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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last Thursday, I traveled back to my home State of Texas but this time to the U.S.-Mexico border, along with Senator Cruz--my colleague from Texas--as well as three of our non- Texas Senate colleagues. Senators Barrasso, Lee, and Ricketts joined us for a series of tours and meetings in the Rio Grande Valley, which is unlike any other place in America.

This has been one of many times that Senator Cruz and I have welcomed our colleagues to the border because every time I hear people in Washington, DC, talk about the border, it is most likely something they have gleaned from movies or a novel that they have read somewhere. It is not based on reality.

And the truth is, the reality at the border has changed substantially from years ago when illegal immigration was primarily people coming to the United States to work and send money home. It has changed entirely to a global human smuggling enterprise that enriches the criminal organization to organize it, charging tens of thousands of dollars a head to people they smuggle into the United States. And if you come from special interest countries, like Iran, Syria, for example, you may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars, but you can still make your way in because of the broken border policies of the Biden administration, which I will talk about here in a moment.

It really is a shame that such a beautiful, vibrant region of our country that has benefited tremendously from the opportunities that come from living along an international border has been damaged and hurt in such an unfortunate way by the flood of humanity and drugs coming across.

Legitimate trade and travel have shaped the unique culture of our border and serve as a boon not just to local economies but to the entire American economy. But like so many other areas along the U.S.- Mexico border, this region has become overwhelmed by the weight of the current border crisis.

Last month alone, Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley Sector--just one of many sectors of the Border Patrol--logged more than 45,000 border crossings. In the last year, nearly 340,000 migrants have crossed the Rio Grande Valley Sector, and, overwhelmingly, the Biden administration has simply just released them into the interior of the United States, which has, in turn, proved to be a magnet for more people to come.

If, in fact, the Biden administration wanted to deter illegal immigration, they would stop people from coming to the border and entering the country illegally, and it would send people back who somehow made it over. That would act as a deterrent.

But right now, notwithstanding the messages of people like Mayor Adams, from New York City, when he recently went to Mexico City, he said: Don't come. Don't come--well, the people who make the dangerous journey from their home to the border and into the interior of the United States, they frequently have access to this thing called television and to this instrument we call a telephone. So they can see people making their way across the border successfully, and they can talk to relatives who have made the trip on the telephone who say: I made it. You can too. Thus, we have seen this huge flood of migrants across the border swell into a virtual tsunami.

It used to be that the overwhelming number of migrants came from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries. And that is when I hear Vice President Harris and others talk--Secretary Blinken--about root causes, like they want to go in and nation-build in order to discourage people from those countries to come to the United States, which tells me they really don't understand the nature of the current phenomenon because it is not just people coming from Mexico and Central America; President Biden's border policies have made it so that people from virtually anywhere in the world can come to the southern border, say the magic words, and be released into the United States.

In fact, we learned on our most recent trip that many migrants don't even claim asylum before they are released because there simply isn't enough capacity to hold them once they cross the border and then return them where they came from. And there aren't anywhere near enough removal flights to deport migrants without valid legal claims to stay here.

So it is no surprise that people are traveling from all over the world, literally, to take advantage of this open border policy. Agents in the Rio Grande Valley Sector told us that they have apprehended, recently, migrants from China, from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and other countries around the globe. America's southern border is the world's worst kept secret.

When we arrived on Thursday night, we witnessed the sheer volume and diversity of migrants arriving at the border. Some of my colleagues spoke with a family from Moldova. You will have to look that up on your map. But it is not Mexico. It is not Central America. But they just crossed over the border moments earlier. You might ask yourself what would a man and his wife and their 2- or 3-year-old daughter--how did they make it from Eastern Europe to Texas's Rio Grande Valley. And the answer is simple: with human smugglers.

Cartels and other criminal organizations have hit the jackpot with the Biden border crisis. Indeed, you could say that President Biden has outsourced U.S. immigration policy to these criminal organizations because they are running the show, not President Biden.

