000 to 6,000 people a year that were granted parole. the biden administration was granted parole -- has granted pa israeli to -- parole to hundreds of thousands. a complete abuse of the process. where did he learn that happen from? where did he learn his lawlessness? from well, from the obama administration, because what sparked all of this was the abuse of prosecutorial discretion, which is what president obama did with the deferred action for childhood ad rivals memorandum. granting prosecutorial

discretion to classes, to hundreds of thousands of people that abused the process and that sparked all of this. i mentioned earlier that i began working on these charts, a chart like this, back in about 2013, 2014 after the daca decision in june of 2012. back then i was primarily concerned about unaccompanied children because that's really seemed to be the real crisis. we've always had a flow of single adults. they are a lot easier to take care of. but unaccompanied children are an issue. so the daca memorandum, that abuse of prosecutorial discretion, what that did is it dramatically increased the number of unaccompanied children. it went from about 2,000 to 3,000 and then started spiking -- as you can see that's in red. pretty soon people got the word out that immigration law changed in america, and so now people

were coming as family units as well. that's in the blue. that's the primary abuse. one of the issues with the family units is we really do not know whether that family or that group of people that present themselves as family really is a family or not. we don't do adequate dna testing. i've been down to the border. i remember seeing soming of the 18--month-old-old little girl being held by some scruffy-looking 50-year-old. i seriously doubt that was her father. i hope it was. in testimony before my committee we found out that the they would sell children. they would sell children for $81 to form a family unit. they would leave little boys, one little boy was left in 100-degree field, just abandoned. the only identification, they wrote a phone number on his

shoe. that's humane? there's nothing humane about the open-border policy. but, anyway, that's what sparked all this. that abuse of prosecutorial discretion led to all of this eventually. now, back then president obama declared a humanitarian crisis. 2,000 people a day, a humanitarian crisis. and it was, it is. and so, president obama started detaining families. there was a decision back in i think 1996, if memory serves me right -- could be a different day -- called the flores decision, that involved unaccompanied children. basically, there is a settlement over this one little girl named flores, and basically the settlement was the u.s. could not hold and detain an

unaccompanied child for more than 20 days. turn them over to h.h.s. and feigned some sponsor family or do something with that child. you can't detain them within department of homeland security. didn't have department of homeland security back then, but within the government structure. of course, that was taken to court once people started abusing our process, started coming as families. and there was what we call the flores decision reinterpretation. and that applied that settlement to not only unaccompanied children but children in family units. so even though the obama administration started separating families who they couldn't detain from the children who they couldn't. that of course was politically untenable and they stopped. but the result of that stoppage, the result that you can no

longer detain people, that pretty well you really ramped up catch and release, that caused president trump's problem. what president trump did, again against great resistance of the open-border crowd, a he enacted some pretty smart policies. i actually worked with senator sinema on something called operation safe return. we had three democrats join independent that letter to dhs and a number of republicans. this is something we worked on with dhs itself trying to design a rapid adjudication process of asylum claims and a rapid deportation, safe deportation back to their ohm countries when they don't -- to their home countries when they did a equal fay for asylum. a very small percentage of people that come in this country actually qualify for asylum. this is a very tough standard. you have to be persecuted by your government on six different

criteria. economic criteria is not a valid asylum claim. i am sympathetic with them. i want a functioning legal system so these people captain can be abused. anyway, what president trump did is he started addressing that, and he took that operation safe return and that morphed into the migrant protection program, otherwise known as return to mexico. that didn't work immediately because we weren't getting cooperation from mexico. we also didn't have the third safe country agreements in place with central america. but those got in place. and then because mexico wasn't cooperating, finally president trump threatened tariffs against mexico. that got their attention, and lo and behold, problem solved. until democrat presidential candidates started talking about they're going to end

deportation, give free health care, and then, even worse, president biden took office and opened up the border. again, you can see -- i just recreated the obama humanitarian crisis in comparison to a normalized flow -- this is about 4,500 a day. maybe it would be only 3,900 a day under the 4,000 discretionary limit. it is going to be thousands a day, which is why that bill had to be defeated. so again, i wish we were debating a true border security bill. i wish we were giving the american people what they want, which is a secure border, being concerned more about american safety than we are the safety of foreigners. i wish we were doing that, but we're not. instead we're debating this supplemental, the largest chumping of that spending is

going -- the largest chunk of that spending is going to ukraine. just like i have a unique perspective on the border crisis because i was chairman of the senate committee on homeland security and government a fairs or six years, i made multiple trips down to the border, i also have a different perspective or unique perspective on the whole ukraine situation. i served as the either children or ranking -- chairman or ranking member of the senate foreign relations committee. i made multiple trips to ukraine. my first trip was in i think june of 2011. we went to georgia, who had already been invaded by russia, then ukraine, then up to the baltics states. back then, the main issue in ukraine was the corruption within the wheat markets and the corruption in their news media a the news oligarchs, they called them. i thought this was kind of interesting because if i looked back at america, you go, well,

we've got billionaires that own the media, too. we just call them billionaires. we don't call them oligarchs. we have the same corrupt and highly biased media in america. so we should be throwing stones -- so we shouldn't be throwing stones. so that was the big issue. corruption of the media, the media oligarchs, and corruption in the wheat markets. i was the only member of congress who attended zelenskyy's inauguration in may of 2019. i went back a few months later with senator morning hour if i, who was also either chairman or ranking member of the european subcommittee. we did quite a bit of travelling together in europe. i think two things stuck out about zelenskyy in those meetings. the first is i do believe he was sincere. we attended his speech at the high court of -- fighting

corruption. and he made a very heartfelt plea laying out his goal that he wanted to defeat -- that's the word he used -- he wanted to defeat corruption. the problem he had is he was a political neophyte, the long knives were out immediately, and he was never able really to accomplish that goal. the other important thing to remember -- or certainly what i remember about this -- is that back then -- you got to remember, this is 2019. vladimir putin has already legally annexed crimea. he's also in firm control of eastern ukraine. but even at that point, president zelenskyy described to me -- certainly told immediate that he wanted to do a peace deal with putin. he understood there was no way ukraine could could dislodge russia from those areas. there is he a just no way.

he realized it wasn't going to be popular. of course it is not going to be popular. you've got an invading force into your territory. but he was practical enough to ras that russia is a much larger country. it has four times the population of ukraines, has a much larger industrial base, has a powerful navy. so he understood that he did not have the wherewithal. he did not have the capability. ukraine didn't have the capability of pushing putin out. so he is intelligence enough to realize i've got to do a peace deal. how is that relevant right now? as much as it pains me to say this, i don't like this reality. vladimir putin is an evil war criminal. make no mistake about it. we all agree on that.

vladimir putin is an evil war criminal. he did not have to invade ukraine. there's no justification for what he did. but he did it. we are now about two years into this blood bath. and now we're in a bloody stalemate. and the reality i think a lot of my colleagues who are supportingthis aid package -- supporting this aid package are ignoring is that vladimir putin will not lose this war. losing the war is existential for vladimir putin. again, russia has four times the population. much larger military industrial base or industrial base just in general. they can produce 4.5 million, 155 millimeter shells.

they're shooting 10,000 a day right now at ukraine. it's a bloody stalemate, primarily a war with artillery. ukraine can only fire a couple thousand a day. i don't think the west manufacturing capability is -- has exceeded a million a year yet. by the way, a little factoid. russia produces those 155 millimeter shells for about $600 a piece. our military industrial complex charges $5,000 to $6,000 a piece, an order of magnitude higher. we're spending $80 something billion in defense. are we getting our money's worth out of that? are we asking that question? are we doing the oversight?

