Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, our hearts do go out to the family of Laken Riley.

Now, we also must acknowledge that we can no longer take the feigned, empty words of sympathy from those across the aisle who refuse to do something meaningful to stop the onslaught that is happening in America today.

Let's think about this. You need to acknowledge you haven't done anything. You sent to us a foreign aid bill that you have claimed is a border security bill. It is no such thing.

However, let's face this fact, as well. Let's face the fact that the law requires detention already. The detention provisions of title 8 are civil in nature and not criminal in nature, and that is why there is already authority and mandates to hold people in custody when they haven't been convicted of various acts, such as drug distribution, prostitution, and other vices. This bill simply adds another criminal offense to a civil construct.

Let's admit that you don't want to stop that. Let's admit that you don't really want to secure the border. If you wanted to secure the border and if this administration wanted to secure the border, there is authority under title 8 right now to enact border closure procedures.

This administration has allowed people to come in running rampant. This administration should apologize to the family of the 11-year-old girl who was raped last week by a Guatemalan illegal alien who should never have been released from custody.

This happens over and over again. It is time now to stand up and say you support this bill, and you are going to begin to take action to bring the border under control.

If you want to talk about parole, we can go into a lengthy discussion about parole, but I am not going into a lengthy discussion.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

The gentleman is exactly right. What is the legislative branch's remedy to an executive branch that refuses to follow the law? It is to remove spending.

I introduced legislation. I introduced legislation that said: We will fund ICE, CBP. We are going to fund TSA. We are going to fund air traffic controllers and our military personnel, and do you know what? We are not going to fund anything else, except for mandatories, until this administration actually enforces the border.

However, we can't do that because there is this fear of a shutdown. Explain that to the American people. Explain that to the American people in my community. Go down there and take a look at the national forest, where there is now a squatters camp set up, filled with people who are flowing across our border.

Our leader said in November that we are not going to do any more short-term CRs--had it with them. This is the third one. Do you know what happens? We just keep spending money, and we keep the policies that are in place.

That means the border remains open. This country remains in danger because of this administration--but not just this administration but because this body does not use what the Founders gave us as the ultimate tool, and that is the purse strings. It is really shameful.

Mr. Speaker, over the last several years, we have received a seemingly endless stream of reports of abuses by the FBI and other parts of our Federal police apparatus spying on Americans by abusing either section 702 or title I of FISA.

I want to review some of those today before I get to the border. Let's talk about the report issued April 21, 2022, by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Washington, D.C. Here's what some of them are.

Between late 2016 and early 2020, the FBI regularly queried unminimized FISA information using identifiers of individuals listed in local police homicide reports.

This wasn't people accused. This included victims. They were using illicit querying, which in my world, when I used to practice, we would call an illegal search. They were going after victims, the next of kin of the victim, and witnesses.

Guess what was found. Those queries were violating the querying standard because there was no reasonable basis to expect they would return foreign intelligence or evidence of a crime. That is just one.

The next one, June 2020, used identifiers of 133 individuals arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests between May 30 and June 18, 2020. Guess what they found. No specific potential connections to terrorist-related activity, and there was not going to be a reasonable likelihood that they would retrieve evidence of a crime. The FBI still conducted that illegal query.

Between June 11 and 15, 2020, another 156 queries were done. Guess what. No reasonable likelihood of finding evidence of a crime or international terrorism.

On the January 6 issue, an analyst ran 13 queries and couldn't even remember why she was doing this. There was no reasonable likelihood to receive foreign intelligence or evidence of a crime.

On April 26, 2021, again, more going after political activist groups, and there were 330 queries and 697 queries. Again, there was no likelihood of foreign intelligence and no evidence of a crime.

They continued on, two more queries, another 360 queries here, another 400 here. None of these queries were reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence or evidence of a crime.

How about this one. They conducted three batch queries. This is the FBI spying on Americans. They conducted three batch queries consisting of approximately 23,132 separate queries.

Guess what, Mr. Speaker?

Those are all related to January 6.

What did they find?

No basis to believe the queries were reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime from section 702 of FISA.

How about this one, this is a favorite, 19,000 people wanted to donate to a political campaign. So they donated to somebody's campaign.

What happened, Mr. Speaker?

The FBI queried all 19,000 of those people.

Guess what, Mr. Speaker?

They said that there were only eight of these 19,000 who had any ties whatsoever to foreign influence.

They abused the civil liberties of 19,000 individuals without a reasonable basis.

I could go on here. There are 2,000 more between April 1, 2020, and March 31, again, no likelihood of intelligence, no likelihood that they will find anything leading to a crime, and it goes on and on in this report.

People say to me: Andy, why do you think we have to have a warrant before the Federal Government starts gaining access to your personal and private telecommunications data?

It is because the FBI has abused it time and time again.

So when we start looking at this, we see other things.

How about this one. This report literally came out yesterday on Valentine's Day. The U.S. intelligence community asked foreign spy agencies to surveil 26 associates of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election. They asked 26 foreign spy agencies of the Five Eyes to spy.

Now, who are the Five Eyes? They are intelligence gathering organizations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

They asked them to spy on people working in Donald Trump's campaign. There was no basis for it. There was no indication that there was any wrongdoing going on and that they would find foreign intelligence, but they had something that they wanted to do, and that was to craft a narrative.

Do you know who knew about that, Mr. Speaker?

The highest levels of the Barack Obama Government.

When I say highest levels, it was President Obama, Vice President Biden, James Clapper, and James Comey.

In December of 2023, a letter was written by the chairwoman of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Now, this is important because my colleagues on the Intelligence Committee want to tell you that: Oh, my gosh, you can't have warrants. If you have warrants, we are not going to be able to spy on enough people, so we can't stop potential threats to the country.

By the way, when I asked them about this letter, because I had this letter, they said: We never heard of that person, and we never heard of that board.

Odd, isn't it, that that board is mentioned in the base bill that they signed off on?

It is mentioned in the base bill.

What is it for?

This is a group that is supposed to help monitor and make sure that we get everything we need to in order to cure and fix FISA going forward.

Now, I am going to take a brief break before I continue on with that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the redoubtable gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Higgins).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, my good friend from Louisiana (Mr. Higgins), who is very eloquent as he conveyed our passion and our sincere desire to curb and restrain an out-of-control, weaponized Federal Government.

So, Mr. Speaker, as I was talking before, how do you get there?

One of the solutions is you have a warrant before you are able to go and conduct that investigation, that basic query into my personal data. We have got some here who don't want to do that. They say: Oh, no, no, we need to expand our spying.

They actually want more authority when they have abused it, literally 278,000 times in the last few years, with what the Inspector General said were unlawful queries.

So we asked the head of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, whose job it is to watch the FISA Court, to say: Look, tell us. We want to know if there is a warrant there, is it going to hinder collection of information that is necessary for the national security of the country?

Do you know what she said, Mr. Speaker?

She said: I strongly disagree that a requirement for FISC approval of U.S. person queries would amount to a de facto ban.

What is that requirement? It is a warrant.

As noted in my separate statement: Requiring FISC review of U.S. person query terms is necessary to protect Americans' privacy rights and, in my view, would neither cause an end to U.S. person queries nor undermine the overall efficacy of section 702 and protect the U.S. national security.

Especially assuming that Congress were to provide exceptions as outlined and we have provided those exceptions. Those exceptions in our warrant requirement are consistent with the canon of law which interprets the most controversial--I shouldn't say controversial--but the most contested of the Bill of Rights, which is the Fourth Amendment.

Moreover, not only is the exception there, I brought this just so you could see, Mr. Speaker, just so I could hold it up so everybody could see. Where these blue tabs are there are other parts of that same underlying base bill which would curb this abuse of FISA that actually have the same exceptions.

So to my colleagues who are complaining that: Oh, no, we can't go forward because we have to have carte blanche on it. The reality is they themselves know and they have approved those exceptions in other parts of the base bill.

Now, I am going to leave FISA for a second. I have to say one more thing. We were scheduled today, this week, we were supposed to be having right now the debate and vote on the rule to allow this base bill to go forward and on the amendments, three amendments from the Judiciary Committee and three from the Intelligence Committee, so we would have a true, regular order, open debate on this, on this very critical issue.

Something happened yesterday. We had the presentation by Judiciary and the Rules Committee, and about that time, there was an announcement that there was something going on, a top-secret, national security issue, come down to the classified room and you can read the documents.

At that time when that statement was released by the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, what happened to the Dow Jones?

It took a spike downward because it spooked our economy.

What happened around the world?

Nations wanted to know what in the heck is he talking about. He is the Intelligence Committee chairman. They were concerned and nervous about that.

Now, I went down and read that document. I can't talk about the document, Mr. Speaker, but I can tell you what the ranking member said. The ranking member said: There is nothing to panic about. There is nothing new here.

I have never seen U.S. national security leveraged to prevent us from even being able to debate a bill or an amendment. In this case, it is not even the bill, it is just the amendment. It is outrageous.

Now, let's talk about something else that is outrageous. I just spent hours in a committee hearing. My Democratic friends always use the terms ``fanatic MAGA Republicans, far-right MAGA Republicans.''

They said that they, those far-right MAGA Republicans, they have to obey Donald Trump on the border. Donald Trump doesn't want anything done on the border.

I am going to tell you something right now, Mr. Speaker. My far-left fanatic Democrat friends are intent on obeying Joe Biden, President Biden, and they don't want the border secure. They say: Oh, my gosh. Joe Biden says: I have to have more authorities.

He didn't need more authorities when he issued dozens of executive orders within 72 hours of becoming inaugurated as President that basically emasculated all of our border security.

Title 8 has not been revised. Title 8 is still there. That is the title under which CBP and ICE operate and USCIS. Right there. That hasn't been changed.

Do you know what has been changed, Mr. Speaker?

This administration has basically said: We are not going to enforce the law.

Not only do they say that; when you go down to the border, and I go down often, and I talk to them: Where are you from?

I am from Senegal.

Really. What are you doing over here?

I am from Burkina Faso.

How about you?

I am from Guinea.

How about you?

Guatemala.

They are from all over the world--Mali, Mauritania. Down in Lukeville, for a while, Mauritania was the number one country of origin for these illegal aliens.

Why are you coming?

We were told it is easy to get into the United States today. That is why we are here.

You are from northeast Africa. Why are you coming to the U.S., into an out-of-the-way place like Lukeville, Arizona?

Well, I am here because the Office of Migration for the United Nations told me it is actually easier to get across the U.S. border than it is to get into Europe today.

Let me just tell you, we saw this today in our hearing. One of the Democrats said: What authority do you think President Biden has today that he could actually shut the border?

Our witness correctly cited 8 U.S.C. section 1182(f), which confers upon the President the authority to close the border in response to a crisis. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that in Trump v. Hawaii. They noted that the statute entrusted the President with the decisions whether and when to suspend entry, whose entry to suspend, for how long, and on what conditions.

Don't tell me that this President can't close the border tomorrow.

I will give you another example. The Del Rio Sector, Del Rio--you will remember this. The Del Rio Bridge, that bridge that goes across the Rio Grande, there is a port of entry right up there on the bridge. Haitians were coming in, 15 to 20,000 a day. They have had 15,000 or so underneath that bridge.

The question at that point was this: Why is Mexico letting them organize? They were organizing down about 60 miles south of the border, bus caravans of Haitians, bringing them up. They would then wade across the Rio Grande River. What can we do?

The CBP sector chief said: I am closing that port of entry.

Now, when you close the port of entry, guess who gets stopped? That is right, legal traffic and the commercial legal traffic.

