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CRISIS AT SOUTHERN BORDER
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for 30 minutes.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for holding this time with my colleagues to talk about what is going on at our southern border and talk about how important it is that we do something about it.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Arizona for his steadfast leadership on border issues. I know that the gentleman was squeezing in some time there, and I am happy to engage in colloquy or yield him some time to continue to talk about this important issue, if he would like.
One thing that I noticed you were saying in the time from my friend from Texas, you were talking about being down at the border, being next to the fence, a fence that works, by the way, where it is up, and then there is a hole or an unfinished fence or where the fence ends.
I noticed that my friend from Arizona was recently standing next to a large pile of metal, steel. I wondered if he might describe for the American people what you were standing next to so they can understand what is actually happening.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs).
Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I was standing next to many piles--I couldn't even fit them into the camera shot--of bollard fencing panels taller than me, $2 million worth of those bollard fences right there.
A little further down from where we were, there is another set of bollard fencing, but they aren't welded together yet. They are not panels yet. They are getting stolen, by the way.
Where we were was by the temporary headquarters of the contractors who were there to put up the fence. You know what? They keep going to work every day. You know why they keep going to work every day? They got a contract, and they are getting paid to go there. But they can't put the fence up because President Biden says you can't put the fence up.
Mr. ROY. I think there is a theme for this administration, and this administration's theme is paying people not to work. In this case, they are paying people not to build a fence, despite the fact that the taxpayers of this country have paid for a fence that would actually do the job of stopping the flow of people who want to come across this country and, in many cases, bringing fentanyl, bringing dangerous narcotics, harming the American people, and harming themselves. Yet, we can solve the problem but refuse to.
Mr. BIGGS. That is exactly right. Think about this, too. It is inhumane, right, because we entice people to come here, and we know that the cartels, they control. I can't emphasize this enough. I was startled when I heard this. The cartels control every person coming across the border.
Let me tell you what that fellow from Cuba, the Cuban national, said to me. He said: Look, I will wait here for the Border Patrol to come pick me up. Will I be molested while I wait?
Think of that. What kind of country are we that we entice people to come here, and they put themselves in the hands of some of the most ruthless criminal gangsters ever.
There are two internecine wars going on between the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel right now. The brutality is phenomenal. It helps you to know that they are not humane. These people that are coming over are paying $700 in the Haitian group, most $4,000 to $7,000. They are putting their lives in the hands of these very violent criminals.
Mr. ROY. Would it surprise the gentleman from Arizona that one of the reasons that the Haitians got a different deal was they came up through Del Rio and they did so purposefully? Why did they target Del Rio, you might ask?
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are clearly sitting over here inquisitive, with their interest of what is happening at the border. While they continue to advance policies that create an open border, they don't seem to actually care about the open border because I haven't seen any of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle when I go down to the border.
In fact, the last one I remember going down to the border was my colleague from New York who went down wearing a pantsuit, standing outside of a fence doing a photo-op, crying about kids in cages--cages created by the Democratic administration, indeed, to try to deal with the fact that we had so many people coming in across the border. Yet, it was fake. It was staged. And then they lied about kids drinking out of toilets.
The actual reality on the ground at the border is dead migrants. I am sure my friend from Arizona knows of dead migrants in Arizona because we got dead migrants in Texas. So my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who pat themselves on the back for how compassionate they are about migrants and Brown people, go talk to the Brown people in south Texas about what they are seeing and what they are finding. Talk to the ranchers.
I would love to hear if you have similar experiences. The ranchers who find a migrant either dead or dying from the heat and exhaustion, seek to get them water, call 911 to get them help, try to help their fellow human being. They are dealing with that.
A hundred bodies in Brooks County, Texas, stacking up this year. Body trailers. The sheriff down there has to deal with this. $3,000 per body for autopsy. $5,000 per body for burial because they can't get the families.
Where are my colleagues? Where are our colleagues on the other side of the aisle? Going around trumpeting and talking about how their policies of open borders are great for migrants. Well, say that to the dead migrants.
