Maritime Border Security Review Act

Floor Speech

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Miss GONZALEZ-COLON of Puerto Rico. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Katko for leading this effort today. I want to thank the chairman of the committee and Ranking Member Thompson for supporting this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on behalf of my bill, H.R. 5869, the Maritime Border Security Review Act.

As we move to secure our borders, it is imperative that we confront the threats posed by criminal and drug trafficking organizations seeking to enter the Nation through our maritime frontier. Illicit trafficking through the transit zone, a 7-million-square-mile area, includes the sea corridors of the western Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the eastern Pacific Ocean. This is the transit zone.

According to the Coast Guard, the total known flow of undocumented migrants attempting to enter the U.S. by maritime routes in 2017 was almost 4,800 individuals. The known cocaine flow throughout the transit zone reached about 2,700 metric tons in 2017.

This bill also addresses the public safety challenges faced by Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the only two U.S. territories located geographically within the transit zone.

The United States' Caribbean border has long been exploited as both a destination and a transshipment point for illicit drugs shipped to the mainland, endangering the lives of Americans in the two territories, but also in the continental U.S. About two-thirds of the cocaine transiting the Caribbean in early 2016 was destined for the U.S., most of it being smuggled through Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

In 2017, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized about 66,000 pounds of narcotics in and around Puerto Rico from drug cartels and smugglers. And let me tell you something: The CBP, or the Customs and Border Patrol, is outside the mainland. So this is the only CBP office outside the mainland operating not just in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but our frontier with Venezuela and the whole Caribbean. The year 2017 was a record high for drug smugglers over the previous year.

Last year's devastating hurricane season disrupted interdiction efforts in the United States' maritime border. According to the 2019 Threat Assessment from the Puerto Rico/U.S. Virgin Islands High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, the damage inflicted by the storms severely diminished the operational capabilities of local and Federal law enforcement on both islands.

The U.S. Coast Guard recently testified before the U.S. Senate that responding in force to the hurricanes meant fewer resources for drug interdiction and border protection. They also admitted that, despite their best efforts, they have struggled to keep up with the volume of illicit traffic due to a shortage of planes, ships, helicopters, and resources, further highlighting the needs at our maritime border.

H.R. 5869 would help us better understand these and other challenges the United States faces along its maritime border by requiring the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct a detailed threat analysis of the region. These assessments must include the terrorism and criminal threats posed by those seeking to enter the U.S. throughout the maritime border; improvements needed at all U.S. seaports to reduce criminal activity; and all vulnerabilities in law that prevent effective border security, similar to those recently released in the Northern Border Threat Analysis of 2017 that were approved by the House of Representatives.

The Secretary of Homeland Security must consider technology and personnel needs, the role of State and local enforcement in border security activities, the geographic challenges of the region, and the impact of last year's hurricanes on general border security activities.

Protecting and ensuring the safety of the American people both on the mainland and in the territories is very important not just for me, but for all of us, and should be one of our priorities. An assessment of the threats posed at our Nation's maritime border will help us achieve just that. The reason behind this bill is to promote that kind of analysis.

I want to thank Chairman McCaul, Ranking Member Thompson, and Congressmen Katko and Perry for their leadership in assisting and moving forward this legislation, and I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 5869.

Mr. Speaker, I will be prepared to close in a moment, but I do want to follow up on a couple of remarks from my colleague from Puerto Rico.

I served there as a Federal organized crime prosecutor in the mid- 1990s in San Juan, and during that time I saw firsthand how much of a vulnerability the maritime areas have of the United States in general, but Puerto Rico in particular.

The HIDTA report, which refers to the high intensity drug trafficking report, talks about severely diminished capabilities for law enforcement post-hurricane. But that doesn't begin to describe what really goes on down there.

When I first walked into the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1996 in Puerto Rico, there were about five or six major fast boats lined up in a parking lot that had been seized. They were seized because of large shipments of cocaine coming across the water directly from Colombia, which is only about 500 nautical miles away. These boats could go anywhere within Puerto Rico. It doesn't have to come to a port. It can pull up to shore anywhere and offload whatever contraband they are trafficking.

Certainly any one of those boats carried millions upon millions of dollars of poison that were going into drug users in this country, but they could easily be carrying terrorists. Once they get into Puerto Rico, you are in the United States. That is what people have to understand. Once you are in the United States, there is more customs scrutiny.

So getting it into Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, or the Virgin Islands, or other territories of the United States, and not knowing what those vulnerabilities are is a serious gap in our security in this Nation.

We did a similar threat assessment of the northern border, and it was very illuminating to see how much the northern border is wide open and how much of a threat it actually is. I would venture to guess that what we will see from this report when it is issued is much more eye- opening. It is a vulnerability in the world where people don't want us to survive as a democracy and, instead, want to impose terroristic views on our society. It is incumbent we pass this bill to get the full scope of the extent of the threat.

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