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CURRENT BORDER INSECURITY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Davidson) for 30 minutes.
Mr. DAVIDSON. Madam Speaker, I have requested this time to address part of the State of the Union that was not addressed last night. In fact, we saw that the President was so bold as to say that the border is secure and tout the fact that they have caught 2 million people at the border, as if that is success. That is what was said.
What wasn't said is what has been going on at the border for a long time and has been made worse by the policies that Joe Biden and his administration have put in place. Frankly, by the United States laws that he and his administration have ignored, and that Secretary Mayorkas enables every day that he leads the Department of Homeland Security down the wrong path for our country.
So, we are here to talk about, stop the cartels. We are introducing a bill called the Stop the Cartels Act. We spend so much time on the sympathetic cause of immigration and we conflate border security with immigration.
We can have an incredibly secure border regardless of our immigration policy, and border security is, in fact, national security. The cartels pose a serious threat to the United States of America. The products that they push in our communities have killed over 100,000 people.
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This past year, the leading cause of death for 18 to 45 year olds is fatal overdoses. The drugs are bad, but now they are poisoned with fentanyl, and we are not taking the threat seriously. So the first portion of the Stop the Cartels Act will focus on gathering intelligence.
As we look at the country of Mexico, our southern neighbor, it controls the whole land portion of our southern border. That border is controlled by the cartels. I had Brandon Judd, the president of the Customs and Border Patrol Union, at a hearing that we had to have offsite because Speaker Pelosi won't have the hearing on the topic in any of our hearing rooms. She won't let the committees of jurisdiction deal with it, so Republicans are forced to go offsite to talk about this important topic.
When I asked him: Who controls the border? You or the cartels? Do the cartels control the border more than you?
He said: You are not putting words in my mouth. That is the exact point. The cartels control the border. We don't control the border.
I said: Why don't you control the border?
He said: Because of policies.
Do you need more resources?
That is a different topic. What we need is good policy. We had policies that were working to control the border, and now we have policies that are not working.
The Border Patrol controls it. We are not even on defense, we are not even on the field, and we are not even in the stadium because the policies of this administration changed so that it gave complete control of our southern border to the cartels.
Now, we could talk about all the corruption and the problems that the cartels are causing for Mexico. That is a problem that Mexico has to deal with, and we should be able to help them once we prioritize intelligence collection on the cartels on par with the other threats to our country, on par with China, with Russia, with Iran, with North Korea, with al-Qaida, with ISIS, and with the known credible threats to our country.
The cartels should have the same level of intelligence priority as those other hostile or potentially hostile countries. And the cartels are clearly hostile. They do a lot of business here--billions and billions of dollars.
So we have highlighted this map. These are the areas that we already know which cartels control. You have the states of Mexico listed, but you also have color coded which cartels control that. We would like to have the granular detail of what is the org chart, who leads the cartels. I am not saying we don't have that, but we do not have it at the right priority. And then when we do have the intelligence--just as we have seen, the intelligence community got Ukraine incredibly right. The problem wasn't that we didn't have good intelligence with respect to Russia, the problem was the administration didn't do the right thing with the intelligence. But let's first get the right intelligence on the cartels.
So the next thing is we have cities, States, and counties that are completely ignoring the United States law. It is a Federal policy to decide who is a citizen and who is not a citizen. And when we go to enforce our laws as to who is here legally versus who is here illegally, that is clearly Federal jurisdiction.
We have cities, States, counties, and other communities that are ignoring these laws--sanctuary cities. And those sanctuary cities are saying: Not only would this be a great place to base your illicit activity, cartels, we will protect you by being a sanctuary. Please come locate your illicit activity here. Bring your drugs, bring your guns, bring your labor trafficking, your sex trafficking, your human trafficking, and bring your money laundering business and every form of corruption into our communities. That is what these first two maps show.
But let me show you next what the impact on our communities is, Madam Speaker.
This young lady to my right is Lizzie Murphy. She died at 21 years old. Drugs are bad, but now they are poisoned with fentanyl. Seeing that it is not a good idea to take it without a prescription or a specific use--a lot of people refer to it as a safe party drug--it is a bad decision. But it is not supposed to kill you. But when it is laced with fentanyl, that is what is happening to our young people. That is how fentanyl killed over 60,000 Americans last year. Not all of it is in the heroin. Not all of it is in the really hard stuff. Some of it is in the stuff that people never suspect is going to kill them. They take one pill, and they are dead.
That is what happened to my friends, Mark and Kristi Murphy when their little girl took one Xanax. Their daughter--she is sitting here hugging her sister, close friends, best friends--doesn't have her sister anymore.
This is wrecking our communities, and we have got communities inviting this in by being sanctuary cities.