I assume my colleague from Arizona has seen similar stories.
Mr. BIGGS. That is correct. We have seen it all along the border, whether it is Arizona, Texas, the New Mexico boot, California. The heat is so great, except for right there at San Diego, but it is even hot there. When it gets 120 degrees in the desert and they are coming across, they got one gallon of water that they got somewhere along the pike, and that is it. It is unrelenting, unremitting heat. We see this.
Here is another question. You got it in Del Rio?
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. BIGGS. And that was not organic?
Mr. ROY. No.
Mr. BIGGS. It was organized. It was organized.
Down in southern Mexico right now, you have a group of 95,000-plus forming up, mostly Haitians forming up, waiting. They have announced that this Sunday is their departure date. We think a good share is going to go to Yuma this time because we have a 7-mile gap in our fencing down there.
Mr. ROY. As my friend from Arizona knows full well, the cause of this is the purposeful and willful disregard for enforcing the laws of the United States at our border. Our laws actually require the enforcement of the law at the border.
The Secretary of Homeland Security is willfully disregarding, for example, as my friend knows, the Secure Fence Act, which among its provisions passed in this body on this floor is to guarantee that we have operational control of the border. That is law.
The Secretary of Homeland Security literally stood in Del Rio, looking at individuals standing in America, going back across the Rio Grande and buying tacos, bringing them back over and selling them to Haitians on American soil. He saw it with his own eyes. He turned to the cameras, and said: Our border is secure.
He looked at the American people and lied, just like the White House press secretary lied when she said Border Patrol agents were whipping Haitians when what they were doing was actually trying to do their job that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Homeland Security is purposefully, willfully trying to deny them the ability to do.
Would my friend agree?
Mr. BIGGS. I agree with you 100 percent. If they would enforce our law, we wouldn't need to be standing here. We had the Attorney General today come in.
Mr. ROY. We did.
Mr. BIGGS. We asked him some pointed questions. How many prosecutions? Is it still illegal? Yes, it is still illegal to come into the country.
Are you prosecuting anybody? Well, I suspect the answer is, no, they are not prosecuting anybody, but they are not detaining anybody either. The law, under title 8, says you must detain unless there is some legal exemption from detention.
The vast majority that are coming across, the Haitians--we heard about 10,000 to 12,000 that Secretary Mayorkas admitted to. They only removed 2,000, and the real number was between 26,000 and 30,000 that actually flowed through Del Rio, Mr. Roy.
What happened to the other 20-some-odd thousand? Well, they are now released into the interior of the United States of America. That is what is happening. This catch and release program is another contravention of our law.
Mr. ROY. Isn't it a perversion of our law for the administration to tell the world: Come to the United States. Claim asylum.
Let's be clear. This is what is happening almost explicitly. The administration is saying to the world: Come to the border of the United States. Claim asylum. We know and you know and every everybody knows well over 90 percent of you do not have a valid claim for asylum.
They are seeking economic benefit. They are seeking jobs. God bless them. I would, too. I have no problem with their desire to come here. But the rule of law matters.
You have an administration saying: Come on here. Claim asylum. What we will do is we will parole you. What does parole mean? Oh, well, you can just come in here and you can work. You can have a job. You can get benefits. And we will just pretend you are going to come back under notice to appear or notice to report. Or we are not going to parole you. We are just going to send you out, and say, notice to appear or notice to report. Oh, by the way, we might just release you and not give you a notice to appear or notice to report, and we just are going to let those numbers flow into the United States of America.
Mr. Speaker, 1.7 million apprehensions this year; 300,000 or 400,000 got-aways this year; hundreds of dead migrants along the Rio Grande.
Where are my colleagues? Where are they? They have a duty under the Constitution, a sworn oath to uphold the Constitution to enforce the laws of the United States, and the administration. Here in Congress, this Chamber is MIA in holding the administration accountable to do their job, and I would like to know why.
