Ranking Member DeLauro Statement at the Full Committee Markup of the 2024 Homeland Security Funding Bill

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, delivered the following remarks at the Committee's markup of the fiscal year 2024 Homeland Security bill:

– As Prepared For Delivery –

Thank you, Chairwoman Granger, Chairman Joyce, and Ranking Member Cuellar, for your work on this subcommittee.

I also want to thank the subcommittee staff for their work, especially Bob Joachim, Shannon McCully, Farouk Ophaso, and Thomas Wilson.

The bill before us today makes irresponsible investments that weaken our national security and harm the Homeland Security workforce. And it does nothing to secure the border.

My Republican colleagues are once again proposing to waste billions of dollars on a useless and ineffective border wall – rather than focusing resources where we need them most, like combatting fentanyl entering through our ports of entry, supporting the Homeland Security workforce, helping our border communities, advancing our cybersecurity posture, and protecting our communities from violent extremism and foreign adversaries.

We have a duty to spend taxpayer dollars wisely, not waste $3.7 billion on border wall construction and ICE detention beds, which do nothing to make us more secure.

With this bill, we should instead focus on the work of the prior Congress to address longstanding and emerging issues at the southern border. The bill misses important opportunities to address the growing fentanyl and opioid crisis, provide more technology and officers at our ports of entry, and provide funding for humane pathways and processes for folks who require refuge in our country – such as those fleeing oppression in Maduros’ Venezuela or Nicaragua.

The bill falls flat across a number of other areas. It leaves Americans vulnerable to the growing number and increasing severity of natural disasters, weakens our national security through inadequate cyber and infrastructure security investments, and undermines the TSA workforce.

Lastly, I continue to be concerned about the conditions that migrants and asylum seekers find when they reach our borders – people who leave their homes out of desperation and necessity.

We have a responsibility to ensure the safety of these migrants, especially that of children, and to provide the resources so that those entitled to stay under our existing immigration laws can do so, and those who are not entitled to stay, depart. Please understand, by law, the United States is required to take in unaccompanied children from noncontiguous countries, screen them, house them, and provide safe placement. These standards are laid out in Section 235 of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protections Reauthorization Act of 2008.

House Republicans claim to care about oversight, but this bill proposes several cuts throughout DHS to programs critical to the oversight of our immigration detention facilities. It also eliminates discretionary funding for refugee processing – shifting the burden of those costs back to an already backlogged and overwhelmed system.

I reject the false dichotomy that we must leave our values at the door as we look to protect and strengthen our nation’s security. I am appalled that this bill chooses to promote that misguided ideology. I hope this backward moving, House Republican bill, can be improved significantly so we can manage our borders responsibly and invest in programs that actually make our country more secure.

Before I close, I must again emphasize the consequences of the broad cuts my colleagues in the majority are pursuing across all of the domestic spending bills. These are cuts that will kick hundreds of thousands of families out of their homes and rob them of the childcare that helps them keep their jobs. Cuts that pull elementary school teachers out of the classroom and put college and job training out of reach. Cuts that make our communities less safe and kick thousands of law enforcement officials off the street. With this context, we should be going back to the drawing board and marking up bills that comply with the Speaker’s and President’s agreement, and which have a chance of becoming law.

We continue marking up bogus partisan bills that have no chance of becoming law instead of actually working together to get this process completed on time.

We all know any hope for the enactment of appropriations will require bipartisan input to make sound investments, not bills full of irresponsible cuts and partisan policy riders.

With that, I yield back.

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