Relating to A National Emergency By the President on February 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to slightly drift off, but not really leave this point.

Fentanyl kills 5,000 in New York. It kills 100,000 in the U.S. It kills thousands in Canada and thousands in Mexico. Those numbers are staggering, but those numbers are a small part of the tragedy to families.

For every fentanyl death in our countries, there are families who are suffering. For every fentanyl death, there is somebody who goes to the hospital multiple times. For every fentanyl death, there are three or four people who are living homeless, drug addicted, and their families are suffering. For every death, there is, in fact, a broken relationship somewhere. That is not 100,000 in America. That is millions in America.

Mr. Speaker, I don't know of an American that you talk to about fentanyl who won't tell you that they know someone whose family, their health, or their child has been destroyed by fentanyl, many of them being destroyed as we speak.

There are about 1,900 miles of Mexican border between the United States and Mexico. I represent about 80 of those miles right there outside of San Diego. I have seen the border closed as best it possibly could in an amazing way. I have seen submarines still coming in the Pacific to try to circumvent it. I know we will never get to zero.

All the President has asked Canada to do is show the kind of effort they can afford as a First World country, and that effort should be far greater at all of their borders than Mexico's, which is a relatively poor country. That effort should be shown. If it is shown, the President has made it clear that these tariffs will immediately go away.

This isn't a tariff that is just because you don't like someone. It is a tariff that says this behavior, this leverage, is being used for one purpose: to get you to live up to a standard that is in your own best interests.

By the way, the 5,500 miles of land border between the U.S. and Canada is our longest by far. The thousands of miles of sea border that Canada needs to also patrol is huge. This President stands with Canada to help them do it, to help in technical ways and every other way, but we cannot allow millions of Americans and countless other Canadians and Mexicans to continue to suffer without us having the real empathy to do something about it.

The chairman said: What about the 5,000? We got this answer: How do you know that they came from Canada? I am sorry, but every time we have a major bust on the Mexican border, my agents tell me that we are getting maybe 10 percent, maybe 20 percent in certain areas. We are never getting 80 or 90 percent. The reality is that those are indications of a small amount of what is getting in through Buffalo and other borders into the United States.

Although the gentleman from New York is from a fairly populous State, he is not from a State without a large rural border, one that you can simply walk across with impunity normally, which has been used to smuggle drugs successfully.

The point I make here today--and I thank the chairman for the time-- is: Every life matters. If the President of the United States cares about his 5,000 or 500 or 5 or 1 enough to use the power of the executive office to get the right thing out of our neighbors to the north and the south, then I want to stand with him. I would never take away a tool being used to save even one life, much less hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of families.

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