Mr. BIGGS. When you say that, I am reminded of the surge of 2019. That surge in 2019 happened. I know you went down to the border multiple times.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. BIGGS. I went down to the border multiple times. I took codels down to the border so folks could see how bad it was. That was my President.
Mr. ROY. Yes.
Mr. BIGGS. You know what? He was trying to enact policies to stop that. They brought lawsuits to prevent stopping that.
Now that their administration has basically adopted an open borders policy, a dangerous policy for the people coming across, a national security issue for us, a national security threat for us, it is crickets?
Mr. ROY. What were those policies that President Trump and his administration put in place to actually secure the borders of the United States in 2019?
Mr. BIGGS. There are several. Title 42 came along a little bit later, though. The most effective were the remain in Mexico policy and the agreements with the Northern Triangle states. There were no incentives in these care packages that came along of $1,400 every time anybody came in illegally.
He started building the fence. He stopped the catch and release. He ramped up the due process speed. He tried to get those folks with the false asylum claims in, get them due process, and get them removed. He was actually removing people who had removal orders.
We got 1.2 million people who had due process with removal orders in this country today, and this administration has told the ICE officers: Don't go out and find them. Don't enforce those removals.
{time} 1815
Those policies were actually working, and title 42 when that came in, that finished it off.
But do you know what you had most of all, Mr. Speaker?
You had a President who said: Do not come, you are not welcome.
Mr. ROY. Right. You are not welcome to come here illegally, and you are not welcome to flout our laws. You are welcome to come here and follow our laws that we have in place for people who come here legally.
There is a waiting list, by the way.
What do you say to the people who are waiting?
Don't worry about it. Let all these other folks come in and just walk through or cross the Rio Grande endangering themselves, endangering Border Patrol, not providing resources to the Border Patrol to do their job, so they are the ones left hanging, dealing with COVID, not having resources, being alone at midnight with no cell signal, no ability to talk on the radio, and no ability to move their car up and down the Rio Grande River.
I have got a bill with my friend, Henry Cuellar, to have navigable roads and a fence along the river.
Why won't Speaker Pelosi bring that bipartisan bill to the floor of the United States House of Representatives?
It is for one reason and one reason only: Democrats want a political tool. They want the political reality of a wide-open border. There is zero other defense for what Democrats are doing, instead of actually doing what it takes to secure the border of the United States.
Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, when you think about it, in 2018 we swore in 830,000 new U.S. citizens. In 2019 it was about 800,000. That is kind of where it sits every year.
I had a young man who worked for me; his family were immigrants from Mexico. Thirteen years it took for them to get citizenship--13 years. And if they would have crossed the border illegally with the current Democrat plan, they would have gotten amnesty.
Mr. Speaker, think about that. Good friends of ours, our neighbors, same situation, 12, 14 years to get citizenship.
And do you know what, Mr. Speaker? I have to get back to this caravan that is coming up.
Mr. Speaker, what do you think 95,000 people will do to a town of Del Rio's size, which I think is 30,000, 36,000, something like that; or Yuma which is a town the size of 80,000; or how about the town of Douglass; or Naco, about 3,000; or Douglass, about 15,000?
What happens when they come in there?
We don't have facilities. They get processed and released. That is what happens.
Mr. ROY. That is what happens. They get processed and released. And then, Mr. Speaker, when you have migrants who are coming in between the ports of entry and they come across ranches and ranchers come across them or they die in the desert, then they are left having to deal with the body. They are left having to go and have a coroner come and do the autopsy. They have to have, like the gentleman said, body trailers coming down there.
Mr. Speaker, you can't make this up. I just want to know: Do my Democrat colleagues think we are making this up?
They may not know because the Secretary of Homeland Security sure as heck isn't coming down and explaining this to us.
I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, we are not having a debate here on the floor of the House about anything at all much less our border.
Oh, we have time to have political show trials. We have time to have a subpoena by a sham commission in which you wouldn't even put on the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker. You wouldn't even put on my friends, Kelly Armstrong, Jim Banks, no, we can't do that. So we are going to have a show trial, we are going to come out here, and we are going to have political theater.
