Access to Counsel Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

When I hear that, oh, this bill simply is just trying to give a phone call, well, then why didn't it say that? Why didn't it say that in the bill? It didn't say that. It talks about access to an attorney. I am an attorney. I did court-appointed attorney work. I did it all the time.

Madam Speaker, this may not give someone a court-appointed attorney, but what it does is, you open it up. If Democrats don't think that consumes resources, then I just wonder if Democrats have ever been to a port of entry and watched people coming through and seen the secondary inspection process.

This is going to bog down your ports of entry, and it is going to lead to litigation. This is a trial lawyer's blessing, a trial lawyer's dream, I can tell you that, because that is what is going to happen. There are going to be mistakes made, and even if there aren't mistakes made, there are going to be lawsuits.

This is not designed to facilitate border ingress and egress. This is not designed to help commercial traffic. This is going to bog down our system.

While that is going on, Democrats say this is not going to be a problem. It will redirect and redeploy Border Patrol agents and Customs agents to deal with this. That means it is going to really slow things down, and everyone knows what that means. That means that all the people who are coming are going to have an even wider open field.

In February, over 101,000 aliens were encountered. In March, over 172,000 aliens were encountered at the border. The number is going up. It is not going down. It is going up. Do you know why? Because the policies of this administration draw people in. They have done absolutely nothing to slow this down.

Madam Speaker, do you know what the number one most important thing would be? How about the President of the United States of America stand up and say: No. We will send you back. Our border is closed. If you want to come in, come in legally through the ports of entry.

How about doing that? Well, he has not done that. That is why you see people showing up with Biden campaign T-shirts on the border. That is why the Mexican President said this is Biden's border crisis. That is why the El Salvador President has expressed the same. And that is what Border Patrol agents also understand.

Ranchers and people in my district and those who live on the border, that is why they will say: This is Biden's problem. He created it. He inherited a solution and created a crisis.

The person who he has tapped to lead the efforts to address this surge at the border has been all over the place, just hasn't been at the border.

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Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, this individual has not been to the border once, but the solutions are not a mystery.

President Biden has to stand up and make a statement: You have to continue construction of the wall; reinstate the MPP program; reinstate the 12 international agreements that were in place that were slowing this down. That would have stopped it. The last thing is, move your asylum courts down to the border to deal with current asylum cases.

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