In 2021 alone, they made an estimated $13 billion from human smuggling operations. That is just the human smuggling alone. Since then, the number of border crossings, of course, has skyrocketed. They get paid by the head, so that is good business for the cartels. And I imagine their profits have skyrocketed even further.

Cartel smuggling operations aren't limited to Mexico and Central America. For the right price, these criminal organizations will help anyone from anywhere reach the United States and make their way into the interior.

As those who have made the journey can attest, it is an extremely dangerous one, particularly for vulnerable women and children. Human smugglers don't view these migrants as fellow human beings; they view them as a commodity. Migrants are abused, neglected, extorted for more money. Women are often raped or sold for sex. Some migrants have been simply abandoned and left for dead if they become injured or unable to continue their travel.

At one checkpoint, which is about 100 miles into the interior of Falfurrias, TX--it is called Brooks County--they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in this little, relatively poor, Texas county burying the bones of dead migrants who have died from exposure in their county because what happens is, once people come across the border, the smugglers--sometimes called coyotes--they put them in stash houses. Actually, we saw one stash house. And then when the time is right, they are loaded in the vans and then transported up the highway. That is the reason for the checkpoint about 100 miles inland. But what the coyotes do is they tell the migrants: Get out of the vehicle before we reach the checkpoint; walk around the checkpoint; and we will meet you on the north side.

Well, for migrants who have come hundreds of miles, or further, already suffering from exposure to make it in the hot Texas summers, where it frequently exceeds 100 degrees, it should be no surprise that some of them--many of them, unfortunately--do not make it. So that is another consequence of the Biden border crisis and open border policies.

And even after they cross the border, many migrants still owe massive debts to the cartels who will not hesitate to use them for forced labor or sex trafficking. In fact, if you go to parts of Houston, TX, you will see women who basically are sex slaves because they are working off their debt to the people who smuggled to get them into the interior of the United States in the first place.

As I mentioned, we also visited a stash house where we saw the migrants awaiting the next step of their journey, and I hate to imagine what the cartels have in store for these individuals. But we know these migrants are not the only victims of the border crisis. While agents are busy processing and transporting migrants, it creates an open highway for cartels and criminal organizations smuggling drugs into the United States. They, of course, have spotters. They use drones for technology to see where the Border Patrol is and where they are not. And they use that knowledge to smuggle fentanyl, heroin--and God knows what else--across the border and into our communities.

Here is a shocking statistic, at least it was to me. I don't know whether the President of the United States even knows this. But the No. 1 killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 is a synthetic opioid called fentanyl--leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45.

We know where it comes from. The precursors come from China. They make their way to Mexico where the cartels mix them up, run them through industrial-capacity pill presses, and make them look like relatively innocuous pharmaceuticals. And then when a young man or a young woman, let's say, in high school, like Sienna--whose father gave me this rubber wristband at the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District last April--they take this, thinking, Well, it is a relatively innocuous pharmaceutical like Percocet or Xanax, but then they don't wake up the next day, of course, leaving grieving families wondering what in the world happened and how could this happen to them and their child.

Drug overdoses alone have taken the lives of about 110,000 Americans a year, currently. And as I said, fentanyl is responsible for about two-thirds of it. Of course, we aren't just worried about substances coming across the border but dangerous people too: criminals, people on the Terrorist Watchlist, people coming from special interest countries like the ones I mentioned.

It used to be that the number of people on the Terrorist Watchlist who were apprehended along the southern border by the Border Patrol was in the single digits. In the past year, at least 169 were apprehended. And that doesn't account for the ``got-aways.'' The ``got-aways'' are the 1\1/2\ million people who have been seen on cameras or detected on sensors but who have evaded capture by the Border Patrol. And you can bet that they are up to no good because they simply--if they actually wanted to make their way into the interior of the United States and didn't have a criminal record or were transporting drugs or on a Terrorist Watchlist, they can just--like almost everybody else under the Biden administration--come to the border, say the magic words, and the Biden administration would release them into the interior of the United States. But we have had 1\1/2\ million ``got-aways'' evade law enforcement since President Biden took office, including 169 people on the Terrorist Watchlist.