But we are not going to do a doggone thing about migrants dying and Texans dying from fentanyl overdoses.
Why don't we talk about the danger of fentanyl?
Oh, no, we don't want to talk about that. Everybody over here has a steak dinner they have to go eat tonight.
Why don't we talk about the fact that there was a high-profile Texas Longhorns football player, today they put out a statement, the family, sadly--Jake Ehlinger, the brother of the former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger--in a statement Thursday the Ehlinger family says they learned Jake accidentally overdosed May 6 from what is believed to be the prescription antianxiety medication Xanax laced with fentanyl.
Well, do you know what, Mr. Speaker, and to all my colleagues who are not in this Chamber, that is a story that is happening every day in America across this country: 100,000 people dead, dead in this country because of wide-open borders, with China putting out this synthetic garbage and putting it into the system, and our children are dying. And the Democratic Party, the people leading this Chamber are MIA. They don't care about you, and they don't care about the American people. They only care about crass political use of the border to advance a racial identity agenda.
Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is right, 100 percent. Mr. Speaker, think about the drug trafficking right now. When the cartels want to bring in drugs, they flood a zone. Del Rio, they put all the Haitians there.
Mr. Speaker, 224 miles of border went unprotected--unprotected--for 8 days. They had cameras, but they didn't have any bodies to go arrest these people bringing the drugs in. We have got places in Arizona for 62 miles with absolutely the only fencing being a vehicle barrier. We have got people coming in who are going through mountains.
We have mountains filled with scouts watching and telling these drug carriers where they are coming in. They come on up, they pop out on Interstate 8 and the intersection of Interstate 10 just south of Phoenix. It is the number one drug trafficking corridor in the country. They spit this stuff out all over the country, and now they are moving into pills. They are moving into pills, counterfeit pills, and we have no idea--they are made by some dude down in a garage.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, some dude is cooking it in Mexico, they are shoving this stuff up from Mexico. There is a guy cooking the Xanax in the same place they have the fentanyl, and people are now getting those pills in the United States, they are dying, and we are just sitting here.
I have got the same Interstate 10 going right through San Antonio, the same Interstate 10 going through Boerne where we just stopped a car with nine immigrants in it, two bound up in the trunk. The car was being driven by a cartel employee, an American citizen, taking them to a stash house. That is the story of your current open border, Mr. Speaker. And, again, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are completely MIA.
Mr. BIGGS. Just on that, I have got to comment on this because when the gentleman said he had an American citizen, the driver, as an employee of the cartel, we see that all up and down the border, and they want to get youth to do it as well because they are not going to be prosecuted.
Mr. ROY. They are recruiting.
Mr. BIGGS. They are recruiting youth because they are not going to be prosecuted as adults. They are going to get off easier.
Mr. ROY. I wonder if the gentleman might indulge, I had planned a couple of things that were border related, but I also have another topic that he might be interested in. I want to set the stage for something I hope is viewed positively because I believe right now what we are seeing is as Sam Adams put it:
You don't need a majority, but you need tireless minorities being willing to set brushfires of freedom.
What we are seeing across the country are people willing to set brushfires of freedom.
A couple of different issues. Right now we have a President of the United States who has set forth an unconstitutional, unlawful, illegal, and tyrannical vaccine mandate that companies have to bow down to the altar of this White House and do what he says. And I say: No, they don't; and the Governor of Texas says: No, you don't.
Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Southwest Airlines decided to play footsie with this tyrannical order, and the pilots said, no; the employees of Southwest said, no; a lot of their customers said no; and people like me and others called them to task.
Guess what Southwest did, Mr. Speaker?
They backed off a bit. They have now said: We are not going to fire people; we will give them unpaid leave.
I said to Southwest: That is not good enough. You need to let them work. You need to let them carry out their livelihoods. But God bless us, that is a move in the right direction.
Delta Airlines said: Well, we are not necessarily going to do that mandate.
