Government Funding and Immigration

Floor Speech

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Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding.

The gentleman is from a border State, but, Mr. Speaker, it is true that every State is now a border State. Our communities are being deluged with individuals who are in this country illegally. That is the bottom line. Every community realizes it.

I had the opportunity to go with Speaker Johnson to Eagle Pass. Mr. Speaker, I will tell you, it was eye-opening. It was eye-opening because, as you know, right now, as we are standing here on the floor today, the Biden Department of Justice is literally suing the Texas Department of Public Safety because Texas actually wants to defend the border. Yes, you heard that right.

The President, who comes out of the meeting yesterday with the Speaker and the leaders over in the House and the Senate and says, oh, we have to do something about the border, yes, he is doing something about it. He sent his lawyers into court to actually tell the Texas department to stand down from defending our border. Those are the facts. I was there.

We got briefed by the directors of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who will tell you that, yes, in fact, they watched the Border Patrol--look, great men and women. They raised their hands and said they were going to obey what their orders were. They are functioning as social workers. That is it. They will tell you.

Mr. Speaker, one of the most revealing facts was the day when they had 6,000 people come to Eagle Pass. We stood in the facility. They will tell you that this facility was originally designed to process about 100 people a day, maybe 200.

It is not a permanent facility, by the way. It is a soft-sided facility. It is a tent. They had to do it that way because nobody could have projected that we were going to process thousands of people a day.

They said, well, we expanded it and can process about 1,000 people a day. What happens when 6,000 people cross the border, and this administration doesn't turn them back, doesn't have a return to Mexico policy?

By the way, just to review the geography, the day we were there, the people who were crossing the border, who were wading through the Rio Grande, were young Venezuelan men. Just to review the geography, I doubt they swam from Venezuela up the Rio Grande, which means they had to come by land and had to pass through all the countries of Central America and then Mexico to get to the United States.

They were claiming asylum, or they could have been paroled into the interior. I don't know. I don't know how Border Patrol handled them, but Border Patrol was not turning them back.

They will tell you that most of the people who come claim asylum. They said it was like 80 percent of the people are claiming asylum. They know the magic words to say. They come to the border and say that they face some kind of persecution and threats of violence in their country and are claiming asylum.

They will also tell you that a large number of those people are actually coming from Mexico. It is not the most now. Most are from Venezuela, but number two is Mexico.

Picture this, Mr. Speaker. We have a trade agreement with Mexico. We have a peaceful border with Mexico--at least with the Mexican Government, not with the cartels. Yet, we are accepting people who are telling us they have to be here on asylum from our neighboring ally, Mexico.

How ridiculous is that? There is no civil war going on in Mexico. There is none of that. Why in the world would we be taking asylum cases from Mexico?

The Texas border people said that the problem is that Border Patrol-- and confirmed by Border Patrol--are instructed to process these people into the interior.

Mr. Speaker, when those 6,000 people crossed the border, they took all the Border Patrol agents from 243 miles of border that the Eagle Pass-Del Rio sector is responsible for--they took them all into the 4 miles of that area around Eagle Pass, leaving 239 miles of Texas border wide open.

The administration will tell you all the fentanyl is crossing at the ports of entry. Really? On a day when 239 miles are unpatrolled, you think that a few pounds of fentanyl worth millions of dollars that could kill tens of millions of people--you think that they are going to risk taking it through a port of entry when the border is wide open? It is not believable.

This administration does not want to enforce the border. They don't care about 70,000 people dying from fentanyl every year and that number going up, not down.

We can't stand for it anymore. The gentleman from Arizona is absolutely right. Our lever is funding. We ought to take advantage of that.

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