Current Border Insecurity

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DAVIDSON. Madam Speaker, I have requested this time to address part of the State of the Union that was not addressed last night. In fact, we saw that the President was so bold as to say that the border is secure and tout the fact that they have caught 2 million people at the border, as if that is success. That is what was said.

What wasn't said is what has been going on at the border for a long time and has been made worse by the policies that Joe Biden and his administration have put in place. Frankly, by the United States laws that he and his administration have ignored, and that Secretary Mayorkas enables every day that he leads the Department of Homeland Security down the wrong path for our country.

So, we are here to talk about, stop the cartels. We are introducing a bill called the Stop the Cartels Act. We spend so much time on the sympathetic cause of immigration and we conflate border security with immigration.

We can have an incredibly secure border regardless of our immigration policy, and border security is, in fact, national security. The cartels pose a serious threat to the United States of America. The products that they push in our communities have killed over 100,000 people.

This past year, the leading cause of death for 18 to 45 year olds is fatal overdoses. The drugs are bad, but now they are poisoned with fentanyl, and we are not taking the threat seriously. So the first portion of the Stop the Cartels Act will focus on gathering intelligence.

As we look at the country of Mexico, our southern neighbor, it controls the whole land portion of our southern border. That border is controlled by the cartels. I had Brandon Judd, the president of the Customs and Border Patrol Union, at a hearing that we had to have offsite because Speaker Pelosi won't have the hearing on the topic in any of our hearing rooms. She won't let the committees of jurisdiction deal with it, so Republicans are forced to go offsite to talk about this important topic.

When I asked him: Who controls the border? You or the cartels? Do the cartels control the border more than you?

He said: You are not putting words in my mouth. That is the exact point. The cartels control the border. We don't control the border.

I said: Why don't you control the border?

He said: Because of policies.

Do you need more resources?

That is a different topic. What we need is good policy. We had policies that were working to control the border, and now we have policies that are not working.

The Border Patrol controls it. We are not even on defense, we are not even on the field, and we are not even in the stadium because the policies of this administration changed so that it gave complete control of our southern border to the cartels.

Now, we could talk about all the corruption and the problems that the cartels are causing for Mexico. That is a problem that Mexico has to deal with, and we should be able to help them once we prioritize intelligence collection on the cartels on par with the other threats to our country, on par with China, with Russia, with Iran, with North Korea, with al-Qaida, with ISIS, and with the known credible threats to our country.

The cartels should have the same level of intelligence priority as those other hostile or potentially hostile countries. And the cartels are clearly hostile. They do a lot of business here--billions and billions of dollars.

So we have highlighted this map. These are the areas that we already know which cartels control. You have the states of Mexico listed, but you also have color coded which cartels control that. We would like to have the granular detail of what is the org chart, who leads the cartels. I am not saying we don't have that, but we do not have it at the right priority. And then when we do have the intelligence--just as we have seen, the intelligence community got Ukraine incredibly right. The problem wasn't that we didn't have good intelligence with respect to Russia, the problem was the administration didn't do the right thing with the intelligence. But let's first get the right intelligence on the cartels.

So the next thing is we have cities, States, and counties that are completely ignoring the United States law. It is a Federal policy to decide who is a citizen and who is not a citizen. And when we go to enforce our laws as to who is here legally versus who is here illegally, that is clearly Federal jurisdiction.

We have cities, States, counties, and other communities that are ignoring these laws--sanctuary cities. And those sanctuary cities are saying: Not only would this be a great place to base your illicit activity, cartels, we will protect you by being a sanctuary. Please come locate your illicit activity here. Bring your drugs, bring your guns, bring your labor trafficking, your sex trafficking, your human trafficking, and bring your money laundering business and every form of corruption into our communities. That is what these first two maps show.

But let me show you next what the impact on our communities is, Madam Speaker.

This young lady to my right is Lizzie Murphy. She died at 21 years old. Drugs are bad, but now they are poisoned with fentanyl. Seeing that it is not a good idea to take it without a prescription or a specific use--a lot of people refer to it as a safe party drug--it is a bad decision. But it is not supposed to kill you. But when it is laced with fentanyl, that is what is happening to our young people. That is how fentanyl killed over 60,000 Americans last year. Not all of it is in the heroin. Not all of it is in the really hard stuff. Some of it is in the stuff that people never suspect is going to kill them. They take one pill, and they are dead.

That is what happened to my friends, Mark and Kristi Murphy when their little girl took one Xanax. Their daughter--she is sitting here hugging her sister, close friends, best friends--doesn't have her sister anymore.

