Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, in Washington, every time that you think you have seen it all and heard it all, you couldn't be surprised, amazed, disappointed, what have you, more than you already are, but it never fails to deliver.

I am going to talk about a few things this evening. I am going to start with this. I am a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and I just attended a hearing on the Afghan reconstruction after withdrawal, so to speak.

So we left, as you know, Mr. Speaker, Afghanistan. Our Nation left there in a bit of a hurry. We won't get into that much, but what I do want to talk about is where we stand at this point because whether or not the American people know it, we are still spending billions of dollars in Afghanistan. So we had a hearing today to talk about that.

We have spent a couple of billion dollars. Now, at the same time we are spending billions of dollars in aid in Afghanistan where the Taliban rules, we have got a guy named Ryan Corbett who has been detained and held in Afghanistan wrongly by the Taliban. They are holding him hostage apparently among other Americans and Westerners who are being held hostage in Afghanistan. In spite of this, we are giving them billions of dollars in aid.

Now, the gentleman who came to talk to us is the Special Representative for Afghanistan and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs at the U.S. State Department. His name is Thomas West. He came to speak to us and answer questions about that.

I asked him: Well, how are we leveraging these billions of dollars to get Ryan Corbett out? Why would we give billions of dollars to this country?

We just had a 20-year war with them, and, unfortunately, the United States left without winning the war because the Taliban is now in charge.

I said: We give them a couple billion dollars a year here.

He said: Well, it doesn't go through the Taliban, it goes through nongovernmental organizations.

That is a whole other story that we will get into, but the point is that we have American hostages in Iran--correction--Afghanistan. That is a Freudian slip because Iran is on my mind, too. That is another problem. However, we will stick to Afghanistan for a minute.

It seems to me that if they want a couple of billion dollars--let's be clear. We are $34 trillion in debt right now. We just went to 34, and by May of this year, we will be at 35. We are going to pay $1 trillion in interest this year. That is no new tanks, that is no new social programs, and that is no new missiles. That is just interest. That is paying for money that has already been spent, and now that you have borrowed it, you get nothing for the $1 trillion.

So it is a long way from $1 trillion to a couple of billion dollars in Afghanistan, but those couple of billion over time add up, and the people whom I am representing are paying for that.

First of all, they paid a couple of trillion dollars for the war in Afghanistan for 20 years, and now we are paying billions more for what?

I said: When are you going to use your leverage to get this guy, Ryan Corbett, out?

In the course of the hearing, we learned about Afghan women and children, little girls, who can't go to school. They are oppressed, and the women can't leave their house, they can't get an education, and they can't work. They are being oppressed as we knew the Taliban was going to do. We told everybody that that is what is going to happen if you leave the Taliban in charge.

One of the folks on the dais asked one of these poor panelists: What are you doing about the mental health state of these Afghan women? They are depressed because of the circumstances they are in.

There was a lot of conversations about, well, we talk to them, and we are trying to work with them, and so on and so forth. I am listening to this like my head is going to explode.

When it was my turn to ask questions, I said: This poor woman here can't help these people, these women and children in Afghanistan, the lady that was sitting there testifying.

Afghanistan is a terrorist superstate, Mr. Speaker. It is a terrorist superstate with multiple terrorist organizations operating in the country with impunity.

We are spending a couple billion dollars there, and we are asking people who we are paying what they are doing about the mental health and depression standards of Afghanistan women and children. How absurd can this be?

I asked Mr. West if he could talk to me about the open-source reporting. Open source is not classified. That is what you can read in the newspaper, see on the TV, hear on the radio about this guy, Abdul Rasheed Munib, who reportedly traveled to North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons technology and collaborate with North Korea. What can he tell me about that?

He couldn't tell me anything about that because he didn't know anything about that. He had never heard of that, yet I see it on open- source reporting.

Shouldn't he know about that? He is the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Deputy Assistant Secretary. He should know.

I asked him about open-source reporting about the Taliban trying to take Pakistan's nuclear weapons. I would think that nuclear weapons in the Middle East with a rogue regime like the Taliban would be a security concern for the United States of America. I asked: What is the endgame to this billions of dollars going to Afghanistan? What is the mission? When does it end? Does it ever end?

