House Freedom Caucus

Floor Speech

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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, we are here to talk about the promise that we made to the American people.

As the proud son of immigrants, my great-grandmother escaped the child bride situation in Colombia and came here with the shirt on her back and her little girl and just enough skills to make it through in America, and she did it legally.

We are a compassionate country who supports legal immigration, but we are here to talk about illegal immigration and the one chance we have left to solve that.

Border security is a bipartisan issue, and it is not just about a wall or a fence. It is about stopping things like illegal immigration and human trafficking, because seeing little girls sold into sex slavery into this country is not a compassionate thing for the American taxpayer to be a part of.

It is about declining economic conditions for America's working poor, knowing that the average high school dropout in America makes about $25,000 a year and, over the last 20 years, that has increased the amount of people, through illegal immigration, who don't have a high school diploma by about 25 percent. Who is standing up for the working poor that were born in this country?

And then there is the abuse of the American taxpayer. Pennsylvanians, where I represent a portion of the population, paid an additional $1.3 billion in taxes this year for things like education, incarceration, healthcare, and a whole raft of social services.

Senior citizens struggling to pay their property taxes in Pennsylvania risk losing their homes paying for those kind of things, and it is completely avoidable.

There is the rise of the opioid crisis, where fentanyl, across the border, the southern border, has increased 750 percent since the beginning of the year. I talked to my DAs today. In the two major counties I represent, that is one death a day due to opioid and fentanyl overdose.

Then there is the potential for terrorism through our southern border, where our Border Patrol says that they seize 10 terrorists a day.

Mr. Speaker, regardless of all those reasons that I have just outlined, there is still just one more that is the most important, and that is that we made a promise to the American people to secure the border. This is our last chance.

Nancy Pelosi will not do this, and the American people are counting on us to do what we said we would do. And that is why I am advocating for the funding package for the border in the CR, or I have to say ``no.''

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