The Crisis At the Border

Floor Speech

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Mr. JOYCE of Pennsylvania. Madam Speaker, this past week, I joined a group of 12 of my colleagues to visit our southern border and to see firsthand the crisis that President Biden's open border policies have created.

What we saw were massive gaps in our border wall that allow for the cartels to traffic money, drugs, and human beings across our southern border. The Border Patrol agents whom we spoke with told us that in the Rio Grande sector that they are encountering nearly 10,000 migrants each month.

In the past year Border Patrol agents have apprehended people from 174 nations attempting to cross our border. And even more troubling, they have encountered 42 individuals on the terrorist watch list.

According to Border Patrol data, over 1,200 pounds of fentanyl were seized in the month of April alone, and at a time when we have just seen over 100,000 Americans killed by drug overdoses, this spike in fentanyl trafficking has made each and every State a border State.

It is time to address this crisis. It is time to finish our border wall--a wall that President Biden has refused to complete while $350 million of unused border wall rust away underneath the Texas sun.

In his budget for this year, Joe Biden doesn't even mention the crisis on the border. Instead of giving our Border Patrol agents the tools that they need, President Biden has proposed to cut $800 million from the Department of Homeland Security budget. If President Biden were to visit the border, he would see this crisis firsthand. But, instead, he has chosen to hide from the problem and continue to allow deadly drugs to flow into our communities and kill our citizens.

The American people can't afford to wait any longer. It is time for the President to order the completion of the border wall and finally-- finally--keep all Americans safe.

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