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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the crisis at our southern border continues to break records. For the first time ever, the United States has encountered more than 2 million migrants at our southern border in a single fiscal year, and that doesn't even include data for the month of September.

Now, my State, the State of Texas, has a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico where most of these migrants show up, although some go to Arizona, some to New Mexico, and some to California. But the vast majority of these 2 million migrants have showed up on our backdoor step. This includes a hodgepodge of people, from asylum seekers to economic migrants, to criminals, to drug smugglers.

In each of the last 6 months, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has logged more than 200,000 migrant encounters--for each of the past 6 months, 200,000 a month. The media used to lose its collective mind when 100,000 immigrants arrived in a single month, but I guess the public has become desensitize to these numbers because they are so huge, and we have now been operating at twice that level for 6 consecutive months.

Communities in my State of Texas have struggled to carry the weight of President Biden's border crisis, and nobody seemed to care. But the moment the burden reached the liberal enclaves of Manhattan and Martha's Vineyard, the outrage machine fired up.

Earlier this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began transporting migrants to other States and cities to ease the burden on communities in Texas. After all, what are we supposed to do? Two million migrants show up at the border. Are they supposed to stay there? Well, most of them have been in contact with relatives and other people in other cities around the country, and so they eventually make their way to their destination. And, if they are asylum seekers, they are given a notice to appear for a future court hearing, which probably will never occur because of the huge backlog in our immigration courts.

So Governor Abbott did what any reasonable person would do and began sending these migrants to other places where they eventually will end up at their final destination, wherever that may be. You can imagine 2 million migrants showing up on your border and what the strain on local health systems is like, what the strain is on emergency response services. The more migrants that show up on our backdoor step, the lower the capacity to care for taxpayers who pay taxes to make sure those services are available.

At the same time, nongovernmental organizations--we call them NGOs-- along the border are expected to pick up the Federal Government's slack and care for the migrants, which harms those charities' ability to support more Texans and other Americans who rely on them.

To state the obvious, the burden of this crisis should not fall on our border communities. The Federal Government, after all, is charged with the responsibility of managing our international borders, and that includes migration.

Simply stated, the Biden administration has refused to deal with this crisis or, frankly, even to really acknowledge it. But that doesn't change the fact that my State--or any other State, for that matter-- should not be left to manage the fallout alone.

Now, since April, more than 11,000 migrants have voluntarily boarded buses from Texas to Washington, DC; New York; and Chicago. In the past, the leaders of these cities have made it clear that they would welcome migrants with open arms. They self-designate as a sanctuary city. Well, now this is their opportunity to provide that sanctuary and those services and relieve some of the burden on the border States that have borne the disproportionate burden for all this time. But you would have thought that something nefarious was going on or a genuine public emergency had occurred. They don't care a whit about 2 million people showing up on the Texas border. But when they show up on a bus in Washington, DC, or Chicago or New York, they howl like a dog that has been hit with a rock.

After ignoring the border crisis during the entirety of the Biden administration, the arrival of a few thousands migrants in these sanctuary cities has put them into an absolute panic. The Democratic Mayor of Washington, DC, for example, declared a public health emergency after her city received only a few thousand migrants. Two million migrants at the border in my State, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, and they didn't raise a peep. But a few thousand migrants to show up here in Washington, DC--roughly the same number that arrive on the southern border every single day--you would have thought there was an emergency.

The Democratic mayor of New York said that his city is ``nearly to the breaking point.'' This is a city of 8\1/2\ million people. Yet the mayor said his city is near the breaking point even though it has welcomed only a few thousand migrants. Give me a break.

Our colleague from Illinois, the majority whip, called the transportation of these migrants ``cruel and inhumane.'' Giving people a bus ride to their ultimate destination strikes me as not cruel and not inhumane. The White House Press Secretary had the temerity to say it was ``shameful and reckless.'' Well, what is shameful and reckless is the Biden administration's border crisis that it simply ignored for the last 2 years.