Do you know what happened? The town just across the river from Del Rio, they said: We can't take this. They lasted 2 days. They called the Federal Government of Mexico and said: We can't have this port of entry closed.

They stopped transporting those illegal aliens to the border to come across. That is what happens. When you close that border, you close that down and use that leverage, all of a sudden, Mexico becomes compliant, and they stop facilitating illegal aliens, that illegal border crossing. That is what happens when you have the will to do something.

I commend the sector chief there, because they kind of took it on their own on that. That is what goes on, and that is what has to go on.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join me in calling upon our leadership to do something that I think is critical.

What is it that we need? We need the leverage to get enforcement, not the leverage to enact policy. I believe this is a lawless administration. They are not going to enforce the policies that we invoke. They instead will go around them.

For instance, H.R. 2. When we go to H.R. 2, a lot of my colleagues say we need to stick H.R. 2 on everything. Well, the problem with sticking H.R. 2 on anything is, even if H.R. 2 passes--it is a great law, by the way. I have written most of the provisions in that H.R. 2 one time or another, introduced those one time or another. It is a good law. I am the cosponsor of that bill. It takes care of a lot of issues, whether it is on asylum, whether it is on Flores, whether it is on any of these other technical issues we have. Guess what? Even if it becomes law, I believe that the administration will paper over it, and they will go around the law.

They will go around the law because they want an open border. That is what they want.

I thought I would share with you just a couple of other, I think, interesting anecdotes.

I got a call recently from a friend of mine down on the border. He is working in the area of the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation. The Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation has 62 linear miles on the border between Arizona and Mexico.

In the middle of that area, you have the mountains that are coming on down, and then you have this area, what we call the San Miguel gate. This gate is really isolated. There is nothing else out there. A little bit--about a mile--I am thinking to myself--south, moving this way, so that would be west. You are going to have the wash. People can just flow across the wash. There is no fence, per se. There is a four-strand wire fence there.

A few months ago, when I was down there, we are driving down the road, and what do I see? I see what looks like five or six kids playing in the dirt road. I mean, there is nothing there. We had been driving for miles, didn't see anybody, no CBP agents or anything.

We get up there, there is a group of 25 people, mostly family units. We asked them where they came from.

They said: We were down in Caborca. That is about 40-50 miles south of the border. That is where we met up with our coyote.

Did you know any of these people?

No, we didn't know each other. We all had to hire this coyote. We came together. The coyote brings us up, drops us off several miles south of the border, points up and says: Just keep walking toward that mountain, and when you get across the wires, step across, sit alongside the road, and then, sooner or later, CBP agents will come.

We asked them how long they had been there. They had been there four hours, hadn't seen any agents. We happened to be down there. I had some Members of Congress with me.

I tell you that because that is how remote this place is, but do you know how many people they are getting there? Groups of 700 to 800 a day, with single groups. This is busloads that are being organized in Caborca. They are bringing them up, dropping them off, and here they come through the San Miguel gate.

Guess what happens at that point? Every agent that is on duty is now processing and moving those people up to a soft-sided facility to await further

processing and ultimately, within 72 hours, released into the United States of America, with parole status, which means they can work after 6 months' period of time. They are going to get legal papers, yet they entered the country illegally.

I asked them: What is happening otherwise?

It just so happens that that is the sector that has the highest rate of known and suspected unknown got-aways. Why don't they want to just surrender? It is so easy now. You just surrender. They are going to process you and release you and pay for you to go wherever you want to go in the country.

What the deal is, they are carrying drugs, or else they are Chinese and nationals of military age, or they are from other nations that are special interest, that sponsor terrorism.

They are coming through, and how do we know that they are coming through in these groups? We do have some sensors in some of those places. We still are using tracking. We have agents who still track. The score, if there is more than 20 in that group, they don't write 35. They write 20-plus, so even that is inaccurate.

I enjoin my colleagues. Please, we have to use the purse strings that we have and stop funding a government that is spying on us and is emasculating our southern border. We no longer have a border. That is the only way you are going to get enforcement on the border. Policy is good, but enforcement is the goal.

Mr. Speaker, thank you, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, James Iredell, one of the Founders from North Carolina, talking about this impeachment clause said: ``The power of impeachment is given by this Constitution, to bring great offenders to punishment. It is calculated to bring them to punishment for crime which it is not easy to describe, but which everyone must be convinced is a high crime and misdemeanor against the government.''

For instance, corruption. ``Its exercise''--the impeachment--``will arise from acts of great injury to the community, and the objects of it may be such as cannot be easily reached by an ordinary tribunal.''

That is why you have impeachment. It is necessary here because what you have is a Secretary who came into Judiciary, he was given the language from the Secure Fence Act of 2006. I said: Is the border under operational control? He says: Well, no. We have redefined it ourselves. We are comfortable with the new definition that we have made. That is a violation of the separation of powers.

Madam Speaker, this is the same Secretary who tells his ICE agents you cannot remove 1 million, 1.2 million people who have actually had due process through the courts and have active removal orders.

He is the same Secretary who said that we don't have to adhere to title 8.

That has resulted in great injury to our communities, and that is why he must be impeached--because he falls on the definitions that one of the Founders, James Iredell, said. He is right on the money, and I urge everyone to support this movement to impeach.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Johnson). We appreciate him. I played with him on the baseball team. He was the catcher, and we will miss his catching abilities. God bless him in his future endeavors.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks. I appreciate his very prescient comments. Before I get on too much more, I have a bill that pulls us out of the World Health Organization. I would encourage all of my colleagues to sign it.

If you watched the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, today speaking at the World Economic Forum, they are planning to use the next epidemic to impose world governance. I mean, he basically said that. I invite you to watch that. That is the head of the World Health Organization.

Let's talk about what my good friend from Texas talked about. He has been a leader on this issue, and we have both been fighting this for some time. That is border security. I can't help but recall the words of President Biden, who was then a candidate for the Presidency, and he was asked in the debate on the Democrat side, they said: What do you tell people at the border? He said: I would urge them to surge to the border if he became President.

There is a reason that in the Zocalo of Tijuana people had T-shirts on saying: Joe Biden, let me in. The reason is because he said he would. There is a reason that the first month after Joe Biden issued I believe it was 90 executive orders undoing the border policy of the Trump administration on the first 24 hours, by the way, that you had the first record of border crossings or these encounters, and that was 150,000. Think about that, 150,000.

Our minds were blown. Wow, we were saying, that is more than 5,000 a day, a little over 5,000 a day for that, that is incredible. Then the next month was more, February was more. March of 2021 exceeded that. Record after record after record until we end up last month with 302,000 encounters.

You begin looking at it and you say, well, how does this happen? Is it just policy?

I used to think it was incompetence. I really did. That is giving them the benefit of the doubt. I thought after the first three months in a row of records, they are just incompetent, they don't quite know what they are doing. Then we got to meet Secretary Mayorkas, he finally came in and he testified. At first, before he testified, he came into the Border Security Caucus and talked to us there, and he said: The border is secure.

Now, mind you, just on the encounters alone for that first 3 months, you were pushing 430,000. For known got-aways, you were pushing about an additional 110,000. Unknown got-aways are estimated to be at least another 75,000. So, you have 600,000-plus illegal border crossings in his first 3 months that he was running DHS, and he sat there and told us that the border was secure and that we have operational control.

I will remember when my colleague asked him: Do you have operational control pursuant to the Secure Fence Act of 2006? He said yes.

Then we got the language out. I think Mr. Roy got the language out and said: Let's read the language.

He still insisted. He knew that they were not in compliance with the law. He knew it. Yet, he persists to craft a narrative that the border is secure.

Of course, it is not secure, which is why you had about 450,000 people enter our country illegally last month.

I am suggesting to America that this country cannot take 12 more months of the Mayorkas security plan on the border because 12 more months would be over 5 million people getting into this country illegally.

What is happening now is they are releasing approximately 80 percent of everyone who comes in. They release them into the country.

I was in Lukeville the week before Christmas. Lukeville is the hub right now and has been. Over a 2-week period, they had 30,000 people come through Lukeville--nowhere else, Lukeville.

I was down there in the heart of that, and I was allowed to talk to people who had not been formally arrested yet. I would go up and ask them: Where are you from? Where are you going? Why did you come? Those were my three questions.

We had the gentlemen from Burkina Faso, another few from Senegal, and another few from Guinea. Those are all African nations.

Then, we had folks from India and Pakistan. That is South Asia, India and South Asia. Pakistan is considered to be the Middle East, although in my mind, they are still South Asia. That is interesting.

Of course, we always have some folks from Guatemala.

You have to understand where Lukeville is. The reason that you have a port of entry there is because it is on kind of a highway that goes from Phoenix, from Ajo, down to a place called Rocky Point, Mexico, which is on the Sea of Cortez. People go down there and recreate down there.

When we asked them where they are going, why they are here, I would say: Where are you going? Everyone that I asked starts fiddling around in their backpacks and pockets, and they pull out a card. On that card will be two or three names with phone numbers and an address somewhere in the country. It is laminated. It is not like this. This is not laminated. Theirs are laminated.

I said: Where are you going? We have a guy going to the Bronx. We have people going to Missouri, Oklahoma, Houston.

If you are going to Houston, why are you crossing into Lukeville? You should have been over in Del Rio or RGV. I don't know why you are here. When you ask them that, it is because they were directed to come there. The coyotes, the cartels, tell them this is where you are going to go, where you are going to come in.

They release them, and they are in good shape. They are in good shape. They haven't walked. They haven't come through the Darien Gap in Panama. Those folks are the folks that are ending up over in Del Rio or Eagle Pass right now.

Those coming to Lukeville, they have flown into Mexico. They have been bused up. They get bused.

How did you get here? Well, we came in from--there is a gap in the gate, in the fence down here.

The border wall that President Trump put up 30 feet high, just on the other side going down to the Sea of Cortez, like I told you, there is a freeway. The cartels will come up and run a real quick couple of cuts. They will remove two slats from the fence, pull them down, and just start flooding people through.

I talked to the guy who repairs them. That morning, in about 4 hours' time, they had already repaired six breaches.

I tell you these things so you understand how real this is. Our lever as Members of Congress is the purse strings. We are not going to have success with just policy because this is a lawless administration. We have to have enforcement as a condition of funding this government.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Harris).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I want to point out really quickly, on parole, which my colleague mentioned, parole by statute is meant to be a case-by-case humanitarian administrative remedy. This administration has granted parole to more than a million people.

What parole does is it actually gives you a work permit. You are supposed to be here. You have a relative that needs surgery. You are going to be here for 2 weeks. Extraordinarily, before Biden, it was about 15 a year. In this administration, it is over a million.

I also want to talk about CBP because those line agents are working their tails off. They are doing everything they can, but they are being undermined by Secretary Mayorkas and this administration.

I have been down there many times and talked to them. Their morale is so low. They want to enforce, but like in Eagle Pass and Lukeville, both places I have been, once you get away from the crowd where they are processing, you can drive along the border for miles. We drove along Lukeville literally for miles.

The only people we saw was the guy in charge of rebuilding the fence and the hundreds of people that were walking along the border road who had come through those holes illegally.

We need to use our lever that our Founders gave to us. It is the most effective. I urge our colleagues to reconsider, as we go forward, using that lever to prevent this administration from avoiding its duty to enforce our border security.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for joining me, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I get a kick out of listening to the gentleman from New York who doesn't know a darn thing about the border crisis and gets to stand up and say: Oh, by golly, 90 percent of the fentanyl they are catching right there is in the port of entry.

