Opening Statement of Chairman Tom McClintock Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement: Restoring Immigration Enforcement in America

Our nation has just suffered the largest illegal mass migration in history, deliberately engineered, abetted and encouraged by President Joe Biden and his allies in Congress.  For four years the American people have endured the effects of this calculated lawlessness: schools flooded with non-English speaking students, hospitals packed with illegals demanding free health care, Americans pushed out of homeless shelters to make room for illegals, an estimated $150 billion a year taken from struggling American families to pay for free food, free legal services, free transportation, free housing, free clothing, free cell phones for those who have broken into our country.  Millions of American workers have been displaced, driving down wages and drying up opportunities for our own young people.  The deadly fentanyl trade coming across our open border now claims the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year.  And worst of all, among these illegal migrants have come the most violent, dangerous and malevolent criminals and criminal gangs in the world, while sanctuary laws in Democratic jurisdictions protect them as they prey on innocent Americans.

Every immigration-related agency in Biden's executive branch had a part in destroying the integrity of our immigration system.

• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did nothing to stop extensive fraud in mass parole programs it implemented, and delayed adjudication of legal immigration applications in favor of those for illegal aliens.
• The State Department gave U.S. taxpayer money to nongovernmental organizations to hire foreign nationals to tell other foreign nationals how to circumvent U.S. immigration law.
• The Department of Homeland Security refused to prevent fraud in visa programs and brought interior immigration enforcement to a standstill. 
• Customs and Border Protection abused its authority by paroling in over 531,000 foreign nationals in just one categorical parole program. 
• The Department of Health and Human Services ignored its duty to determine whether unaccompanied alien children who arrived at the border had criminal backgrounds and were a danger to themselves or others before releasing them into the country. 
• The Office of Refugee Resettlement used taxpayer dollars to fund housing for illegal aliens. 
• The Department of Justice told its immigration judges to stop adjudicating cases. 
• And it reversed common sense Trump-era opinions that prevented asylum fraud.

Time and again we were told by the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats that our border was secure.  We were told there was no national security or public safety risk.  We were told the Administration could do nothing more to prevent illegal immigration.

But Americans knew better.  They got tired of feeling unsafe in their own towns, tired of seeing illegal aliens sleeping in their community schools, rec centers, airports, and police stations, and tired of footing the bills for foreign nationals who showed nothing but contempt for U.S. law.  And on November 5, 2024, they delivered a resounding victory to President Donald Trump with a clear and unambiguous mandate to stop this insanity.

Yesterday, President Trump, within hours of returning to the Presidency, issued 11 executive orders to once again secure our borders, recover our sovereignty, protect our people and restore the rule of law.

The wreckage of the Biden years will take years to repair.  Between the 6 million illegals deliberately trafficked into our country and another 2 million known got-aways who evaded an utterly overwhelmed Border Patrol, an illegal and unvetted population the size of the State of Washington has been ushered into our country.  That population includes at least 99 terrorists that we know of, more than 1.4 million aliens defying court orders of removal, 7.6 million aliens on the ICE non-detained docket.

President Trump's executive orders reinstate the successful Remain in Mexico Program, that had brought phony asylum claims to a trickle until Joe Biden abolished it.  They revoke Biden's anti enforcement executive orders and policies, and make clear to the world that the only pathway to the United States is to obey our laws.  And after the largest illegal mass migration in history, this administration must now undertake the largest repatriation operation in history.  And I speak for every Republican on this committee and I believe every Republican in Congress when I say we will stand behind him in this necessary work.

This Congress must not only give President Trump the tools to restore our national sovereignty, but we must also enact laws so that a future Democratic President cannot once again throw our borders wide open.  We need to reform our asylum laws to ensure that only legitimate claims will be honored.  We must close the loopholes that allowed Biden to abuse the limited parole authority Congress gave him.  We must revamp our unaccompanied minor laws to prevent human trafficking that ran rampant under Biden - and we must rescue the hundreds of thousands of children that Biden and his administration simply lost track of.  We must restore integrity to our temporary and permanent visa programs so that only those who are an asset to America can take advantage of them.

Much of that work will fall to this sub-committee, and all of that work begins today.  I look forward to hearing from our witnesses to help us chart that path.

With that, I yield to the Ranking Member for her opening statement.