Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the topic of this Special Order. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I…
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the topic of this Special Order.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, tonight we are going to speak about the border, the failed policies, and the false security that has been created under the Biden-Harris administration.
It is a target-rich environment, I will tell you. We have many examples of the problems that have been created and the policies that created those problems before us.
Keep in mind we have examples of what is also to do right, not theories, but we have hard examples of what to do to secure our border that were implemented under the Trump administration.
Yes, now we have examples of what not to do as we look at the current wide-open border and the massive problems that were created under the Biden-Harris administration.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Rose) my distinguished colleague, to kick this off.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.
Mr. Speaker, you can see there is a long list of problems, and we have many speakers here who want to speak to those problems this evening.
It is critically important for the American people to hear that not only do we identify what these problems are, but the Republicans have been bringing solutions forward to address these problems.
We have been bringing solutions that we know will work. They are not, again, theories. These are issues that have been addressed, and we know that the solutions that we are recommending have been utilized by the Trump administration and are extremely effective.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Edwards).
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina for participating tonight and helping us to shed some light on all the problems that have been caused by this wide-open border that has been created by the Biden-Harris administration.
I yield next to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Westerman), my good friend, a fellow duck hunter, and chairman of the Natural Resources Committee.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arkansas for his remarks. I think that this reflects very clearly on the losses that our country is suffering. It is much, much more than monetary consideration. We are losing lives every single day. We also have to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been lost from fentanyl overdoses.
Mr. Speaker, we have many of our colleagues lined up here to speak. Right now I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Burchett), my very good friend.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Tennessee for his remarks. I certainly appreciate him being here this evening, again, shedding light on these massive, massive terrible problems that this open border has created. It is much more than monetary costs to the taxpayers across this Nation. There are lives that are lost and there are lives that are suffering as a direct result of it.
Next I yield to the gentleman from the great State of Arkansas (Mr. Hill), my good friend. They have a showing this evening.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arkansas for joining us this evening, helping us to shed some light on the problems associated with the wide-open border, and I think that we can see that the people of Arkansas are very fortunate to have him representing them. It sounds like he has a lot of very, very good neighbors to keep him here in office. We appreciate the work that he does.
Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.
Mr. Speaker, this wide-open border is a national security threat. It is much more than a monetary problem that has been placed upon the taxpayers across the United States. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion to $500 billion a year is being taken out of the revenue that we should be spending on our veterans, that we should be spending on our own citizens, and it is being spent on illegal immigrants as they come into our country.
Everyone is always striving to find a better place. They want to have more opportunities for their family, for their children, for their grandchildren. We hear about the Dreamers. We hear about the Dreamers all the time. Guess what? American children and citizens have dreams, too.
My children have dreams of what they would like to accomplish in this country. My grandchildren have dreams of what they would like to accomplish and what they see that this country could be, and we are stripping away all of those dreams when we continue to leave this border wide open.
I have grave concerns about not only the millions of people who have come in here illegally that we have had encounters with but, as has been touched upon this evening, I have grave concerns about the several million people who have come in as got-aways and have not had any encounters with any law enforcement whatsoever.
What kind of problems can they cause to our infrastructure? What kind of problems can they cause to our rail systems, to our water systems, to our sewer systems, to our power grid?
Why is it that when it is so easy to sneak into our country, to walk in, to be greeted on the border of Texas, to be greeted on the border of California, and be given new clothes, be given a cell phone, be given transportation to virtually any place in this country that you want and some traveling money to go with it--what kind of criminal do you have to be to actually sneak into our country and what plans do you have to cause problems?
What strain is it causing to our school systems? How about the human trafficking, the human suffering that is taking place with the people who are forced into the sex trade day after day? We know that it is happening.
The hundreds of thousands of children that are completely unaccounted for, where have they been sold? Where have they been transported to? What kind of hell are they living in right now? How many of them will be just lost and end up taking their own lives because they cannot endure it any longer?
What about the introduction of diseases that we haven't seen for decades that are showing up on our streets and in our schools, coming directly from the illegal aliens who are coming into our country?
How about the suppression of wages and the problems that is causing for our labor community? We are keeping the wages down. People ask, why can't we just increase the minimum wage? Because the market is so flooded with people who are willing to hire illegal aliens that we cannot get those wages up.
Then, the suffering and the families that lose loved ones every single day--about 100,000 lives a year are lost in this country due to fentanyl overdoses that we know are coming directly from the southern border. This body, this body right here, is going to have to do something about it because the administration, the Biden-Harris administration, has demonstrated they will not do anything about it.
We have passed H.R. 2, and I am told that it is the most comprehensive border security and immigration legislation that has ever come through here. We passed that, and it is over in the Senate, waiting for Chuck Schumer to do something with it.
We passed the SAVE Act. We have heard so much about it for the last couple of weeks and how it is going to straighten out and make sure that we don't have illegals voting in our elections. We passed it in July, and it sits on Chuck Schumer's desk, waiting for some kind of action.
The only thing that remains for us, the only thing that is left for Congress to do, is to use the power of the purse strings that we were granted by the Constitution that we continually hear about.
Continuing resolutions prohibit us from doing our job. Our job is to pass appropriations bills and to transparently and properly fund government. Continuing resolutions simply continue funding at levels that most of us voted against and on policies that most of us voted against. It is not the way to run government.
It continues to fund the very agencies that cause problems in our Nation and that have been weaponized against our citizens. They are literally growing larger bureaucracies they are using to attack American citizens, all the alphabet agencies: the ATF, FBI, IRS.
We must reclaim our authority and utilize the appropriations process as called for in the Budget Act of 1974, and thereby fund government in a transparent and responsible fashion. If not, we will see a continuation of these disastrous policies and an accumulation of the ever-growing debt, which now exceeds $35 trillion.
Mr. Speaker, we must do this, and we can do this, but we have to stand up and declare that we are going to do this. They are tough decisions for very difficult problems, but that is what we signed up for, and I am here to make sure that it happens.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
