Our Borderless Country
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, last year, we had achieved operational control of our southern border for the first time in generations. Trespassers knew they would be turned back, so they never started the perilous journey.
On his first day in office, Joe Biden canceled the border wall, ordered ICE not to faithfully execute the laws, and canceled the remain-in-Mexico policy for asylum claims. This sent a powerful message throughout the world that America's borders are wide open. So now we are 4 months into an experiment that will test how long a country without borders can survive.
The numbers speak for themselves. The week of the 2020 election, scarcely 100 family units illegally crossed our border. By the week of the inauguration, 1,100 did. By the last week of March, it was over 14,000 in a week.
In February, the Border Patrol encountered roughly 100,000 aliens illegally crossing our border. That is about the size of South Bend, Indiana. By March, that number had grown to over 170,000. That is about the size of Salem, Oregon. Last month, the number reached nearly 180,000, the population of Providence, Rhode Island, a 900 percent increase over April of last year.
Thirty-eight percent are being released into our country. In April, ICE deportations fell to their lowest number in history. Felons that the law requires to be deported are instead deliberately being released into our neighborhoods.
In the last 2 months, I joined delegations led by Congressmen Jordan and Biggs across the southern border. In the Rio Grande Valley sector, we watched one night as hundreds of aliens from Central America illegally crossed our border with impunity and entered a Disneyland- style queue. After a brief interview, groups in the company of small children were dropped off at transportation hubs to be taken anywhere in the United States they wanted to go without even being given a notice to appear in court.
Unaccompanied minors were taken to a holding facility where they were placed in cattle pens. One unit designed for 33 people had over 500 in it. After a few days, they were transferred to HHS facilities.
No effort is made to safely return them to their homes. Every effort is made to place them in the United States, often with family or friends who are themselves here illegally.
The President just transferred $2 billion to accommodate this flood that he has created, taken from funds Congress appropriated to rebuild our emergency medical reserve and fund COVID testing. Simply stated, Americans last.
In the San Diego, El Centro, and Yuma sectors, we saw the nearly completed border wall built by the Trump administration made useless because of small construction gaps that can't be filled because Mr. Biden has forbidden it. Aliens just calmly walk through them.
We saw one group taken into custody from Romania. Another group of about 20 were from Cuba, Russia, and Armenia. From all over the world, people are flying into Mexico on tourist visas, making their way to border towns, and then walking through the gaps to enter the United States illegally.
In California, one officer told us their orders were to process as many illegals into the country as fast as possible. From its polling, Gallup estimates there are 42 million people now living in Latin America and the Caribbean alone who intend to come to the United States if they can. And now they are.
We are witnessing the beginning of a mass migration of historic proportions, one that no civilization in human history has ever survived. One Border Patrol officer warned us that every community in America is about to become a border town. Every American will feel it as classrooms are filled with non-English speaking students; as gangs proliferate; as criminal illegal aliens are released in our communities; as hospital emergency rooms are packed with illegals demanding basic medical care; and as a desperate labor market is flooded with low-wage illegal labor, meaning lower wages and fewer opportunities for working Americans.
This is not accidental. This administration is pursuing a deliberate policy to fundamentally change the culture, electorate, and founding principles of our Nation. It is working, and it will continue as long as the people responsible for it remain in public office.
History is littered with the ruins of nations that fail to control their borders. Whether ours soon joins them depends on Americans taking back their government before it is too late.
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