Of course, I got some kind of long-winded answer that is circular and never gets anywhere. I asked: What is our national security interest in Afghanistan at this point?

He said: We have spent $2 trillion there over the last 20 years.

I said: Stop. Please don't tell me we are spending billions of dollars to secure the $2 trillion that we spent during our 20 years in Afghanistan because--I have bad news for everybody--it is gone. The money is gone.

Mr. Speaker, this is just another example of the fantasy land that is Washington, D.C., because the Taliban is in charge in Afghanistan after kicking the United States of America out after America spent $2 trillion there--forget the $2 trillion, a couple thousand lives in Afghanistan. Here today, in 2024, you are going to be expected to spend a couple billion dollars more in Afghanistan.

Mr. Speaker, this can't continue. I will bet one thing, though. I will bet the Taliban controls Afghanistan's border. I bet they do. I will bet if somebody tries to get into Afghanistan that doesn't belong there, I bet the Taliban doesn't allow that.

I will move on to the next subject, which I think we are going to spend the bulk of the time on, which is the southern border of the United States of America.

Now, I am not advocating to hire the Taliban to come patrol the southwestern border of the United States of America, but it seems to me that we could certainly do a better job.

We just recently took a trip--and I say ``we,'' Members of Congress, only on this side of the aisle. The other side of the aisle doesn't care to see what is happening on the border. I know some of them go as a token trip so they can act like they care about it.

While I am on that subject about caring about it, we are hearing today, in the last couple of days, about people here illegally in the United States of America residing in the State of New York. They moved them into a school and kicked the kids out of the school. The people in New York and the leadership of New York are saying this has to end. This is a crisis.

One of the States, I think, just declared an emergency. This is a crisis. We need resources. We need to deal with all these people who are here illegally. They are here, and we don't have what we need to deal with them.

Do you know what I am waiting to hear? It is quiet here on the floor, but I am waiting to hear, ``We in the State of New York hereby revoke our status as a sanctuary State,'' or New York City, ``We revoke our status as a sanctuary city.'' I haven't heard that. I don't know if you have heard that, Mr. Speaker, but I haven't heard that.

What that means is that we have a problem here, but the way to fix it, Mr. Speaker, is to kick your kids out of your school, take your tax money, and let people who are here illegally stay in the school that your kids are supposed to be learning in. That is apparently the answer.

The difference is that instead of the taxpayers of New York paying for it, they want the taxpayers of the entire United States to pay for those in New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, and all the 50 States. That is what they want. They don't want to fix the problem. They want you to pay for more of the problem.

I suspect it is the whole cause and effect thing, supply and demand, et cetera, age-old precepts that seem to make sense. It seems to me that if we are going to pay for more of that, we are probably going to get more of that. That is what it seems to me. I might be wrong.

Anyhow, back to where I was. We took this trip down to the border. We went down to Eagle Pass, Texas. Thousands of people were coming across the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, for days and days on end.

I am going to recognize my good friend, the gentleman from Arizona, here in a moment, but we have seen it on TV. We have seen it. We have heard it. We have read it in the papers. Thousands of people are coming illegally.

Merry Christmas. You are in America now. You crossed the river, and here you are.

When we went there, we went to a processing facility where they processed the people in. Understand, it is not like our Border Patrol has orders to say: Dear kind sir, or ma'am, I know you have come from one of the 170 countries that is currently infiltrating the United States, but we are going to have to turn you around and send you back.

No, it is: Here, get in the truck. We will take you to the processing facility. Make sure you are all cleaned up and get what you need. We will send you wherever you want to go in the United States of America.

By December 20, there were about 10,000 people at this processing facility at Eagle Pass, Texas, about 9,800, 260 percent of its capacity. They knew we were coming, so when we got there, somehow it went from 10,000 to 600.

Interestingly enough, when we got there, even though there were only 600, we think we are representative of the people. I am seeing this. My good friend from Virginia, Mr. Good, who is here with us this evening, has eyes in his head. He was seeing it. My good friend from Arizona, Mr. Biggs, was there. He has eyes in his head, so he saw it, too.

