Current Border Insecurity

Floor Speech

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Mr. BUDD. Madam Speaker, up there where you sit, last night Joe Biden stood here and delivered his State of the Union address. He spoke about lots of issues. But he didn't even touch on the biggest issue facing our country today, and that is the southern border.

Make no mistake, the state of our border, it is not good. The Border Patrol has encountered over 150,000 illegal aliens--not last year but just last month, in January, just 33 days ago, when they tallied up those numbers. That is a 96 percent, almost 100 percent increase from last year.

Over 62,000, out of that 150,000, 62,000 of those individuals were released into the United States. It is unbelievable. It is unacceptable. It is dangerous.

When I get to travel around North Carolina and visit with law enforcement, as I love to do and have the honor of doing, the sheriffs tell me there are about 3,200 counties in this amazing country. They said every single sheriff right now is a border sheriff because of the policies that are happening right here, just down the street in the White House. There are drugs, fentanyl.

We think about the devastation and the suffering years ago in the Vietnam war, a decade where we lost about 70,000 servicemembers. We think about what we lose every single year, not in a decade, but every single year from drug overdoses. That is about 70,000, largely because of what happens at the border.

Just a few months ago, when I was down there visiting with our Customs and Border Patrol agents, they were off duty that day. We were in a pickup truck as far as from here to, Madam Speaker, where you sit. They slammed on the brakes and said: I am sorry. I have got to go on duty. I have to arrest these cartel members.

He said the sad thing is they will be back out on the street or, in this case, back out in the desert in just a few days.

We looked all up and down the border, and there was tens of millions of dollars of steel just laying there. Then there was tens of millions of dollars' worth of idle diesel equipment that has been idle since January 20 of last year.

He said: You know what? We need to finish this wall.

That is what the Customs and Border Patrol agent told me. He says: But what we really need, what we really need is an administration that has our back and, sir, right now, we don't have that.

Instead, Madam Speaker, what we have is an astounding 11,200 pounds of fentanyl, deadly fentanyl that was seized last year, and even more has made it into the homeland. It is killing thousands of our fellow Americans. Dangerous cartels are flooding this country with counterfeit prescription pills containing fentanyl and meth. All of this can be prevented and should be prevented. It must be prevented.

The bottom line is it is time to finish the wall. It is time to support our border agents and end this administration's dereliction of duty.

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