This is wrecking our communities, and we have got communities inviting this in by being sanctuary cities.

We have got a President of the United States who is not just doing nothing, he is doing worse than nothing. He is making it worse by empowering the cartels. They exploit people, and they cause harm to our communities.

To highlight the ways this is happening and the ways to solve it, I have asked some of my colleagues to join me in this Special Order.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DAVIDSON. Madam Speaker, look, if we look over on the far right, how does a young lady lose her sister? How does a young lady, 21 years old, in Ohio wind up dead from fentanyl poisoning, poison in the drugs?

They know drugs are bad, but they are not supposed to kill them. They are in Ohio. Ohio is not--I mean, we do have a border. It is on Lake Erie with Canada. That is not the border that is causing our young people to die. That is not the one that is causing the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds to be fatal overdoses.

It is all the way down here on the southern border. And it is not officially the Mexican Government. It is the cartels. And we refuse to collect the intelligence at the right level.

At our southern border, we have a joint task force. We don't have a joint interagency task force. We have that out in the Pacific Ocean. We have that in the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. But we don't have a joint interagency task force.

The place probably that it makes the absolute most sense to have an interagency task force is at the southern border. We have Customs and Border Protection. We have people that are focused on smuggling of people, smuggling of drugs, of guns. We have people that are focused on counterfeit property.

We are focused on levying taxes at the border, inspecting fruit at the border, and everything else. But we don't have an interagency task force that uses the power of our military to conduct surveillance, that uses the power of our Director of National Intelligence and all the resources that we have to know everything about the cartels, not some benign name like Sinaloa, but, specifically, who leads that.

We know who leads Russia. We know it is Vladimir Putin. They are a nation-state.

But we have these transnational criminal organizations that go unnamed. Again, they are involved in the activities not because they care so much about the activity itself. They want the money.

We don't have an organized way to collect all the intelligence on the money. What yachts are they buying? What properties do they own? How do they move this heavily cash business into other goods and services?

They move everything that can store value possible all over the world to try to clean up this money. We don't have the kind of pressure that was just brought to bear on Vladimir Putin going against the cartels.

Vladimir Putin we finally recognized as evil as he invaded Ukraine. But when he was doing the menacing, threatening activity, when we had at least gone so far as to collect the intelligence, we didn't take the actions that could have stopped him.

Here, we can't even go so far as to collect the right level of intelligence. Intelligence is the first thing.

The next slide I have deals with the sanctuary cities. We are going to defund the sanctuary cities. They can't keep getting funded. They have to conform to U.S. law.

We just had a Supreme Court ruling that said if you want to get paid for providing Medicare and Medicaid services, you have to make your employees conform. We can do that to American citizens, and we can't do that to deal with the cartels.

Now, it is a different topic, I will grant you, but it is the same thing, the strings attached to the money. We have to put the strings attached to the money to say, if you want the money that is collected here in the city, you have to reflect the laws of the United States of America, and you can't offer sanctuary to these cartels that are killing our young people.

There is more to the bill, but let me highlight in another way the consequences of not stopping the cartels.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Budd).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DAVIDSON. Madam Speaker, this is a gravely serious matter. I highlighted a young lady, Lizzie Murphy; her sister, Catherine; her mom and dad, Mark and Kristi Murphy, who lost their daughter, their best friend, their sister.

Communities like this are losing young people all over our country. I kind of wish I could say that it was only happening where the sanctuary cities are pictured. I kind of wish I could say it was only right next to the border that we have the problem.

But our whole country is experiencing the problem because we won't secure the border. This administration won't secure the border. They won't listen to the men and women whose duty it is to secure the border.

I went down there a week after Joe Biden was inaugurated and they said: We told him. We will see what happens. They said they are going to do these things, and we told them this is what is going to happen.

Now, when we go to the border, when they come and talk to us up here, the exact same things they knew were going to happen are happening.

We stopped sanctuary cities. We put strings attached to the grants. But the other thing is we have this Flores settlement. Congress has not provided clarity on the Flores settlement, so we provide funding so that we can hold people as long as they need to be held till their cases are adjudicated on the Mexican side of the border.

We put pressure on the Government of Mexico to cooperate with us in this, and we put pressure on the Government of Mexico to resume their cooperation on intelligence-gathering.

Just yesterday, ahead of the State of the Union, I have my county sheriffs--Butler County Sheriff Jones was here in Washington, D.C. Why? Not because he is a border sheriff in the strict geographical sense, but because he is a border sheriff there in Ohio.

Let me close, Madam Speaker, by just highlighting that what happened to this family could happen to anybody. I appreciate the time to speak tonight.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source