We have got a President of the United States who is not just doing nothing, he is doing worse than nothing. He is making it worse by empowering the cartels. They exploit people, and they cause harm to our communities.
To highlight the ways this is happening and the ways to solve it, I have asked some of my colleagues to join me in this Special Order.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs).
Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. It is good to be here.
I am glad my friend is raising awareness. I am going to go as quickly as I possibly can because I don't know how much time I am going to take up.
But let's talk about fentanyl for just one quick second. Local reporting out of Tucson was that last year 13 million fentanyl pills were seized in Arizona alone--13 million. DEA has said 40 percent of all pills seized have a lethal dose of fentanyl in them. I want you to think about that, Madam Speaker. You add that 13 million and you take it into what agents and local law enforcement has told us, and that is they only interdict 8 to 10 percent. That means you have got over 100 million fentanyl pills floating around.
The cartels control all of the border between every port of entry on our border with Mexico. Let me give you an example, Madam Speaker, of the story out of southern Arizona recently just in the last couple weeks.
A lady was found wandering around. Local law enforcement deputies found her and assisted her.
What did she have on her possession?
A bag full of pills. They wanted to know what this was, was this an illicit drug or illicit? What is going on?
She said: These are morning-after pills. I knew when I would be coming across the border that I would be raped multiple times so I brought a bunch of morning-after pills.
That is fact. That is what is happening. It is not humane on the border. I find myself baffled by this.
So let's talk about cartels a little bit more. In a story from just early January--and I have been down to the border and talked to this team since then, a cartel, a Mexican cartel put out a hit on Cochise County sheriffs' deputies--two of them--because they are on the border team. There is a small border team down there. They are very effective. They had a hit put on them by a cartel.
So what happens? What happens?
Why is the Biden administration ignoring this crisis?
Let's take a look at something else. In September of last year I said: How many unaccompanied children have been brought into the country?
One hundred ten thousand roughly.
They finally responded to a series of questions I had just this week.
They said: We have lost contact with 20,000 of those children.
They basically have lost 20,000 unaccompanied children.
This is the border under President Biden.
Now, in Cochise County, 82 miles, a remote border crossing area, between the Border Patrol and the Cochise County Sheriff's Office, about 16,000 illegal immigrants are detected every month in a huge, huge county. Two years ago the county recorded an average of 4 to 500 illegal aliens per month. Let's give it to you more starkly, Madam Speaker: under the Trump policies, we slowed down illegal immigration. Under the Biden policies, we went from 4 to 500 people a month in this massive county to now 16,000 a month.
What are they paying the cartels?
A minimum of $1,000, but typically more like $4,000 per person coming in. Most of these folks don't have $4,000.
So what happens?
They become indentured servants of cartels, and they are located in--
and I know Mr. Davidson is going to show you a map, Madam Speaker--they are in virtually every community in this country.
There is a reporter named Jorge Ventura. Jorge does a lot of work on the border issues. And I want to talk to you about cartels again and how they have infiltrated not just the border but they are also beyond the border. A year ago there were illegal marijuana farms in southern California. There are about 100 in L.A. County. It is a huge county both geographically and population wise. Its neighboring county, San Bernardino County, had about 2 or 300. Today over 200 illicit marijuana farms are in L.A. County and over 1,100 in San Bernardino County.
Now, why is that important?
It is important for you to understand that those are coming in from cartels. The mayor of Lancaster, Rex Parris, said in July of last year that it is the cartels. They had seized more than 16 tons of marijuana worth about $1.2 billion, and the mayor said: ``We are very, very close to driving down the freeway and seeing bodies hanging from the overpasses. That is what is coming.''
Why does he say that?
Because the cartels are ruthless. They have little value for human life. When you hear about children, toddlers being thrown over a border fence, that is the coyotes.
Whom do they work for?
The cartels. When you hear of children 2, 3, and 4 years of age wandering around in 115-degree heat in Arizona's desert without an adult present and without water, that is the cartels. They don't care about human life. This is a business enterprise, and the product is to move people and drugs into the country.
So what happened just a week ago, not even a week ago?
Prosecutors in Mexico in the town of San Jose de Gracia in the western State of Michoacan said that they can't determine how many people were killed because attackers cleaned up the scene and removed any bodies.
Mexicans have been left wondering what happened to about one dozen men who disappeared after they were seen lined up against a wall by drug cartel gunmen in this small village.
In a video filmed by a resident of the town that was later posted on social media, bursts of gunfire break out, smoke covers the scene, the camera cuts away, and all the men, perhaps as many as 17, were killed.