Do you know why they catch it at the port of entry? Because that is where you have x-rays for the vehicles coming in. You have dogs that sniff. Most of the vehicles are getting picked up and looked at. It is the same with the pedestrians coming across.

Do you know why you don't find it between the ports of entry where 1.9 million people have come across the border, Mr. Speaker? You know why they don't find it? Let's say, right now if you are on the Tohono O'odham reservation, they have 62 miles right there along the border. You can drive that, and you are going to see maybe one or two agents in that entire area.

Do you know why? Because the rest of them are processing all of the people that the agents have had to encounter. They are out at these facilities.

When I was down in Lukeville right before Christmas, I was standing there and I asked, hey, where you from? Guinea. How about you? Burkina Faso. How about you? Senegal. How about you? India. How about you? Pakistan. They are coming from all over the world to Lukeville, Arizona.

I happened to be there during a 2-week period where 30,000 encounters took place in that area alone. Oh, yeah, this border is secure. It is closed. What they don't tell you is that you have got a bunch of people coming in between the ports of entry that we can't even catch.

When I was down in Lukeville, we couldn't catch them. Why can't we catch them? We sense them. In some places we have sensors. Why couldn't we catch them? As I drove along for miles along that border, I didn't see a single agent. Why? Because they are all back at the facility processing. That is what they are doing. That is what these guys have done. That is what the Democrats have done.

When they say, parole is a good thing, the statute is real clear: It is supposed to be particularized. It is supposed to be case by case.

We actually heard in Oversight today that the million-plus people who have received parole are all being adjudicated on a case-by-case basis. I asked the witness: Have you ever been down there and watched the process before they grant somebody parole? I saw it on video. Go with me sometimes. Stand down there, visit, watch it, and you will be stunned to know that there is virtually no vetting whatsoever. Why? We are relying on those individuals to tell us where they are from and who they are. That is how open this border is.

Mr. Speaker, I will say that the gentleman from New York also explained the reason that they support this illegal migration is because they want people to pick our vegetables. That is how they view people coming in from all around the world.

Mr. Speaker, I support this resolution, and I urge my colleagues to do so, as well.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor the life and service of United States Army Sergeant Andrew Paul Southard.

Andrew was a husband; a father; a son; a brother; an elite Nightstalker with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment; and a resident of Apache Junction in Arizona's `Fighting Fifth' District.

Tragically, his life was cut short as one of five Special Operations soldiers aboard a Blackhawk helicopter that went down in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea on Friday, November 10, 2023. His sacrifice, like that of all our courageous fallen, is the culmination of a life of duty and honor.

Andrew was born to Kim and Randy Southard in Spokane, Washington in 1996, and moved to Apache Junction, Arizona at the age of 11. From a young age, he embodied the integrity and compassion instilled in him by his family and tight-knit community. A former high school teacher shared this about Andrew after his passing:

``He didn't do things because he thought people were going to give him gratitude for doing it. He did it because he thought it was right.''

And from a long-time classmate:

``My mother was battling cancer and it made it hard sometimes at school. I will never forget the compassion Andy showed me through the hard days at school. He never treated me differently, but always had a joke to keep me laughing and my mind off of what was going on at home. I will always he grateful for that.''

Andrew graduated from Apache Junction High School in 2015. Coming from a military family he eagerly enlisted in the United States Army at the age of 18 and was assigned as a `15T' UH-60 Black Hawk Repairer stationed with the 1st Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Bliss, Texas.

In this role, Andrew deployed to Egypt for a 13-month rotation as part of Task Force Sinai in support of peacekeeping operations, and deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Wherever he served, Andrew's unit members recognized both his selfless service and the energy and time he dedicated to those around him. Andrew was the type of soldier and man who, while at Fort Bliss, pulled a woman from a burning vehicle without even telling his friends about it.

When asked about his heroism, Andrew simply responded: ``I feel like anyone would pull over. It was just my time and place where I was that day.''

A friend and fellow soldier who completed Army basic training with Andrew shared:

``It's a statement to who he was. You ask anyone; if they knew him for seven years or just seven days, you understood the type of person he was and how much he would be there for you, how much he would invest in you and expect nothing in return.''

Never content with the ordinary, Andrew stared down one of the most grueling challenges any military service member can endure by volunteering for the Army's legendary 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

After completing Green Platoon, the regiment's rigorous training and assessment program in 2023, he earned his place with the First Battalion, 160th SOAR as an MH-60M Crew Chief based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

After the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, elements of the 160th SOAR were assigned to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea in support of our allies in Israel.

On November 10, during a refueling training exercise over the Mediterranean between Cyprus and Lebanon, Andrew's aircraft crashed after suffering a catastrophic malfunction.

Tragically, he and four of his teammates were killed. We mourn them:

Chief Warrant Officer Stephen R. Dwyer, Clarksville, Tennessee; Chief Warrant Officer Shane M. Barnes, Sacramento, California; Staff Sergeant Tanner W. Grone, Gorham, New Hampshire; and Sergeant Cade M. Wolfe, of Mankato, Minnesota.

Though we grieve, we celebrate Andrew's life along with his devoted wife Ashley, his sweet children Jack, Gavin, and Hallie, and his parents, brother, grandparents, and friends.

But we also recognize that his sacrifice epitomizes the way he lived his life; defending the defenseless, standing by his fellow soldiers, and doing what was right without the thought of recognition or reward. May each of us follow his valuable example of courage, service, and friendship.

No. Let's pick up with Mayor Adams of New York. Here is a guy who presides over a sanctuary city--that is awesome, that is awesome--but he doesn't want to experience what is a daily occurrence along the border, for those who live in a border community.

They got some rain and wind in New York. It was blowing down the tents that the illegal aliens were dwelling in in New York at a park, so he decides this is what we are going to do: We are going to clear out a school. We are going to tell those 4,000 kids with no notice to the parents really, no notice to the teachers, no notice to the district. Boom, all these families, all these individuals--they are not all just families; you have got men of military age--2,000 of them plus--they are going to dwell in the school that your kid was getting ready to go to.

He is like: What could go wrong? Why is everybody so upset?

He says about that, the illegal aliens: I didn't see illegal migrants. I saw children. I saw children, and this community will always stand with children.

What about the 4,000 kids at the school? What about those families?

I didn't see children. I mean, he didn't say that, but that is really what he is implying: You are only a child of value if you are in the country illegally. You are not a child of value if you are going to a New York public school. That is the very attitude of this administration.

Mr. Perry was down in Eagle Pass, and I was down in Eagle Pass with Representative Good. When I talked to the Speaker, he was a little miffed with me.

He said: Why aren't you coming with us on our tour? Why are you going on your own tour?

I said: Because I have got to go back to Arizona a little early, I am going to need to leave the bus.

His staff tells my staff: Oh, Biggs can't come then because he has got to be on the bus the whole time.

I said: I am going down a day early. I am going to rent a car and invite a few friends. Scott is a friend, but I am sorry, the car filled up too fast.

We went down early. You know what CBP did? Because I go down often, I know a lot of people in CBP. They routinely take us on tours, but in this instance they said they had a new guy coming in, he hasn't been sworn in yet. He says, look--he tells my staff--you can come, but then he says, no, no, you can't come.

We reached out to the chief judge of the Western District of Texas. We said: Look, we are going to be down there, we would like to visit with you. We want you to tell us what is going on.

She says: Are you going to take them to the border?

I said: No, they withdrew the border.

She makes the call and says: I will be with Biggs and his group; we want a tour of the border.

That night you did not see anything; you didn't see a lot of people crossing, did you?

Right. Right. I will tell you why in a second. That night it was cold, really cold, unseasonably cold in south Texas. It was raining cats and dogs. We are in the van, and they are taking us down there.

I have been down there many times. We see it. It is cleaned up. They have moved 12,000 people in 24 hours because you guys, you yahoos are coming down there the next day and Secretary Mayorkas was down there yesterday. They cleaned it up. We can't have this. The media is coming down, a big gaggle of media, they can't see this. We can't have this, so they cleaned it up. They actually mowed the grass.

I asked the guy, I said: Where's the garbage, man? I know there is garbage. I know there is clothing. As we are driving along, there is this massive pile of clothing.

Did you see it, Bob? I said: Hey, is this one of the piles of clothing?

Yeah, that is one of the piles right there.

As we are going down, there are people all along the way there, right? That is what you see.

Now, why did you not see anybody?

We met the next day with a lot of folks you didn't get to meet with-- sorry--one of which informed us very clearly that the flow of people at the ports of entry are controlled by the CBP One app, so they will give you a green light.

If you want to come into the country illegally, they want to slow--they want to get some of you to come into the port of entry, so they have created an app. You preregister as an illegal alien say: I am going to be coming, and I want to be able to declare asylum, which is also illegal, by the way. That is not what the law is. So you have got an app.

The gentleman is correct. The reason is because they want to facilitate you getting through faster and we want to distribute you throughout the country, at least this administration does. You register with the CBP One app. Well, they are going to tell you where the green lights are, and they are going to gray out where you can't come.

So they started graying out Eagle Pass. This bridge we are talking about, there is a port of entry on the bridge. They said: No, we are not going to take any more people that way. You are going to need to go to some other port of entry, and so they do. That is how they slow that down.

However, in the meantime, between the ports of entry, they are coming in droves.

The record number for apprehensions was 302,000 plus-- 302,000 people. That would have put it clearly within the top 20 largest cities in this country, when you think about that.

Yes, I will speak to that for just a second. A couple weeks ago now, I took a group of people to Lukeville, Arizona. Now, Lukeville is an incredibly remote port of entry, 35 people or so live by there. You come through Ajo, if you are coming from

Phoenix or Tucson, and you are going to go to Rocky Point down in Mexico, it is very heavy traffic.

Well, they actually had to close that port of entry. Why? Because the number of people pouring through, cutting holes in the fences, and we had to bring these people--we are talking multiple thousands a day, multiple thousands a day, 30,000 people in the last couple weeks, right? Think about that.

What do they do? All they could do is take the personnel that they have, and they start working the line, right? No, they don't. They actually start transporting them to an off-the-border facility, a soft- sided facility kind of like the one you saw except smaller for the first wait, because it is so remote, it literally takes hours to get to a soft-sided facility in Tucson, Arizona. They will go there, and they will spend a few hours, maybe a day or two before they are distributed.

What happens? When I was there, I thought, oh, man, we missed the flood because we got there a little late in the morning. I went and talked to these people.

I said: Where are you from?

Guinea, Burkina Faso, Senegal, India, Pakistan, a few from Guatemala.

Where are you going? You know what they do? They look around, they find a paper, it is a laminated card. It has the names of the people they are going to be in contact with, with phone numbers and an address where they are going to be taken. Everywhere from the Bronx to Missouri, to L.A., to Houston. They are going all over.

Anyway, I said: This is interesting. Let's go on down, and we will drive the border road for a while. We drive the border road. There is a family of 10 people or so.

I said: How did you get here?

We came about 2 hours ago. No, they were 4 hours.

We came 4 hours ago. We came through a hole in the fence down here that the coyote showed us, and we walked on up and we are just waiting. We haven't seen a CBP agent.

In 4 hours?

No, we haven't. We are just waiting. We are assured that someone will be along.

They were from Mexico, within Mexico, so we were able to speak Spanish and talk to them.

Then we go on down, and as we are going along, there isn't anybody. There is no CBP agent. We go a few miles, and we stop.