we should be. china is hard to say exactly what they spend. it's about $300 billion a year. now, purchasing power, they're probably getting more for the 300 billion. we're spending almost 900 billion. they're spending 300 billion. the briefings i get, they're building up their military rapidly. the next 13 nations combined spend less than $700 billion combined. so i would ask what are they spending that money on? by the way, i think it's a depraved justification. it's depraved to say one of the rationales for sending -- spending $60 billion for ukraine is that it's really not growing to ukraine -- going to ukraine. it's being used here in america. it's creating jobs in your

state. why do i say that's depraved? because if you're really concerned about the ukrainian people, that's my concern, the ukrainian people. if you're really concerned about the ukrainian people, you ought to be concerned about what is happening to their country. it's hard to get the exact statistics, but i've got something like 70,000 ukrainian soldiers killed in action. 10,000 to 40,000 civilians. 100 to 120,000 ukrainians wounded. i've heard other estimates far higher than that. russia has about 120,000 soldiers killed in action. wounded almost 200,000. this is a bloody stalemate. i've seen some estimates of the destruction of ukraine approaching if not surpassing a

trillion dollars. so again the awful reality that we need to face if we're really going to vote to add $60 billion of fuel to the fire of a bloody stalemate is, what's the result of that going to be? the only way this war ends because putin is not going to lose this war, the only way it ends is you negotiate a settlement. every day that goes by, the settlement gets worse and worse and -- it doesn't get better. it gets worse. more ukrainians will have died by then. more russian conscripts and i take no joy in that. i take no joy in the death of russian conscripts, some young man yanked out of his village by vladimir putin, sent to the front as cannon fodder.

i take no joy in that. none of us should. and more ukraine gets destroyed. our policy should have been for quite some time now to use whatever we influence we have in ukraine not to fuel the flames but try to reach a peace agreement. again, i'm not pollee anny. i realize how hard it's going to be. there have been atrocities created, war crimes. that isn't just -- you just don't kiss and make up. that doesn't heal overnight. that will take generations. we got to start now. one of the main reasons, as sympathetic i am for the ukrainian people, i don't see how sending another $60 billion helps their plight. because i see no strategy whatsoever on the part of the

biden administration to actually try and end the war. i see no strategy whatsoever. either spend more money or send more munitions and stoke the fires, fuel the flames of the bloody relentless stalemate. so again unfortunately that is just the stark reality of the situation. it was interesting we had a -- we did an x space. that's how you pronounce it with david saks, an associate with e-lon musk. he was on with senator vance, senator lee. and i did mention, i just read the new book about elon musk by walter isakson. and in that book walter isakson describes what elon musk has

developed. he calls it an idiot index. it's a very interesting concept. i'm in manufacturing. it resonated with me. i kind of look at things the same way. basically, you take a look at any product and you calculate what is the raw material cost of that product. this desk, maybe you have $10 worth of wood, maybe you've got $20. i don't know what it is. the next question you ask, what is the price? it's the price divided by the raw material cost, that gives you your idiot index. the higher that number, the more opportunity there is for dramatically reducing the cost of that product. that's what elon musk is a genius at. i was being interviewed by a "wall street journal" reporter. i haven't verified this but this is what the reporter told me. he said elon musk through the use of things like idiot indexes in the relentless pursuit of questioning every requirement

and driving costs out, just m mon -- he's taken the cost of a rocket from a billion dollars to $70 million. and he's come up with technology to land the boosters sink i.n.s.ly -- sink i.n.s.ically. that's what the private sector does. we talked earlier about spending 08 something billion dollars on defense. $5,000 to $6,000 for a 155 millimeter shell versus russia spending $600? it's time for congress, it's time for the senate to do oversight, start putting pressure on our military industrial complex to deliver a whole lot more for a whole lot less as opposed to being driven.

as president eisenhower warned us, being driven by the military industrial complex into all these foreign entanglements. well, i do want to provide a little retrospection of america's foreign entanglements. let me first say i truly believe america is a good country because americans are good people. the reason we supported the ukrainian people is because we want to help anybody fighting for their freedom. that's who americans are. as colin powell and others have famously said, we don't send our sons and daughters halfway around the world to conquer land. the only land we ever asked for is enough to bury our dead.

we send our sons and daughters overseas to help other people fight for what we have, freedom, for those universal goals and values that we all cherish, safety, security, prosperity, opportunity. that's what americans want for not only ourselves and our children but for everybody on the planet. we are good people. we are a good country. we have had leaders. we have the military industrial complex. we have agencies that are far from perfect. that i think have led us astray. as a nation we better start taking a look back and going what was the result of that intervention?

i just recently -- i was just recently in hanoi. what wonderful people. we did a trip to singapore, thailand and vietnam. singapore, per capita gdp about 75,000. it's a wealthy country and you can tell. go to thailand, a tenth of that, 7500. and you see squaller. you see high-rises. there's wealth, there's the income gap. but you see squaller. you go to vietnam, half of tha thailand's gdp. you don't see squaller. you see an inchettedably -- incredibly industrious people. we were told a poll recently of vietnamese, 96% of vietnam have a positive opinion of america because we are good. we never should have gone to war and bombed vietnam.

and that is no way denigrating the service and sacrifice of the finest among us. 15,000 paid the ultimate price. was it worth it? what's been the result of afghanistan? what's been the result of iraq? i recently saw a meem. the title was, this just sh shows -- to describe it better, it showed a picture of iran and it had all of these u.s. military bases surrounding iran. basically saying well, you can see why we find iran so provocative because they put their country so close to our bases. again, i don't apologize for the moles. they are the largest state

sponsor of terror. they provide the i.d.'s that was responsible for more than 600 american soldiers dead. do we ever look back and say was that worth it? do we take the right actions? -- did we take the right actions? ukraine, listen, i was as big a cheerleader as anybody, as the freedom-loving -- demanding freedom. asking what we have. prosperity. they wanted to link up with the west which we of course were happy to accept them. then i did walk the streets with john mccain and i saw the bold holes in the light posts. i visited the memorial to the more than a hundred ukrainians that were slaughtered by their

own government. now, the price of freedom is high. those people were obviously martyrs for the cause. that was 2014. fast forward. i truly think this war never had to happen. i remember being briefed in a scif and afterwards i was talking to two of my colleagues. i think there's still a way of avoiding this war but we won't take those actions. we can declare that we will never allow ukraine, at least in the foreseeable future, to become a partner in nato, we could declare that. we could say we're not going to bring ukraine into nato memb membership. the other thing is take u.n. troops and put them in as a trip wire. we certainly didn't very visually show putin all the defensive weaponry we were

providing for ukraine to deter him from invading. but we didn't do that. and putin invaded. i still am very interested to find out exactly what happened in istanbul, where they were sitting down and trying to bring the war to a quick conclusion, and boris johnson flies in. what happened there? i don't know. all i know is the result has been awful for ukraine and the ukrainian people. and i guess my time is -- not quite. must be really anxious. we need to understand and accept reality. as much as we hate it, you cannot create good policy living in a fantasy world, constructing your own reality. you have to accept the hard

realities of the moment. just to repeat, with my remaining minutes here, our first priority should be to sure our own border, to protect americans, to keep americans safe, to keep our children safe. this surge, this contratastroph it's not just impacting isn'ties like new york amendment chicago. -- cities like new york and chicago. there's a city in wisconsin, whitewater, i was called down there with the chiefs of police and the county sheriffs. 15,000 population. they have hundreds of migrant children in the school system speaking a different dialect of spanish that their bilingual teachers don't understand, so they have to hire another interpreter. costs them another $100,000 plus. police calls are taking three,

four times the normal time. so other activities are weighed down responding to the migrants. migrants are crowding into apartments, unsafely, 12 to an apartment. now they're asking for help for funding. i'm sympathetic with them. the solution isn't to spend billions on sanctuary cities. the solution is to reduce the flow to a trickle so we don't have to spend those hundreds of billions of dollars taking care of this catastrophe, and that's what this is. six million people, it keeps rising by a couple hundred thousand a month. probably seven, more than seven million by the end of biden's, hopefully, only term. this shouldn't be that hard. this didn't require a monstrosity of a rube goldberg immigration bill. all we asked for was some

enforcement mechanism tied to ukraine funding to leverage that funding to force president biden, who wants an open border, who caused problem, to use the executive authority he already has to secure the border. and by the way, recognize how much easier it is for a democrat president to secure the border versus a republican. president trump, again, faced strong resistance from the open border crowd, and no help from democrats here in this chamber to override court decisions, for example. president biden, i don't know, he may face similar resistance, but he would have republicans who are more than willing to pass a quick little law by unanimous consent to override a wrongful court decision, like the flores reinterpretation. it may not be widely known, but president obama's secretary of dhs, jeh johnson, completely