Vice President Kamala Harris even went so far as to call this ``the height of irresponsibility'' and a ``dereliction of duty.'' I doubt Vice President Harris recognizes the many layers of irony in that statement. After all, last March, she was designated as the border czar for the Biden administration, but she wouldn't visit the border. She was charged, by the President of the United States, with finding solutions to address this ongoing crisis. If she wants to talk about dereliction of duty, her refusal to acknowledge, much less address, the border crisis is a prime example of irresponsibility and dereliction of duty.

But what is even more misleading about her statement is the fact that transporting migrants to cities far from the southern border is nothing new. In fact, the Biden administration has been doing it all along. Here is a chart. It shows the cities that have been receiving migrants from the Biden administration since the President became President of the United States in January of 2021: In Washington State, Yakima, if I am pronouncing that correctly; Minneapolis; Denver; Phoenix; Yuma; even Atlanta; White Plains; Scranton; Baltimore; Harrisburg; Allentown; Jacksonville, FL; Birmingham, AL; Houston, TX; Brownsville; San Antonio; Dallas--all of these cities have been the recipients of migrants transported by the Biden administration.

In April of last year, the Associated Press published a story with the headline ``Unaccompanied children from border arrive in Pennsylvania.'' The following month, the local news station in Chattanooga, TN, posted a story with the headline ``Late-night flights carrying migrant children arrive in Chattanooga.'' Here is another headline from October of last year: ``Biden administration quietly flies illegal immigrants to New York in the middle of the night.'' We didn't hear the howls of protest from Mayor Adams or the Governor when the Biden administration was doing what they are now complaining about. Though they don't talk about it very often, the Biden administration has a history of transporting migrants to cities far from the U.S.- Mexico border, and they didn't call it shameful or reckless then.

Just to be clear, when somebody claims asylum at the border and passes an initial test of a credible fear of persecution, they are then given a notice to appear for a future court hearing that may be years off, with millions of cases in the backlog. That is called a notice to appear, and it shouldn't surprise anybody that, over the years, after people have already made their way into the interior of the United States, that many of them don't show up for their court hearing. This is part of what the Border Patrol said is a lack of consequences associated with entering the United States in an irregular fashion. Oh, by the way, 90 percent of the people who do show up for their court hearing are not granted asylum. They don't qualify.

As I have stressed on many occasions, Mr. President, communities in my State do not have the capacity, the infrastructure, or the resources to handle this crisis alone. As New York City, the largest city in America, raises alarms over a few thousand migrants, I can't help but think about what happened when 15,000 Haitian migrants showed up under a bridge in Del Rio, TX, a town of 35,000 people. The group of migrants who showed up under that bridge in Del Rio equated to more than 40 percent of the city's population. Can you imagine what a challenge that was just to feed people, provide them humane treatment, sanitation. But if you extrapolate that 15,000 in a city of 35,000, that would be the equivalent of more than 3 million people showing up in New York City or 280,000 arriving in Washington, DC, in the course of just 1 week.

So whether they intended to do so or not, the mayors of Washington, DC and New York City--and Chicago, for that matter--have shown that the weight of this crisis is extraordinarily heavy, and they are only experiencing a tiny fraction of what Texas communities have faced every day for the last year and a half. And do you know what? Apparently the Biden administration simply doesn't care. As these mayors now know, caring for these migrants who cross our border is a herculean task because of the sheer volume of people coming across.

Legal immigration is part of the secret to our success as a country. We naturalize a million people a year. But these are people who have chosen to jump ahead of those waiting in line to enter the country lawfully, and we simply don't have the resources in place at the border or other places to deal with this vast tsunami of humanity--food, clothing, shelter, medical care, translation services, legal services, sanitation. Communities in Texas apparently have been expected to bear the entire brunt and the entire burden. It is time consuming, it is labor intensive, it is extraordinarily expensive, and it is dangerous.

