Senator urges full Homeland Security funding, defends Save America Act and backs Mullin confirmation

A senator speaking on the Senate floor urged colleagues to restore funding for the Department of Homeland Security and defended the Save America Act as a tool to help states verify voter eligibility.

The senator framed the issue as three linked priorities: confirming the president’s DHS nominee, funding the department after a prolonged lapse, and securing regular data-sharing from states into the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database to identify noncitizen registrations. “If you don’t enforce who may call themselves an American,” the senator said, “you can be neither a nation nor a nation of laws.”

Why it matters: The senator said gaps in funding have left many DHS employees unpaid and hindered operations across TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, USCIS and CISA. He argued that enabling DHS to access state voter-registration data would let election officials ‘scrub’ rolls to reduce the risk that noncitizens appear on federal-election rolls.

On the nominee: The senator said he cast his vote in favor of confirming Markwayne Mullin as secretary of Homeland Security and described the nominee as energetic and idea-driven. The transcript does not include a full roll-call tally in this excerpt; the senator reported his own affirmative vote.

On the Save America Act: The senator repeatedly cited the bill’s text, saying it would require new registrants to attest to citizenship by sworn affidavit and would not force existing registrants to refile. He said the bill shifts verification duties to state election officials and noted it references Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) in its legislative context.

Responding to criticisms that the bill would disenfranchise millions, the senator pointed to a Brennan Center finding that an estimated 21 million Americans are unsure where documents that could prove citizenship are located, and argued that uncertainty does not equal automatic disenfranchisement because the bill allows affidavit attestations and state verification. He stated that objections claiming the law would require widespread new document costs are “false.”

Claims and numbers cited by the senator: he said the DHS workforce numbers are between roughly 230,000 and 260,000 employees and suggested there are at least thousands (and possibly many more) of noncitizen registrations in some states; he also asserted that more than 30 million noncitizens live in the U.S. and that 10–15 million entered unlawfully between 2021 and 2025. Those figures were presented as the senator’s assertions in the speech and are not independently verified in the transcript.

What happened next: In the remarks the senator urged colleagues to clear the “log jams” by (1) confirming the nominee, (2) funding DHS so its employees are paid and operational capacity restored, and (3) enabling the data-sharing he described to protect federal elections. The senator said he had cast his vote in favor of the nominee and called for continued debate and passage of the legislation.

Context and limits: The senator cited statutory and constitutional provisions (NVRA; Article I, Section 4) and compared the bill’s verification approach to routine employment verification (I‑9) to illustrate how affidavits and document checks can work alongside state records. The speech attributes policy positions and data to the senator and to the cited Brennan Center study; the article does not independently confirm the numeric claims made in the floor remarks.