disagreed with that court decision. complete digs agreed -- disagreed with it, wrongfully decided. president obama should have come to congress and asked us to write a very focused law, very targeted law to instruct the court that you're wrong. we can detain families with their children. that's the humane thing to do. as opposed to initiate a massive catch and release, facilitating the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the drug trafficking that goes along with it. again, a reality that i know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want toif face. they don't want to admit what a crisis, what a catastrophe this is. secretary mayorkas, how many times has he been before the senate and house? when we ask him will you

recognize this is a crisis? no, senator. at least a problem? no, senator, it's a challenge. it's a challenge we're rising to. we have control over the border, secretary mayorkas says. again, his definition of control and their solution is billions of dollars to sanctuary cities, billions of dollars for more cbp officers, not to secure the border, not to stop the flow, but to more efficiently and effectively encounter, process, and disburse and create a problem for cities large and small that is going to be with us for years, if not decades. this has to end. it is a tragedy that this body, this senate couldn't rise to the occasion, actually construct a

real border security bill, one that would bring this down to a trickle, do what president trump did in march and april of 2020, bring this flow down to way under a thousand a day. that's what the american people expected. that's what we should have delivered. that is what we have failed miserably to do. and now we're about ready to send $60 billion to ukraine, no border security whatsoever, and we'll fuel the flames and prolong the destruction of ukraine and the killing of its citizens and russian conscripts. this is a pretty easy no vote for me. it boggles my mind that so many of my colleagues here are actually going to vote yes on this without first securing our border. and with that, madam, i yield to

the good senator from nebraska. the presiding officer: the senator from nebraska. mr. ricketts: thank you, madam president. i rise today to join my colleagues in talking about the catastrophe at our southern border. what has happened under this biden administration? how it was created by joe biden, because of his policies this self-inflicted wound has been created by joe biden and his policies. let's step back a little bit to see how did we get here. how did we get to the situation where we have a flood of illegal immigrants coming across our

southern border? as my colleague from wisconsin just described, under the trump administration president trump brought the crossings of illegal immigrants to a 45-year low, less than a thousand encounters per day. he did that with the same tools that president biden has available to him today. but instead of taking the same policies that president trump used to control that border, president biden was in a rush to undo those policies. he promised a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants that are in this country. he promised to stop locking

people up, quote-unquote. he said, quote, for those who come seeking asylum we should immediately have the capacity to absorb them and keep them safe until they can be heard, end quote. and he said those who cross the border illegally, quote, shouldn't be the focus of d deportation, end quote. well, certainly on that last point, president biden has been accurate, if you look at the september numbers. about 270,000 contacts along our southern border, and only about 10% of those folks were deported. he is certainly living up to his promise. in his first hundred days of office, president biden issued 94 executive orders on immigration. he stopped the construction of

the border wall. he halted deportations. suspended the remain in mexico provisions. he repealed trump's interior enforcement executive order that prioritized immigration enforcement. president trump's order encouraged states and local jurisdictions to enforce federal immigration laws. part of it was reviving the secure -- which ordered dhs to strip federal funding from so-called severn chew airy cities -- sanctuary cities. and encouraged criminal prosecution for illegal entry into the united states. under the biden administration joe biden has abused the process of parole. i want to be clear when talking about parole. we're not talking about parole as in i have been in prison and

now i've done enough of my time and have been a good -- been on good behavior in prison that i get paroled and released with supervision from our criminal justice system. no, that's not what we're talking about here. parole is a function that the executive branch can use to be able to allow people to come into this country. now, the way the law is written it is supposed to be on a case-by-case basis. that is only to be used in cases of extreme humanitarianed need -- humanitarian need or in the best interests of our country. if we look back over the obama and trump administration, on average about 5600 people were paroled into this country, these are people not united states sit

sfwlens, these people were paroled into our -- not united states citizens, paroled into our country in a given year. of that would suggest it was used on a case-by-case basis by the previous two administrations. under this president, he has absolutely abused parole. this is a lawless administration. president biden has paroled last year in this country 1.2 million illegal immigrants. 1.2 million. to put that in perspective, that is an about -- that is about two-thirds the population of my home state. two-thirds the population of nebraska. again, take a step back. 1.2 million people in the last year versus an average of 5,600.

this is absolute abuse of executive power. of taking a law that was meant for one purpose, to be on a case-by-case basis and applying it to whole classes of people to allow people to come in here. president biden is handing out this parole like it's halloween candy. i mentioned the september statistics were about 10% of the people had been deported. it turns out about 85% of the people who knock on our door are getting into our country. that is creating the incentive for people to come here. it is not hard to understand. if you were not allowed into the country in the previous administration, and now this administration is saying if you

come across that border illegally i am very likely at that parole you into this country, as soon as you cross that border, you get picked up by customs and border patrol, you get processed and released, the first thing you're doing then is calling or texting your family members at home, saying, i was able to get into the united states. i didn't have to follow the regular process, which takes years for people who follow the process legally. i didn't have to do that. i could just walk across the border. and get into this country. why are we surprised -- or rather we shouldn't be surprised that there are millions of people making that dangerous trek to get here. and of course again, as described by my colleague from wisconsin, it is a dangerous trek. this open-border policy has

facilitated human trafficking, sex trafficking, women being sexually assaulted, children being trafficked. one of the things this biden administration has done has stopped the dna testing of children coming across the border. and that just facilitates the cartels in trafficking those children. the scenario is, if you come across the border with a child, you are a family, and so the administration won't detain you. guess what? the cartels know this. they take advantage of that. and so they take these unaccompanied children, put them with an adult, and send them across the border. on my last trip to the border -- i've been there four times; we'll talk about that a little bit more. but on my last trip to the

border, we talked to the customs and border protection people. they told us that sometimes the sometimes 40% or sometimes up to 509% of the kids that came across -- 50% of the kids that came across that border were not the kid of the parent -- or the adult that was with them e with them. the child did not belong to that adult. dna testing at least helped us to be able to verify whether that child actually indeed was the kid of the adult who claimed to be the parent. when i was down on the border, i saw this for myself first is. -- firsthand. there was a man there that claimed that this little girl that was with him was his daughter. we questioned this man, and he said, yeah, this is my daughter. but i'm a father myself. i've got two girls. this girl was terrified.

and as a dad, you can kind of tell, right? you know when a little girl is with her father. and it was clear that there was not that kind of relationship. that this girl was afraid. she was terrified. and after more questioning, the man said, well, i'm actually not her father. i'm her uncle. and because of biden's policies, the border patrol could do nothing. they did not have the ability to do the dna testing, to see if that child was indeed this man's daughter. and so what does that open it up to? they come in, they get processed, they get released and that child gets sendst september back to mexico and

gets used with another adult to come back across the border. this is the type of humanitarian crisis that president biden has created. he is absolutely responsible for every case of sex trafficking, child trafficking that is going on along this border because of his open-border policies. he is responsible. he made the decisions to undo the policies that had reduced the trafficking and the illegal immigrants coming across our border. it is absolutely terrible. so let's talk a little about that a d. about that. what has happened under this administration? since joe biden has been president, there have been nearly 6.6 million encounters at

our southern border. when he undid those policies, he sent a message to people not just south of our southern border, not just in central america, not just in south america, but to the entire world -- our borders are open. and, in fact, my colleague from wisconsin had just talked about the open-border crowd. it is a very real thing. there are people in this city that want open borders. and with this president, they're getting it. and when the people of the world heard that, they started flooding to come here. as was previously mentioned, president trump brought those encounters down to under a thousand a day u now we see 5,000, 10,000. in december we saw days at

