Secure the Border Act of 2023

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, we are here today because of the abject failure of the administration to do its fundamental duty to protect the United States.

We have a wide open border, empowering cartels, empowering China to the detriment of American citizens and to the migrants who seek to come here, supposedly in the name of compassion. However, that is in the false name of compassion.

Dead migrants, lying along the Rio Grande and in ranches in south Texas. The extent to which migrants suffer in the Texas heat--53 dying in a tractor-trailer last summer in San Antonio; thousands being sold into the sex trafficking trade, being used as crass political pawns by a party devoid of anything substantive to take this country forward.

Republicans are standing up strongly to make sure that this country will stand for the rule of law that sets our country apart around the globe and attracts so many to want to come here.

Border Patrol right now apprehended over 10,000 migrants on Monday and 11,000 on Tuesday, the highest single-day totals ever recorded. There were 26,000 got-aways and 660,000 migrants waiting in Mexico. The President of Guatemala has confirmed 80,000 Venezuelan migrants are traveling to the U.S. ahead of title 42's expiration; 15,000 Venezuelan migrants crossed into Brownsville; Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said he estimates 60,000 to 65,000 migrants are in northern Mexico.

I got a text from local law enforcement yesterday saying: We are almost at broken arrow. Every sector is near 150 percent capacity. DHS is calling for border agents from other northern and coastal sectors to help the southern border. The first 550 in a group of 1,500 servicemembers from the Army and Marines were set to arrive. A shootout between the Mexican Army and human smugglers erupted at the Pharr- Reynosa International Bridge. Schools in El Paso are adding more security. El Paso ran out of shelter. El Paso declared an emergency. Brownsville declared an emergency. Laredo declared an emergency. San Antonio is preparing; their migrant shelters are expressing concerns about being overwhelmed. Even our Nation's Capital is being overwhelmed. Now, the New York City mayor--a sanctuary city-- criticizing bussing, is bussing migrants outside of New York City out to the suburbs because my Democratic colleagues and the Democratic administration and Democratic leaders in so-called sanctuary cities don't give a whit about migrants. It is about political power, and they are costing lives. They are endangering Americans. They are causing children to die from fentanyl poisoning, and they know it. That is what is so pathetic and sad.

Republicans offer legislation today that would force this administration to do the job it refuses to do, by ending the magnet, by stopping the releases, by forcing us to do the job we are supposed to do to protect unaccompanied children from being atop train cars, being subjected to the abuses of cartels, holding families together while we adjudicate claims of asylum, and, yes, providing for a path for asylum while making sure we don't create a magnet for the abuse of migrants in the false name of compassion.

Republicans are leading. We are doing the job that the President refuses to do. The American people know it; they see it; and my Democratic colleagues are going to suffer the consequences for this abject failure.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source