No End in Sight

Floor Speech

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Mr. NEHLS. Madam Speaker, Vice President Kamala Harris was named border czar on March 24, 2021. It was 93 days later when she finally went down to visit a border community amidst this unprecedented humanity crisis. There is just one problem: she didn't actually visit the border.

Last Friday, Vice President Harris hopped off her plane in El Paso for a few hours on her way to California. She quickly toured a border patrol station 10 miles away from the actual border avoiding a visit to ground zero.

And what do I mean by ``ground zero''? I mean the actual border where thousands of migrants are flooding across daily, like the Rio Grande Valley sector where over 50,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended in May alone, which is 128 percent, more than the entire El Paso sector.

Or in the Del Rio sector where every afternoon buses on the Mexican side of the border pull up and they unload hundreds of migrants who cross the Rio Grande River in knee-high water.

I saw it myself firsthand when I visited the Del Rio sector in June. While I was there getting a tour of the actual border, a couple of men crossed the Rio Grande over to the American side, and when they got to the bank of the river, DPS agents and I questioned them.

We asked them where they were from, why they were here, and why they thought they could get into America. They told us they were from Cuba and they had come here to work. Then they told us something that shouldn't surprise anyone: They thought they could get into America because President Biden said they could come.

Within minutes, agents of Border Patrol pulled up in a van, loaded with other migrants who had crossed down river, and away they went. Situations like this are happening in the thousands every day along our border. And Border Patrol is the one being forced to pick these migrants up, process them, straining their manpower and resources, resulting in our border being completely open for criminal illegal aliens who want to cross undetected.

Americans have been hearing about this Biden border crisis for months, and they see nothing changing. They see the cartels are getting rich trafficking these migrants across our border. And they hear the horror stories of children being abandoned and abused during their journey to our southern border. All of this has a real world impact on Americans.

As a former county sheriff in Texas, I know all too well the second and third order effects of an unsecure southern border. Americans will undoubtedly become victims of crime from the illegal aliens successfully avoiding detection when they cross. Like Ms. Bowie who was run over and killed while I was sheriff by an illegal alien who had been deported six times prior.

Our open border will strain local law enforcement and border State resources who are tasked with cleaning up the mess. A mess created by the Biden administration's failure to stem the flow of illegal aliens pouring across the border.

But it really doesn't need to be this way. The Biden border crisis all started when Biden reversed the Trump administration's remain in Mexico policy and stopped construction of the wall. We can get back to operational control of our southern border if the Biden administration just reverts back to the Trump administration's policies. Until then, there simply is no end in sight.

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