We are like, you know, we have kind of missed the rush. One of the people I am with said: That looks like a group right there, over here, down to the right, on the road.

Sure enough, there's 30 or 40 people walking, right? We wait, and they get by, and there is another group right behind them and another group and another group. We asked them where they were from. They are from all over.

Where are you going? All over.

How did you get in? There is a hole in the fence right down here a couple miles.

We drove down there. Again, no CBP agents. Why? They are working their tail off having to transport and process. They can't do what they were hired to do, what we need them to do.

We happened to run into a contractor: Hey, what are you doing?

He has got a truck, and we had just seen the welding guy, who I knew was fixing the fence, and he had just driven by. We talked to this guy and said: What is up? Well, you know, he gets this notebook out and starts showing us all the holes in the fence they have had to repair.

He said on this day--I can't remember the actual day; I think it was December 14--there were something like 28 holes in the fence that they had to repair. We were there at 10:30, 11:00 in the morning, they had already repaired six holes in the fence.

I asked: What is happening? How does this happen? He says: Well, you will see along the Mexico side there is a highway. The coyote will come in, controlled by the cartel. He has got his own torch to cut the holes in the fence. They will wrap chains around it, they will pull out the slats, and people will just flood through, and that is what you saw.

That day they had already repaired six holes, and we said: Well, where's the agents? We were looking for agents, as well. I love the agents; I talk to them all the time.

They said: Oh, they are back at the facility processing.

Because they can't get there. You know what? My colleagues on the Democrat side, they will tell you that there is no problem down on the border because they really don't think there is. I think this is an existential crisis.

Three days.

One hundred fifty years ago.

Can I interject something? We have been talking about Eagle Pass, and I have a bit of breaking news for you.

Those who were with me, we actually drove through the golf course to get to a couple of our points.

The breaking news is this: That park area has now been-- today, Governor Abbott of Texas, because he feels so overrun, has declared a state of emergency, and that property has been taken over by the State of Texas.

They will arrest anybody who enters that property for criminal trespass and prosecute them. I guess it underlines kind of a finer point that we have been talking about. Is this a crisis? Are we chasing phantoms, or is this a real crisis? Well, it is a real crisis, and as we sit here, this administration is a lawless administration. They are not going to do anything to actually enforce the border.

I say this often. We can pass every kind of policy we want, but believe me, title 8 forbids Mayorkas from doing what he is doing.

He can't catch and release. Courts have told him to reinstate MPP, the migrant protocol protections. He won't do that. This administration is lawless, and I can only think of one thing, and the Founders gave it to us. They were crystal clear. They said: Your check, legislative branch, is the purse strings. It is the funding. I do not know how we can continue to fund an administration that chooses willfully to facilitate an invasion of the United States of America. How can we?

You are being asked to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security today with no policy changes even. That is what you are being asked. But more than that, you are being asked to continue all the other programs, the crazy subsidies for Green New Deal stuff, which was forecast at $350 billion, which is now forecast at $2.5 trillion. But they are asking you to basically get on board that. So you are getting a weak sauce plan from the Senate that even Senators are rebelling against, saying this will do nothing, which it won't do anything.

Well, so the question is really then are you content with approximately 5 million more people illegally entering the country over the next 12 months or are you going to try to do something about it? Because 302,000 plus at least--they acknowledge 50,000 on the got- aways. They don't know what the unknown got-aways are, but--a lot of people don't this, but I am going to explain it.

When you have a group that you can't catch up to--and we get that a lot in Arizona. Arizona is the number one known got-away place. Why? Because it is rugged. It is really desolate. If you see a group, and you can't tell how many it is, do you know what you get to mark down? Twenty plus. They count it as 20. It may be 75. It may be 50. It may be 22. But it is inaccurate. And the people I talk to tell me it is at least one for one. If it is 50,000, it is 100,000 because they don't know what the real number is. That is 402,000 last month alone. And do you want to continue that? How can we as a country continue that? And they are coming from 170 different nations.

I will tell you this: There may be three people over here I can name. I won't name them to protect them because they always talk like they are going to help us out, but they don't ever help us out. I love them to death, but they never quite can deliver it. But I will tell you, when you go along the border from RGV to San Ysidro, which is San Diego, and you go talk to the local folks, many of whom are Democrat leaders of those cities and those counties, they want something done. They will stand with you.

And do you know what you guys heard in your group, and we happened to be there? They said shut the government down until you shut the border down. And do you know what? That is a common sentiment all along the border. It is common in my district in Arizona. And I have got a great plan for that, but I can't introduce it in 2 minutes, but, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you, that is the facts. Even the Democrats who are facing the brunt of this--and I don't care what New York is doing. You go tell the people down in Ajo, Arizona, why they are getting overrun right now. They would like to hear it from you.

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.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Good for engaging me in this colloquy.

I want to talk briefly about this number that has been put out there. He is asking the question: Will we rise to the occasion?

I am going to give the bad news first. This is like in ``The Matrix,'' the first version, where they give you the red pill or the blue pill. The red pill is reality. The blue pill is you can continue on in your slumber.

I am going to propose a different pill, and it is a black pill. The black pill, I would suggest to you, means that reality is the awful truth. The awful truth here is we know that we are not going to rise to the moment.

Why do we know that? Because in the context of everything you just gave us, I want to talk about that supplemental that has been proposed by the Senate.

We have already passed out of this body a $14.5 billion supplemental package for Israel. We found a way to pay for it. It goes to the Senate. They don't bother to take it up. They don't want

that. In fact, one of the Republican appropriators over there said: We don't do that; we don't pay for supplementals.

Wow. You know what? That individual was correct. It had never been done before. We did it, but they don't want to do that.

Instead, they want to leverage a controversial spend of $61 billion for Ukraine funding by leveraging what Israel needs, our good friend in the Levant. That is what they want to leverage.

You know what they throw in there, as well? They throw in some money for Taiwan; they throw in some money for the border. I won't get into the border until you yield more time, but I will tell you this: That money they are talking about for the border is not to stop the 10,000 to 12,000 people per day coming into the country; it is to facilitate their entry and dispersion throughout the country.

If you think we are going to rise to the moment when we are dealing with a group of people across the way, the leadership over there, that have proposed that--and I am seeing, sadly, a momentum for that to happen right here on the floor of this Chamber--then I would tell you the black pill has been swallowed, and there is trouble and tough sledding ahead for the United States of America because the people who have been elected to fight that are acquiescing.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, when the gentleman starts talking about that, he raises a point that I have been arguing vociferously about for some time, and that is Republicans manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over again. We negotiate against ourselves. That is what is happening on the supplemental. That is what is happening on the NDAA.

We passed out of the Judiciary Committee today a bill, hugely bipartisan, 35 people voted for it, 2 against it, including massive reforms, reforms that groups across the spectrum, from right to left, Republican and Democrat, have said these are the reforms we need to see.

The leverage goes away when you give an extension into April for FISA in its current form, which is what the Speaker is acquiescing to after telling us he wasn't going to go there. That is negotiating against yourself. Why is that? What happens?

The leverage against the Senate on FISA then goes away. I was not surprised to know that Chairman Turner said he will let the Judiciary bill come to the floor. Why wouldn't he?

Because he knows that the leverage is now gone and the Senate has no incentive to take up a meaningful reform bill. That is the problem. It goes back to the border.

The border is the same way. There were 12,000 people that came across yesterday. That was an all-time single-day record. There were 12,000 people encountered. That does not include the 10,000 people that got away.

You are looking at 300,000 plus for the month of December that we can project already. That will be a record. We say, oh, let's do H.R. 2. We did H.R. 2. That was a good, solid border security package.

We got it through. It went through and is languishing in the Senate. We say things like: I will tell you what, let's put the H.R. 2 bill on the supplemental. We are not going to do anything with regard to the supplemental unless you actually give us border security. It isn't policy anymore because the policy doesn't work unless you have a lawful, rule of law type of government. We don't. We flat out don't.

This administration is lawless. They are not going to follow the law. They are not following the law now. They are not following the law on FISA, which is why we have to reform FISA. They are not following the law on the border policies and the border laws. This is why we have got to say we are going to stop funding a government that is lawless and surveils American citizens and allows us to be overrun.

Did you know that in Portland, Oregon, they had more than 300 fentanyl overdose deaths in the first 3 months of this fiscal year? They are on track for over 1,200.

Just in Portland. I am telling you that this is a regime that is okay with dismantling our country. It is time that we stand up and say no more. No more.

I am happy to talk about any other topic that you want.

What I would tell you is that when you have--let's take Lukeville, Arizona, a small port of entry. There are people going from Phoenix and Tucson down to the Sea of Cortez and they are going to go down to Rocky Point, which is a lovely seaside village. It is a small town, and people love to go down there. It is closed now. Do you know why it is closed?

Because so many people, groups of 1,000 illegal aliens, are coming to that port of entry. There is no way to process them. There is no way to get them to Ajo or the Three Points Station or the Casa Grande station because that takes hours. They closed that down.

You can now see sitting there 1,000 individuals. If you look closely, you won't find a single woman or a child in that 1,000. They are all men ages 18 to 35 from multitudes of nations.

You say: What are we willing to do?

I am going to offer a humble suggestion.

It is my suggestion and it is this: This administration is lawless and has no desire to enforce the laws already in place. What I would say is, how do you incentivize them?

Do you incentivize them by allowing them to keep the FRA spending?

Do you incentivize them when you say, okay, I will tell you what, we are going to keep your Green New Deal subsidies that you said would not cost more than $350 billion, which will now cost more than $2 trillion?

Will you do anything if we don't stop funding the things you desire?

The answer is no.

What I would say is, we know that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and veterans' benefits will continue on. Why not then identify that we are going to pay for ICE, CBP, the air traffic controllers, TSA, the military men and women, and then say that is it, Mr. Biden. That is all we are going to continue funding. That is the basic minimum to make sure that Americans are safe.

We refuse to do more spending. By the way, we are having to borrow significant portions of that. We refuse to keep borrowing money and go in debt so future generations will go bankrupt themselves until you secure the border with demonstrable and measurable metrics.

I will give you one example. Yuma, Arizona. Yuma has one hospital and there are about 80,000 people in Yuma. The emergency room on most days is completely filled with illegal aliens. The local people, people who are going to have babies. If there is a woman ready to deliver, do you know where she is going?

She is driving 3 hours up to Phoenix or 3\1/2\ hours over to San Diego. The people with heart conditions that need procedures on an emergency basis, same thing, they are getting Air Evac'd up to Phoenix or San Diego.

Here is the deal. Under the last full year of Donald Trump as the President, do you know what they had?

They had a total of 8,600 encounters. That is for a year. Do you know what they are doing in a week now?

About 8,000 a week. That is under this administration.

Do you think it is not a crisis?

Go down there and talk to the planters who have had to literally plow under fields because these people come across, they go walking through the fields. These are sensitive fields. Why is that important?

Because more than 90 percent of all green vegetables provided to this country during the winter months come out of Yuma, Arizona. It is a hazard to our food supply.

This administration doesn't care if it is a hazard to food supply. They don't care if you have got 1,200 people going to die of fentanyl overdose in Portland, Oregon. They just don't care. They are not going to actually follow the law, so we have got to incentivize them.

If we do not have the courage to incentivize them, then why the hell did we come to Congress?

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to serve with the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Let me say two things. I am more than willing to be here over the next 5 weeks if it means that we can work to get these things addressed.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you one more reason why you should not be giving up on FISA and why you should not be extending it. It is because the authorities and warrants issued before April 10 will continue on into 2025. We will have lost, perhaps even forever, our ability to reform a program that has been weaponized against the United States of America and our beloved fellow citizens.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of my amendment that would cut funding for the student financial assistance account by $9.25 billion.