It seems like a long time ago to many people, particularly if you are relatively young, but it was September 11, 2001, where 19 people killed 3,000 Americans by flying airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and taking down a plane over Pennsylvania.

So 19 terrorists killed 3,000 Americans back in 2001. We know that at least 169 people on the Terrorist Watchlist have been apprehended so far. We don't know how many actually have made their way into the United States, but it is a safe bet it is people from countries all around the world where the prevailing ideology is to kill Americans in the United States.

So the truth is really, depressingly, stranger than even fiction here because the potential for us to wake up someday and have a terrorist attack in our country as a result of uncontrolled migration across the southern border is very real, and it is growing by the day.

Yes, there is a humanitarian and security crisis at the border, and it is impacting all of our country. That is the reason you have Senators from Nebraska and Utah and Wyoming coming to the border, because, as several of them said, every State is now a border State. Recently, one of our colleagues from Montana was there, and he said: You know, the fentanyl that comes across the border has made its way into the communities in my State, in Montana, in the northern border of our country.

So every State has become a border State as a result of the Biden open border policy.

We know migrants are being exploited and abused. American families are being terrorized by the opioid epidemic. Cities in Texas and across the country are struggling to keep up with the mass humanitarian needs of migrants. Yes, we heard from Mayor Adams from New York; we heard from Mayor Bowser here in Washington, DC; the mayor of Chicago; the Governors of Massachusetts and Illinois. This is a national crisis.

The situation is extremely complex, but the solution doesn't have to be. We need deterrence through consequences. That is what the Border Patrol tells me and tells anybody who will listen. If there are no consequences to entering the country illegally, people are going to just keep coming. I think we all understand why. But if we are going to deliver consequences, which means to deter more people from coming, that means ending catch-and-release, which is the policy of the Biden administration. We need to actually remove people who have no legal reason to remain in the United States. That means expedited removal. We need to send a message to people who have no legal reasons to remain in the United States that if they come, they will not be able to stay. It is really not any more complicated than that. Congress doesn't need to do a rewrite of our immigration laws in order to give President Biden the authority to do these things. He already has that authority under existing law, but he won't use it.

Deterrence is a key component of a safe and secure border. Until the administration starts deterring would-be migrants with frivolous asylum claims from even approaching our border, we will remain in a constant state of crisis. And I predict it will get worse. We have just seen a record number of people coming across the border. That number is going to continue to grow as more and more people know that if they show up at the border and say the magic words, President Biden will say: Come on in.

The only way to truly understand what is happening at the border is to see it firsthand and to speak with the individuals who live and work in our border communities. I have had the pleasure, as I said earlier, of taking dozens of Senators, both Republicans and Democrats, down to the border to hear from these men and women firsthand. I appreciate all of our colleagues who made the trip and continue to advocate for smart border policies, especially, most recently, Senators Barrasso, Lee, and Ricketts.

I want to thank the many men and women in the Rio Grande Valley who took the time out of their schedule to speak with us. Their input is absolutely invaluable to the work of the Senate. I am extremely grateful to each of them.

I want to especially thank the law enforcement officers who are on the frontlines of this crisis. Every day, Federal, State, and local law enforcement put their lives on the line to safeguard our border and stop potentially dangerous individuals and drugs from reaching our communities, but they need our help, and they are not getting it today. They deserve more than our gratitude; they deserve our commitment to fix this crisis in any way we can.

President Biden has not only proven himself incapable but also unwilling to address this border crisis, so Congress needs to step in and fill the void. In the coming weeks, the Senate will advance legislation to address some of our greatest national security threats, including action to address the border crisis.

As my colleagues and I saw last week, this crisis cannot be fixed with more no-strings-attached funding. We will not fund current border policies under the Biden administration. As long as a flood of humanity is coming across the border at this pace, it doesn't matter how many Border Patrol agents or immigration judges we have; it won't be enough.

The only way to address this crisis is by deterring more illegal immigration, and the simplest way of doing that is by delivering consequences for entering the country illegally. It is a tried-and-true strategy that has worked countless times before.

In the coming weeks, I hope Congress will step in where President Biden has refused and establish deterrence once again.

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