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Floor Speech

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Mr. HAGERTY. Madam President, I am here today to discuss what I saw this past weekend when I took a trip to our southern border in Texas.

I led a delegation of eight sheriffs and mayors from my home State of Tennessee. We went to see what is happening, what the effects of the border crisis are, and to hear from them and allow the border agents to hear from them the effects of the border crisis in our own communities in Tennessee.

Our mayors and sheriffs are seeing record drug overdoses, gang violence, and other forms of criminal activity right there in Tennessee.

We learned that what is really happening at our border is quite simple: Well-financed, operationally sophisticated drug cartels, with the help of the Chinese Communist Party, are exploiting our immigration policies and human economic desires to make billions of dollars from drug and human trafficking.

Ignored by the Biden administration and the corporate media, this increasingly powerful criminal enterprise is expanding further into American communities.

Our trip revealed two key insights. First, under Biden policies, this national security crisis is unmanageable. Second, and paradoxically, this crisis is well within the Federal Government's ability to fix.

My central takeaway was this: If every American saw what we saw and heard, this would end. America wouldn't tolerate this. It is a crisis.

Here is the cartels' business model: Fentanyl ingredients are shipped from China to Mexico. In Mexico, the cartels turn these chemicals into astonishingly potent drugs bound for the United States.

Last year, fentanyl seized at the border was more than enough to kill every American. And that is just what we caught. Think about what has not been caught. Think about what is getting through.

The cartels control the entire Mexican side of the U.S. border, and each migrant must pay thousands of dollars for safe passage to these cartels. Often, they have to pay through subsequent indentured servitude. Many young women become victims of human trafficking.

So in this vicious cycle, the more illegal immigration, the more money for the cartels; and the more money for the cartels, the more drugs they produce.

For cartels, the illegal immigrants are more than an expendable revenue source. They are a tool for facilitating transport of drugs and criminals. The cartels push scores of migrant customers across the border so they can occupy American border agents. Then they exploit the resulting gaps in patrol coverage to move across drugs, gang members, those they refer to as ``high-value'' individuals, terrorist-watch-list members, and others.

Border Patrol agents told me that, given the recordbreaking border crossings they are currently facing, there are times when every agent is busy processing migrant paperwork, leaving the border wide open for drug and human trafficking. The drugs and gang members and the accompanying violence will then flood into our American communities.

As one agent put it: The people crossing the border don't stay in this area, and neither do the drugs.

More than 100,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, mostly from fentanyl, which are really more akin to CCP-engineered poisonings. Several thousands were Tennesseans. The Tennessee sheriffs and mayors on this trip told me that deaths from illicit drug overdoses in their counties are at record highs. Our Tennessee sheriffs know the families in their communities. They told me the toughest part of their job is to see a mother or a grandmother, to go to their home and tell them that their son or their grandson will never return. It is heartbreaking. Each one of these obituaries has the CCP's fingerprint on it.

The migrants' money and usefulness to distract border agents are essential to the cartels' operations. These illegal immigrants are incentivized to come because of our current catch-and-release policies.

To illustrate the current policy of absurdity, last Friday, around midnight, near a stretch of--of course--unfinished border wall, right outside of McAllen, TX, our vehicle came across about 15 recently arrived migrants. They approached us and asked us where they could find the Border Patrol agents. They wanted to turn themselves in, having been coached by their cartel handlers that this was the first step to U.S. Government-funded release into America. Our policies are so upside-down that the suspects are looking for the officers.

Nevertheless, U.S. Border Patrol and other law enforcement Agencies are working tirelessly day and night to protect our Nation. Understandably, morale is at an all-time low with a Biden administration that refuses to give them the tools that they need to deal with this crisis.

Border Patrol can process a maximum of roughly 5,000 migrants a day. Right now, they are facing nearly 8,000 migrants a day. And when the Biden administration lifts title 42 authority, they fear that the number could exceed 15,000 per day.

Therefore, and unsurprisingly, the constant plea I heard from Border Patrol agents was this: We need effective policy, not more agents, not more equipment. Bad policies are what have created this incentive to cross the border, and eliminating these policies is the only fix. Our agents signed up to protect our border, not to facilitate its demise.

Border agents in Laredo told me that the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as MPP, were a perfect illustration of the need for policy change. MPP was a policy that required migrants seeking asylum in the United States to remain in Mexico until it was determined whether or not they were actually entitled to asylum. Most are not.

When it was implemented in 2019, the agent said it was like flipping a switch because this stopped people coming when they knew that they wouldn't get in.

This ``Remain in Mexico'' policy cut illegal border crossings dramatically in fiscal year 2020. Yet the Biden administration nixed the MPP, and, not surprisingly, border crossings more than quadrupled in fiscal year 2021.

With the help of their media allies, Washington Democrats ignore this crisis and they hope that the American people will too. They don't travel to the border because they don't want to answer for the crisis that they have created. They have chosen appeasement of loud, radical immigration groups over American security, over American sovereignty.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris haven't seen the border stations where the agents sacrifice day and night, mentally and physically, battling a crisis that their Departments haven't given them the tools to address.

For many Americans, this crisis seems far away, at least until it is too late--until it is their child, their grandchild, their brother and sister who become a statistic.

That is the other thing that I heard constantly from Border Patrol and law enforcement agents: We need someone to tell America what is happening here.

With the President and media averting their eyes and abdicating their responsibilities, it becomes even more critical to spread the word before more American lives are needlessly lost, before more migrants' lives are destroyed in the journey or through indentured servitude once they arrive, and more communities are damaged beyond repair.

So what can we do to address this crisis?

Even though the border cries is worse than ever, the Biden administration is voluntarily ending title 42 pandemic-related authority for expedited removal.

The Border Patrol agents I met this weekend believe that this will make this recordbreaking crisis substantially worse. Such a surrender of American security would be intolerable.

And there is another health crisis that title 42 is critical to battling. The cartels send migrants across at strategic points to bog down Border Patrol agents with paperwork processing that takes five times longer without title 42. Then they use the resulting enforcement gaps to move fentanyl across the border.

We have to close these enforcement gaps with better policy.

So I have introduced legislation to add drug smuggling as an additional basis for title 42 authority. Overdoses have become an epidemic in America. This legislation would allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to use title 42 to combat drug trafficking across the border. This bill would give our Border Patrol agents the tools they need to quickly remove migrants who illegally cross the border, substantially freeing up agents to focus on actually stopping drug traffickers.

More than 100,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, many from fentanyl coming from across our southern border. We desperately need title 42 to fight this drug epidemic. It is a tool that would quite literally save American lives in every State in the Union immediately.

3959 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. HAGERTY. Madam President, I want to thank my colleague from Hawaii for his remarks, but I want to explain what just happened here.

My colleague objects, despite the fact that recordbreaking numbers of Americans are currently dying from overdoses, fueled by fentanyl coming across our border. This legislation is a tool to help save American lives. Indeed, 100,000 American lives were lost last year to drug overdoses. These lives are being deprived of the American dream forever. So Democrats are categorically opposed to commonsense border security tools to prevent drug trafficking into America no matter how bad the drug overdose numbers get? How much longer will it take to change course from the Biden administration policies that have created this national security crisis? How much longer will we allow our immigration system to be manipulated by a massive transnational criminal alliance between the Chinese communists and billion-dollar cartels who are shipping deadly quantities of illicit drugs into the United States?

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