The student financial assistance account is being funded at $22 billion for fiscal year 2024. This account provides funding for grants, loans, and other financial assistance to students who choose to pursue higher education, but the Federal Government's subsidization of higher education costs for individuals has actually created perverse incentives for higher education institutions to raise prices for all students and prospective students.

This is a spiral and cycle that has been going on for decades. A 2017 study from the Federal Reserve found the average tuition increase associated with expansion of student loans is as much as 60 cents per dollar.

Federal student loan subsidies don't help students with the cost of higher education. These subsidies actually result in increased costs for higher education, tuition, fees, and expenses.

With the Federal Government bearing the brunt of student loans, colleges are guaranteed to get the funding they ask for at the expense of the American taxpayer. This is a cycle that only leads to higher spending each fiscal year.

Cutting funding for this program would claw back billions that could be diverted to lowering the national debt and the financial burden on the taxpayer.

The Federal Government should not have a place in the monetary affairs of its private citizens. That is a matter for private banks, colleges, and students.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, as it stands today, Americans owe over $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, more than 5 percent of the Nation's total $33 trillion debt.

The annual cost of attendance for students living on campus at a public 4-year State institution is 26 grand, or over $104,000 for a 4- year degree. Out-of-State students pay $27,000, or over $108,000. Private nonprofit university students pay 55 grand, or more than $225,000.

Do you know what is a new low? Do you know what is cruel? Do you know what is unconscionable? It is sending kids out with worthless degrees with debt that they can never sustain.

It is a new low to oppose something like this because you know what is driving this? It is the exponential growth of children and kids who are coming up who cannot afford education because your grants, your continued giving of taxpayer funding to the universities has actually increased the number of people who have to get assistance.

Why? Because tuition has spiked. It is growing multiples of the inflation rate. That is what is cruel. That is what is unconscionable.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, what is driving the increased costs of tuition? Well, most of that is because the bureaucratization of academia. That drives costs higher every year.

Let's go back to that 2017 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The average tuition increase associated with expansion of student loans is 60 cents for every dollar. So when your tuition is going up a buck, 60 cents of it is because of expansion of student loan programs.

The Biden administration's efforts to eliminate student loan debt is wrong--wrong because they force everyday Americans to pay for the student loans taken out by others and wrong because they doubled down on a failed public policy that incentivizes price increases. You incentivize tuition to go up. Why would a university ever reduce its tuition or its costs? They know that they have the Federal Government to backstop every student who wants to go in.

The way to curb the rise in both college tuition and student debt is to get the Federal Government out of the student loan business. The result will bring about more fiscally responsible citizens and a more fiscally responsible Federal Government. This would make the loan market more responsible and cause colleges to rein in their costs and reduce tuition so fewer students would need Pell grants or private aid.

Private lending would also limit taxpayers' exposure to billions of dollars in student loan defaults. Did I say billions? I meant to say trillions because that is where we sit.

Now, I want to respond in the time I have left to the cynical statement by the previous speaker who was talking about aid to Israel. We passed aid to Israel by a 226-196 vote. How did that happen? Mr. Chair, 196 of my friends across the aisle did not want to provide aid to Israel in that circumstance.

Mr. Chair, I urge people to adopt this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment that would strike funding for the Student Aid Administration.

The Student Aid Administration provides funding for the government to administer student financial assistance programs, including funding for the office responsible for ensuring accountability for higher education institutions who receive Federal dollars.

Unfortunately, under this administration, this regime, the Department of Education has developed a pattern of attacking large, higher education institutions that have a religious affiliation.

I will give you two of these today.

The Department of Education has repeatedly gone after Grand Canyon University, the largest private Christian university in the country. The Department of Education levied a $37.7 million fine. This is the largest fine in the Department's history.

GCU was a nonprofit from its inception in 1949 until 2004 when they partnered with private investors in order to avoid closing.

In 2018, GCU returned to its nonprofit status and is recognized by the IRS, the Higher Learning Commission, the State of Arizona, Arizona Private Postsecondary Board, and the NCAA. However, despite all this, the Department of Education has refused to acknowledge GCU's nonprofit status for purposes of Federal student financial aid.

By not acknowledging GCU's nonprofit status, the Department of Education is able to target GCU and others as ``bad actors due to the disproportionate number of Americans who attend those schools and then default on Federal student loans.''

However, GCU provides much higher levels of transparency than are legally required, and it is considered a leader in education transparency. The Department of Education, for instance, only requires universities to provide cost estimates for the first year in college-- for first-year, first-time students, and only for undergraduate programs, but GCU goes beyond these requirements by providing cost estimates for each year of the program study and for all of its degree programs, including the doctoral level.

Rather than apply what GCU has done, the Department has attacked them, making this fine all the more troubling. The Department of Education is trying to make the claim that GCU lied to students about the cost to attend doctorate programs, but that is inaccurate.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, GCU's degree program calculator provides the total estimated cost for a 60-credit doctoral program the exact same way it does for other degree programs. That is not required under the Department of Education, but the Department of Education still goes after them.

GCU in its effort for clear transparency in red print above the calculator makes clear both the average number of continuation courses and cost for continuation courses that students may need to complete a doctoral dissertation.

The Department of Ed even acknowledges that GCU provides this disclosure, but nonetheless, continues to go after them. GCU graduates are incurring less debt than the national average due to its affordable tuition rates, and still, the Department of Ed goes after them.

A GAO report found that 91 percent of American colleges have misleading information in their financial aid offers, but GCU is the only nonprofit university being attacked from the Department of Education.

At the same time, Liberty University is being threatened with a similar $37 million fine by the Department of Education, alleging Clery Act violations based on a preliminary report in May of this year.

Liberty University has fully cooperated with the Department's investigation and found the Department made significant errors, misstatements, and unsupported conclusions in their findings.

Why is Liberty University getting threatened with what would be another $37 million fine from the Department of Education when they are fully cooperating?

These two big universities are two of the largest Christian universities in America. Is that why they are being attacked by this Department of Education? It certainly seems to be the case.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I ask my friends: Do you support a tax on private Christian universities by the Department of Education, the very Department that I am trying to defund?

When you talk about the American Dream, student loan debt is crushing graduates, which is why when you look at polling, it indicates very clearly that young graduates do not believe they will attain the American Dream that their parents had access to. They are coming out with crushing student debt at the same time that that same Department is trying to crush very fine universities.

Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I am going to respond to the ``scurrilous'' comments made in the last statement. Nothing in my amendment addressed online, for-profit private colleges, postsecondary. That was a deliberate mischaracterization of what I said, because the two universities I talked about are both nonprofit universities, recognized as postsecondary education institutions.

GCU is recognized by the IRS as nonprofit, Higher Learning Commission, State of Arizona, and the Arizona Private Postsecondary Board. Liberty University is equal in their classification.

To say what was said for 2\1/2\ minutes, to actually misdirect and try to misattribute my purpose, was an ascribing of motivations which should have been taken down.

Mr. Chair, I rise now to speak in support of my amendment, which would strike funding for the higher education account. It appropriates over $2.7 billion. This account provides appropriations for grant programs that provide direct taxpayer support to higher education institutions.

The effect of government subsidy and control has been more damaging than anyone has yet realized. Coupled with student assistance programs, direct government assistance to institutions has led to increased education costs and administrative costs.

Let's think of it. College costs are out of control. Harvard, the total cost of attending for 4 years is now around $300 grand. College costs have risen to this level because D.C. is heavily subsidizing tuition through Federal grants and loans, leaving colleges and universities free to increase their prices because they know the Federal Government is going to pick up the tab in between.

In FY 2023, we enacted a level of $2.994 billion, $600 million more than fiscal year 2019.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, it is a shame that people make aspersions on the floor when they don't know anything about a subject.

I think of Grand Canyon University and the 35,000 students on campus, on a physical plant, in Phoenix, Arizona. I just heard that they are an online school. Go tell those people who commute or live in the dorms at one of the fastest growing physical plant campuses in the country.

It is like saying the University of Arizona is an online school, with their 35,000 students, because they have an online program where you can get a bachelor's degree without ever setting foot on campus, or ASU or BYU, or any of the hundreds of other campuses.

How can you misdirect and try to attack an amendment when you simply don't know what is going on with what you are saying? It is astounding. It is astounding.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, nobody wants to revoke postsecondary education. What we want to do is acknowledge what the Federal Government has done to distort the cost of education.

The New York Fed itself has said it is eating it up, and 60 percent of every tuition increase is coming because of this aid. We want to get it down so it is affordable again. We want nobody leaving college crushed by the student debt that they have. That is what is going on here.

The fiscal year 2023 enacted level was $3 billion. That is $600 million more than just a few years before in 2019. The 2024 number is slightly less, but it doesn't do enough to cut spending when we are $35.5 trillion in debt.

Let's talk about what is happening. Universities are discriminating against conservative-leaning students. We see that. We had a hearing on that just last week. A recent University of North Carolina study found that conservative students within the UNC system face distinctive challenges when it comes to free speech and expression.

Nearly 68 percent of conservative students are at least slightly concerned about possible social consequences that may come from voicing one's true opinion in class. It is a massive problem that higher education fosters.

It is time that we move the Federal Government out of this business because they don't have any constitutional authority to be there in the first place.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which strikes funding for the Institute of Education Sciences.

The current funding in the fiscal year 2024 bill is $707 million. The institute puts this funding toward programs such as governing boards of institutions of higher education, which is interested in the disclosure of gender, racial, and ethnic composition of governing boards of higher education to promote DEI institutions, which is a pointless use of information and resources.

This institute puts funding toward programs such as cross-sectional studies. This is a program launched to provide real-time data about the impact of COVID-19 on public K-12 education. The content focuses on how COVID-19 is affecting the delivery of education and how schools are navigating recovery efforts from that epidemic.

The Department of Education requested $4 million initially to further expand the survey across districts nationally. It is not a mission that the American taxpayer needs to fund, and it is a direct waste of our budget.

It is offices such as this that contribute to the rapid wasteful spending that has become so commonplace in our country under our Federal Government.

As far as the grant programs under the Institute of Education Sciences, they go toward post-COVID-19 research. This is research to accelerate pandemic recovery in special education grant programs and improve pandemic recovery efforts in education agencies' grant programs.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, under the Institute of Education Sciences, they will establish two research networks, the pre-kindergarten through grade 12 recovery research network and the community college recovery research network to study pandemic events. It is a grant that pertains to gender-integrated classrooms to see if boys and girls are better equipped to learn together or separately in the classroom.

The fiscal year 2019 enacted level was over $615 million, but 2024 is currently set at over $707 million. That is a $90 million increase in just 5 years. This rate of growth is not sustainable.

This program is part of what we could safely call the educational- industrial complex. Over the years, our predecessors created a constituency and expanded on it every year by giving more money. They justify it by putting more mandates and doing more studies that don't mean anything. They come back and do it again and again.

Thus, we are well over $33 trillion in national debt. Our structural deficit last year was over $2 trillion. Fiscal year 2024 looks like it is going to be about the same, except we are going to be north of $35 trillion, $36 trillion in national debt. That is crushing.

Mr. Chair, I take my colleagues back to the New York Fed and its study. Of every dollar of tuition that increased, 60 percent of that, 60 cents of that, goes to the fact that the Federal Government is meddling in postsecondary education. That is what is happening here. That is the educational-industrial complex.

