Republican Congressman Chip Roy on debt ceiling debate and border policy
Interview
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Thanks. Great to be on.
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Yes, thanks.
So, first of all, I wouldn't say that addresses immigration. It is in fact designed to be a border security-focused piece of legislation. It is designed to, frankly, force the administration's to do what current law actually requires the president to do, which is to maintain operational control of the border.
And, in fact, they are losing control. I have gotten text messages today from Border Patrol agents and members of the Texas Department of Public Safety, DPS, telling me that they are effectively at a broken arrow situation. They have got overrun facilities, that they have got Chinese nationals coming across, that they have lost complete control of being able to maintain it.
You have got El Paso has declared a state of emergency. You have got Brownsville that has declared a state of emergency. Laredo has declared a state of emergency. San Antonio is preparing for overwhelming amounts of migrants in their centers in San Antonio.
The reality is, we have a crisis at the border that is getting worse. And it is because the president and because Secretary Mayorkas has basically been using loopholes to force the releases of people into the United States, which is causing the flood at the border. And our legislation would end those loopholes.
It would stop the abuse of asylum and it would stop the abuse of other provisions of law from unaccompanied children and so forth to cause releases in the United States, which is actually endangering the migrants in question, 856 dead migrants along South Texas in the Rio Grande found on ranches, 856, 53 cooked in a tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas, last summer, millions of immigrants coming up to our border.
And you got 72,000 dead Americans from fentanyl pouring into our communities because we're not policing the border.
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We need to do something about it. And this bill would do that.
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Of course there is. We're a sovereign nation. This is the problem.
My Democratic colleagues do not believe that we're a sovereign nation. We do have laws. We do have doors that are open for people to come here legally. We do have asylum protections. And the bill that we passed today allows for asylum to be claimed and processed. What it doesn't allow is for people to bum-rush our border and get released into the United States.
The fact that there are lots of people in the world who would like to have a better job and come to this country, God bless them. I do not begrudge them. But we are undermining the rule of law that causes people to want to come to this country. We are undermining the Western Hemisphere. We are empowering China.
Talk to the moms, the three moms, the fentanyl moms who lost their kids that I had breakfast with in Austin last Friday morning. Talk to the parents of the four dead children in my school district where my kids live, where we live in, Hays County, Texas, and who have lost their kids to fentanyl. Talk to them.
Talk to the thousands of grieving families that have lost their loved ones to fentanyl, because we're allowing China to have control of our border, because the cartels have control of our border. That's the reality. You could stop it right now with our legislation. There are 12 people that stand between chaos and security. And it's 11 Democrats in the Senate and the Democratic president in the White House.
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Yes.
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Well, look, I'd love to talk to Hakeem and see what he actually means by that.
I mean, if you get to the end result where we actually reduce spending, and do what we need to do to stop the fiscal insanity, while we manage and go through and figure out the debt ceiling along the terms of the deal that we throw out, certainly happy to have whatever conversation gets us to that end result.
But what we're not going to do is negotiate against ourselves. We're not going to be saying, well, we will give you this and give you this. They need to come forward with a proposal and figure out how we're going to get there. You want to have a short-term debt ceiling increase to try to do it, well, then that's going to cost something too.
We're not just going to do a three-month extension, which would also be a clean extension, borrowing more money, without some fiscal reforms. But we can maybe buy some time and get there. I'm open to ideas. But what we're not going to do is back away from what we have already put out as our proposal.
The president needs to step up to the plate, as he did when he was vice president and he negotiated a deal in 2011, as he did when he was a senator in '94, '84, and other times. He's been very clear that you need to come to the table without just raising the debt ceiling with a blank check and not actually getting fundamental fiscal reforms, which is what we're trying to do.
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We -- he's not going to bring a clean debt ceiling bill to the floor, because that is not something that Republicans got elected to do. He's not going to do that.
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Hey, thank you all.
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