Madam President, the clock is ticking and the days are passing us by, but we know we have a deadline to meet on December 7, and if we don't meet that deadline, then there will be a lot of lives disrupted and a lot of people will say: There…
Madam President, the clock is ticking and the days are passing us by, but we know we have a deadline to meet on December 7, and if we don't meet that deadline, then there will be a lot of lives disrupted and a lot of people will say: There they go again. Congress is unable to work together to try to solve problems, just creating more distrust and undermining confidence in our ability to actually do our job to govern.
What I want to talk about specifically is this fight over border funding because that is what the deadline is on December 7. Our Democratic friends have said: We are not going to fund President Trump's wall. On the other hand, we see caravans of people coming from Central America, coming through Mexico, closing down the ports of entry at the San Ysidro bridge between Tijuana and San Diego. What I fear is, we have made a parody out of what the problem is. We have thought about the challenge of border security and immigration in too small a way and not given the complete picture of what the challenges really are.
I just have to believe that if we were willing to acknowledge the facts, that we would be more inclined to work together to solve the problem, and I feel like we are looking at these problems like we are looking through a soda straw.
I have heard people talk about the humanitarian crisis at the border there at Tijuana caused by this huge caravan of Central Americans who want to storm the barriers and enter the United States illegally, and people question why would we stop them, why would they use nonlethal means like tear gas and pepper spray like President Obama did during his administration and which now Customs and Border Protection is doing again in order to protect the sovereignty of our country and to protect our borders from those who would enter it illegally.
So let's not look at this through a soda straw. Let's open up the aperture and look at the larger problem because it is a very serious problem, and it affects many lives, both here, in Mexico, and in Central America.
Our Democratic colleagues have offered a lot of criticism of the Trump administration when it comes to border security, but anytime you ask them, well, what is your solution, what are you offering as an alternative, it is crickets--complete silence. In other words, they are not offering any constructive solutions, just criticism. Our constituents deserve more than just for us to criticize one another. They deserve our working together to try to come up with solutions.
This is a crisis that has arisen as a result of our inability to acknowledge that this is a failure to enforce our immigration laws, a failure to fix our broken immigration system, and a failure to secure our borders.
Coming from Texas, representing 28 million constituents in a State which has a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico, this affects my constituents in my State directly. We are at ground zero, and I have tried my best to get educated about the problem and potential solutions. My trips to the border, talking to people in border communities who live and work in those communities, talking to our heroic Border Patrol agents, and visiting our ports of entry where millions and even billions of dollars of commerce flow legally between the United States and Mexico--that is important not only to our border communities but to jobs in the United States.
The border communities that rely on the flow of legal commerce through our ports know that without border security, legitimate trade can easily be brought to a standstill. In fact, that is exactly what has happened at San Ysidro, the port of entry between Tijuana and San Diego. They had to shut down the port of entry. So people whose jobs depend on those ports of entry and the trade and commerce that goes on between our countries, they are the ones who are being hurt by the uncontrolled disruption of legal immigration. Any disruption of legitimate trade has an immediate impact on the businesses and the employees and affects the livelihoods of our border residents.
An unsecured border creates avenues for the entry of drug cartels and
transnational criminal gangs to exploit because they are the same people who are facilitating the passage of migrants from Central America to our borders. Those are the same people who are transiting the heroin, 90 percent of which comes from Mexico, which contributes to our opioid crisis in the United States.
As I mentioned before, last year the Centers for Disease Control estimates 72,000 Americans died of a drug overdose--about 50,000 of those from some form of opioid, either prescription drug, synthetic fentanyl, or heroin coming across the same borders these migrants are attempting to storm across.
The people who are organizing that, as I said, are the same people. They are the drug cartels that are getting rich because we have not found a way to come together to fix our border, to reform our laws, and come together to try to protect the people we represent in the process. We know that the gangs, the cartels, and the transnational criminal organizations are ever evolving. They are always adapting. They spread terror, they prey on the weak, and they have taken control of large swaths of Mexico and Central America. They are, as I have said before, commodity-agnostic--they don't really care whether they are trafficking children for sex or heroin that will cause an overdose in the United States or a migrant who just wants a better life in the United States, because they do want a better life. The same people facilitate that for money.
On average, I have read that a migrant from Central America has to pay about $8,000. You multiply that $8,000 times thousands and thousands. Last year, in 2017, there were almost 400,000 migrants detained at our southwestern border. Just multiply that number by $8,000, and you get just a glimpse of what we are talking about in the huge criminal enterprise. We are continuing to enrich these cartels and transnational criminal organizations when we fail to do our job when it comes to securing our border and fixing our broken immigration system.
This is more than just about whether President Trump gets his money for the wall. As a matter of fact, many of our Democratic colleagues voted in--I think it was 2006 for the Secure Fence Act, which called for 700 miles of secure fencing along the southwestern border. So they have already voted for tactical infrastructure that is part of the piece of the puzzle of securing our border; yet they stand intransigent against our effort to try to improve border security now even though they have supported similar funding in the past.
As I said, we know that the cartels are very shrewd, adaptive, and are always evolving. They know that if they can tie up the Border Patrol with processing children and family units, those same Border Patrol agents aren't available to stop the drugs that come across the border. So it is a method of distracting the Border Patrol and law enforcement in order to exploit that vulnerability for the purposes of bringing those drugs into the United States.
When I want to learn more about what is happening at the border, I talk to my constituents in the Customs and Border Protection business, such as Chief Manny Padilla, who is the Chief of the Rio Grande Valley Sector of the Border Patrol, and Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost. Customs and Border Protection does all it can do with the tools available to it to stop flows of illegal immigration and to stop illegal contraband, including drugs, from making it across the border, but they need our help. We basically have not given them the tools they need in order to do the job we have asked them to do. Shame on us.