The criminal organizations that are getting rich moving these migrants into the country for $5-, $10-, $15,000 a person are flooding the Border Patrol with these migrants, diverting necessary resources from the Border Patrol from interdicting the drugs that are entering our country that killed 108,000 Americans last year alone. Seventy-one thousand of those 108,000 died of fentanyl overdose, a synthetic opioid. Precursors come from China, get to Mexico, are manufactured there, and are smuggled into the United States. And fentanyl has taken far too many lives in every State and in every city in this Nation, and yet the Biden administration has not awakened to the fact that they are being played; that part of this business model, if you want to call it that, of flooding the border with migrants is to divert the Border Patrol and law enforcement officials from stopping these drugs, this poison, from coming into the country.

Then, yes, in every city in the Nation, we have seen a spike in crime. Do you know who the distribution network is in the United States for the drugs that the cartels smuggle across the border? It is gangs in every city and in every State in the country. And who is responsible for most of the gun violence and crime in our cities? It is these gangs that are the principal distribution network for the drugs that come across the border. Yet the Biden administration has not connected the dots. I don't know why. The DEA, or the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI Director--there are a lot of people in the administration who could inform the President and the Vice President of what the facts are, but they apparently are not even curious, or, if they know, they don't seem to care.

From El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley, as I said, Texas shares a 1,200-mile border with Mexico out of our total border of 2,000 miles. The communities situated along that border simply cannot handle the monumental job of dealing with this flow of migrants and the failure of the Federal Government to live up to its responsibilities. But this isn't a partisan matter.

My friend Oscar Leeser, who is the mayor of El Paso, TX--he is a proud Democrat--he has been busing migrants to get them off the streets of El Paso to the cities where they want to go.

He said a few days ago:

People are not coming to El Paso, they're coming to America.

It is only fair for other parts of the country to bear the burden that we have borne alone in my State and in other border States, as long as the Federal Government is simply advocating its responsibility to deal with illegal immigration and to fix this crisis. They know what to do. They simply are refusing to do it, presumably because some of their political supporters don't believe in anything except open borders.

The Biden administration has completely abdicated its duty to secure the border, and it has failed to supply border communities with the resources they need to try to manage this fallout. The truth is, no matter what the resources were, the numbers are just overwhelming. And that is the point. The cartels get rich; they smuggle drugs and additional migrants; and that is the point. So it is not going to stop until the Biden administration wakes up out of its deep sleep and deals with the reality of what is happening at the border.

In the last 12 months, Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 2.3 million migrants at the southern border, and that total grows every single day. All you have to do is turn on your TV set and see people streaming across the border, many of them turning themselves in, getting into this asylum system where they ultimately melt into the great American heartland, never to be heard from again, successfully making their way into the country.

Our amazing men and women at the Border Patrol are grappling with staffing shortages and poor morale. How would you like to be a police officer where the mayor and city council say: Well, we had to hire a police force, but we are really not going to fund that police force or we are not going to do anything to recruit more people to serve in that police force. And do you know what? We really don't care whether they enforce the law or not.

That is the message that the Border Patrol is receiving from the Biden administration. So, of course, morale is bad. Of course, it is hard to recruit. The agents are outnumbered, they are overwhelmed, and, frankly, disgusted with the lack of leadership.

Border communities are buckling under the weight of vast humanitarian needs, and now even the self-proclaimed sanctuary cities don't seem to want to help. Unfortunately, the Biden administration appears to have no intention of fixing the problem. And it sure seems like they don't think anybody else should have to help either.

It is leaving Texas and other border States to buckle under the weight of a crisis that we had no hand in creating. It is forcing Texas taxpayers to make up for the failure of the Federal Government to perform its responsibilities. And what is worse, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Members of this body are trying to paint my State as the enemy for trying to deal with the hand that it has been dealt while they continue to refuse to lend a helping hand.

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