11,000, 12,000. in december there were over 300,000 encounters at our southern border. let me put that in perspective. that is larger than the capital city of nebraska. 300,000 encounters is more than the population of lincoln, nebraska. my state's capital. that's how many people have been coming across. i mentioned people from all around the world. the night i was on the border last and this group of illegal immigrants crossed the border. they were apprehended by customs and border protection, we had folks from el salvador primarily. but there was a couple from moldova. think about that. moldova. eastern europe. they had traveled through a half

a dozen different countries to get to the point where they crossed our border. when i was in the rio grande valley on a previous trip, they said that the number of people crossing from china had been up 400%. we're also talking about people from syria, iran. these are countries that have terrorists that are committed to killing our people e people. in years past, we would have single-digit numbers of people on the border -- the terrorist watch list cross our southern border. six, selfen, eight -- six, seven, eight, nine. last year under this administration, 169 people just at the southern border crossed that were on the terrorist watch list. so how many people have crossed in the intervening years? total? total encounters by customs and

border protection in fiscal year 2021 was 1,734,686. in fiscal year 2022, 3,378,944. and in fiscal year 2023, 2,465,669. that's the roughly almost 6.6 million encounters by customs and border patrol. but what that does not count is the approximately 1.8 million got-aways. what do i mean by got-away? these are the people that cross the border that for whatever reason customs and border protection could not get to to apprehend. so what happens is often people come across the border, and they

surrender themselves right away, such as i saw on my last trip. people -- families came across or individuals, that couple from moldova with their little baby came across the border, and they surrendered right away. but there are people who are evading apprehension. and, by the way, the cartels understand the system. and they try to game it. customs and border protection has told me what they will do is they will understand we've got limited resources, flood a certain number -- like a large number of illegal immigrants cross one part of the border, and then at another part of the border they push through their high-value people or cargo. we've been talking about the people coming across the border. but it also includes drugs.

and that's why now every state is a border state. because of this humanitarian and national security crisis, we see people coming across the border that are impacting our communities. we see illegal drugs coming akrolls the border that are -- across the border that ared impacting our communities. and it impacts not just states like texas or arizona, but my home state nebuchadnezzar -- my home state of nebraska. in the last two years, we saw a dramatic increase in the amount of drugs, specifically fentanyl, and i want to take a step back here for a moment. because as we talk about the drugs coming across the border, there's two big ones that are impacting my state -- fentanyl and methamphetamine e methamphetamine. fentanyl is the leading killer of americans age 18 to 45. the leading killer of americans

age 18-45, our young people, is fentanyl. that fentanyl is manufactured and precursors -- or starts at precursors in china, gets shipped to mexico where illegal labs the cartels run turn it into fentanyl and then this gets pushed across the border. and when i was governor -- this is to share with you how much it's changed -- under the biden administration and his rush to undo the policies that have brought these crossings to historical lows, in 2019, law enforcement in nebraska confiscated 46 pills that were laced with fentanyl. 46. by 2021, that number had jumped

to 151,000. in just two years, going from 46 to 151,000 pills laced with fentanyl. that is another example of joe biden's failed policies. he is directly responsible for this huge increase in fentanyl coming into our country because of his open-border policies. and these policies have real-world impacts on people. i mentioned how many people have died because of fentanyl, the leading killer of our young people. but every one of those cases is not just a statistic, it's a person. a person like terry lee griffith. terri lee griff i am was a young man in lincoln, nebraska.

she had two kids. she went out one night and took a pill she thought was percocet. turns out it was laced with fentanyl. a lethal dose. and she died that night. leaving her two little children to have to learn about their mom from pictures and stories from relatives. that family paid the price for joe biden's open-border policies. it is killing our people. and that's why my colleagues and i said, let's see what we can do to stop this. actually, as governor, i did the same thing. i said, this is impacting us in the state of nebraska. how can we stem this tide of people coming into our country,

this tide of drugs coming into our country? and so as governor i set my state patrol, 25 guard trap troopers, down to assist the texas department of public safety in doing law enforcement -- they weren't doing border patrol, but they were doing law enforcement to help out the overwhelmed and overworked law enforcement at our southern border. when they came back, they told the stories of how, again, these folks crossed the border. they're being victimized by the cartels, and when they get across, most of them are surrendering themselves to our law enforcement. because they know they will be safe with our law enforcement. they don't want to be left up to

the mercies of the cartels. they know they will be safe with our law enforcement. our troopers told the stories of providing that safety. -- to these people who came across the border. that is also part of the human impact this open-border policy is having. and we continue to see the effects of it in my state today. in january news channel nebraska reported on a man in mexico who was sent to prison in nebraska after being convicted of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. talked about fentanyl but methamphetamine is an even bigger problem in the state of nebraska. this 43-year-old man was in the country illegally. he was arrested in a motel room with 15,000 -- $15,000 in cash

and 11 and a half pounds of methamphetamine. and he previously had been deported for drug charges. this was a problem that became apparent to me early on when i was governor. and not just me. many of my colleagues as well. and so what we did, 26 of us got together. and we sent president biden a letter saying president biden, your policies are impacting our states. remember, this was early on in the administration of president biden. this was his first year. we're like, your policies are impacting our states. will you please meet with us to talk about the impacts in our states and what potential solutions would be. and president biden absolutely refused to meet with us. he absolutely refused. so we went down to the border.

and we talked about the solutions that had worked in the previous administration. we had a 10-point plan that would address the border issues that we have. and we listed those out and we knew they would work. you know why we knew they would work? because they had worked in the trump administration. those 10 points included continue the title 42 health restrictions. about 18 to 20% of the people who were crossing the border at that time -- this is in september 2021 we sent that letter. we heard nothing back from the president. we went down to the border in october of 2021. and about 20%, 18% to 20% of the folks crossing the border tested positive for covid. one report estimated about 40,000 illegal immigrants were sent to our cities with

covid-19. and you wonder why big cities had problems controlling that. we said reinstate that. second, we said fully reinstate the migrant protection protocols. this was established -- again, by the prioredon managers that bayingly said if you're seeking asylum in our country, you have to stay in mexico. and now, this is a big deal because when somebody comes here illegally, they know i have to wait years to get into the country just to have my court case. that's a disincentive to come here. when they know they can just come here, maybe get a court date that's four years down the road, ten years down the road, that's a good deal for them. they'll come here and get released right away and say hey, i've got a court date that's years down the road. guess what? not many of those folks show up at their court date when it comes up. so they basically get into this country without going through the regular process that so many legal immigrants do to come to

our country. we said finish securing the border. finish building the wall. president biden stopped the construction of the wall. now, the wall by itself is not going to solve the whole problem. but when we talk to customs and border patrol folks, they say walls do work. they help. they help limit where you come across and helps them do their job. and catch and release. again, if you know that you can come to this country and get released back into our country, what's your downside? you come, you get processed, you get released. your court date may be years away. so we said part of how we address that also -- this is point number five -- is clearly judicial backlog. devote more resources to processing the asylum claims. get more judges in there so we don't have this long backlog. again, if the incentive is to come here and you know you're going to get released, people are going to come. if people come here and they get

processed and they're told you don't qualify for asylum and they get sent back, that word will get out and people will stop coming here. that's part of the problem. we create these incentives for people to come here. the backlog is part of it. we need to address it. and by the way, again i've been down to the border. when i talk to people coming across, by and large what they're saying is they just want a better job. i'm certainly sympathetic but a better job is not a reason for asylum in this country. asylum is for people who fear for their life in their own country and not just in their neighborhood. you have to fear that their federal government is trying to harm them. there's no place safe in their country. that's a reason for asylum. that's not the vast, vast majority of people coming across the border. they're just looking for a better job. and then number six on our ten-point list the governors put forward, resume the deportation

of all the criminals. the biden administration should enforce all of our deportation laws. as i mentioned again in september, only about 10% of the people were being deported. seven, develop more federal resources. again, this is where my colleague from wisconsin said, he would find allies and republicans in the u.s. senate to get more resources for federal officials to go after the criminals at our southern border. we need to get after them. stop this trafficking. stop the sex trafficking. stop the drug trafficking. stop the child trafficking. one of the other policies of the previous administration was to work with the northern triangle countries, guatemala, el salvador, and mexico, to address the issues there for people who are fleeing those countries. and work with them to keep the folks in their countries and address their issues and not let

them cross through mexico to get to our southern border. again, the biden administration got rid of that as soon as they came into office. got out of that agreement. number nine, send a message to everybody trying to come here that it's not a free ride. if you were coming to this country and you were forced to remain in mexico for say three, four years before your court date, you weren't likely to come and do that. send that message. but this administration did just the opposite. they sent the message that our border is open. come here and you will get in. then of course number ten is we need more help for the customs and border patrol. we need more officers. we need more equipment. we need more technology. whether i was down there they said the cartels had better drones than we do. we saw aerostats which are basically these balloons that go up with cameras on them to help mon core the border. -- monitor the border. they're very effective but they just don't have enough of them. there are things we can do to be able to address this. so that's what we did as governor to address this crisis.