We know the cartels are cunning. I have seen produce that appears to be watermelons or other vegetables that basically contain heroin or fentanyl or some other illegal drug. The creativity of the cartels is amazing. I have seen them put human beings, migrants, into the upholstery of a seat in a car so they are obscured or pack them into a truck or put them in an 18-wheeler--unfortunately sometimes leaving them to die as a result of exposure to heat and other conditions. We also know that these same organizations traffic women and children through Central America and enslave them, essentially, here in the United States. They traffic them for sex--again, to generate money because that is all they care about.
The operations of these cartels are increasingly sophisticated, and they are always diversifying their income streams to avoid detection and defeat our efforts to stop it. They are strategic about when and how they cross the border, and they have developed this strategy over many years.
To put it simply, they are taking advantage of and exploiting our inability to deal with our porous border, and a lot of innocent people are getting hurt in the process.
Again, this is about more than just funding President Trump's border wall; this is about our pulling back and looking at the complexity of this problem and using our very best efforts in order to stop it. But somehow it becomes trivialized over a fight over tactical infrastructure that our Democratic colleagues have already voted for in the past under the Secure Fence Act.
Well, the instability and violence created by the criminal organizations in Central America and Mexico over the last few years are part of the strategy. Violence, unfortunately, is at an alltime high in Mexico. That is one of the reasons President Lopez Obrador was elected. He said he wanted to decrease the violence in Mexico. I learned recently that more people have died in Mexico since 2007 than have died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. It is terrible, and we need to work together to try to stop it. We know that gangs control much of El Salvador, and as a result, many Central Americans have their lives and safety threatened daily. It is no wonder they try to flee.
But the United States cannot bear the burden of this crisis alone. I believe the United States is the most generous country in the world when it comes to legal immigration. We have always considered ourselves a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws, and we see what happens when the law is ignored and when Congress fails to fix the problem to the best of our ability.
We have seen uncontrolled illegal immigration. We see thousands of people banding together in caravans trying to storm our ports of entry into the country, overrun our Customs and Border Protection personnel. Until we deal with this problem, new caravans will continue to arrive on a daily basis. In fact, they have. It is just now in the news because it is so large. We have had literally many caravans show up on a daily basis, but that doesn't make a lot of news. As I said, 400,000 people were detained on the southwestern border in 2017 alone.
What is frustrating is that the tools we need to address these problems are at hand and available to us. We can begin to work together to fight these gang cartels and organizations and secure our border by partnering with the governments of Central America and Mexico because our War on Drugs, our effort to provide safety and security to our constituents, is part of their war too. It is a fact that border security doesn't begin at our southern border; it ends at our southern border. It starts in Central America and Mexico.
I know it is sometimes difficult to grasp the complexity of these problems, and that is why it is so tough to resolve them. There are social, political, historical, and moral aspects to all of them. Many people and facets of our society are implicated.
Because of corruption and powerful criminal organizations in Mexico and Central America, a genuine rule of law is missing in many parts of these countries, and it has been for a long time. That is why it is so important for us to work together with these countries in Central America and with Mexico to help them stabilize their governments, root out the corruption, and stop the violence, which will benefit them and their economy, as well as the United States. These countries can in turn restore the relationship between their government, their law enforcement, and their people. When their people begin to see opportunity and safety in their home countries, making the long haul from Central America to the United States becomes less of an imperative and less of a necessity for them. They would probably be happier staying at home if they could do so safely and enjoy some modest prosperity.
We have already had some successes in partnering with our closest neighbor in the crisis; that is, the Government of Mexico. I believe we can and should continue to build on some of the things we have already put in place.
We have already partnered with Mexico in recent years through programs like the Merida Initiative to combat drug trafficking, organized crime, and money laundering.
We have directed funds toward strengthening communities and empowering the Mexican criminal justice system and judicial system to combat the rampant culture of impunity.
We have collaborated on intelligence matters and cooperated on providing various forms of security.
The Bureau of International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement Affairs continues to work to develop programs to combat international narcotics and crime, especially in Central America, but U.S. funding for this program in Mexico has stagnated. Why? Because we somehow fixed the problem? No. It is because we have taken our eye off the ball once again.
Additional aid for these programs would help not only improve drug interdiction and train Mexican law enforcement and judicial personnel, it would help them help us work together to combat the threats of these transnational criminal organizations. We should begin to look at the effectiveness of these programs so we can take full advantage of the work they do and make sure they are modernized and are more efficient and more effective.
I was encouraged to see that the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Trump administration have already begun to negotiate new partnerships with Mexico to implement a new strategy to address some of the migrant flows from Central America. I appreciate Secretary Nielsen's and Secretary Pompeo's work with Mexican officials--primarily those associated with the incoming administration of President Lopez Obrador--toward an arrangement where migrants can seek asylum in the United States but wait in Mexico while their claims are being processed.
I look forward to attending the inauguration of Mexico's incoming President this Saturday with Vice President Pence and other Members of Congress. I think this is--hopefully--a gesture that will be appreciated and reciprocated when it comes to our desire to work closely with this new administration to address many of the problems that I have talked about this morning.
Ignoring this problem is not going to make it better; it is only going to get worse. Working together--not just here in Congress but with the administration and our partners to the south--to secure our borders is the only path forward. Solving this crisis takes a whole- government strategy and one that looks at all pieces of the puzzle.
Instead of shutting down the government by refusing the President's request for border security measures, we need to get to work and fix our broken immigration system. I hope our friends across the aisle are ready to leave their criticism behind and join us in solving the problem.