Crisis At Southern Border
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for holding this time with my colleagues to talk about what is going on at our southern border and talk about how important it is that we do something about it.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Arizona for his steadfast leadership on border issues. I know that the gentleman was squeezing in some time there, and I am happy to engage in colloquy or yield him some time to continue to talk about this important issue, if he would like.
One thing that I noticed you were saying in the time from my friend from Texas, you were talking about being down at the border, being next to the fence, a fence that works, by the way, where it is up, and then there is a hole or an unfinished fence or where the fence ends.
I noticed that my friend from Arizona was recently standing next to a large pile of metal, steel. I wondered if he might describe for the American people what you were standing next to so they can understand what is actually happening.
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Mr. ROY. I think there is a theme for this administration, and this administration's theme is paying people not to work. In this case, they are paying people not to build a fence, despite the fact that the taxpayers of this country have paid for a fence that would actually do the job of stopping the flow of people who want to come across this country and, in many cases, bringing fentanyl, bringing dangerous narcotics, harming the American people, and harming themselves. Yet, we can solve the problem but refuse to.
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Mr. ROY. Would it surprise the gentleman from Arizona that one of the reasons that the Haitians got a different deal was they came up through Del Rio and they did so purposefully? Why did they target Del Rio, you might ask?
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are clearly sitting over here inquisitive, with their interest of what is happening at the border. While they continue to advance policies that create an open border, they don't seem to actually care about the open border because I haven't seen any of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle when I go down to the border.
In fact, the last one I remember going down to the border was my colleague from New York who went down wearing a pantsuit, standing outside of a fence doing a photo-op, crying about kids in cages--cages created by the Democratic administration, indeed, to try to deal with the fact that we had so many people coming in across the border. Yet, it was fake. It was staged. And then they lied about kids drinking out of toilets.
The actual reality on the ground at the border is dead migrants. I am sure my friend from Arizona knows of dead migrants in Arizona because we got dead migrants in Texas. So my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who pat themselves on the back for how compassionate they are about migrants and Brown people, go talk to the Brown people in south Texas about what they are seeing and what they are finding. Talk to the ranchers.
I would love to hear if you have similar experiences. The ranchers who find a migrant either dead or dying from the heat and exhaustion, seek to get them water, call 911 to get them help, try to help their fellow human being. They are dealing with that.
A hundred bodies in Brooks County, Texas, stacking up this year. Body trailers. The sheriff down there has to deal with this. $3,000 per body for autopsy. $5,000 per body for burial because they can't get the families.
Where are my colleagues? Where are our colleagues on the other side of the aisle? Going around trumpeting and talking about how their policies of open borders are great for migrants. Well, say that to the dead migrants.
I assume my colleague from Arizona has seen similar stories.
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Mr. ROY. Yes.
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Mr. ROY. No.
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Mr. ROY. As my friend from Arizona knows full well, the cause of this is the purposeful and willful disregard for enforcing the laws of the United States at our border. Our laws actually require the enforcement of the law at the border.
The Secretary of Homeland Security is willfully disregarding, for example, as my friend knows, the Secure Fence Act, which among its provisions passed in this body on this floor is to guarantee that we have operational control of the border. That is law.
The Secretary of Homeland Security literally stood in Del Rio, looking at individuals standing in America, going back across the Rio Grande and buying tacos, bringing them back over and selling them to Haitians on American soil. He saw it with his own eyes. He turned to the cameras, and said: Our border is secure.
He looked at the American people and lied, just like the White House press secretary lied when she said Border Patrol agents were whipping Haitians when what they were doing was actually trying to do their job that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Homeland Security is purposefully, willfully trying to deny them the ability to do.
Would my friend agree?
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Mr. ROY. We did.
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Mr. ROY. Isn't it a perversion of our law for the administration to tell the world: Come to the United States. Claim asylum.
Let's be clear. This is what is happening almost explicitly. The administration is saying to the world: Come to the border of the United States. Claim asylum. We know and you know and every everybody knows well over 90 percent of you do not have a valid claim for asylum.
They are seeking economic benefit. They are seeking jobs. God bless them. I would, too. I have no problem with their desire to come here. But the rule of law matters.
You have an administration saying: Come on here. Claim asylum. What we will do is we will parole you. What does parole mean? Oh, well, you can just come in here and you can work. You can have a job. You can get benefits. And we will just pretend you are going to come back under notice to appear or notice to report. Or we are not going to parole you. We are just going to send you out, and say, notice to appear or notice to report. Oh, by the way, we might just release you and not give you a notice to appear or notice to report, and we just are going to let those numbers flow into the United States of America.
Mr. Speaker, 1.7 million apprehensions this year; 300,000 or 400,000 got-aways this year; hundreds of dead migrants along the Rio Grande.
Where are my colleagues? Where are they? They have a duty under the Constitution, a sworn oath to uphold the Constitution to enforce the laws of the United States, and the administration. Here in Congress, this Chamber is MIA in holding the administration accountable to do their job, and I would like to know why.
