Government Funding and Immigration

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Johnson). We appreciate him. I played with him on the baseball team. He was the catcher, and we will miss his catching abilities. God bless him in his future endeavors.

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks. I appreciate his very prescient comments. Before I get on too much more, I have a bill that pulls us out of the World Health Organization. I would encourage all of my colleagues to sign it.

If you watched the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, today speaking at the World Economic Forum, they are planning to use the next epidemic to impose world governance. I mean, he basically said that. I invite you to watch that. That is the head of the World Health Organization.

Let's talk about what my good friend from Texas talked about. He has been a leader on this issue, and we have both been fighting this for some time. That is border security. I can't help but recall the words of President Biden, who was then a candidate for the Presidency, and he was asked in the debate on the Democrat side, they said: What do you tell people at the border? He said: I would urge them to surge to the border if he became President.

There is a reason that in the Zocalo of Tijuana people had T-shirts on saying: Joe Biden, let me in. The reason is because he said he would. There is a reason that the first month after Joe Biden issued I believe it was 90 executive orders undoing the border policy of the Trump administration on the first 24 hours, by the way, that you had the first record of border crossings or these encounters, and that was 150,000. Think about that, 150,000.

Our minds were blown. Wow, we were saying, that is more than 5,000 a day, a little over 5,000 a day for that, that is incredible. Then the next month was more, February was more. March of 2021 exceeded that. Record after record after record until we end up last month with 302,000 encounters.

You begin looking at it and you say, well, how does this happen? Is it just policy?

I used to think it was incompetence. I really did. That is giving them the benefit of the doubt. I thought after the first three months in a row of records, they are just incompetent, they don't quite know what they are doing. Then we got to meet Secretary Mayorkas, he finally came in and he testified. At first, before he testified, he came into the Border Security Caucus and talked to us there, and he said: The border is secure.

Now, mind you, just on the encounters alone for that first 3 months, you were pushing 430,000. For known got-aways, you were pushing about an additional 110,000. Unknown got-aways are estimated to be at least another 75,000. So, you have 600,000-plus illegal border crossings in his first 3 months that he was running DHS, and he sat there and told us that the border was secure and that we have operational control.

I will remember when my colleague asked him: Do you have operational control pursuant to the Secure Fence Act of 2006? He said yes.

Then we got the language out. I think Mr. Roy got the language out and said: Let's read the language.

He still insisted. He knew that they were not in compliance with the law. He knew it. Yet, he persists to craft a narrative that the border is secure.

Of course, it is not secure, which is why you had about 450,000 people enter our country illegally last month.

I am suggesting to America that this country cannot take 12 more months of the Mayorkas security plan on the border because 12 more months would be over 5 million people getting into this country illegally.

What is happening now is they are releasing approximately 80 percent of everyone who comes in. They release them into the country.

I was in Lukeville the week before Christmas. Lukeville is the hub right now and has been. Over a 2-week period, they had 30,000 people come through Lukeville--nowhere else, Lukeville.

I was down there in the heart of that, and I was allowed to talk to people who had not been formally arrested yet. I would go up and ask them: Where are you from? Where are you going? Why did you come? Those were my three questions.

We had the gentlemen from Burkina Faso, another few from Senegal, and another few from Guinea. Those are all African nations.

Then, we had folks from India and Pakistan. That is South Asia, India and South Asia. Pakistan is considered to be the Middle East, although in my mind, they are still South Asia. That is interesting.

Of course, we always have some folks from Guatemala.

You have to understand where Lukeville is. The reason that you have a port of entry there is because it is on kind of a highway that goes from Phoenix, from Ajo, down to a place called Rocky Point, Mexico, which is on the Sea of Cortez. People go down there and recreate down there.

When we asked them where they are going, why they are here, I would say: Where are you going? Everyone that I asked starts fiddling around in their backpacks and pockets, and they pull out a card. On that card will be two or three names with phone numbers and an address somewhere in the country. It is laminated. It is not like this. This is not laminated. Theirs are laminated.

I said: Where are you going? We have a guy going to the Bronx. We have people going to Missouri, Oklahoma, Houston.

If you are going to Houston, why are you crossing into Lukeville? You should have been over in Del Rio or RGV. I don't know why you are here. When you ask them that, it is because they were directed to come there. The coyotes, the cartels, tell them this is where you are going to go, where you are going to come in.

They release them, and they are in good shape. They are in good shape. They haven't walked. They haven't come through the Darien Gap in Panama. Those folks are the folks that are ending up over in Del Rio or Eagle Pass right now.

Those coming to Lukeville, they have flown into Mexico. They have been bused up. They get bused.

How did you get here? Well, we came in from--there is a gap in the gate, in the fence down here.

The border wall that President Trump put up 30 feet high, just on the other side going down to the Sea of Cortez, like I told you, there is a freeway. The cartels will come up and run a real quick couple of cuts. They will remove two slats from the fence, pull them down, and just start flooding people through.

I talked to the guy who repairs them. That morning, in about 4 hours' time, they had already repaired six breaches.

I tell you these things so you understand how real this is. Our lever as Members of Congress is the purse strings. We are not going to have success with just policy because this is a lawless administration. We have to have enforcement as a condition of funding this government.
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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I want to point out really quickly, on parole, which my colleague mentioned, parole by statute is meant to be a case-by-case humanitarian administrative remedy. This administration has granted parole to more than a million people.

What parole does is it actually gives you a work permit. You are supposed to be here. You have a relative that needs surgery. You are going to be here for 2 weeks. Extraordinarily, before Biden, it was about 15 a year. In this administration, it is over a million.

I also want to talk about CBP because those line agents are working their tails off. They are doing everything they can, but they are being undermined by Secretary Mayorkas and this administration.

I have been down there many times and talked to them. Their morale is so low. They want to enforce, but like in Eagle Pass and Lukeville, both places I have been, once you get away from the crowd where they are processing, you can drive along the border for miles. We drove along Lukeville literally for miles.

The only people we saw was the guy in charge of rebuilding the fence and the hundreds of people that were walking along the border road who had come through those holes illegally.

We need to use our lever that our Founders gave to us. It is the most effective. I urge our colleagues to reconsider, as we go forward, using that lever to prevent this administration from avoiding its duty to enforce our border security.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for joining me, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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