Advancing Important Measures on the Floor
Floor Speech
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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time and the opportunity to expound upon very important topics that we face across the board, whether it is today's legislation, or ongoing discussions.
Mr. Speaker, I want to touch a little bit this afternoon on the situation with Secretary Mayorkas and the Biden administration, who are willfully and systematically ignoring our Nation's laws, which are diminishing our national security. Of course, I am talking about the border situation. How the President and the administration continue to get away with ignoring the sieve that our border is, the hundreds of thousands coming across.
My colleagues could put the number at over 7 million over the full time, over 3 years. It is probably hard to really estimate what it is, the people coming into this country. Under the terminology, let's say migrants, or even in some cases by the administration, newcomers.
Why these euphemisms? People are breaking and entering into this country illegally and undermining its security, undermining our systems of services, et cetera.
Early on in this session, House Republicans passed the bill known as H.R. 2, which is one of the strongest border security packages ever in the history of the House. H.R. 2 holds the administration accountable for this colossal failure we see every day in Eagle Pass, all along Texas, all along Arizona, New Mexico, and California.
What is the outcome from Secretary Mayorkas? Well, the House, in its wisdom, decided to move forward with an impeachment. Now, that hasn't been delivered to the Senate yet. I think timing is everything, and the Speaker, in his wisdom, decided a little more time was needed before those documents are delivered and the Senate is looking at taking it up.
Hopefully, they will. Hopefully, Leader Schumer doesn't just try and brush it under the rug. There are serious charges here, and the track record of the Secretary and the whole Biden administration on this certainly bears the discussion, certainly bears the information that has come out and will continue to come out in an impeachment process.
Therefore, as well, whatever happens with that impeachment, whatever the timeline is, we still have H.R. 2 sitting over in the Senate waiting for action as well. Again, in order to tighten up our own border and properly handle the laws we already have on the books, we don't need a lot of new legislation. We just need it defined better, it looks like, on what asylum really means, on the policies that had been in place before that were working reasonably well.
However, under Mayorkas' leadership, we would have over 9 million illegal immigrant encounters nationwide, 7.4 million encounters at our southern border, and then 1.8 million known as got-aways that have gotten away from our Border Patrol. Those are the ones that we know about.
Immigration judges have thrown out approximately 200,000 cases because the DHS did not properly file the required notice-to-appear paperwork by the time of the scheduled hearing.
Did they purposely blow that at DHS so that they could say 200,000 of them didn't have the proper paperwork to appear and that those are now permanent getaways? It is a pretty wild coincidence for 200,000.
In my personal opinion, on top of that, do they have the same rights on this type of legal question, where the timeline expired and they didn't get the right paperwork? They are still illegally in this country. Again, they are not migrants. They are illegal aliens that have broken into this country.
The Biden administration's far-left open-border policies are what is to blame for this historic crisis. There are over 60 instances of the Biden administration taking actions that have undermined our Nation's security, including halting the construction of the border wall.
That is what I said, 60 different actions. Was it just to unwind what Trump did because he doesn't like Trump?
I had a recent visit south of the Tucson area near a place called Naco, Arizona. My colleagues can still see what looked like probably a mile in either direction of the metal material there that was being used at the time to construct the border fence. There were piles and piles of giant girders of steel there, and I could look at it up close. I could show pictures where it is marked on there, October 2020. The date of it is still marked there on the material laying there.
President Biden, about 1\1/2\ years ago, made some mention: Well, maybe we will start putting that back up and fill in some of the gaps.
On a different trip to Arizona, closer to a dam, all these different gaps were seen. There were miles of fence, but there were gaps in it.
The people coming in since they are being welcomed by our government can just find any one of the gaps in the fence and be picked up. Actually, we are sending vans to go pick them up so we can get them processed sooner and cut them loose with the idea that they might come back within 2 years or whenever the court date would be except that DHS screwed up the date and lost 200,000 of them because they didn't give the required notice to appear.
In the meantime, we are trying to hustle them into the country as fast as possible through the actions of Biden's directives with border personnel.
They announced on May 10 of last year that it would allow for some release of migrants in the U.S. with no way to actually track them.
The Department of Homeland Security has now admitted that 40 percent of catch and release migrants have just disappeared into the country.
The Senate must hold the trial for Secretary Mayorkas' impeachment because he needs to be held accountable. You can't just ignore our laws like that and make a joke out of it. This is, again, our security. Fentanyl is coming in. We have people coming in that will be part of known terror cells. The people they have caught and turned away are from very questionable, very dangerous associations.
This is no joke. This is not just shouting in the wilderness. This is very real, and how this administration continues to get away with it blows my mind and a lot of the minds of the American people out there.
How can this be happening? Lately, President Biden is talk about, well, does he have the authority to make a move on further enforcing the border? It is an executive action. The laws are on the books. We have legislated on that. We have put forward funding on that. The President in his action is to execute and to enforce the laws that are on the books.
If we would execute and enforce them properly to the fullest extent we could, as a country, we wouldn't have nearly the problem that we are seeing right now.
In the meantime, we legislate here. H.R. 2 is sitting over in the Senate. I urge the Senators to take that up and move in the direction that will further define and tighten our laws so we will have a much more secure border.
With that, I suggest that the American people call your United States Senators and have them move H.R. 2.
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