and then we -- i come to the u.s. senate. what i want to do is continue to work to keep people safe like we did in nebraska. so we've had this long negotiation on a border bill. again, to be clear, president biden has the same laws that president trump did. but my colleagues and i wanted to do more to secure our border. for example, end this abuse of -- we wanted to stop the flow of people coming into our country. but the bill that we got did not get the job done. it didn't address parole in a meaningful way that was going to stop the people comes across the border. it set the level of an emergency at 5,000 encounters a day.

folks, that's not an emergency. that's a catastrophe. remember, trump brought it to less than a hundred -- less than a thousand. that's the emergency level. not 5,000. and we weren't doing enough to detain people. by the way, here's the other kicker. our leader scheduled a vote on the border bill before we even had a cost estimate from cbo. so we're supposed to vote on a bill that we don't know how much it's going to cost? how crazy is that? lots of people understand that there's a cost benefit trade-off that you just don't pay an unreasonable amount of money that something that does not have the value. we don't even know what these policies are going to cost yet we're asked to vote on them. that's why i voted no on that

bill. now, one of my colleagues from south carolina came to me and said hey, i've been in contact with the border patrol council. he sent me a letter. i want to read this letter from brandon judd into the record. dear senators graham and cornyn, i'm responding to your questions regarding how to improve the border security provisions in the emergency national security supplemental. simply put, defining an emergency at the border as 1,000 encounters a day would be a substantial improvement. it is apparent that 5,000 encounters in a day is a catastrophe. and 1,000 encounters a day is a true emergency. this is in line with what former secretary of homeland security for president obama jed johnson said when he said one day of 1,000 encounters was a very bad day and overwhelms the system. if you could lower the number to

1,000 encounters on average over a seven-day period and require the president shut down the border at that level of encounters, that would be a substantial improvement to the legislation. as to the question of how to end catch and release, detaining single adults and families rather than referring to them as noncustodial removal proceedings -- again, noncustodial, that's just letting people go -- and enrolling them in alternatives to detention -- again letting them go -- would be a giant step forward to that goal so don't do it. this would not effectively curb the catch and release policies of the biden administration for single adults or aliens in a family unit. therefore, changing the bill to provide for detention of families as well as single adults would be a tremendous improvement in stopping catch and release. finally the idea of putting a cap on parole would be a game changer on ending the parole abuse. as you indicated on the trump administration and obama

administration, grants of par recall by customs and border protection at the southern border averaged less than 6,000 a year. under president biden, grants of parole across the department of homeland security skyrocketed to over 800,000 a year and capped par recall at 10,000 grants a year would be a check on their ability to abuse this authority. in summary, redefining emergency from 5,000 to a thousand, requiring actual detention instead of alternatives to detention and 10,000 a year cap on parole would make the bill exponentially better. thank you for your questions and interest. sinc sincerely. i see my colleague from ohio is here. i want to be respectful of his time because i know he is anxious to also speak on this issue. but as i wrap up here, what i am hearing from might constituents is that they understand this is a catastrophe at our southern

border. it's a humanitarian catastrophe as we described, a national security catastrophe. they want a secure border. they also understand that under the trump administration, that we had this. this once a problem. this has blood pressure the number one issue in -- this is -- every state is a border state and they want us to take action. this bill does not get the job done. this bill does not make meaningful reforms. and that's why i voted no on the border bill. we must continue to look for solutions as a u.s. senate. but at the end of the day, the responsibility for this catastrophe lies squarely on the shoulders of our president joe

biden. he is responsible for every case of human trafficking, sex trafficking, child trafficking, drug trafficking that comes across our border. every single one because of his open border policies. he is responsible for these deaths. we didn't even talk about the thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the border who have died crossing the border. he's responsible for those, too. my colleagues and i have introduced a number of pieces of legislation to address this. because i want to allow my colleague from ohio to have the opportunity to be able to talk about this, i won't go into it but the one that i introduced was called the ensure uniform border inspection processes act to make sure we were doing the right things across the entire border. but there are a number of other pieces of legislation introductioned by my colleagues -- introduced by my colleagues that would have addressed the drug trafficking, the asylum abuse, upholding the laws at our border, the sanctuary cities that are also

draws, all these things could be addressed. this administration could do it. i call on this administration to stop these open border policies. use the powers at your disposal to secure our border. that's what the american people want. president biden, secure our border. the american people demand it. you have the tools. i call on you to do this. with that, mr. president, i yield back. the presiding officer: the senator from ohio. mr. vance: thank you, mr. president. and thank to my colleague from nebraska who confided in private to me he didn't think he could go for the full hour. i would have welcomed at least another 20 minutes of speaking from my friend from nebraska. it is 3:15 in the morning, and we're here discussing sending

another $61 billion to ukraine as part of a $95 billion security supplemental. i think it's important to at least give some context for the four people across our country who are currently awake to how we got here and why we got here and why we managed to fumble i think a great opportunity in this chamber to do real border security. first, months ago my republican colleagues and i discussed the possibility of doing a border security package as a point of negotiation with our democratic colleagues over ukraine. the basic set of negotiation went something like this -- republicans are unified, at least allegedly, in our view that the border is a national security crisis. this is allegedly a national

security supplemental and the border is the most important national security issue we confront. on the flip side democrats are united in their view that ukraine must receive another $61 billion or even more of american aid. there were the seeds of a potential deal that could be cut between senate democrats and senate republicans. there are a few problems with this as we learned. the first is that while our democratic colleagues might agree that the border has some problems, this he apparently don't agree that it is quite the same crisis we do. that's one. another problem is that apparently our republican colleagues are not nearly as united as we thought that we were or as we pretended to be. in fact, the closer we got to an actual resolution of the negotiation the more that we learned that our republican colleagues, at least a small subset, cared a hell of a lot

more about the ukraine package than about securing the american southern border. it's negotiation 101 that if you go into a negotiating posture where you desperately want the thing that the other side of the table also desperately wants, you're not in an especially good position. if republicans are as desperate to send $61 billion to ukraine as democrats are, it's not very shocking that the democrats were not willing to give us a large amount on border security. now, this is what, of course, everyone knew. this is what everyone now knows, because after a mere hour of debating a border security package as part of a broader supplemental senate republicans joined with democrats to immediately move on to a discussion of a ukraine supplemental. literally an hour. if you had dreamed up something from the fever swamp conspiracy

theory of the american conservative movement, you could not have come up with something more egregious than this fake negot negotiation, what it produced and how it immediately led to a debate not about our southern border, but about ukraine. now, there are a few problems with this particular nego negotiation, a few problems with the way it unfolded. the first is that it was done in secret. a border security -- by the way, this is problems from the perspective of conservatives, problems that the republicans in our conference who are supporting this should have been mindful of if they wanted to actually get to a border security package, they could have got a majority of republican support. after many months of negotiation there was a border security package that received i believe four republican votes, and now we have a ukraine supplemental that received far less than a majority of the republican

conference. if you wanted to get a majority of republicans to support this border security package you should have observed a few basic rules. . first, you should not have done a secret negotiation. many of our voters, many of our colleagues are mistrustful of secret negotiations. they're mistrustful of the people who participate in secret negotiations, because if you're not getting the details of a plan out as it unfolds you're not doing two things. first, you're not allowing the people who know immigration law best within the conservative movement to understand what's in it, to offer feedback, to try to improve the bill, to ensure whatever text is coming together actually matches the terms of an alleged negotiation deal. two, you're not -- you're denying the american people an opportunity to actually understand what's in the border security deal that's unfolding.

