Crisis At the Border

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I appreciate him holding this Special Order to discuss this most existential of issues.

Talk about nihilism for a second. Nihilism is where you actually are fostering programs and activities to ensure your demise. I can tell you, what is happening on the border is unbelievable.

When my colleague, Mr. Ciscomani, starts talking about Lukeville, he is talking about the Lukeville port of entry. Thirty-five people live in Lukeville. This is a port of entry people from Phoenix and southern Arizona use to transport down to Rocky Point on the Sea of Cortez and vice versa and our friends from Mexico come up and go shopping in Arizona. It is a very synergistic type of relationship.

What happened, more than 10 days ago, that resulted in the closure 10 days ago of that port of entry, is that there were so many illegal aliens coming there and entering our country that the Border Patrol couldn't process them. We couldn't keep enough people there to process legal traffic and deal with the influx of over 1,000 a day. Wow. Now, we have that port of entry closed, and you still have 1,000 to 1,600 people a day coming there from all over the world.

That is one of the distinctions from my friends in Texas. Eagle Pass, which is also being inundated right now in the Del Rio sector, most of those folks coming across there speak Spanish, because they are coming from Central American and South American states.

What happens is, when you have these people coming in from Mali, Mauritania, Madagascar, West Africa, Somalia, Syria, or the Middle Eastern countries that are coming through Lukeville, we don't even have translators for them. Our port agents down there can't even communicate with these folks.

That is just one port of entry. I am going to give you one more example. Yuma is a town of about 80,000, 85,000 people, sits right on the border across from San Luis, Mexico. They have got one hospital in Yuma.

By the way, what is Yuma? You need to understand what it is. Almost every piece of lettuce that you eat, or other green leafy vegetable, in the wintertime, for about 6 months out of the year, comes from Yuma, Arizona. It is an agricultural community. They work well together. During planting and harvesting, 7,000 to 10,000, sometimes 12,000, people a day come across legally to help the farmers in Yuma.

What happens now? What happens now is if you are a lady and you are going to give birth to a baby, many times you can't even get into the maternity ward at the Yuma Regional hospital. Why is that? Because of the influx of people from across the border, who are in the country illegally, and the women are going to have babies right there at Yuma Regional. Every maternity bed is taken up with someone who doesn't live in this country. Where do they go? They drive 3 to 3\1/2\ hours up to Phoenix or 3 to 3\1/2\ hours over to San Diego.

We have known people who have had heart attacks and other really serious emergencies who could not even get into the emergency room in Yuma. They had to be transported by helicopter, Air Evac, up to Phoenix.

Why is that? Because we are inundated at the southern border. This is a crisis of our own making. Not ours, but this administration's making.

People say to me: Why do they do this? It is inexplicable. It is not incompetence. Surely, if you are incompetent, at some point you would say: Hey, almost 10 million illegal aliens in the country in 3 years, we have got a problem; we probably ought to change our policies.

They don't want to change their policies. They do not want to enforce the law. There are laws on the books that would help slow this down immediately, if they would enforce them. You know what the first one would be? You actually take the 1.5 million people who are in this country illegally, who have received due process and have removal orders to leave the country but who refuse to leave the country, you would actually find those people and remove them.

You know what happens when you are removing people? Then folks say it is probably not worth spending every dime that I have, every dime my family has, getting in debt to the cartels, and going across all of that hardship to get into the country. That is what they would say. How do we know that works? Because when President Trump said we are going to start removing people by their orders, it slowed it down.

By the way, let's go back to Yuma for a second, Yuma, Arizona, where I was talking about the hospital. During President Trump's last year, the entire year, 8,600 people who were illegally entering the country were apprehended in the Yuma sector. It is like 120 miles long. They do that in a week now. That is about a week's worth of illegal aliens crossing. Trump had that for an entire year. You couldn't do that by accident or incompetence. It almost has to be by design.

How do you stop it? You start enforcing the law. How do you get this administration to enforce the law? You tell them we are going to fund only certain aspects of the government, like the military, like the border patrol, like ICE, like air traffic controllers, and like the TSA. Let's make sure the country is safe, but we are not going to give Mr. Biden any more money than that.

For all of the bureaucracy and the crazy programs that he has out there--by the way, they churn out 40,000 pages of laws on a regular basis from those bureaucracies--we are going to slow that down until they do something with measurable metrics that shows us that they are actually bringing down the number of illegal border crossings and bring it under control. That is how you settle this.

We have to settle this. It is going to change this country.

We can talk more about fentanyl. When my colleagues across the aisle say that 95 percent of fentanyl is seized at the ports of entry, why do you suppose that is? It is because, at the ports of entry, you actually have people waiting there, investigating and inspecting vehicles and individuals crossing. There are machines where they can look into a truck and see what is in there. They can see if there is something disorderly in there and then inspect it.

Between the ports of entry is where we know that 1.75 million people have come across during the Biden administration. They are wearing camo and carpet shoes so they won't be detected. Our BuckEye cameras and field cameras pick them up, but we just can't get to them.

Where Mr. Ciscomani and I live in the Tucson sector, the terrain is so rough and rugged that we might see somebody there, but it will take you 2\1/2\ to 3 hours to get your vehicle there, get out of your vehicle, and hike to where they are.

They will then pop up south of Phoenix. They will go through the Tohono O'odham Reservation. They will pop up through Pinal County. When they come out, they are 40 miles, as the crow flies, from Phoenix, which is a major hub for transporting illegal drugs and human trafficking. That is what is going on between the ports of entry.

Every hearing that we have held in the last 3 years where this has been brought up, the Democrats have said we interdict 95 percent of that at the ports of entry. No. You interdict 95 percent of the overall interdiction at the ports of entry, but you don't know what you are not interdicting.

What we do know is that 1.97 million people carrying backpacks come into our country. What is in those backpacks? It used to be bales of marijuana. It isn't bales of marijuana now. It is small backpacks to bring in fentanyl pills. That is what is going on.

I beg this administration to wake up. I beg my colleagues to join us. Let's entice this administration to do what is right and enforce our border laws.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for having this Special Order today. Let's join hands and defeat this wide-open border that is forever going to adjust our country.

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