That is what cartels do. Cartels do not care about human life. And when I have had multiple briefings, as I go down to the border virtually every month of every year, I wonder where the border czar in this administration is. She got to El Paso, almost made it to the border, and didn't quite get there. It is kind of like when she went over to Ukraine, she made it to Germany but didn't make it into Ukraine.
I look, and I say: What happened?
Why is this happening?
And my briefers tell me the border is controlled by cartels. Between every port of entry no one enters this country without a cartel knowing about it.
When I was in the Tucson sector right before Christmas, I went down and you see 2 miles of fencing, and there is 8 feet of gap, then another 2 miles of fencing, and then it just stops, and then it goes for literally 60 miles with no fencing other than the Normandy barrier. I went to the gap, and I am standing there looking into Mexico. You can see, Madam Speaker, that gap is where all the pathways lead, and there is all the debris and crud that is out there.
I said to my folks who were with me: Please videotape it because I am going to explain what was going on here.
I didn't bother to tell CBP, because I get down a lot. Sometimes I tell them I am going to be there. An agent rolls up.
He said: Who are you talking to?
He didn't know who I was.
I said: I am not talking to anyone. I am doing the video here for my constituents.
He said: Oh. I thought you were talking to the cartel scouts.
I said: What do you mean?
He said: We literally chased--before we detected you, we chased four cartel scouts back up through that gap, and they sit in a hooch on this little bluff.
That is where the cartel scouts are as they are sending people through.
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The way it works is this. They will send a group of 100 people to some place, maybe the San Miguel gate down near Sassabe, near the Tohono O'odham Reservation. That takes the four or five people that are trying to patrol that area. They will go to that gate. They have to process those individuals. It is so remote that it takes literally hours to remove those people and get them bused to a detention facility and processed.
In the meantime, they will see what we call ``known got-aways,'' dozens of known got-aways rolling through other parts of that border. They are dressed in camouflage. They are wearing carpet shoes. They have got backpacks filled with fentanyl and methamphetamine on their backs.
I am just telling you, I appreciate my friend from Ohio, his efforts, and this very important piece of legislation. And I call upon this administration, don't tell the American people--I am reminded of the
``Darkest Hour.'' It is a movie with Winston Churchill. The King says to Winston: Don't lie to the people. Tell them the truth.
I am asking this administration: Tell the people the truth. They can take it. They understand.
Because last year, over 2 million, about 2,500,000 people, entered this country illegally; another 1.2 to 1.3 million entered legally. Now, of those 2.5 million, probably about 1.5 million are wandering around this country. They are somewhere in this country today. This administration let them go.
Madam Speaker, we have to get control of our border. I find it remarkable that the deputy Homeland Security director was saying that we really need to protect the borders, that you won't have a sovereign nation without a protected border. But he wasn't talking about our border, which isn't protected. He was talking about the Ukrainian border.
I asked them to have the same concern and care for the U.S.-Mexico border as they profess to have for the Ukraine border.
Mr. DAVIDSON. Madam Speaker, look, if we look over on the far right, how does a young lady lose her sister? How does a young lady, 21 years old, in Ohio wind up dead from fentanyl poisoning, poison in the drugs?
They know drugs are bad, but they are not supposed to kill them. They are in Ohio. Ohio is not--I mean, we do have a border. It is on Lake Erie with Canada. That is not the border that is causing our young people to die. That is not the one that is causing the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds to be fatal overdoses.
It is all the way down here on the southern border. And it is not officially the Mexican Government. It is the cartels. And we refuse to collect the intelligence at the right level.
At our southern border, we have a joint task force. We don't have a joint interagency task force. We have that out in the Pacific Ocean. We have that in the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. But we don't have a joint interagency task force.
The place probably that it makes the absolute most sense to have an interagency task force is at the southern border. We have Customs and Border Protection. We have people that are focused on smuggling of people, smuggling of drugs, of guns. We have people that are focused on counterfeit property.
We are focused on levying taxes at the border, inspecting fruit at the border, and everything else. But we don't have an interagency task force that uses the power of our military to conduct surveillance, that uses the power of our Director of National Intelligence and all the resources that we have to know everything about the cartels, not some benign name like Sinaloa, but, specifically, who leads that.
We know who leads Russia. We know it is Vladimir Putin. They are a nation-state.
But we have these transnational criminal organizations that go unnamed. Again, they are involved in the activities not because they care so much about the activity itself. They want the money.
We don't have an organized way to collect all the intelligence on the money. What yachts are they buying? What properties do they own? How do they move this heavily cash business into other goods and services?
They move everything that can store value possible all over the world to try to clean up this money. We don't have the kind of pressure that was just brought to bear on Vladimir Putin going against the cartels.
Vladimir Putin we finally recognized as evil as he invaded Ukraine. But when he was doing the menacing, threatening activity, when we had at least gone so far as to collect the intelligence, we didn't take the actions that could have stopped him.
