Police Our Border Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. LaLOTA. What the heck, Mr. Chairman?
When he was President, President Truman had a placard on his desk: ``The buck stops here.'' It was a sign of responsibility that the Commander in Chief, the Chief Executive of our great country, wouldn't pass off as an excuse any responsibility that he was responsible for. Yet, what my colleague proposes to do is to disassociate the border crisis from the chief proponent of it and to pass the buck to somebody else.
Not 1, not 2, not 10, not 20. Rather, the President has taken 64 different actions to undermine border security through executive orders and other administrative actions, which have opened the border wide, canceled mass parole, repositioned border agents away from the border, paroled millions into the interior, causing crises in cities like New York.
It is the President's border crisis. There should be no renaming of this. There is one individual in our great country who can today, with the stroke of a pen, start to solve this crisis, undoing the same executive orders that he issued to get us into this crisis. That is President Biden.
Mr. Chair, I am in strong opposition to this amendment. Bipartisanship does not mean blind. It doesn't mean that we need to be ignorant to the facts that the Commander in Chief, President Biden, is the sole person responsible for this border crisis. Announcement by the Acting Chair
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Mr. LaLOTA. Mr. Chair, the cartels have more control over the U.S.- Mexico border in Cochise County than either the governments of Mexico or the United States.
That is what law enforcement officers from the Tucson sector of America's southern border told me on my fourth trip to the southern border recently: The cartels have more control over our border than we do.
What are the cartels doing with that control? To America's detriment, they are smuggling people and drugs across it every day.
I suppose we could blame the cartels because they are vicious and ruthless, but we should look closer to home for the blame.
We should look to the person most responsible for creating the disaster at the southern border. We should look to the very person who, when he took office, repealed 64 very effective policies, which were keeping our border safe: canceling border wall construction, instituting a mass parole system, and taking border agents away from the border to place them in migrant processing centers to process more and more migrants into the interior of the country.
Who is responsible for the disaster at the southern border? It is not climate change or migratory patterns. Rather, it is illegal immigration's best friends: President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas.
President Biden's open-border policies have allowed nearly 10,000 pounds of fentanyl to enter the United States so far this fiscal year.
This scourge has led to over 200,000 fentanyl deaths in the United States since President Biden started repealing those very effective border policies. In fact, fentanyl is the leading cause of death of Americans ages 18 to 45.
In response to President Biden's open-border policies, my good friend and fellow Long Islander, Congressman D'Esposito, has proposed an effective bill that would modify the requirements for reporting by the Attorney General on the impacts of the border crisis.
Included in Congressman D'Esposito's bill is language to better understand when law enforcement is exposed to fentanyl.
This legislation is critical to understanding the challenges law enforcement officers face every day while giving further insights into the crises at our southern border, those crises caused by President Biden.
I, alongside my good friend from Florida, Congressman Carlos Gimenez, am proposing an amendment to Congressman D'Esposito's bill that would further get to the root of the fentanyl crisis.
Our amendment requires the nationality of the migrant be included in the underlying reports when said migrant exposes a law enforcement officer to fentanyl during an encounter at the border.
It is imperative that we, as a Nation, collect more information on who and where these drugs are coming from so we can put an end to the fentanyl scourge.
We know from the DEA that most of the fentanyl consumed in the United States is produced in Mexico using precursors that come from China. Also, China is producing it on their own and sending it across the southern border, as well.
Fentanyl is not only deadly in miniscule doses, but it is also frequently unknowingly contained in other substances, which multiplies the risk and the range of its impact.
Mr. Chair, 75,000 Americans died in 2022 due to the scourge of fentanyl. Enough is enough. I urge all of my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment that will help better identify where the fentanyl is coming from.
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Mr. LaLOTA. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman, my colleague to the west of me in New York, says how most of the fentanyl is being seized at the ports of entry.
I would hope the gentleman would also simultaneously criticize the President for repositioning border agents away from those places where vehicles and people are coming to traffic the drugs across, and, instead, repositioning those same agents at migrant processing centers just to parole more and more people into the country.
If the gentleman is sincere about his concern for fentanyl coming in at ports of entry, he must call on the President to stop repositioning those agents away.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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