Biden's Border Crisis

Floor Speech

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Ms. MALLIOTAKIS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about how the crisis created at our border by President Biden's executive orders is affecting my city and also the Senate's refusal to pass H.R. 2, the border security act that we passed in May.

In addition, it is only exacerbated by Mayor Eric Adams' insistence that these individuals who enter our country are entitled to free housing at taxpayer expense. New York City has now over 200 shelters and is housing more illegal immigrants than actual citizens of New York.

Not all of these individuals are innocent asylum seekers. Let's be honest and let's be clear. First of all, many of them are using the generosity of this country to gain entry. We know that more than half, between 50 percent and two-thirds, of these individuals are denied their asylum cases when they come to court. There are also many who have already been arrested for committing crimes in our community.

At just one of the 205 migrant shelters, the Roosevelt Hotel, there have been dozens of arrests, mostly for domestic violence, robberies, and assaulting police officers, as well. Earlier this year, four individuals that were housed at the Watson Hotel were arrested for shoplifting tens of thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise from Macy's at Roosevelt Field Mall.

Just this week, an illegal immigrant, who was previously released from Customs and Border Protection and the New York State Police was arrested for a murder on September 2. He was in our country and on our streets, despite having a warrant out for his arrest for a previous stabbing.

There were two individuals who are accused of sexual assault in Erie County in western New York. Even the Erie County executive, an elected Democrat, has had enough of what is going on, demanding that Mayor Adams pause putting more of these asylum seekers in his community until these security threats are addressed.

Now, this Monday, we marked 22 years since the 9/11 attacks. Democrats and Republicans say, ``never forget,'' yet here we are in a situation with an open border that just in the first 10 months of this fiscal year, 146 people who appeared on the FBI terror watch list were apprehended at our southern border. Combined with the last fiscal year, we are talking about 250 individuals.

What we should be more concerned about, however, are the 1.7 million individuals who are the got-aways, meaning they had zero interaction with our law enforcement or our government. They are in the interior of the country. We don't know who they are. We don't know where they are. We don't know what their intentions are. That is the estimate that CBP is saying.

Yes, we have had millions of people cross our border, but guess what? There are 1.6 million of them who we don't know who they are or what their intentions are. This should be concerning, considering that the FBI has just confirmed that ISIS is smuggling Uzbek asylum seekers across our southern border. An Iranian national was caught in the interior after Iran has threatened revenge and harsh retaliation against the United States, and they said they are going to conduct terrorism on our soil. Yes, the same Iran that Joe Biden just gave $6 billion to.

More than 107,000 Americans died from overdoses last year, and two- thirds of those deaths are attributed to mostly fentanyl. The DEA recently made over 3,000 arrests of drug cartel networks operating right here in the United States of America thanks to Joe Biden's open border. The deaths are equivalent to a commercial airline crashing every single day.

I ask my colleagues on the Senate side: When are you going to pass our H.R. 2, our border security act? If the President is not going to undo his executive orders, we need to take action. The House passed it. Unfortunately, I think every Democrat in this Chamber voted against it. Let's see the Senate do its job and pass H.R. 2. If the President is not going to undo the crisis that he created, then we must do it for him.

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