Senate Democrats refused to give ICE, Border Patrol funding for 110 days
WASHINGTON— Yesterday, United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) spoke on the Senate floor imploring his Senate colleagues to secure funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Boder Patrol (CBP) during budget reconciliation, which had been shut down since January.
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Remarks as prepared for delivery:
“We have gone 110 days with border patrol and ICE being defunded by the Democrats. The question I ask is: what do they want? They want to see more deaths. In 2025 alone, in my home state, 41 Tennesseans died at the hands of illegal immigrants… I took a call from a father whose son didn’t wake up on Thanksgiving morning because he got Fentanyl into his system. I do not ever want to take a call like that again.
And [Senate Democrats] want more national security risks. Under the Biden administration, 1,500 Iranians were apprehended at the southern border. 700 of them were admitted into the United States. We don’t know where they are. 24,000 Chinese nationals in one year were encountered at the southern border under Joe Biden.
… [Senate Democrats] want to distract us from the fact that every Democrat is about vote to defund ICE, to defund law enforcement, and to keep our border unsecure. Therefore, Mr. President, the pending amendment contains matter not within the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee, and thus is extraneous. Therefore, I raise a point of order under Section three 13 B one C of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.”
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