In December 2020, the Trump administration nominated Steve Hanke and John Yoo, both professors, to the advisory board for the IES. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona refused to acknowledge the appointments, deliver their credentials, or facilitate statutorily required board meetings.

That is the educational-industrial complex that we are facing today. It is crushing. It is crushing our students who want an education.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, the greatest strength of this body is that we represent constituents who send us here knowing that we are constrained in protecting their rights because we are limited by what we can and cannot do by that great document, the Constitution.

I stand here willing to learn and find out where in the Constitution there is any specific authority for this body to meddle in postsecondary educational choices of the American people. That is the educational-industrial complex at work, for what we are seeing in the arguments against my amendments today.

I support postsecondary education. I do not support the Federal Government meddling in the choices of individuals to get that education and how they are going to get it and the institutions that are providing it--the harassment that some of those institutions are receiving from this administration.

Mr. Chair, I urge the adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which will prohibit the Department of Health and Human Services from making any voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization.

The World Health Organization failed the world and America with its response to COVID-19 and has continued to fail the world and the U.S.

The WHO helped perpetuate the Chinese Government's wholly inaccurate claims and even praised their handling of the outbreak. The WHO Director-General applauded President Xi's very rare leadership and China's transparency. The WHO was complicit in its deception, willfully accepting what China had claimed and spread to the rest of the world instead of doing its job and verifying the claims that were made.

Further, in 2021, the WHO dismissed the COVID lab leak theory as being ``extremely unlikely'' after a visit to China. The WHO even returned from that trip with the theory that the virus was transmitted to humans through frozen food, which was an absurd claim.

Then, in 2022, 2 years after COVID, the WHO changed its tune and recommended more investigation into the lab leak theory, the same theory that it had so eagerly dismissed as a conspiracy theory because President Trump suspected what was going on back in 2020. It turns out President Trump was right to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization.

In addition, the World Health Organization has allowed North Korea to sit on its executive board. North Korea lacks any qualifications to justify a seat on the board. North Korea lacks any sort of transparency in its management of the COVID-19 outbreak. North Korea's track record of responses to public health issues raises significant concerns that it is able to participate in the WHO's decisionmaking process.

How is it that North Korea, a country that has a well-documented history of human rights abuses and atrocities, is allowed to sit on the World Health Organization's executive board, an executive board that sets and enforces the organization's agenda and policy? The human rights record of North Korea is often considered one of the worst in the world.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have been talking about North Korea. At the same time that we put North Korea on the board, you see North Korea on the executive board of the WHO, Taiwan is excluded. Why? Because China isolates Taiwan.

If you are concerned about China taking our place in WHO, China already has incredible resources and influence over Director Tedros. That is what is going on.

Let's talk about this because I think that what we just heard was a conflation--a conflation, all the things, all the good things the WHO is doing, this and that. Guess what? We paid mandatory fees to them of $200 million in 2021. In the 2021 report to Congress, the excess amount, or the voluntary amount, was $99 million.

Since the despicable attack on Israel by Hamas, the World Health Organization and its subsidiary in Gaza has

spent weeks using their platform to advocate for an immediate cease- fire, a position that has been the rallying cry for the Hamas- sympathizing political left right here in the United States.

On October 18, the Twitter account for the WHO in occupied Palestinian territory--in other words, in Gaza--issued a statement on the explosion in the parking lot of the Al Ahli Arab Hospital, which turned out to be bogus.

We are saying we will keep paying a mandatory amount. We are not going to give up our seat, but we are not going to pay a $99 million voluntary amount.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I remind everyone that this is only the voluntary amount that we give above our membership allotment to the World Health Organization.

We should all be in support of this.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, my amendment would prohibit the use of funds to pay for the salary and expenses of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is currently occupied by Director Robin Dunn Marcos.

ORR's negligence has led to the endangerment of unaccompanied alien children.

In March of 2021, ORR weakened its safety protocols by eliminating the proof of address requirements for sponsors and exempting other household members from submitting to a background check or providing identification.

ORR has prohibited asking whether a sponsor of a UAC is a citizen and doesn't consider a sponsor with deportation orders as disqualified. In addition to this, criminal history and a refusal to submit to a background check also are not considered disqualifiers for individuals becoming sponsors.

Think of this: Children, unaccompanied minors, who have come into the U.S. that we have placed into the care of ORR are being given to people who may have a criminal history, but those people with a criminal history are not disqualified for being a foster parent for this UAC.

It is an abject failure that the lack of a vetting process is in place to allow for an individual to become a sponsor when they have a criminal history or deportation orders that are not considered.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

You know what I think is a disgrace? I think it is disgraceful when the person who is in charge of placing those children has lost contact and communication with more than 85,000, according to The New York Times, and that was 7 months ago. The real number now exceeds 100,000. Mr. Chair, that is 100,000 children that this individual has lost contact with--her office and the Department has lost contact with. That is what is disgraceful.

If we are talking about policy and that she is merely carrying out the policy of the administration, are you telling me that it is the policy of this administration to lose contact and not adequately vet people? You know, you have some people who received literally a dozen or more individuals--little children--into that home, and that person was not qualified and not adequately vetted.

Two-thirds of all UACs that leave HHS's care work illegal, full-time jobs, often in factories and in hazardous conditions.

ORR has an agreement that the sponsor is supposed to sign to protect the UAC from being trafficked or exploited, but that doesn't seem to be very effective.

Caseworkers within ORR claim that HHS regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation, such as single sponsors sponsoring multiple UAC, hot spots in the country where many UAC sponsors are not the children's parents, UAC with significant debts, and direct reports of trafficking.

These sponsors that are inadequately vetted by ORR and HHS can be dangerous, and they are sending these children to work in factories and other hazardous work environments.

You want to know what is disgraceful? That is what is disgraceful.

This person should not be in this position. If this is the Biden policy, that is disgraceful. I don't think that is really what this administration wants done.

This amendment would remove this person from office, and let's get somebody in there who is interested in taking care of those kids and making sure they are cared for.

I get down to the border regularly. I go to the border often. I can't tell you how many times I have come upon groups with unaccompanied children, knowing that we have no idea whether they are going to be cared for in our country or not.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Again, you know what I think is disgraceful? That we are going to start discussing someone's livelihood and say, oh, they have an impeccable background. Do you know who doesn't care about their livelihood and impeccable background? How about the kids that have been misplaced, over 100,000, many working in illegal labor jobs. They don't care about her livelihood. They would like to be cared for humanely. How about the children who have been sex trafficked? They don't care about her livelihood or her impeccable background, and I don't either. I care about those children.

I think it is disgraceful that this administration continues to allow this kind of policy to be implemented if that is their policy. The vetting requirements that this director put in place facilitates this trafficking and abuse of these children. It is disgraceful.

Mr. Chair, I urge people to adopt my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, this is a serious time. My mind immediately goes to the young deputy from Cochise County who 2 nights ago, while trying to apprehend a runaway vehicle smuggling humans across the border, suffered major injuries. He was transported to Pima County where he is in a Tucson hospital fighting for his life.

I am talking about a border that remains wide open where drugs come through. The Tucson sector has the most got-aways known and unknown of any sector along the border. There are terrorists coming in, people conducting criminal conduct coming in, criminal gang members, human smugglers, and sex traffickers. They are coming across our border to the tune of hundreds of thousands every month.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleagues and their position, but I would suggest something: I don't think you can just skip to last weekend and say, oh, my goodness, a CR came out last weekend on Saturday. I think we need to go back to January.

I will say this. This body came together on the Republican side and we passed a good border security piece of legislation, H.R. 2. That is good.

Last week we passed the DHS bill and the DOD bills which had funding for our CBP, ICE, military leaders, and military men and women. Why were we successful in doing that? What happened to motivate us to get there?

Well, for one thing, we didn't bother to pass the 12 appropriations bills as required under the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. We didn't do it. Do you know how many times that has not been done?

That has not been done 25 years in a row.

Do you know how many CRs this body has passed in that same period of time?

It is 130.

Do you know what that gets you?

A $2 trillion-plus structural deficit like we had in fiscal year 2023.

Do you know what that leads you to?

A $33 trillion national debt, which is where we sit today. It leads you to somewhere north of $700 billion in interest payments.

Do you know why that happened?

Because this body is entrenched in a suboptimal path and refuses to leave it. It refuses to leave that path. You cannot change if you are unwilling to change. We had every opportunity to change. We were promised change.

We were promised we were going to go ahead, and we were going to get those 12 bills done. If we got those 12 bills done--do you know why you do 12 bills?

Because it allows you to reduce spending and get rid of wasteful duplicative programs. It allows you to set an agenda to restore fiscal sanity. We chose to not do it again. We were promised we would do it. That is why at the end some people said: We will vote present. We will go ahead. We are going to put our trust in Mr. McCarthy to become the Speaker. That didn't happen. I suspected that would be the case. That was my struggle. That was my struggle last November and December. I iterated it to this body, our Conference anyway.

When we got to the debt ceiling, again, that seemed to spring upon everybody like a surprise. When that happened, I was in there for some of those

negotiations on where that number would be, and I was astonished how that $1.5 trillion number was negotiated. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

However, I will tell you this: To his credit, the Speaker told us one thing that I believe to be true. He said that is basically the ante in a poker game. You can sit down at the table.

I told my colleagues who supported that: That $1.5 trillion in 8 months that you are willing to raise the debt ceiling, that is the opening marker.

Indeed, it was. Now, projections are many trillion dollars above that.

Yes, I think it is time to make a change. I am not the only one, and thus, it is somber. But what have we failed to accomplish? Why didn't we get this stuff done?

When we are campaigning, we are talking about an extension of the debt ceiling to January 2025.

We are talking about additional Ukraine funding. Maybe that is good in your districts. Maybe it is not. That money is not offset. We are not paying for it. We haven't designated how we are going to pay for that--the same with the disaster package.

The IRS remains 80 percent increased. I could go down the list, but I will just tell you why this happens. When you don't do your 12 budget bills and you rely ultimately on a CR--and I will get to the calendar in a second--what happens is, you cannot leverage this administration to actually enforce the border laws that you need to have enforced.

This is a lawless Biden regime. They will not enforce border laws. We can pass them until we are blue in the face, but until you leverage the budget and the spending, you will not see enforcement by this administration.

Now, take a look at the calendar that we were just provided last week. We are supposed to finish our 12 bills by November 3. By November 17 is when we are supposed to see that the conference committees have come together, both sides, and we have resolved this. I don't believe that that is going to happen.

It wasn't going to happen before. You were betting on the come again. At some point, I would urge you to stop betting on the come and bet on the reality. That is why I can't support the Speaker any longer, and I will be voting for the motion to vacate.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment that cuts $300 million in funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. I encourage all of my colleagues to support that.

The fiscal year 2024 Defense Appropriations bill authorizes a total $826.45 billion in new discretionary spending. This figure is $28.71 billion or 3.6 percent more than the fiscal year 2023 enacted level.

Currently, the United States has committed over $113 billion in military, economic, and humanitarian assistance to protect Ukraine's border, but we can't fund our own border to protect our citizens from the fentanyl pouring across our southern border that is killing over 290 Americans daily, and the trafficking that the Mexican cartels are engaging in.

Mr. Chair, I find myself asking this question: How is it that we are willing to send over $100 billion to Ukraine, and in this bill an additional $300 million, but we can't spend the money or find the ability and will to secure our own border?

With no end in sight, we cannot continue to blank-check fund a war when this administration said that we are going to stay there as long as it takes and spend as much as it takes. We don't really know why we are there, but we have morphed into a regime-change objective.