We thought: Well, wouldn't it be nice if we showed our bosses, the people who pay our salary, our constituents? Why don't we take a picture of this?

Hold on a second. You get your camera out, and the Border Patrol says: No photographs allowed.

Some Members of Congress are a little recalcitrant. Maybe they didn't hear, I don't know, but they took pictures anyhow, or they got their phones out, and then Border Patrol said: You have to delete that photo.

Mr. Speaker, at the very same time, this whole codel of 60 Members of Congress had cameras pointed at us from the Border Patrol.

I said: Hold on a second, here. You are taking pictures of us, but we can't take pictures of this for our constituents? What is the policy? Who came up with this policy? What is the purpose for this policy?

Mr. Speaker, I have this letter here, to the Honorable Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, asking about that policy. We don't have the answer yet, but what is interesting is that right after we left, the media went into that very same facility, the television media. What do you think they did, Mr. Speaker? They filmed in that facility.

Let me get this straight: If you are a member of the leftist media, God bless you. Take all the pictures you want of a facility that is at a fraction of what it was in capacity just days before, 260 percent.

When Congress gets there, it is down to, I guess, manageable levels, if there is such a thing. We can't take pictures and show our constituents, our bosses, but the media sure can. The media sure can go in there and take pictures to show their viewers. Nothing to see here. Isn't it amazing?

Mr. Speaker, unaccompanied minors increased 62 percent from 2011. The number of persons prosecuted for human trafficking increased 84 percent.

We are being told that this policy of letting anybody from 170 countries come to the United States of America illegally across our borders is humane because whatever they are dealing with in their country must be worse, even though they have to pay the cartels, even though there are rape trees, even though there is indentured servitude and modern-day slavery associated with every single one of these individuals who come through the cartels, and the cartels have operational control over the border.

Do you know how I know? Not because Secretary Mayorkas said so. He lied when he came to Congress and said he had operational control because the chief of the Border Patrol told us that they don't have operational control. After the chief of the Border Patrol told us that, the Secretary changed his position on it. He lied for a while, and now, I guess, he feels he is absolved from lying the first time he was here and lied to the American people.

The other thing that you might not realize is that anybody under 14 who comes across the border illegally, no background check. Guess what, Mr. Speaker? Probably no documentation either. If you say that you are 14, no background check--whether you are 19, 21, or 13. No background check, so there is no way to prove it.

The other thing is that people are coming from 170 countries, and one of them might be Afghanistan. One of them might be Iran. One of them might be North Korea, for all I know. I saw some crazy things--Germany, the Netherlands, Spain. I saw them on the list.

Are these oppressed countries coming to America illegally? I don't think so, but they are coming illegally.

What about the ones that don't have any relationship with the United States, other than a bellicose relationship?

What about the Taliban? What about Syria? I don't know. What about Iran? Are any of those folks coming? Any folks coming from Hamas or Hezbollah? I don't know. Apparently, they don't know either because, do you know what, Mr. Speaker? When they do a background check, they check all the United States' references. That is awesome unless you are not a United States citizen or in the United States crime registry. Then we don't know what you have done.

If you are Iranian coming across the Mexican border, and we ask Mexico to help us: Do you have anything on this Iranian person? He is of military age. He is not from America. He seems to be from Iran. He speaks Iranian. He speaks Persian. What do you have on him?

I don't know. We are Mexico. We don't have anything on him.

So, he is clear. That is what happens, Mr. Speaker.

Sometimes they bring a minor with them, and this is where it really gets ugly. To have a minor with you, the background check, first of all, is often waived anyhow, or we can't get any information, even if they are not a citizen.

We have this minor who comes into the country illegally. We are sending him somewhere. They have a phone number, send him there. We don't ask if that person is a citizen because we can't.

If the person isn't a citizen and has a deportation order, and the minor is going to go to that person, the deportation order is not valid grounds to not send that minor to that person.

That means we are sending a minor to a person that the United States is going to deport. Where is the minor going to be then? Look, I think we all know that is not really a problem because we are not going to deport anybody in the United States of America.

How about this? If you have a criminal history or you refuse to submit to a background check, but you are claiming an unaccompanied minor, that is not grounds for you to not have that unaccompanied minor.

