ICE Council President Urges Senators To Vote No on Corker-Hoeven Amendment
Chris Crane, the National ICE Council President, today called on Senators to defeat the Corker-Hoeven amendment to S. 744 – the comprehensive amnesty bill. He said that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) admitted needed interior enforcement provisions are absent, and that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) abandoned his commitment to ICE officers and Sheriffs to repair the bill’s provisions that gut interior enforcement.
The following are excerpts from Crane’s press release:
“Senator Rubio left unchanged legislative provisions that he himself admitted to us in private were detrimental, flawed and must be changed. Legislation written behind closed doors by handpicked special interest groups which put their political agendas and financial gains before sound and effective law and the welfare and safety of the American public. As a result, the 1,200 page substitute bill before the Senate will provide instant legalization and a path to citizenship to gang members and other dangerous criminal aliens, and handcuff ICE officers from enforcing immigration laws in the future. It provides no means of effectively enforcing visa overstays which account for almost half of the nation’s illegal immigration crisis.
“Instead of empowering ICE agents to enforce the law, this legislation empowers political appointees to further violate the law and unilaterally stop enforcement. This at a time like no other in our nation’s history, in which political appointees throughout the federal government have proven to Congress their propensity for the lawless abuse of authority. There is no doubt that, if passed, public safety will be endangered and massive amounts of future illegal immigration – especially visa overstays – is ensured.
“Abuses by political appointees, who currently pick and choose which laws enacted by Congress will or will not be enforced, will escalate with their increased discretion and authority provided by this bill. This bill avoided every significant problem with our broken immigration system that should have been addressed, and instead became a wish list for special interest groups representing and profiting from illegal immigrants. Regretfully, the months of talking points by the Gang of Eight do not accurately reflect the content of this bill. This bill will not only fail, it will worsen the broken system we now have. It should not be allowed to pass the Senate for the House of Representatives to ‘hopefully’ fix later as Senator Corker has suggested.
“Members of the United States Senate must act to ensure that this legislation will solve the nation’s immigration problems once and for all before it passes the Senate. Either good faith debate must continue until further amendments can be made to dramatically improve the legislation, or if forced to vote today, on behalf their constituents, Senators must vote no on this 1,200 page substitute bill. Far from fixing the bill, the Corker-Hoeven Amendment makes it worse. A vote against this bill is not a vote against the immigration reform which we all seek, it’s a vote against bad legislation and the special interests that wrote it; it’s a vote to start this process anew and create reforms that truly fix the nation’s broken immigration system.”