I would ask: What does that regime change look like? How are you going to get there? What is going to be the extent of our participation?

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, it is interesting to hear that. I appreciate those comments. Explain to me, then, how this administration and our allies have lost contact and cannot provide a full accounting of all of the money we have sent and all the materiel we have sent.

Here is an example of that: When we talk about insufficient oversight of funding going towards Ukraine, the Pentagon has overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past 2 years. They have overestimated it.

How have central African nations reported that U.S. materiel has been found in the hands of warlords in their areas, in their own countries, rebellious warlords fighting them with U.S. materiel?

How is it that we have gone from supplying surplus to supplying our own inventory, where our own stocks are going to take in some instances 7 to 10 years to rebuild, to put our own Nation in jeopardy?

The democratic peace theory was debunked 20 years ago, and that is the argument I heard today; basically, the democratic peace theory. That was utterly debunked.

This administration has also provided no explanation on what the objective is, what does it look like. The objective is to stay as long as it takes. What does that mean? Another 20-, 30-year war that we are participating in funding? Not only as long as it takes, but as much as it takes.

We are $33 trillion in debt. Our structural deficit this year is going to be more than $2 trillion. It will be that next year. Our interest cost is $700 billion. Everything we are sending to Ukraine, we are borrowing. It is our children and grandchildren who are effectively paying for this.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Crane), a great American.

Mr. Chair, in closing, our national interests are best rooted in solving our national debt crisis, which has been determined by many national security leaders as being our number one security threat. I urge Congress to adopt this amendment.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of CISA Director Jen Easterly.

It is no secret at this point that this administration is waging war on conservative voices, and Jen Easterly has been at the tip of the Biden administration's spear to censor American speech.

In the recent case decision of Missouri v. Biden, Judge Doughty specifically pointed out Ms. Easterly's targeting of conservative speech for censorship. In fact, Ms. Easterly's censorship efforts were so explicit and pervasive that Judge Doughty believed that the plaintiffs in the case are likely to succeed in their claims against Ms. Easterly and the other Biden administration officials.

This was affirmed recently by the Fifth Circuit. On September 6, 2023, they wrote, ``CISA, however, did flag content. Beyond holding regular industry meetings with the platforms, CISA officials engaged in `switchboarding' operations, meaning they acted as an intermediary for a third-party group by forwarding flagged content from them to the platforms.''

For her part, Ms. Easterly has both worked with and in some cases coerced social media platforms to take down and suppress posts that don't fit into the administration's idea of what the truth is. We know this because Ms. Easterly herself has said that conservative opinions that question the administration are not truth but are instead alternative facts and are dangerous to national security, implying that terms like truth are for her and the administration to define. She and other members of the administration have ordered the removal of posts about Hunter Biden's laptop, the COVID lab-leak theory, the ineffectiveness of masks and the vaccine, questions about the security of the 2020 election and future elections, and the state of the economy. Most of that has been proven objectively to be true, but she suppressed it as well as suppressing a variety of other posts, which happened to be inconvenient for the Biden administration.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, not only has Ms. Easterly already suppressed many conservative voices, she has stated that she is preparing to do the same thing again for the 2024 election; not somebody else in the administration, not somebody else in CISA, Ms. Easterly has said this. This continuous and purposeful censorship of conservative voices must stop.

Just as we saw in the last amendment with Secretary Mayorkas, using the Holman rule helps us do our job and do our duty.

In July, Federal Judge Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana gave a memo decision in the case of the State of Missouri v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. As part of his conclusions, Judge Doughty stated multiple times that it was likely the plaintiffs in this case will prevail on their ultimate case of censorship and suppression of conservative voices by the Biden administration.

The primary means of censorship by the defendants in the case was by colluding with and in some cases ordering social media companies to ban conservative individuals on their platforms and to take down posts which dared to question the Biden administration on a number of important issues.

Among the defendants listed by Terry Doughty as having directed this purposeful policy of censorship are CISA Director Jen Easterly. I urge my colleagues to join me in this important endeavor of holding someone accountable. I don't know what more we need to do, but certainly we should hold Ms. Easterly accountable.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I appreciate the two-on-one here. No, that is fine. I am just kidding you guys.

Here is the deal. Not only is this critical that you hold people accountable, but this person, this Director lied in response to a question from Representative Cloud on this particular issue, on these issues that we were talking about in testimony in the approps oversight hearing earlier this year.

It is my opinion that if we fail to hold this person accountable, then we are going to see like things happen in the future. When you provide a specific deterrent, you also provide a general deterrent, and that is the way a justice system works. That is the way you hold people accountable.

Mr. Chair, in closing, I appreciate my colleagues who don't want to see this

done. It is not unconstitutional to do this. This is a good way to hold people accountable. That is one of the jobs of the United States Congress, to hold people accountable.

What did the Founders give us? They gave us the purse strings. In this instance, it seems to me that this individual should have her salary eliminated.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, this may seem like Groundhog Day, but I am going anew. I rise to speak in support of my amendment which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of CISA Director of Election Security Initiative Geoffrey Hale.

As outlined in Judge Doughty's memo decision in the Missouri v. Biden case, as Director Hale worked with social media companies to censor conservatives who speak out against the Biden administration, he was singled out by the judge.

Under the guise of protecting national security and election integrity, Mr. Hale and his team purposely suppressed social media posts that went against the Biden administration's view of what they considered the truth to be.

CISA seems to believe itself to be the ultimate arbiter of truth, ordering social media companies to suppress and ban posts and users that dare to question their side of the story, that dare to speak up for what they believe. Listen to what I am saying, please.

That is what was going on in the agency that was supposed to protect cybersecurity and our elections.

The blatant censorship by Mr. Hale and others of constitutionally protected speech has got to end. It is the weaponization of government against the American people. It is up to us to stand up against that.

I urge my colleagues to join me in passing this amendment. At some point we are going to have to recognize that we need to hold people accountable.

Now, I appreciate my colleagues who oppose this, but I will just tell you something. I don't think we can say we can't do this in the appropriations bill. We have already done something else in the appropriations bill. We just passed by voice vote a defunding of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Why cannot we hold these people accountable? I think we can.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I again appreciate my colleagues and their position. I fundamentally disagree. You have a heavy burden when you are going to enjoin people. When this case came before the court, the CISA Director of Election Security Initiative, Geoffrey Hale, was one of the defendants that was found to be one of the officials of this administration that was engaged in a clear and focused policy of using the Department of Homeland Security to stop conservatives from questioning the Biden administration on social media, even if it meant censoring constitutionally protected speech.

I guess we have a fundamental difference here. I appreciate and understand what my colleagues who oppose this measure are saying, but I am just not certain what we are going to do then. How are we going to stand up to an administration where every institution of this administration has been weaponized: FBI, DOJ, Department of Education, the border security leadership.

We have CISA and the people who are running CISA leading areas that are systematically suppressing speech and censoring speech.

This isn't me saying it. It is a court of law saying it after evidentiary hearings. It is through admissions, through discovery of these individuals. That is why these individuals lost in court, but there is no other way to hold them accountable.

Holding an administration accountable is one thing, but holding an individual accountable for systematically participating in violations of our First Amendment rights, this is the way we do it. This is the way we should do it.

Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to join me, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of the DHS Under Secretary for the Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, Robert Silvers.

Much of my argument is the same. In a court hearing, they are found to have violated the free speech rights of Americans systematically. They are going to lose in court, and we have an opportunity to hold them accountable.

I feel the need to try to throw maybe a slider instead of a fastball. I am reminded of George Mason, who said many years ago something to the effect that because individuals can be punished and rewarded in Heaven but nations can't, nations need to be held accountable on Earth. I am now making an appeal that we hold individuals where we can accountable on Earth.

What we have are people who systematically defied the rights of American citizens for no other reason than they didn't like what was being said about the administration. They politicized their position, and we are going to hold them accountable. I thought it was $17 million or something like that that was going to come off their overall budget. Maybe I am off on that--$19 million? I was pretty close.

Let me give you another example. Somebody said recently that they will take responsibility for that, for a problem that this administration was doing. That begs the question: How did you take responsibility for it? You can't just say, ``I take responsibility. I take the full blame.'' No. What did you do? What did you do to take blame? Were you fired? Were you reprimanded? What happened?

If you don't hold people accountable, they will persist. There is a theory of punishment in criminal law--and I practiced criminal law--and it was, why do you have punishment and sentencing at all? You have punishment and sentencing for public safety. That is one reason.

You also have two kinds of deterrents. You have a general deterrent and a specific deterrent. If you have a specific deterrent, you are trying to teach that individual that that conduct is not acceptable and cannot happen again, so you punish them in whatever way you can that is appropriate. A general deterrent is when the entire society--in this instance, it is the Federal bureaucracy that says, if we do that, we are subject to specific deterrents--in other words, maybe even the elimination of our position, elimination of our salary, whatever it may be.

If we don't hold people accountable, this action will persist because there will be no specific or general deterrents.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. Chair, I appreciate my colleague talking about the border. I wasn't going to bring up the border because that is not what my main beef is with this amendment. My beef was about the censorship of U.S. citizens, but if you want to talk border, let's talk border.

I have to clear up one fact that I hear so often from my colleagues across the aisle. When they say something like 90 percent of all the fentanyl that is coming across the border is seized at ports of entry, that is a total sham statement. Ninety percent of interdictions take place at ports of entry, not 90 percent of the drugs coming across.

Why do you stop 90-plus percent at the ports of entry? Because that is where the X-ray machines are, where the dogs are, where the personnel is.

You have all the equipment, but do you know where you don't have equipment? How about the 62-linear miles of the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation in southern Arizona, which is one of the busiest drug and human trafficking corridors in the world?

This Under Secretary has not secured the border. That is two strikes.

I want to get back to the CISA argument because we have an individual who systematically is okay with censoring United States citizens who are exercising First Amendment rights, but if we want to talk border, I will be here till hell freezes over to talk about why we need to make changes in the Homeland Security folks on the border.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which

prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of the DHS Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention, Samantha Vinograd.

When she was senior adviser for national security, Ms. Vinograd took her role of surveilling and stopping terrorist threats against our Nation and turned it on the American people.

As outlined by Judge Doughty in his memo ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case, Ms. Vinograd and her colleagues purposefully and systematically targeted American conservatives who dared to exercise their right of freedom of speech.

This is on issues that later proved to be accurate objectively, ranging from COVID-19 origins, lab leak theory, the Hunter Biden laptop. The DHS explicitly sought to suppress statements and posts that made the Biden administration look bad.

Turning the counterterrorism role of the DHS on the American people and engaging in explicit government censorship of constitutionally protected speech constitutes a major breach of trust.

Despite this--or, more likely, because of it--Ms. Vinograd was promoted. She wasn't held accountable.

The court names her as a responsible defendant for this activity. She wasn't held responsible. She was promoted to Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention.

In her new position, Ms. Vinograd is no doubt even more of a threat to conservatives who wish to exercise their constitutional right of freedom of speech.

Unelected bureaucrats like Ms. Vinograd cannot be allowed to continue to censor Americans and to decide for themselves what is worthy of being called the truth.

Mr. Chair, I urge the passage of my amendment.

Now, I want to add something different this time, as well. Elected officials have an accountability measure built in. Leave out impeachment or anything else, our voters elect us. They look at us with scrutiny. We stand before them. We tell them what we intend to do. They look at our record to see how successful we were in doing what we said we would do. You do not have the same ability with a bureaucrat.