Mr. Speaker, I hate to say it this way, but it seems to me that in the United States of America it is probably easier to adopt a stray cat or a stray dog than to receive an unaccompanied minor coming across the Texas border through the cartels. That is one hell of a damn statement to make on this House floor, but I think it is reality.

I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs) for the purpose of a colloquy. Maybe he has got some thoughts on it. Am I wrong?

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Mr. PERRY. No. We saw a few.

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Mr. PERRY. I think my good friend from Arizona has to explain what the CBP One app is? What is that?

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Mr. PERRY. You are telling me I have got an app on my phone where I can make a reservation to come illegally into the country, and I am making the reservation with the law enforcement agency charged with keeping me out of the country illegally?

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Mr. PERRY. What was the number, if you don't mind, the record number in December?
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Mr. PERRY. It certainly is an astounding eventuality that we are realizing, and we also know that the Border Patrol wants to do its job. I firmly believe that 99.9 percent of the good members of Customs and Border Protection want to do their job. They want to protect the homeland, but they have been given orders.

They have been given orders to process these people, not bar entry to this country, but process them to the point where we don't even have anybody out on the line. I am sure the gentleman from Arizona can talk about that.

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Mr. PERRY. Back at the facility processing?

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Mr. PERRY. I disagree. They do know there is, but they want to deny that there is to the American people. They want these people to keep coming illegally in the numbers that they have been and will continue to come, and every policy that they support promotes that. Every policy that we support to stem that tide they object to.

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Mr. PERRY. My good friend from Virginia, I know you were there and talked to some of the folks, regular residents, not Border Patrol, not law enforcement, just people trying to get through their day as American citizens.

I talked to a husband and wife who have a ranch there. The lady told me horrific stories. They have an 18-year-old daughter. The lady came home, and there were people who came across the border illegally, men, in her home.

She was worried her daughter was upstairs, and she kicked those people out of her home and went to check on her daughter. Her daughter was upstairs listening to music and didn't even know anybody was in the house.

I said: Well, what were they doing in your house?

She said: Well, I keep a refrigerator out on the front porch because we get a bunch of migrants that come through, and we put water and stuff in it. We put beer in it, too. They wanted beer, but they didn't like the beer that I had out in that refrigerator, so they came into the house.

How would you like that?

If that is not enough, she told me she went to get in her truck, and some lady was in her truck bleeding to death because she had gotten her foot cut off trying to jump off the train that goes through their property.

She said in the period of time between the end of the year, so the end of December, and when we were there, which is the beginning of January, I think essentially 3 or 4 days, there were 77 cuts in their fence.

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Mr. PERRY. The U.S. Government--your tax dollars--is paying for the cuts in the fence that Mr. Biggs from Arizona is talking about.

These people, citizens of the United States who are taxpayers depending upon their government to protect them from invasion, guess who pays to fix their fence?

They can't even have animals on their land anymore because they can't keep them in the fenced area because the fences get cut by people coming across illegally.

Is that any way to live, my good friend from Virginia?

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Mr. PERRY. Wait. Four miles?

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Mr. PERRY. I want to tell a story about getting on the plane in San Antone to come home. Before I do that, we are joined by the great Eli Crane from the State of Arizona, out of that uniform and into this uniform, fighting for the great people of Arizona.

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Mr. PERRY. Well, I was around when that agency was enacted, and there was a reason we called it that. It was supposed to help all the disparate agencies collaborate toward one singular focus, which was protecting America.

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Mr. PERRY. People don't know that, Mr. Biggs from Arizona, but there is a golf course right on the river at Eagle Pass, Texas.

While people are coming illegally across the border, you could be teeing off or on the green trying to get one in the cup. They are walking right across in front of you, yelling. They were yelling ``Venezuela'' when I was there.

I don't know why you come from Venezuela to America illegally yelling ``Venezuela.'' You would think you would at least have the sense to say ``USA,'' but that is another story.

What is your story on the golf course?

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Mr. PERRY. Well, Mr. Biggs of Texas, I am glad you brought that up. Now, on my trip home, I went to the airport in San Antonio. It was early in the morning. People are around, but, you know, we know what to look for because we have heard the stories. There is a brown envelope, and people are carrying it.