three, you're denying senate colleagues a real opportunity to debate the merits as they come together. what actually happened was not you negotiate for a couple of weeks and this is where the democrats are, and this is where the republicans are, maybe we can find some seeds of a compromise here. what actually happened is that after months of negotiation senate republicans started asking what's in this deal? what shape is it taking? what have the democrats given? what have the democrats asked in return? this was all mediated through a very, very small number of channels, and that process bred mistrust before we even new any of the details of what was in the border security package. if you're a cynic, you say this is by design, that we signed a -- designed a package meant to create mistrust, designed a process meant to create

mistrust, and never meant to lead to any significant border security. i hate to say i think that's the package that was produced. after months of secret negotiations and denying some of the smartest immigration experts in the world the opportunity to critique and offer feedback on this package, after months of breeding mistrust within the american body politic, the details of an immigration grand bargain started to leak out. and the details were pretty troubling. there were some good things, of course, some things we like and think were necessary, but it's interesting that even in the most generic terms, the details of the immigration plan started to create some backlash among most republicans. again, if you can't pass a border security package without the support of most republicans, then it's not actually going to

pass. so, here we are, early 2024, with the promise of a grand bargain on border security and a national security supplemental to boot. and yet, every single detail, turns out, to have not been manifested in the text, turns out to have not produced something in the text that would have actually meaningfully secured the border. the first thing you want to do if you're serious about border security, first thing is to limit the president's ability to parole close to a million illegal migrants a year. go back to the obama administration, the obama administration paroled about 5,000 illegal aliens every single year. senate republicans think that's too much, but 5,000 a year is

far less than the 750,000 or close to a million a year that the biden administration has decided to parole. now, it's not just the direct effect that you're taking close to a million people a year who have violated our immigration laws and given them what amounts to effective legal status. you're also sending a message all across central america and the world that america is open for business. this is why when you put a camera or microphone in front of somebody crossing the southern border illegally and say why are you coming now, they will say because joe biden and kamala harris invited us in. the parole policy has thrown open the floodgates, and this grand border compromise contained almost nothing that would meaningfully reduce the number of paroles that the president of the united states can issue. it required a report, i believe, but nothing that would limit the president's discretion to grant parole en masse as he has done

for the last three years of his administration. that was the first problem. second is that the grand border compromise did very little on the question of asylum. it pretended to do something. it changed the asylum standard. it increased that standard from a credible fear to a reasonable fear. but it also changed who was enforcing that standard to cis agents who are among the most pro-asylum people in the entire united states government. so you change the standard, but you make it much easier, you created a person enforcing that standard that has almost no reason to meaningfully enforce american asylum laws. why is this a problem? well, because we have fundamentally at the united states southern border an economic migrant crisis that is pretending to be a massive asylum crisis. people who are traditional economic migrants come into our

country, they claim asylum, they say they're persecuted, they're fleeing persecution, and then the asylum officer usually will tell them you have to come back in six years, 12 years, however many years to have your case adjudicated before an immigration law judge. for those ten years, maybe more, that they're in the country, they effectively have legal status. they're in our country. many never show for their court date, even though the date is years later. the asylum process has turned millions of economic migrants into alleged asylum claimants. i find it interesting that when you look what's actually coming -- who's actually coming across the southern border, it's very, very often young men between the ages of 20 and 35, unaccompanied by women or children. because if we know anything about world affairs, it's that when people are politically persecuted, it's always the

young, unaccompanied men, not the women or children. my colleagues will forgive my sarcasm there. why is it the people flooding across our southern border, why are women and children so poorly represented plunge them? this -- represented among them? this is about manipulating america's lawyers -- america's laws. it's a legal arbitrage that immigration attorneys in the united states of america have cooked up. by the way, one of the great things about the grand border compromise is that we decided to pay immigration attorneys who are undercutting our immigration laws massive amounts of legal fees from the american taxpayers. why not have a handout for the immigration attorneys who have helped create a system where we undercut our immigration laws? that was the second major problem with the grand border compromise.

a third major problem is that it did not meaningfully increase the president's authority or frankly force the president's hand into deporting anyone who is currently here illegally. just a couple weeks ago in new york city a group of illegal immigrants violently assaulted a police officer. those people as far as i know are still in our country because we don't deport people. even though who violently assault police officers. we deport an incredibly small number of the people who come into this country illegally. a fourth problem with the grand border compromise cooked up by my colleagues is that it had an emergency border shut-off authority which was really anned a mirable effort to force -- an admirable effort to force secretary my porkas and the president's -- mayorkas and the president's hands. it went like this, if border crossings reach a certain threshold, 5,000 a day i believe

in the text we received, there's an emergency shutdown authority that applies for a certain number of days per year. 270 days in the first year, less in the second year and less in the third year. that sounds not too bad, right? you hit a certain threshold of illegal border crossings, you should shut down the border. i think that number should be close to sfwloer. whatever -- should be close to zeros. opinions can differ. yet, that authority set at 5,000 a day, which effectively says that you can have nearly 1.9 million illegal aliens come into the country before you trigerthat authority, it has multiple provisions that allow us to waive it. it has a 45-day emergency waiver authority for the president. it has an 180-day discretionary waiver for secretary mayorkas.

180 days plus 45, is 225 days. so if a 270-day border emergency shutdown authority, 225 days can be waived by the president or secretary who refused to enforce our immigration laws. that's not much of an emergency authority if they only have to use it 45 days in the first year, given what's going on at the american southern border. the fundamental problem as so many of my colleagues have recognized and noted is how do we get joe biden and secretary mayorkas to enforce the border law when they clearly don't want to. this is a forcing function. the real negotiation here as was obvious to anybody from the start was how do we force joe biden to do his job and what leverage do we have in order to force that very thing. instead we went into it, a negotiation where, again, it was in secret and where our

colleagues who were negotiating fundamentally didn't understand or didn't enforce this fundamental insight. they wanted to give joe biden additional authorities. he might not use those authorities even if you give them to him. they wanted to give joe biden a number of discretionary get out of jail free cards where even if you create authorities for him to enforce the border you give him discretion to get out of it. we don't need to be granting joe biden more discretion. we need to be sustaining his discretion because it has led to the border crisis that we have. a number of my colleagues mentioned the terrible consequences of the border problem and what it looks like for so many of our citizens. there is no overstating the catastrophe that's going on at the american southern border. there's the fentanyl crisis that is killing over 100,000 citizens of our country.

of course the fentanyl is now transitioning to other drugs just as the heroin transitioned to the fentanyl just as the prescription pills transitioned to the heroin. one of our gifts of the southern border is the virtually limitless supply of increasingly more powerful synthetic opioids to kill our citizens. if you read anything about the history of the opium war, you wonder if we're witnessing the reverse opium war where precursors to synthetic opioids come in from communist china. the mexican drug cartels manufacture them and ship them across the southern border. if you were serious about addressing this crisis, the first thing you happened want to do is limit joe biden and secretary mayorkas's authority to open the floodgates and invite millions of illegal aliens into this country, limit their discretion. that was always the only pathway to meaningful border enforcement

under this administration. as so many of my colleagues mentioned, joe biden clearly doesn't want to enforce the border. so, ladies and gentlemen, how do we force the president to enforce the border. the basic deal that was offered by a number of my colleagues and friends went something like this. if the democrats are so desperate to send another $61 billion for ukraine, what we could do is meter the money based on border enforcement metrics. this is in fact what was discussed in the republican conference and it received support from ukraine supporters like jim risch and ron johnson to people who are more skeptical of the conflict like me, to people who are in the middle like ted cruz. the basic idea was we are going to force as much as possible joe biden to enforce the southern border. and unless he gets illegal

border crossings under a certain level using his existing authority we will not provide support to the security supplemental. in other words if he wants $61 billion for ukraine joe biden will have to do border enforcement despite the fact that he obviously doesn't want to. that was the deal we thought was on the table and that unfortunately was not the deal actually on the table once it was advanced by our leadership team and of course on sunday night, february 4, we received a text of the grand border compromise. typically with the field of law as complicated as immigration, you would expect days, weeks, months of committee markups, of debates, of negotiation over text, of trying to understand how one provision influences another provision, how another provision affects the other.