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Mr. ROY. Yes.
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Mr. ROY. Yes.
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Mr. ROY. What were those policies that President Trump and his administration put in place to actually secure the borders of the United States in 2019?
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Mr. ROY. Right. You are not welcome to come here illegally, and you are not welcome to flout our laws. You are welcome to come here and follow our laws that we have in place for people who come here legally.
There is a waiting list, by the way.
What do you say to the people who are waiting?
Don't worry about it. Let all these other folks come in and just walk through or cross the Rio Grande endangering themselves, endangering Border Patrol, not providing resources to the Border Patrol to do their job, so they are the ones left hanging, dealing with COVID, not having resources, being alone at midnight with no cell signal, no ability to talk on the radio, and no ability to move their car up and down the Rio Grande River.
I have got a bill with my friend, Henry Cuellar, to have navigable roads and a fence along the river.
Why won't Speaker Pelosi bring that bipartisan bill to the floor of the United States House of Representatives?
It is for one reason and one reason only: Democrats want a political tool. They want the political reality of a wide-open border. There is zero other defense for what Democrats are doing, instead of actually doing what it takes to secure the border of the United States.
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Mr. ROY. That is what happens. They get processed and released. And then, Mr. Speaker, when you have migrants who are coming in between the ports of entry and they come across ranches and ranchers come across them or they die in the desert, then they are left having to deal with the body. They are left having to go and have a coroner come and do the autopsy. They have to have, like the gentleman said, body trailers coming down there.
Mr. Speaker, you can't make this up. I just want to know: Do my Democrat colleagues think we are making this up?
They may not know because the Secretary of Homeland Security sure as heck isn't coming down and explaining this to us.
I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, we are not having a debate here on the floor of the House about anything at all much less our border.
Oh, we have time to have political show trials. We have time to have a subpoena by a sham commission in which you wouldn't even put on the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker. You wouldn't even put on my friends, Kelly Armstrong, Jim Banks, no, we can't do that. So we are going to have a show trial, we are going to come out here, and we are going to have political theater.
But we are not going to do a doggone thing about migrants dying and Texans dying from fentanyl overdoses.
Why don't we talk about the danger of fentanyl?
Oh, no, we don't want to talk about that. Everybody over here has a steak dinner they have to go eat tonight.
Why don't we talk about the fact that there was a high-profile Texas Longhorns football player, today they put out a statement, the family, sadly--Jake Ehlinger, the brother of the former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger--in a statement Thursday the Ehlinger family says they learned Jake accidentally overdosed May 6 from what is believed to be the prescription antianxiety medication Xanax laced with fentanyl.
Well, do you know what, Mr. Speaker, and to all my colleagues who are not in this Chamber, that is a story that is happening every day in America across this country: 100,000 people dead, dead in this country because of wide-open borders, with China putting out this synthetic garbage and putting it into the system, and our children are dying. And the Democratic Party, the people leading this Chamber are MIA. They don't care about you, and they don't care about the American people. They only care about crass political use of the border to advance a racial identity agenda.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, some dude is cooking it in Mexico, they are shoving this stuff up from Mexico. There is a guy cooking the Xanax in the same place they have the fentanyl, and people are now getting those pills in the United States, they are dying, and we are just sitting here.
I have got the same Interstate 10 going right through San Antonio, the same Interstate 10 going through Boerne where we just stopped a car with nine immigrants in it, two bound up in the trunk. The car was being driven by a cartel employee, an American citizen, taking them to a stash house. That is the story of your current open border, Mr. Speaker. And, again, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are completely MIA.
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Mr. ROY. They are recruiting.
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Mr. ROY. I wonder if the gentleman might indulge, I had planned a couple of things that were border related, but I also have another topic that he might be interested in. I want to set the stage for something I hope is viewed positively because I believe right now what we are seeing is as Sam Adams put it:
You don't need a majority, but you need tireless minorities being willing to set brushfires of freedom.
What we are seeing across the country are people willing to set brushfires of freedom.
A couple of different issues. Right now we have a President of the United States who has set forth an unconstitutional, unlawful, illegal, and tyrannical vaccine mandate that companies have to bow down to the altar of this White House and do what he says. And I say: No, they don't; and the Governor of Texas says: No, you don't.
Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Southwest Airlines decided to play footsie with this tyrannical order, and the pilots said, no; the employees of Southwest said, no; a lot of their customers said no; and people like me and others called them to task.
Guess what Southwest did, Mr. Speaker?
They backed off a bit. They have now said: We are not going to fire people; we will give them unpaid leave.
I said to Southwest: That is not good enough. You need to let them work. You need to let them carry out their livelihoods. But God bless us, that is a move in the right direction.
Delta Airlines said: Well, we are not necessarily going to do that mandate.
We have got In-N-Out Burger saying: Do you know what, Mr. President? We are not going to do that.