The reason that we know about these things, as we began to see these things, is you had an attorney general and several attorneys general come together and file a lawsuit, and a court, in looking at the discovery and taking evidence, said the plaintiffs here, the attorneys general, the States, are going to probably win this. Why? Because people like this bureaucrat, Ms. Vinograd, abused her authority and violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. Seems to me that someone like that should not be in the pay of the American Government.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, may I inquire how much time is remaining.

Mr. Chairman, I would rebut a couple of things. When you quote statistics saying 94 percent of all drugs coming into the country are stopped at interior checkpoints or ports of entry, that is an inaccurate statement. It is 94 percent of drugs that are interdicted, that we catch, that is where you catch them.

Why do you catch them there? I mean, this is not rocket science. You catch them there because you have personnel there. You have drug- sniffing dogs. You have X-ray machines that are looking at trucks. You have personnel there.

But I will tell you what you don't have. Come with me to San Miguel Gate.

I have been all over southern Texas. I have been all over southern Arizona and Southern California. Come with me to San Miguel Gate. There is nothing near the San Miguel Gate. The nearest town south of the border is Caborca; that is 2 hours away.

You know what happens? You have more got-aways, known and unknown, through that sector than anywhere else in the country.

Good grief. They don't want to be caught because they are the ones that are bringing in drugs and human trafficking. That is just kind of a fallacious argument.

The next thing is when you say, only two people voted to increase Homeland Security funding, it was because it was an omnibus bill. You had every Christmas tree ornament in the world on that puppy, just enough to drive every Republican off but two.

Yeah, if we had done 12 bills like so many of us advocate, you might have seen a different thing. You might have seen a kind of a joinder of stuff. This does not violate the Bill of Attainder provision of the Constitution. It doesn't violate a court decision. What this is is adherence to the Holman Rule?

Mr. Chairman, I urge adoption, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I rise in support of my amendment, which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of DHS Director of the Departmental GAO-OIG liaison office Jim Crumpacker.

Director Crumpacker leads DHS's Department of OIG liaison office, an office tasked with maintaining mutually beneficial and productive relations with GAO and the OIG. That is what Mr. Crumpacker stated in testimony before the Senate several years ago.

Unfortunately, under the Biden administration, that mutually beneficial and productive relationship has broken down completely.

DHS continues to obstruct oversight by its own inspector general in violation of the agency's obligations under the Inspector General Act.

Last year, then-Ranking Member Comer and Oversight Committee Republicans opened an investigation into reports that the Department of Homeland Security was obstructing efforts by their inspector general to conduct oversight over DHS programs and policies consistent with its obligations under the Inspector General Act.

At the time the letter was sent, committee Republicans had uncovered a memo circulated to Customs and Border Protection employees, which essentially encouraged CBP employees to resist OIG's request for access to CBP systems.

Think of that. You have a memo going out to CBP employees saying, Don't cooperate with the OIG. The memo falsely claimed that OIG's access to information was not unlimited, contrary to the statute, incorrectly relying on a statute that limited public disclosure of information.

To be clear, the Inspector General Act contains no such limitation.

DHS/OIG has a statutory mandate to have timely access to all records, reports, audits, reviews, documents, papers, recommendations, or other materials from DHS components, with only a narrow national security exemption that requires Congressional notification. Unfortunately, DHS continues to slow-walk and stonewall oversight efforts.

In June, Inspector General Cuffari came to committee and testified under oath that:

Since the fall of 2021, DHS/OIG has consistently reported DHS delays and denials of DHS/OIG's request for information.

These are requests for information allowed under statute, and a response is mandated. These are requests for information that our more than 700 career professionals need in order to do their jobs in the OIG offices and which DHS is required to provide to DHS/OIG consistent with the statute.

I remain hopeful that DHS will improve its responsiveness to our requests for information so that DHS/OIG can continue to provide Congress and the public robust and timely oversight with the words that Inspector General Cuffari said.

I appreciate his optimism, but after nearly 3 years, Congress may need to start twisting some arms.

This is the place, this is the individual who has put his thumb on the scale to prevent that information from going to the inspector general, information that we need, and we need the results of that OIG report.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, may I inquire how much time is remaining.

Mr. Chair, let's litigate the border some more, and let's talk about how these things get funded.

If that is the new deal that you throw an omnibus bill because you don't bother to do your 12 bills and you are going to say, Oh, you voted against something, then we should start talking about all of the bad programs and policies that you all voted for in that omnibus bill that has left us with $2 trillion in deficit this year. That is what you did. You added $2 trillion to the national debt.

Mr. Chair, the bottom line is they have an individual here, Mr. Crumpacker, who has basically said we are not going to provide information to the DHS-OIG.

What are we going to do about it? We are going to say, Oh, that is just too bad. That is too bad.

Mr. Chair, we have a massive border problem. I don't even think my colleague across the aisle would disagree with that.

Last Friday in the Rules Committee, the gentleman from Massachusetts said there was no border crisis. I thought that was intriguing. You got 11,000 people rolling through the Tucson sector. Those are the encounters. They don't get those kinds of groups in Tucson because they are getting the runners. But you know what, the whole border is in disarray, and that is between the ports of entry.

That is your ports of entry that you are so pleased with. You have the CBP One app bringing people in by the tens of thousands. I think we need to hold Mr. Crumpacker responsible.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

I want to speak about Secretary Mayorkas. I want to speak about what has happened at the border. By the time we are standing here today, you have millions and millions of people who have come through illegally into our country, and what they have done is they have surrendered.

In the meantime, you have at least 2.5 million people who have not surrendered and who have escaped into the country.

I have asked Secretary Mayorkas, I brought him to a Border Security Caucus. I said: Secretary, do you know what the Secure Fence Act of 2006 says?

Can you tell me, do we have operational control of the border?

He says: Oh, yeah, we have operational control of the border.

Okay. Then how come you have set a record every month?

At that point, he had set a record every month, from February 2021; every month a new record. In fact, last month we had another new record: 304,000 encounters.

We brought him into the Committee on the Judiciary. He is under oath at that point.

Do you know what the definition of operational control of the border is?

Oh, yeah.

Do we have it?

Yeah, we have it.

Then, Mr. Secretary, why in the world are we seeing literally tens of thousands of people, 8 to 9,000 most days, some days 10, 12, 13,000 people? That is a violation of that act.

He says, Look, we have control.

The last time we had him in, what, just a month, month-and-a-half ago: Mr. Secretary, hey, do you have operational control?

And he says, Yeah.

We bring out the poster with the statute again and said, Hey, take a look at the statute.

He says, Oh, no, no. We don't have operational control with that. We have defined our own operational control.

That is the kind of person that needs to be held accountable.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Scalise), our distinguished majority leader, who we are so happy to see with us on the floor tonight.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. Chair, let's talk about which side wants to get something done on the border. I keep hearing about the magnificent omni bill. How many Democrats voted for H.R. 2 in this House? Not one. Don't tell me that you care about the border. You didn't vote to secure the border with H.R. 2.

When you say Americans are importing the drugs, first of all, you got it wrong again. I don't think you are listening. Ninety-two percent of the drugs they catch, that is what they catch. It is what they interdict. That is what they stop. That is who they arrest. That takes place at the ports of entry. That ain't where 92 percent of the drugs are coming through.

They are coming through the places wide open where there is no fencing in Arizona. We don't have the river. We have four-strand barbed-wire fence in places. They are coming through there. It is considered the number one drug trafficking corridor in the world.

Don't be telling me that we are stopping 92 percent of the drugs because we are not. Don't show me a heat map of where people are coming through in Texas. That is xenophobic. You need to spread out. Don't be so parochial.

Let's go to Arizona. I will take you to Cocopah. We will stand right there. Literally hundreds of people walk on through. They are not coming from the Northern Triangle states. They are coming from Mauritania. They are coming from Mali and Togo. They are coming from all over the world.

Don't say that you guys care about the border because you are not doing a damn thing to stop it.

What is happening on the border is a crisis. It is the largest mass migration in the history of this entire world. It is time you join us and bring it under control because it is bringing crime.

Laredo is great. Good.

Do you know what they are releasing in Cochise County now? Secretary Mayorkas is calling them freedom runs. We are just going to release people into the community and call them freedom runs.

Mr. Chair, it is time to do something, and I urge my colleagues to vote for my amendment.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which prohibits the use of funds in furtherance of the public charge ground of inadmissibility rule.

Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that any alien who is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible for entry or a readjustment of status. Any alien at any time who might become a public charge is inadmissible for entry or even for readjustment of status. Think about that.

Someone is a public charge if they are likely to become primarily dependent on the government for subsistence, as demonstrated by either receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or institutionalization for long-term care at government expense.

The primary factor that the DHS is supposed to look at when determining if someone is or will likely be a public charge is the likelihood that the person will be reliant on government benefits and services, such as Medicaid and SNAP.

This past December, the DHS greatly reduced the number of public benefits considered when determining whether an immigrant is or will be a public charge and thus inadmissible for entry or permanent residency.

The Trump administration rightly included programs such as SNAP, housing vouchers, and Medicaid in its determinations on whether an individual would be a public charge. However, President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas have decided that not only should we take in thousands of illegal aliens every day but that they should receive the same benefits that thousands of struggling Americans rely on and that those same Americans should pay for it.

The American ideals of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility have always been the spirit of our immigration law. It is in this spirit that Congress decided that immigrants who are likely to become a public charge are ineligible for admittance or permanent residency. However, under this new rule, individuals who are reliant on a number of government benefits can be considered self-sufficient when applying for renewal or adjustment of status.

The DHS' new rule is not only costly to the American taxpayer but also directly incentivizes hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to cross the southern border and come into our country.

It seems to me that Secretary Mayorkas is not only negligent and reckless with securing the border, but he is also negligent and reckless with the American taxpayers' hard-earned money.

That is why I am calling to stop any funding for the DHS' new public charge rule until they secure our border and start acting in the best interests of the American people.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I urge the passage of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment.

My amendment prohibits the use of funds to implement a TSA vaccine or mask mandate. For years, the Biden administration subjected millions of Americans to draconian vaccine and mask mandates, even when the science showed these mandates did very little.

I remember at one point having literally meta studies and individual studies showing the inefficacy of masks, but we were nonetheless compelled to wear masks.

Now, we are beginning to hear the same people and institutions suggesting again that we need to start looking at public vaccine and mask mandates due to small rises in COVID. This must be coming up on an election year or something.

Specifically, there is talk about TSA mandating people who wish to fly to wear a mask or be vaccinated. These types of mandates are just another form of overreach by this power-grabbing administration, and the American people are not going to put up with it for a second time.

Americans make calculated decisions about their health risks every day. You just saw the great Steve Scalise come down, with a judgment of his own health risk, so he could participate on the floor in something that is meaningful to him. We all make those types of decisions about our health risks every day.

The last thing they need is for unelected bureaucrats to tell them once again when they can and cannot fly, especially since we now know the actual efficacy, or I should say ineffectiveness, of the vaccine and masks.

These calls to renew vaccine and mask mandates are coming from the same people such as Anthony Fauci, who relished controlling the day-to- day lives of Americans and profited off it.

Americans have had enough. This is why we must ensure that neither President Biden, Anthony Fauci, or any other bureaucrat can force Americans to get a vaccine or wear a mask just to exercise their right to travel.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I think this does belong in this bill. TSA is in this bill, and this is an important policy. I urge the passage of my amendment to stop any funds from being used to implement a TSA vaccine or mask mandate.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.