Crisis At the Southern Border
Floor Speech
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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me. I would like to help set the stage here just for a moment. Imagine, if you will, 100,000 people entering the country illegally and stopped on our border just in the first 2 weeks of March of this year. But because of title 42, which allows the Border Patrol agents to immediately turn people away because of communicable diseases, that is the term used in title 42, they sent 50,000 of them back away. You don't have to imagine it because that is true. That is exactly what happened.
If you extrapolate that out, because you can, just looking at it from January, February, March of this year, they turned away over a quarter million people under title 42.
Now, when title 42 goes away on May 23, because that is exactly what this administration wants, you will double the amount of people who are coming in just through the apprehension route. We have another record month in March. Those numbers are just out. That means that you are going to be sitting on about 300,000 to 400,000 apprehensions that you are going to be releasing right into the United States of America.
What does that do? Everybody in here knows this because you have been down to the border. I have been down to the border with you. The cartels are in it to make money. As they see this opening up, more and more people getting freedom to the United States caught and released, what they will do, and what they are already doing, by the way, is they will advertise.
The NGOs that we help fund, that the United Nations funds, will advertise. It will be chaos, chaos on the border. My prediction is somewhere around 400,000 to 500,000 people a month coming in. But it actually could be more. A lot of people are talking about the ceiling now being 18,000 people a day when that goes away. I don't think it is going to be 18,000. I think it will exceed 20,000. If it exceeds 20,000, that is 600,000 a month coming in. That is bigger than the city of Mesa in Arizona, which is Arizona's second largest city.
You know what that means? In the last half of this year, the last half of the year alone, you are going to be sitting, as you said, at 4\1/2\ to 5 million people brought into this country illegally, and that is not counting the get-aways. The get-aways last year were at least 800,000.
It is enormous; it is dangerous; it is inhumane. I haven't even touched on the inhumanity of it. We are just talking up here. We are not getting granular. We are just talking about the overrunning of America, our culture, and our sovereignty. We won't have much of a nation after this is done.
You said it yourself, is this incompetence? The answer is no, this is willful. This is willful, and this is what they want.
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Mr. BIGGS. Absolutely, 100 percent. Do you know how we know they have been emboldened? Because it used to be they would have the coyotes take the people up and locate them in the U.S. They don't do that anymore. The coyotes take them up, they put them on the border and say, ``We don't have to go in with you. Go in. Go in with your cell phone.'' Oh, by the way, Biden administration says now they are going to give away a cell phone to every illegal alien crossing the border.
But they will just come across. I have seen it; you have all seen it. They are walking across, they are FaceTiming their friends back home: ``Yeah, I made it in.'' They are dressed nice; they are dressed clean. The cartels are emboldened not just at the southern border any longer.
This is spilling over into the country, and we are seeing violence along the border because of it, and you are seeing cartel members ship all over. If there are drugs being distributed anywhere in the United States, you have got cartels there.
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Mr. BIGGS. The average price right now is $4,000 to $7,000, unless you are from China, and then it is $35,000. Very few of these people have that to pay. Guess what happens? Either they can work it off by delivering illicit drugs, helping to smuggle human beings, including sex trafficking, or they come in, they get a job, and they are indentured servants. They are effectively slaves to the cartel, and they will never work it off, because the cartels are taskmasters at this. They know exactly how to keep these folks under their thumb.
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Mr. BIGGS. He could enforce the MPP, the migrant protection protocols. That is the remain in Mexico policy. What he could do is, instead of enforcing that at 9 people a day--that is the number we heard earlier this week, 9 people a day--you could actually enforce it the way it was intended to be enforced, and that would be thousands a day because we have thousands of folks coming in. That would be another deterrent. That is just one of the things that he could do.
He could actually go in and encourage us to fix the Flores law or the TVPRA laws. All of those things would be deterrents. But, instead, he has opened it wide open. He has taken away any deterrent. Instead, he is basically encouraging people to come into this country illegally.
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Mr. BIGGS. Well, first of all, the underground economy right now for people, my estimate is about 25 to 27 million illegal aliens in the country. You are going to bring in another 7 million, so you are going to have an underground economy. Those people who are not skilled laborers are going to have a tough time getting jobs. A lot of these folks are going to go on social welfare programs, even though they are not supposed to be allowed to. They will get on social welfare programs.
We are already on the verge of stagflation right now, high inflation and a shrinking GDP. As that happens, and you bring in that many people undocumented, you are going to actually exacerbate both those problems, and we may see the likes of something we haven't seen since Jimmy Carter. It might even exceed what happened under Jimmy Carter, who was probably the most unfortunate and incompetent President in my lifetime.
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