Sen. Schmitt blasts Dems for holding DHS hostage
By U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt
R-Missouri
We’re not doing anything to kneecap ICE’s ability to do their jobs and deport the people who’ve come here illegally. The only reason the Democrats want to unmask ICE agents is they want facial recognition software to identify these ICE agents and harass their families, so nobody wants to be an ICE agent.
Again, we lived through this with the defund the police movement where you saw a drop in people who want to be police officers. You saw early retirements. We’re not doing that again.
We’re also not going to make it harder to do their job through all the hurdles that the Democrats want them to jump through. Because if you understand this fact, you realize that the central operating idea between the Democrat party now is that they believe in open borders, and they don’t believe that anybody that came here illegally should have to go home, and we cannot give in on that fact.
Now, if there is a scenario where we’re able to fund the other operations and maybe provide a 10-year revenue stream for ICE deportations moving forward through reconciliation, I’m all ears on that, but we’re not going to do anything to defund ICE. We’re not going to do anything that makes their job harder.
We’re supporting making sure TSA agents get back on the job, Coast Guard, Secret Service, all those things. The Democrats have obstructed all this. And they believe in sanctuary cities. They believe in open borders. They’re being exposed, and I don’t think we should cave in on those fronts.
The Democrats are so out of touch. These folks (TSA agents) are going without their third paycheck. Like most people in real life, they can’t do that, and the Democrats did this to them just a few months ago.
If you peel back the onion here, what this is really about is they want to defund ICE. They want de facto amnesty for the 15 million people who came here illegally because they know they can’t pass a bill to get that.
But if you actually get rid of all the enforcement mechanisms and the people who want to do that job, then they would get it, and we’re not giving in on that.
So, I think we've got to continue to fight here. There could be a path forward where we do it with a simple majority vote on reconciliation and make sure they’re funded. But the Democrats need to pay a price if we’re going to do that, then they need to be funded for 10 years, as far as I’m concerned, or multiple years, so the Democrats can’t play these games next year.