We have got In-N-Out Burger saying: Do you know what, Mr. President? We are not going to do that.
God bless these corporate entities that are saying: No. No. No. We are not going to bow down to whatever the President says because he doesn't have the power. He is not a king. You can't say that we are going to get vaccinated when we believe there is natural immunity or we believe there might be a myocardial issue for our kids, when we believe it is in our best interest to decide what we are going to do for our families. Under no circumstances are we going to bow down to what a dictator in the White House is trying to tell us to do, and I wonder if my friend from Arizona agrees.
Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I agree 100 percent. We have other places where the employees are fighting back. You have got the Chicago police union. God bless them.
Mr. ROY. Amen.
Mr. BIGGS. Guess what is happening, Mr. Speaker?
The mayor there is trying to put pressure on them.
Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Indiana cities are offering jobs to those Chicago police officers. If they come here, we are not going to mandate that.
Mr. ROY. Yes. We need some cops in Austin, Texas, to fill the holes when those liberals in Austin decided to get rid of the cops. We need some more. Come on down.
Mr. BIGGS. That is what you are seeing, Mr. Speaker. I just got a tweet just 20 minutes ago, 30 minutes ago. We are seeing one of our big companies, one of my big defense contractors in Arizona had an employee walkout today. They don't want this.
Do you know what, Mr. Speaker? If you want a vaccine, go ahead and get the vaccine.
Mr. ROY. Amen.
Mr. BIGGS. But doggone it, it should not be mandated by a tyrannical government. And this is the tip of the spear on a fascist-style government, in my opinion.
Mr. ROY. We have a few others: General Electric employees in Greenville, South Carolina, walked out over the vaccine mandate. A New York hospital will stop delivering babies as workers quit over a vaccine mandate. Nearly 1,900 Washington State employees quit or were fired over the vaccine mandate because they said no. And a trooper tells Governor Inslee to kiss his--fill in the blank--in his final signoff before a vaccine mandate, and they put their boots out on the steps in protest. Seattle first responders fired for vaccine noncompliance march on city hall to turn in their boots. Parents in California protest student COVID-19 vaccine mandate, keep kids home. A vaccine opponent protest outside a hospital following shot requirement for employees. And a Wyoming teenager--God bless that Wyoming teenager--was arrested after refusing to wear a mask on school grounds.
That is the America I know. That is the America that doesn't bow down to the tyranny of a federal government that has no constitutional power to tell them what to do and tell them how to live their lives. That is the America that is going to preserve a republic for our kids and grandkids worth passing down to them.
Mr. BIGGS. Amen. People say, looking around, they get so depressed and frustrated when they see the horrible and horrific impacts of the policies coming out of this administration, not the least of which is the curtailing of their freedoms.
Mr. ROY. Amen.
Mr. BIGGS. The gentleman from Texas talks and reminds us of all of this, and we are seeing it. Like my friend, I keep a folder in my computer of story after story of people fighting back saying: No. We are not going to kowtow; we are not going to bow down to this tyranny.
It gives me hope, and it gives us the optimism to carry on and keep up the fight because this country was born on freedom, and it is going to continue. We will see a comeback of freedom.
Like Ronald Reagan said, it may not be in your genes, but you have to fight it. For every generation it is a new fight to keep freedom, and this is our fight today.
Mr. ROY. Amen. We have got frontline doctors who are out there making sure that people can get access to ivermectin. We have got people who are working around all the barriers of these pharmaceutical companies that are saying: No, you can't get this stuff.
Americans want to take care of their loved ones despite a government saying they can't get the treatments that save lives.
I had a woman today break down in tears. She came up to me, and I hugged her. She was crying because her 52-year marriage to her husband--he passed away in August. He was fighting COVID, and he was beating COVID, but he couldn't get ivermectin. They couldn't get to it. They were denied access to it, and they couldn't get monoclonal antibody treatment. She said to me: If I had been able to get him to Florida, I would have saved his life, and I would still have my husband.