this process of legislative policy making is what was short circuited by this secret negotiation. so on sunday the text dropped, and on wednesday we were expected to vote on it. for three days, from february 4 until february 7, my staff and i imagine the staff of nearly every republican member worked long nights to try to understand what was actually in the border security package. they identified many of the problems that i just repeated that actually existed with the policy. even where it looked good on the surface it very often contained provisions where democrats had frankly outnegotiated republicans. it reminds me a little bit of the fiscal responsibility act, where senate negotiators -- excuse me -- where the president's negotiators took to "the new york times" to brag afterwards that while then-speaker kevin mchad gotten a lot of concessions off the

white house they had fallen apart when translated to legislative text. that's a problem. if the legislative text isn't very good, no matter how good the headline promises the legislation are, you shouldn't support the legislation. that's of course what happened. on wednesday republicans decided as a conference that they would not support an additional, they would not support the border security package that came out. a curious thing happened then. if you you had really been serious about border security, if you really wanted to advance the ball in any negotiation, the other party comes with an offer. you consider the offer. you read it, you try to understand it, you decide it's not good enough. what do you do if you're serious about the problem? you go back and say this isn't good enough. we need to keep going down this pathway. we need to keep on fighting for a way to secure the border. but that never happened. why that never happened is because too many within the republican conference were

desperate, desperate for money for ukraine, so desperate they were willing to short circuit any meaningful border security. that is the fundamental truth. as much as i am frustrated at my democratic colleagues for not doing more to secure the border, as much as i am frustrated for democrats who are at large and the president of the united states for not doing his job, on this particular negotiation the simple truth is tomorrow senate republicans cared far more about ukraine than they did their own country. you heard it earlier today when one of my colleagues said this was the most important vote any of us had ever taken in the united states senate. i can't imagine what leads a person to think that sending $61 billion to ukraine at this moment of crisis for our country is the most important vote that we have taken. by god, maybe we should take far more important votes that actually solve the problems that confront this country.

maybe we should confront the mental health crisis in our country, the fact that our teenagers seem to have rising depression rates, our young people have rising suicide rates, the fact that we have a wide open southern border, the fentanyl and sex trafficking crisis. all are substantially more important than what we are about to vote on in the united states senate and what we voted on last night but not of course if your main priority is securing ukraine's border rather than fixing the problems much your own country. this unfortunately is where we are. this is unfortunately the problem that we're confronting. we have a democratic party that want an open border, and we have a republican party where most of us don't want to, most of us want to fight for border security but a few of us actually care more about ukraine. therein is the seed of the real bipartisan compromise we have in this country which is constantly focussing on problems of other countries instead of on the

problems of our own. let's talk a little bit about the ukraine policy because that's now after the southern border deal fell apart, now we're on to focussing on ukraine. and of course this has become the main focus of so many of my senate colleagues. this has become the reason for breathing, the reason for waking up in the morning, the reason for coming to work in the united states senate, to ensure that we send another $61 billion to ukraine. there are so, so many problems with our ukraine policy. and i'm going to start from the most obvious all the way hopefully to the unintended consequences if we have enough time and if i'm still standing. let's start with the most obvious problem of our ukraine policy. there is no strategy. a year ago i spoke with secretary blinken and i had a

number of private conversations with people in the administration. what was the goal of our ukraine policy? and then the goal was to ensure that ukraine had enough weapons so that they could launch a much anticipated counteroffensive. that would allow them to gain large amounts of territory. it may even allow them to push the russians out of crimea. and then of course you could have peace settlements where ukraine was from a position of strength and russia was from a position of weakness. we would, in other words, throw the russians back to close to the 1919 borders of ukraine -- 1991 borders of ukraine and then we would try to negotiate with them. this leaves out of course an important historical detail that back in april of 2022 as federal reserve gerhardt schroeder to a number of our nato allies pointed out the russians wanted to negotiate in april of 2022.

the negotiation was possible back then but boris johnson, the prime minister of the u.k., and our own administration refused to engage in that negotiation. we wanted the ukrainians to fight and to fight on. of course they have at great cost to themselves and at great cost to the american taxpayer. here's the problem with this idea that the ukrainians would ever throw the russians back to the 1991 borders is they are massively outmanned and massively outgunned. ukraine has a population today of about 28 million people. russia has a population today of 145 million people. russia manufacturers far more artillery shells not just in ukraine but in the united states of america, an economy that is ten times as large. russia is not going to lose the war. that is a fundamental fact that everybody needs to accept. they are not going to lose. it is existential to them.

it is the main focus of vladimir putin. they are bigger and they have more weapons. so the question then becomes how do we preserve as much of ukraine as possible, how do we prevent as much innocent loss of life as possible? and how do we ensure this war comes to a negotiated peace in a way that prevents a number of negative consequences. that is the goal here, a peace that prevents as much bad from happening. but that's not our strangle. our strategy is to throw money and weapons at the problem indefinitely. if a year ago we were praying for a counteroffensive we could ask ourselves how did that counteroffensive go? the ukrainians lost tens of thousands of soldiers. they gained miles of territory. not hundreds of miles. miles of territory in a country that's massive. and they lost some of their best

troops and some of their best equipment. that was the result of the counteroffensive that was the linchpin of american strategy. having failed to accomplish what we set out to accomplish, did we say maybe our experts were wrong. maybe we should revisit some of our assumptions? no, we moved on to the next thing. without even blinking an eye, without addressing the american people, the biden administration just went on to the next thing. and the next thing is, well, we're just going to try to give the ukrainians as much as possible to hope they don't lose. that is now the strategy such as it is of the american president with ukraine. throw resources, throw weapons, and throw munitions at the problem and hope against all hope that something goodwill happen. what is that that's the good thing that will happen? we have no idea. the war is at a stalemate and as i mentioned, russia has more

money, more manpower, and more weapons. so we have no strategy. why are we giving $61 billion to ukraine when we have no strategy for how they're going to use it? we have no sense of how they're actually going to bring this war to a close. and we have no realistic possibility of getting to any reasonable goal with in any reasonable time frame. we are america's legislative body. our only real role in foreign policy is to approve nominees that the president makes to his own government. posts of course that have importance in foreign affairs, that's number one. fwhum is we -- number two is we control the purse strings. that point of controlling the purse strings gives us leverage to ensure the people's business is actually being done. what are we doing with that leverage here? we're writing effectively a

blank check with no guarantee that it will produce a strategy, with no demand that the president actually tell us what the $61 billion is meant to produce. we know where this will end, ladies and gentlemen. we know exactly where this road ends. this road ends at some kind of a negotiated settlement. the only question is how many ukrainians die before we get there. how many american dollars are wasted before we get there. how many american weapons are spent not for our own national security but for the national security of another nation. that is it. how much death and destruction do we promote on the path to peace? and my answer is we should be promoting as little as possible. we should be promoting a negotiated peace. we should be trying to get there as quickly as we possibly can. where, i wonder, is the antiwar

left? it's interesting that in washington, d.c. in 2023, 2024, you haer a whole lot about the bipartisan consensus of ukraine. and yet you never hear people asking where is that bipartisan consensus led in the past? i am 39 years old. in the 1970's, the bipartisan consensus was lined up behind the vietnam war, a conflict that killed nearly 60,000 americans over the span of a decade and a half. in early 2000, the bipartisan consensus was not that -- just that we should knock out osama bin laden's terrorist network but we should rebuild afghanistan into a flowering, western-style democracy. we should put resources into training the afghan population

