Managing the Crisis on the Southern Border

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, we have already talked tonight about the numbers which come from the crisis at the southern border.

During the Obama administration, Mr. Speaker, if you had 1,000 contacts a day with people trying to sneak in this country, that was a lot. We are now at around 3,000 a day. February of this year compared to February of last year is up 173 percent. That is shocking. It didn't have to be.

What incompetence did it take to get such a massive swing of people coming across our border?

President Trump had something called the migrant protection protocol. When people tried to sneak in here and claim asylum, they were sent back and held by the Mexican Government pending a hearing. This was a great victory for President Trump.

Maybe just because he is President Trump, it means you don't like him, Mr. Speaker, and you had to get rid of him like the protection protocol. So, we are back to the old days.

Rather than being held south of the border, waiting to see if you can come here, you are escorted into the United States, turned over to some nonprofit organization, and told to disappear somewhere in the United States to show up for a hearing which you don't show up for. And that is, more than any other reason, why we have this problem.

Another thing they have changed is that President Trump had worked on a deal with Central American countries so that people trying to come up here from South America and other Central American countries were held south of the Mexican border. One more good policy, but let's throw it overboard and see what happens.

By doing this, not only do we let more people in the country, but we enrich and empower the drug cartels. The drug cartels are charging about $3,000 for every Mexican they let in here, about $5,000 for every Central American, $8,000 to $9,000 for every Brazilian, and up to $20,000 for every Asian.

When you are making that kind of money, Mr. Speaker, you know very well the drug cartels will recruit as many people as they can to come into this country.

Of course, nowadays, it is unlike years ago when they used to find marijuana. Now when people come across the border, it is fentanyl, meth, and heroin. So, in addition to the huge amount of humanity moving across the border, we have that many more drugs to kill the people of our country. I am sure the American people already remember we are losing about 80,000 people every year to illegal drug use, so much of which comes across the southern border.

As has been mentioned by other speakers, there is an increase in sexual assaults as people try to come across the border and are escorted by the drug cartels.

I want to point out that the drug cartels control that southern border. If you try to come here without their approval, Mr. Speaker, you are in big trouble. I will give you an anecdote from the last time I was down there. Three people tried to escort other people over the border. Two of them were skinned alive and died. The other was partly skinned alive and told to go back south to Mexico and tell everyone what happens if you try to come across the border without going through the drug cartels.

Just as another indication of the huge problem we have at the border, last year, which was an unusually hot year, they found, in the Tucson sector alone, 100 bodies of people who dehydrated trying to come here.

Under President Trump, Mr. Speaker, you know how good it can be. They went from a point where they were letting 100,000 people across the border, which was about 2 years ago, back down to, around December, about 10,000 people crossing the border. They did that with the migrant protection protocol, with dealing with Central America, and by being concerned about COVID.

So, what to do now? I am sometimes asked how the United States got in this mess, and I am talking about a wide variety of issues. Where would the Founding Fathers say they screwed up?

Until this, I always felt that if I look at the three branches of government and say between the legislative, executive, and judiciary, our Founding Fathers would have never believed the judiciary could have such complete lack of respect for the Constitution. But now, I have to answer something else.

The press sometimes considers themselves the fourth estate. There are rumors right now that the Department of Homeland Security has put a gag order on the Border Patrol agents who always have so many interesting stories down there. If I think of our Founding Fathers now who wanted a free press, as disappointed as they would be in our President, as disappointed as they would be in our Congress, and as super disappointed as our Founding Fathers would be in our judicial branch, I think the area they would be most disappointed is in the fourth estate. The bootlicking sycophants of the fourth estate are just horrible. These toadies are ruining the country.

Wake up. Insist on being able to talk to the Border Patrol. Get down to the Border Patrol and find out exactly what is going on.

Mr. Speaker, my final plea tonight is for the press corps to wake up, get to the southern border, and report what is really going on down there.

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