Border Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from North Carolina and appreciate his distinguished service on behalf of the citizens of North Carolina, his leadership of our Republican Study Committee in the last Congress, and his leadership as our Conference leader for this Congress. And I greatly appreciate his personal engagement to help continue this conversation with the American people about the need for enhanced security along our southwest border.

Like my colleagues you have heard from, I have been to the southwest border four times as a Member of Congress. I worked in Texas for nearly a decade, so I am very familiar with the southwest border in Texas. But, as a Congressman, I have gone four times to get at the root of what is the balance that we want between border fencing, barrier, the use of technology, screening technology, enhancements at our ports of entry, and the manpower issue.

Mr. Speaker, we need all of that, and that is, in fact, what we have produced time and time again on the floor. Just in the last year, Mr. Speaker, we have proposed these kinds of commonsense border security issues, and we have not gotten sufficient votes to pass them.

So this is why we find ourselves hearing from the Border Patrol and our officials at Homeland Security that we need additional barrier construction, additional boots on the ground, new judges, additional screening technology--all of the things I hear about from county judges, county sheriffs, Federal law enforcement--to make our border, in fact, safe.

But tonight I want to reflect on the impact in my home State of Arkansas. I see it every day. I have two young adults now, Mr. Speaker, a 19-year-old and a 22-year-old.

When I was in high school, I didn't know anybody who had died of a drug overdose. I didn't know anyone who had committed suicide among my peers in my high school. And I am brokenhearted tonight, Mr. Speaker, to report that my kids and their age group have seen deaths from deadly addiction to these drugs that are coming over our border, our southwest border. It breaks my heart to see them at funerals when they should be at soccer games.

The opioid crisis has killed more than 100 Americans a day and caused 45,000 deaths last year, alone, almost as many as we lost in all of the Vietnam conflict. A third of these deaths were attributable to fentanyl, much of which is manufactured in China.

This Congress, bipartisan, last year, decided to get screening equipment to our postal service to interdict and try to stop fentanyl. Senator Cotton and I want to increase criminal penalties for fentanyl possession and dealing because, Mr. Speaker, in this small Sweet'N Low packet that we are all familiar with, 1 gram has enough--if it were fentanyl--to kill 500 Americans. That is what confronts our kids as it is laced into heroin, pressed into pills, soaked into marijuana on the streets of our country, coming across the southwest border.

So my kids have suffered from it. I have watched their faces. I have hugged a lot of moms. And whenever I think of this issue, I think about Nate Gordon, who lost his life, whose mom I visit with and who has helped me in my roundtables on helping me cope with how to talk to our parents about this deadly addiction that has overtaken our country.

Nate was a kid who got addicted, and he tried to beat it. And he beat it. And then, one night, it took his life.

His mom doesn't have her son anymore, but she has dedicated her life to helping parents to educate kids, to get people in treatment. And that is what we need. We need an entire community to bond with this Congress to fight drug addiction.

I spoke to our attorney general, my friend from North Carolina, and she told me that over 1,000 illegals had been arrested in Arkansas recently, tens of thousands of pills, and over 1,000 pounds of drugs.

So this is something that challenges our whole country, and we have to work together. I commend our President for keeping it at the forefront of the American people, and I commend Mr. Walker for inviting us here to visit about it tonight.

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