God bless these corporate entities that are saying: No. No. No. We are not going to bow down to whatever the President says because he doesn't have the power. He is not a king. You can't say that we are going to get vaccinated when we believe there is natural immunity or we believe there might be a myocardial issue for our kids, when we believe it is in our best interest to decide what we are going to do for our families. Under no circumstances are we going to bow down to what a dictator in the White House is trying to tell us to do, and I wonder if my friend from Arizona agrees.
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Mr. ROY. Amen.
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Mr. ROY. Yes. We need some cops in Austin, Texas, to fill the holes when those liberals in Austin decided to get rid of the cops. We need some more. Come on down.
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Mr. ROY. Amen.
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Mr. ROY. We have a few others: General Electric employees in Greenville, South Carolina, walked out over the vaccine mandate. A New York hospital will stop delivering babies as workers quit over a vaccine mandate. Nearly 1,900 Washington State employees quit or were fired over the vaccine mandate because they said no. And a trooper tells Governor Inslee to kiss his--fill in the blank--in his final signoff before a vaccine mandate, and they put their boots out on the steps in protest. Seattle first responders fired for vaccine noncompliance march on city hall to turn in their boots. Parents in California protest student COVID-19 vaccine mandate, keep kids home. A vaccine opponent protest outside a hospital following shot requirement for employees. And a Wyoming teenager--God bless that Wyoming teenager--was arrested after refusing to wear a mask on school grounds.
That is the America I know. That is the America that doesn't bow down to the tyranny of a federal government that has no constitutional power to tell them what to do and tell them how to live their lives. That is the America that is going to preserve a republic for our kids and grandkids worth passing down to them.
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Mr. ROY. Amen.
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Mr. ROY. Amen. We have got frontline doctors who are out there making sure that people can get access to ivermectin. We have got people who are working around all the barriers of these pharmaceutical companies that are saying: No, you can't get this stuff.
Americans want to take care of their loved ones despite a government saying they can't get the treatments that save lives.
I had a woman today break down in tears. She came up to me, and I hugged her. She was crying because her 52-year marriage to her husband--he passed away in August. He was fighting COVID, and he was beating COVID, but he couldn't get ivermectin. They couldn't get to it. They were denied access to it, and they couldn't get monoclonal antibody treatment. She said to me: If I had been able to get him to Florida, I would have saved his life, and I would still have my husband.
Now, I don't know the facts of that, but I hear that from thousands of Americans all the time. They are being denied the ability to get treatment and being denied the ability to get care because we have got a top-down dictatorship coming out of Washington trying to coerce and tell the American people what their healthcare should look like.
But it is not just healthcare. It is critical race theory. It is all of the garbage being taught in our schools about wokeness and telling people that we should be racist because that is what critical race theory is. It is racism, and it is nothing other than that. We have got American people, parents, going into school boards and saying: Enough. We are not having it anymore.
We have got Texas Carroll Independent School District; parents in Southlake recently fought back and won; Fort Worth Independent School District; Colleyville, Texas; New York, Clarkstown School Board; Georgia, Atlanta where parents are coming in, and they are saying enough. We believe in America, and we believe in the content of one's character and not the color of their skin. We don't want to listen to this garbage dividing us further by race.
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Mr. ROY. I always notice that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle snicker when we say things about critical race theory. They laugh at it. But they never want to debate the actual substance of the garbage being taught. They never want to actually look at the curriculum, look at the books, and look at what is being taught.
The Virginia Department of Education administered a training to teachers that included a presentation instructing them to embrace critical race theory and engage in race conscious teaching and learning in order to--this is a quote--reengineer attitudes and belief systems.
That is what it is about. Its roots are in Marxist ideology, and we know it. It is clear. It is evident, and we see it in Loudoun County right now where we see what is unfolding in Loudoun County, which is all about critical race theory, parents getting angry, and then a school board stepping right over the rights of a dad to be able to go down and protest to the school board because his daughter was raped in a bathroom by a dude wearing a skirt. And they want to then go down and say, oh, well, we are just going to say this is domestic terrorism.
And what happens? The Attorney General of the United States gives the FBI the power to go after parents because parents are protesting against this stuff because they know the power is in the people. We the people.
And you know what? The American people are on to this stuff, and the American people are going to stop it because that is the way we do things in this country.
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Mr. ROY. Well, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for his comments. I believe my time is winding down.
Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?
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Mr. ROY. Well, I appreciate the Speaker for his indulgence. I appreciate my friend from Arizona.
I would just point out that what we learned today was highly troubling. What we saw with the Attorney General, what we learned today when we saw that the White House was colluding--we saw this in evidence in emails--colluding with the National Association of School Boards to include language in the memoranda that then got the Attorney General to go target parents with the FBI. We saw that. It was evidence. The AG admitted today in our committee, he said, because of that memo, I created this effort by the FBI. We saw that. It is happening. The American people are onto it.
The American people, if you are listening to me, you stand strong. You say no. Say no to vaccine mandates, say no to mask mandates, say no to all the nonsense coming out of this critical race theory garbage. Stand up for your kids. Go to school boards, turn over the school boards, and fight for freedom.
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