The Crisis At the Border

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding.

This debate over securing our border has become a debate over the morality of our efforts, and I welcome that debate. But if we are to debate this issue of border security on the basis of morality, it is fair for us not only to ask how this issue affects our own Nation, but to look across our border and see how our national policy affects those beyond our borders.

For those of us who live near our southern border, we understand all too well the effects of the criminal cartels who profit from abusing our Nation's generous immigration laws.

When I visited the Rio Grande Valley just recently, a rancher with land on the border described the situation, saying that he finds dead migrants on his land all the time.

In my hometown of Victoria, Texas, 19 migrants died of suffocation and overheating after being trapped in the back of a trailer abandoned by a smuggler with a callous disregard for human life.

But beyond our borders, these cartels carry an outsized influence in Mexico and in developing nations in Central America. We know that cartels profit from smuggling drugs and humans across the border. They siphon oil from pipelines. They extort families and businesses and kidnap for profit.

The barbarism of these criminal cartels has led to 150,000 homicides in Mexico, alone, since 2006. They have worked their corrupting influence into the halls of government and law enforcement, hindering the people of these nations from developing and realizing the blessings of liberty for themselves.

Our Federal Government's unwillingness to control our border allows cartels to amass profits of tens of billions of dollars each year smuggling drugs and humans into our country, with a devastating toll on the most vulnerable in our Nation. Our lack of border security allows these criminal cartels to wield their corrupting influence in a way that makes positive change so difficult in these developing countries.

Unfortunately, like too many issues these days, border security has become a divisive and a partisan issue when, historically, this has had broad support. But there should be nothing partisan about ending a humanitarian and criminal crisis that is driven by cartels and enabled by our Federal Government's failure to act.

Congress has a responsibility to protect the citizens of our country and to end the humanitarian crisis on our southern border, and it is past time to reform our broken asylum system and secure the border.

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