Attack in Sonora, Mexico

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CRAMER. Madam President. First of all, I have never come to the floor of the Senate--and previously of the House--as ill-prepared as today, but I want to follow up on something my friend from Utah just spoke about, and that is the attack on the innocent people in the last 48 hours. When I learned of it last night, I was stunned.

I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with the brother and sister of one of the victims. A young mother, Anita Miller, was killed along with her four children. They were in the first SUV that was shot up and burnt. They were on their way to Phoenix to pick up their dad from North Dakota--Howard--who was working on an oil rig as this occurred. I just talked to Howard's brother Kenny and his sister Heather.

All of the Millers and the LeBarons who are victims of this have many, many family members in North Dakota. They have lots of businesses in the State of North Dakota. They are hard-working, faithful people.

It was a hard phone call to make. This was a hard message to deliver. And I didn't really know what to deliver except that I wanted them to know that the people of their country and the United States are hugging the people of their country, Mexico, and that what they have experienced is certainly the personification of evil in the form of these thugs from this cartel, for sure. They are people who kill with reckless abandon. They have no regard for life, even the life of innocent children. But we serve a God who personifies pure good, and the greatest response to pure evil is pure good.

Kenny and I had a particularly long talk regarding his family--what they are experiencing and what is going on. They wanted me to know that they support the United States as well as their country. They wanted me to tell the President that they support what he is doing and appreciate his offer of help to the Mexican Government.

I told them that there is lots of time for talking about the response of one government working with another but that, right now, grief is sort of the emotion of the moment, and remembering their loved ones is important, and we would be doing it as a Congress, as an administration, as a country, and as the State of North Dakota, which embraces these people we know and love so much. We will do what needs to be done, and we stand ready, first of all, to hold them up in prayer and to share their burden with them.

I wanted to express as much as anything that their burden is ours today and that, to the degree we can share a burden like this, we are sharing it. We will react. We will respond in whatever way is appropriate and whatever way we can.

I join Senator Lee in gratitude to President Trump for his reaching out and his offer of assistance. It can't be easy to live in a country or even to rule a country where the cartels are so powerful, where their weapons are as good as, if not better than, the weapons of the police and maybe even the military. It can't be easy to stand up to that, but with good friends and allies and neighbors, perhaps now, perhaps this event and perhaps the grief of these families will be the things that bring two countries together to fight this evil.

I will end as I began and look forward to future days when we speak more thoroughly about it and there is more information on it, but to remind perhaps ourselves as much as anything, the only effective response to pure evil is pure love. As people of faith, we know pure love is personified in our Lord. So tonight, my message to the families in Mexico, North Dakota, and Utah is that we love them. We love them.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source