Now, you know, you either have your app on your phone--not the CBP One app, but the app for the airline you are flying--so you get your boarding pass or you are carrying a physical boarding pass, and it says, you know, zone one, whatever, right, to tell you when you are boarding. People not from this country that have never been on an airplane before don't know what any of that is. They want to get to the next--and I happened to be going to Charlotte, South Carolina, for my connection to get back home to the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I am sitting listening to the announcements, and I am going to show up in line at the appropriate time. But the folks that don't understand English and don't know what a boarding pass is, they just all go to the front of the line.

These people that work for the airlines, they are trying to hold back this horde of people that just want to get in the airplane. Now, it is one thing--Mr. Biggs, you speak Spanish. My mother is Colombian, so I know a little bit; you know, I can make my way through it. But if you have got people coming from 170 different countries, the gate agent likely doesn't know what you speak in Burkina Faso or maybe you don't know Farsi or something like that. They are trying to explain to these people, no, you have to wait your turn.

Now, while all that is happening, it is going through my mind that these people that came from some other country other than Mexico, which is important because they flew into Mexico and then walked across the border, so they had some means to get there. It wasn't like they were just out in a boat floating around in the ocean and all of a sudden, oh, we are on the Rio Grande and we are coming into America now. I mean, this is all planned, right?

Now the American taxpayer is paying for these folks to get on this plane. They just came across illegally, and they are going to Charlotte. I don't know where they are going after that, but I know a bunch of them were going to Charlotte because I was on the plane with them. We are going to pay for that.

We are talking about funding, last year's funding. We are not into this year's funding. We are still trying to figure out last year's funding. And I think, Mr. Biggs, right now we are being asked to just continue to fund what we have been talking about for the last hour; is that not right?

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Mr. PERRY. So in the 5 minutes we have remaining, now, Mr. Crane is new here, so maybe he is excited to vote to continue that. I don't think he is, but that is between him and his constituents.

Mr. Good was here not this last Christmas last month but the Christmas before, and we got a present from the United States Senate called an omnibus. Everything was in it: all kinds of spending, trillions of dollars, bad policy that is leading to the destruction of this country, including a wide-open border.

If I am not mistaken, Mr. Good, you voted ``no'' on that.

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Mr. PERRY. In the 4 minutes we have left, I am standing with great American patriots here that have decided to serve in Congress, do the right thing no matter what Washington, D.C., tells them. It seems to me--I don't know, maybe I am cynical, maybe I am jaded--we are getting no help from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle on this border issue or on this spending issue. Likewise, we are getting little to no help from the other side of the building.

Are we the only four Americans that care about this? There are other good colleagues here that care about it. Well, they are on this side of the aisle, and they are on this side of the building. Mr. Biggs, is there anybody--you come from a State where there are Democrats elected. I come from Pennsylvania. We have 12.5, 13 million Pennsylvanians. During the course of the 4-year Biden administration there is going to be a whole new Pennsylvania in this country, right? That is how many people are coming. Do our friends on the other side of the aisle have no constituency that says, hold on a second, I am tired of paying for this? Mr. Speaker, is there anybody in your State on the other side of the aisle that will say I have had enough? Mr. Biggs?

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Mr. PERRY. That is right. In the remaining 1\1/2\ minutes, I will kind of end this where I started it out for all of us. We have got friends on the other side of the aisle here in this building, friends in the other party around the country in charge of cities, in charge of States. All of them are complaining. They are all complaining. This is a crisis. It is an emergency in our State. It is an emergency in our city and our community. We have to have something done about it.

I am still waiting. I am still waiting for the first one to say we are going to revoke the sanctuary city, the sanctuary State status. But until that happens, Mr. Speaker, they are not serious about any of this. They don't care about any of this. They don't care about any of the citizens that elected them, that pay taxes in those political subdivisions. They don't care about them. They want to appear to care, but they don't care because they are allowing this. They are not only allowing it like Secretary Mayorkas, like my friends on the other side of the aisle and the other side of the building, they are not just allowing it; they are promoting it. They want it to happen.

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