to think about americans -- or to think about gender roles as americans do in the 21st century, to promote the creation of democratic institutions, to train an afghan army. for 20 years american blood and treasure was committed to that project, and that project fell apart in a matter of weeks. turns out the afghans don't want western-style democracy. turns out the afghans don't want to fight for a country that apparently very few of them actually believed in because it took about three weeks, three weeks before the taliban rolled over their country. the bipartisan foreign policy consensus got us exactly there. that same bipartisan foreign policy consensus got us to iraq. under the pretense vr weapons -- of weapons and mass destruction, many people in this chamber who supported the war in iraq are now supporting limitless supply of arms to ukraine. interesting how that bipartisan consensus works out. that same consensus supported

knocking out libyan dictator qaddafi which led, of course, to incredible chaos and destruction in that country. that bipartisan consensus led us to get involved in syria and yet another quagmire in the lavont. that has found a new passion project. limitless war, limitless weapons, and limitless money to ukraine. why is it that we think that the same people who have been wrong for a half of a century are somehow right about this question. why do we not learn the lessons of iraq, one of the most important lessons of iraq as a great late general colin powell pointed out is that we didn't have a defined strategy. what is the mission? what are we trying to accomplish? what is america's blood and treasure actually trying to do and how long must we be required to spend it? never has that question been answered in ukraine. never has that question -- never

have we tried to answer that question over the last 40 years of failed foreign policy experiments. i look at this country over the time i've been alive, and i look at what its leadership has accomplished, and it's hard to not think that a bipartisan -- the bipartisan consensus in american foreign policy has led to effectively graveyard after graveyard after graveyard $34 trillion in debt. we have purchased on the backs of our children and grandchildren a number of graveyards all across the world. i don't know what we've accomplished beyond that. and yet people in this chamber, including my friends on the left who used to have a real antiwar sentiment, the left used to have a real understanding that war has terrible unintended consequences, that it enriches all of the wrong people, that it

kills many innocent people. there is no meaningful push back on this conflict from the left. i find that shocking. i find it depressing, frankly, because those of us on the right who are sick of war and sick of our children and grandchildren paying for it would actually like some allies and pushing back against this latest conflict. in fact, if you look, just to meditate on this point about strategy a little bit longer, if you look at the arguments of why we should be in ukraine, they all boil down to unless we send resources, something terrible will happen. the russians will overrun the ukrainians when they don't have enough resources and they won't stop at kyiv, we're told. they'll go on to poland and other nato allies. and then it will be americans who are on the front lines of germany defending against the terrible aggression of vladimir putin. well, it must be said that first of all, this is a fantasy.

no credible military expert, no person with a thinking brain believes that vladimir putin has the capacity to march all the way to berlin. he did not have the capacity to march all the way to kyiv. of course he can't march all the way to berlin. so the fearmongering just doesn't work. that dog just doesn't hunt. now, of course, if vladimir putin could -- let's entertain this thought experiment. let's just assume that vladimir putin could march all the way to berlin. what would that mean about our nato allies? well, one thing it would mean is that they're a lot weaker than they pretend to be. another thing it would mean is the fact that we know that nato needs to step up and spend a lot more resources on their own national defense. if vladimir putin could march all the way to berlin, that suggests that the germans have got to do a lot better at defending their own country and they've got to step up. nato was never meant to turn

europe into permanent welfare client also of the american taxpayer. it is time for europe to step up. now, some of my colleagues give the europeans far too much credit for doing their part over the last 18 months of conflict in ukraine. they point to charts that say if you include humanitarian assistance and economic assistance, the europeans have actually spent about as much as the americans, maybe even more than the americans on ukraine. well, that chart misses a couple of important facts, the first of which is the most critical thing is not money, it's weapons and the united states has supplied a disproportionate share of the weapons to the ukrainians at great cost to ourselves and great degradation of our defense capability. the other thing it leaves out is nato for decades have sucked on the teeth of american taxpayers. trillions and trillions of dollars have gone into american

defense budgets that have been an implicit subsidy to nato, an implicit subsidy to nato. so forgive me if i'm not impressed if the europeans are stepping up a little bit for a war that is literally in their backyards. the other thing this misses is that the war in ukraine hasn't been going on for 18 months. it's been going on for over a decade. of course conflict, the conflict that brought us to russia's large-scale invasion of ukraine has been going on in ukraine since 2014. if the europeans want to compare who is spending more, the relevant point of comparison is 2014 or maybe 29 -- maybe 1992. it is not 2022. we're bailing out the europeans, $61 billion to bail out the europeans on a preposterous set of circumstances, a a preposterous subsidy. by the way, many of our european allies, thanks in part of course to our subsidy, they manage

their financial houses better than we do. if any time was the time for them to step up, it might be now that we're $34 trillion in debt. so every argument for why we should support limitless war in ukraine ultimately falls apart. it ultimately boils down to fearmo fearmongering, fearmongering that doesn't have any basis in reality. again, i would ask if the goal is to prevent vladimir putin from overrunning ukraine, the question has to become for how long are the american taxpayers on the hook? what if this goes on another ten years? are we on the hook to the tune of $500 billion of security assistance and a trillion dollars of reconstruction? at what point is enough enough? at what point do we say the war is a stalemate. it's going to end in a negotiated settlement anyway, let's stop wasting lives, let's stop wasting money and let's get

on with the peace. that is what american diplomacy could be used for. infortunately, the president -- unfortunately, the president seems uninterested in that. but i'm worried more about the unintended consequences in ukraine. a friend of mine made the observation today actually in a public conversation that i hosted that we are seeing the acceleration of an economic and military alliance that will challenge the united states over the coming decade and the coming generation. the cooperation between russia and china has accelerated significantly over the last two years. we've attempted to set off a financial bomb using america's incredible financial power, the rules-based international order has given america's financial system great power, and we used it to try to set off a bomb in the russian economy. but that bomb appears to have fizzled. the russian economy has constantly defied growth

expectations and forecasts. our own leadership has admitted that its sanctions haven't worked nearly as well as we wanted them to. and the russian economy now put on a war footing by vladimir putin is producing weapons at a faster rate than the united states which of course is an economy ten times the size of russia. so if the goal was to weaken russia here, we have catastrophely failed owe. what we've created is an alternative system around russia, china, and other countries, and we've created an accelerating military alliance between two of our most dangerous adversaries in the world. that is the net effect of our policy. that is unintended consequence number one. unintended consequence number two is that we are at this very moment destabilizing governments all over the world with higher fuel prices and high er food prices. i made this observation earlier.

my colleagues hopefully will forgive me for repeating myself, but one of the most interesting conversation, i've ever had was with former president barack obama just days before he left the oval office. about a week before donald trump and mike pence were inaugurated. and obama made the observation that though he was obviously more a fan of -- we'll call it mass migration than i am, that he knew that if you created too many immigration pressures in a country, it could destabilize that country. and he made this observation in the context of the 2015 jumpian refugee crisis telling me -- european refugee crisis and he felt the 2015 refugee crisis that actually destabilized the number of european governments and in fact had led to the election of his political adversary donald trump in 2016. well, i thought that was a smart and inciteful observation from

the former president. of course i disagreed with his politics and immigration policies but it was interesting and self- -- a very self-reflective observation. what i wonder happens if the european refugee crisis of 2015 destabilized europe, what happens when we apply massive energy and food price increases to the entire continent of africa? 1.5 billion people, almost all of whom have a much lower quality of living than the afternoon american or the average european. we know exactly what will happen. if you take 1.5 billion people, most of whom are just good people who want to feed their families and you make it impossible for them to feed their families in their own country, they will move. where are they going to move? they're going to move to europe and they're going to move to the united states of america. can we at a time of a historic border crisis possibly absorb

hundreds of millions, at the very least millions of starving people moving? and why are they starving? they're starving because eastern yup is the breadbasket -- europe is the breadbasket of the world, especially that part of the world. and wheat prices, bashly prices, have skyrocketed over the last two years. we are creating the predicate for a refugee crisis that will destabilize europe and the entire world. we're also, while we're at it, enriching vladimir putin. while we spend $61 billion in ukraine, we're enriching vladimir putin with idiotic energy policies. we're actually funding both sides of this conflict. putin's economy depends substantially on natural gas. on petroleum. and our energy policies, our refusal to empower america's energy producers, the biden administratius