Here, we can't even go so far as to collect the right level of intelligence. Intelligence is the first thing.
The next slide I have deals with the sanctuary cities. We are going to defund the sanctuary cities. They can't keep getting funded. They have to conform to U.S. law.
We just had a Supreme Court ruling that said if you want to get paid for providing Medicare and Medicaid services, you have to make your employees conform. We can do that to American citizens, and we can't do that to deal with the cartels.
Now, it is a different topic, I will grant you, but it is the same thing, the strings attached to the money. We have to put the strings attached to the money to say, if you want the money that is collected here in the city, you have to reflect the laws of the United States of America, and you can't offer sanctuary to these cartels that are killing our young people.
There is more to the bill, but let me highlight in another way the consequences of not stopping the cartels.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Budd).
Mr. BUDD. Madam Speaker, up there where you sit, last night Joe Biden stood here and delivered his State of the Union address. He spoke about lots of issues. But he didn't even touch on the biggest issue facing our country today, and that is the southern border.
Make no mistake, the state of our border, it is not good. The Border Patrol has encountered over 150,000 illegal aliens--not last year but just last month, in January, just 33 days ago, when they tallied up those numbers. That is a 96 percent, almost 100 percent increase from last year.
Over 62,000, out of that 150,000, 62,000 of those individuals were released into the United States. It is unbelievable. It is unacceptable. It is dangerous.
When I get to travel around North Carolina and visit with law enforcement, as I love to do and have the honor of doing, the sheriffs tell me there are about 3,200 counties in this amazing country. They said every single sheriff right now is a border sheriff because of the policies that are happening right here, just down the street in the White House. There are drugs, fentanyl.
We think about the devastation and the suffering years ago in the Vietnam war, a decade where we lost about 70,000 servicemembers. We think about what we lose every single year, not in a decade, but every single year from drug overdoses. That is about 70,000, largely because of what happens at the border.
Just a few months ago, when I was down there visiting with our Customs and Border Patrol agents, they were off duty that day. We were in a pickup truck as far as from here to, Madam Speaker, where you sit. They slammed on the brakes and said: I am sorry. I have got to go on duty. I have to arrest these cartel members.
He said the sad thing is they will be back out on the street or, in this case, back out in the desert in just a few days.
We looked all up and down the border, and there was tens of millions of dollars of steel just laying there. Then there was tens of millions of dollars' worth of idle diesel equipment that has been idle since January 20 of last year.
He said: You know what? We need to finish this wall.
That is what the Customs and Border Patrol agent told me. He says: But what we really need, what we really need is an administration that has our back and, sir, right now, we don't have that.
Instead, Madam Speaker, what we have is an astounding 11,200 pounds of fentanyl, deadly fentanyl that was seized last year, and even more has made it into the homeland. It is killing thousands of our fellow Americans. Dangerous cartels are flooding this country with counterfeit prescription pills containing fentanyl and meth. All of this can be prevented and should be prevented. It must be prevented.
The bottom line is it is time to finish the wall. It is time to support our border agents and end this administration's dereliction of duty.
Mr. DAVIDSON. Madam Speaker, this is a gravely serious matter. I highlighted a young lady, Lizzie Murphy; her sister, Catherine; her mom and dad, Mark and Kristi Murphy, who lost their daughter, their best friend, their sister.
Communities like this are losing young people all over our country. I kind of wish I could say that it was only happening where the sanctuary cities are pictured. I kind of wish I could say it was only right next to the border that we have the problem.
But our whole country is experiencing the problem because we won't secure the border. This administration won't secure the border. They won't listen to the men and women whose duty it is to secure the border.
I went down there a week after Joe Biden was inaugurated and they said: We told him. We will see what happens. They said they are going to do these things, and we told them this is what is going to happen.
Now, when we go to the border, when they come and talk to us up here, the exact same things they knew were going to happen are happening.
We stopped sanctuary cities. We put strings attached to the grants. But the other thing is we have this Flores settlement. Congress has not provided clarity on the Flores settlement, so we provide funding so that we can hold people as long as they need to be held till their cases are adjudicated on the Mexican side of the border.
We put pressure on the Government of Mexico to cooperate with us in this, and we put pressure on the Government of Mexico to resume their cooperation on intelligence-gathering.
Just yesterday, ahead of the State of the Union, I have my county sheriffs--Butler County Sheriff Jones was here in Washington, D.C. Why? Not because he is a border sheriff in the strict geographical sense, but because he is a border sheriff there in Ohio.
Let me close, Madam Speaker, by just highlighting that what happened to this family could happen to anybody. I appreciate the time to speak tonight.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 38
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