Providing for Consideration of S. Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend- Lease Act of and for Other Purposes

Floor Speech

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Mr. COMER. Mr. Speaker, Oversight and Reform Committee Republicans witnessed firsthand the crisis on the border after the southern border trip I led earlier this month.

By pushing blanket amnesty and eroding interior enforcement, President Biden has now signaled to the world that our laws can be violated with little to no consequence.

In 2021, over 2 million apprehensions of illegal immigrants were made. This is the most ever recorded by U.S. Border Patrol. In fact, I want to quote Punchbowl News because they really put it into perspective yesterday morning when they reported: ``According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, during the past 3 weeks, the agency has `encountered an average of 7,800 migrants per day across the southwest border. This compares to a historical average of 1,600 per day in the prepandemic years,' a roughly 480 percent increase.''

The surge of illegal immigrants is overwhelming the Department of Homeland Security. As a result, DHS was forced to release hundreds of thousands of these illegal border crossers into the United States.

Catch and release does not work. It only encourages more illegal immigration. The numbers we have don't even account for illegal immigrants who have evaded capture entirely. That number is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

The situation only gets worse when we look at how much fentanyl and other deadly drugs are being smuggled across the border by cartels. On our trip, we witnessed hundreds of discarded backpacks littering the ground, backpacks that once carried illicit narcotics.

The Biden administration's border policies have only boosted the human smuggling industry and empowered drug cartels.

Now, President Biden's decision to terminate the CDC's public health order under title 42 on May 23 will turn this national security and humanitarian crisis into a catastrophe.

Former Obama administration Secretary of Homeland Security Johnson once said that only 1,000 apprehensions per day was ``a relatively bad number'' that ``overwhelms the system.'' He described 4,000 apprehensions per day as a crisis.

The Department of Homeland Security now predicts as many as 12,000 to 18,000 illegal migrants per day will attempt to cross the border because of President Biden's policies when the title 42 order terminates, overwhelming the congregate processing facilities in ports and Border Patrol stations that we toured along the border in California and Arizona.

This administration's plan to address this catastrophe boils down to simply speeding up the release of even more illegal border crossers. Mr. Speaker, that is no plan at all. Placing illegal immigrants over Americans is unacceptable.

Committee on Oversight and Reform Republicans have been at the forefront of this crisis, demanding answers and seeking to hold the administration accountable to the American people.

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Mr. COMER. Mr. Speaker, the American people should know this: We will persist in exposing the waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement by this administration that has led to this current crisis. We will do everything in our power to stop the flow of fentanyl across President Biden's broken border.

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