Now, I don't know the facts of that, but I hear that from thousands of Americans all the time. They are being denied the ability to get treatment and being denied the ability to get care because we have got a top-down dictatorship coming out of Washington trying to coerce and tell the American people what their healthcare should look like.
But it is not just healthcare. It is critical race theory. It is all of the garbage being taught in our schools about wokeness and telling people that we should be racist because that is what critical race theory is. It is racism, and it is nothing other than that. We have got American people, parents, going into school boards and saying: Enough. We are not having it anymore.
We have got Texas Carroll Independent School District; parents in Southlake recently fought back and won; Fort Worth Independent School District; Colleyville, Texas; New York, Clarkstown School Board; Georgia, Atlanta where parents are coming in, and they are saying enough. We believe in America, and we believe in the content of one's character and not the color of their skin. We don't want to listen to this garbage dividing us further by race.
Mr. BIGGS. One of the only good things about the COVID outbreak was that parents got to see what the kids were learning for a change, and when they saw it, they said: This is not what I want my kid to learn. And they started standing up.
Do you know what, Mr. Speaker? It is working.
But do you know what is happening?
Right now, we have got an Attorney General who has basically said: We are going to stop those protests, we are going to stop that communication that is First Amendment messaging that you give as parents to the school boards.
That is not the American way. That is the tyranny, and that is the fascism we are fighting about. That is what you and I were fighting with the Attorney General today about. And doggone it, we have got to stand up, and those parents need to be able to stand up, express themselves, and express their protest.
Mr. ROY. I always notice that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle snicker when we say things about critical race theory. They laugh at it. But they never want to debate the actual substance of the garbage being taught. They never want to actually look at the curriculum, look at the books, and look at what is being taught.
The Virginia Department of Education administered a training to teachers that included a presentation instructing them to embrace critical race theory and engage in race conscious teaching and learning in order to--this is a quote--reengineer attitudes and belief systems.
{time} 1830
That is what it is about. Its roots are in Marxist ideology, and we know it. It is clear. It is evident, and we see it in Loudoun County right now where we see what is unfolding in Loudoun County, which is all about critical race theory, parents getting angry, and then a school board stepping right over the rights of a dad to be able to go down and protest to the school board because his daughter was raped in a bathroom by a dude wearing a skirt. And they want to then go down and say, oh, well, we are just going to say this is domestic terrorism.
And what happens? The Attorney General of the United States gives the FBI the power to go after parents because parents are protesting against this stuff because they know the power is in the people. We the people.
And you know what? The American people are on to this stuff, and the American people are going to stop it because that is the way we do things in this country.
Mr. BIGGS. That is where it is. That is where the fire is starting, right there at the level of the people.
And if we are going to save this country--I tell people all the time--it is going to come from the grassroots. It is going to come from the people. It is going to take off into the local jurisdictions in the States.
If you think that you are going to save this Nation with the United States Congress, you are sadly mistaken. It is the States. It is the individuals. It is the families. It is the people who love this country, and they are going to keep fighting us back. I am with you 100 percent on that.
Mr. ROY. Well, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for his comments. I believe my time is winding down.
Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Texas has 1 minute remaining.
Mr. ROY. Well, I appreciate the Speaker for his indulgence. I appreciate my friend from Arizona.
I would just point out that what we learned today was highly troubling. What we saw with the Attorney General, what we learned today when we saw that the White House was colluding--we saw this in evidence in emails--colluding with the National Association of School Boards to include language in the memoranda that then got the Attorney General to go target parents with the FBI. We saw that. It was evidence. The AG admitted today in our committee, he said, because of that memo, I created this effort by the FBI. We saw that. It is happening. The American people are onto it.
The American people, if you are listening to me, you stand strong. You say no. Say no to vaccine mandates, say no to mask mandates, say no to all the nonsense coming out of this critical race theory garbage. Stand up for your kids. Go to school boards, turn over the school boards, and fight for freedom.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from engaging in personalities toward the President.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 185
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