Termination of National Emergency Declared By the President on February 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, the President clearly laid out the case for the declaration of a national emergency in his State of the Union Address right here. National security is obviously the President's highest priority, and I support his efforts to build a wall.

There is a crisis. There is a crisis at the border that could have been addressed much sooner and prevented. Open border policies of the last administration compounded this growing problem.

We have schools, hospitals, and other services that have become overcrowded. American workers have been hurt by reduced job opportunities and lower wages. At the same time, human and drug trafficking has thrived.

In many communities, the notorious MS-13 gang has grown. We have seen tragic cases of crimes committed by illegal aliens who have been deported not once, not even twice, but multiple times.

I want to cite just one example from my home State of Missouri. A man named Pablo Serrano-Vitorino was deported to Mexico after a felony conviction in 2003. He later returned to this country illegally and was arrested again in 2014 and 2015 after several more violent incidents, but he remained in the U.S.

Then, in 2016, this individual, who had no right to be in this country, was charged for murdering five people in Kansas City, Kansas, and Montgomery County, Missouri.

Stories like this are not unique to Missouri, Mr. Speaker. These horrifying events are happening across this country.

This is a crisis. The men and women who put their lives on the line every day to bring order and security to our borders deserve the tools that they need to do the job, and now this President is taking decisive action to finally address the crisis using the authority provided to him by the Congress.

The National Emergencies Act is very clear. The provisions the President will use under title 10 explicitly provide the President with clear authority.

I support the President's efforts. I believe he is well within the law in making this declaration, and I urge my colleagues to oppose H.J. Res. 46.

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Mr. GRAVES of Missouri. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining?

I might remind my colleagues that Title 10, Section 2808, explicitly authorizes the President to change the appropriation for military construction. He is operating within the law.

I might point out to my colleagues just how much of a national emergency this is.

It was President Obama who recognized the crisis at the border. In 2014, President Obama requested $3.7 billion in emergency supplemental funding for what he described as a humanitarian crisis, a humanitarian crisis at the border. He specifically cited an increase in family units trying to cross the border and the lack of resources to accommodate them.

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Mr. Speaker, we did take an oath of office to defend the Constitution. The Constitution applies to citizens of the United States. It does not apply to people who are not citizens of the United States.

Border security officers have made 266,000 arrests of criminal aliens in the last 2 fiscal years.

These include criminal aliens charged or convicted of assaults, sex crimes, and killings. These are not victimless crimes.

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Mr. GRAVES of Missouri. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, we keep hearing that most drugs coming into this country are coming in at ports of entry, and I would make a correction: Most drugs that are caught are caught at ports of entry. We don't have any idea what is coming in across the border.

When we say that, this is like saying we are going to reinforce the front door, but we are going to leave the back door wide open. We don't know how many drugs or the amount of drugs that are coming across the border, particularly in rural areas, because we just simply can't patrol it.

As the gentleman from Illinois pointed out, you can't deploy Border Patrol quick enough to catch much of this. So we don't know how many drugs are coming through in other areas. We have a pretty good idea at ports of entry because we catch them there.

Mr. Speaker, I make a point of clarification because the statement was made that individuals from outside this country coming to ports of entry seeking asylum were entitled to that. No one outside of this country is entitled to anything in this country.

They can be heard, but they are not entitled to asylum in the United States just because they ask for it, just because they seek it. They aren't entitled to anything within this country.
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I find it ironic, I guess, and actually it is kind of ludicrous, that we talk so much about how much this wall is going to cost and how inhumane it is and how immoral it is, yet we build thousands and thousands of miles and spend millions and millions of dollars on noise abatement wall, 30 feet high and 20 feet high, in our suburbs and our urban areas all over the country. Yet we can't do something to protect our border.

That is not a crisis, Mr. Speaker. This is a crisis. What we are talking about today is a crisis.

President Obama agreed when he requested emergency funding in 2014 to deal with the crisis on the border, when he declared a national emergency because of transnational drug traffickers.

Since fiscal year 2012, Customs and Border Patrol has seized 4 million pounds of drugs at ports of entry and more than 11 million pounds of drugs between ports of entry. And nearly three times as many drugs are seized between ports, Mr. Speaker.

Many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle recognize the need for a border wall, voting to authorize a wall in 2016 and again under President Obama in 2013. Last year, we passed bipartisan legislation to address the growing impacts of opioids in our communities, drugs that continue to flow into our country through our southern border. We all agreed, on a bipartisan basis, that there was a crisis, but now, suddenly, they are calling this a manufactured crisis.

The National Emergencies Act is clear, Mr. Speaker. The President's authority is clear. The President is acting within the authority that Congress has given him.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote on this resolution, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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