The Current Issue At the Border

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak one more time about the current issue at the border.

We have gone from a situation in which 1 year ago at this time there were 36,000 confrontations at the border to last February 100,000 encounters at the border.

In addition to a three-fold increase, there has been a corresponding increase in unaccompanied children at the border.

How did this happen? There are several policies that should be reinstituted immediately.

First of all, prior to President Trump being sworn in, we had a policy in which the Mexican Government was keeping people on their side of the border pending an asylum hearing. We have now undone that policy, which does three things:

First of all, new people arriving at the border are escorted into the United States and sent somewhere inland.

Secondly, people who have been waiting on the Mexican side of the border are coming across.

And thirdly, you are sending the message around the world that the United States is not enforcing their immigration laws the way they are intended to be enforced. The word gets out, be it in Central America, be it in Mexico, be it in Asia, be it in Brazil, the United States is inviting people in. And with that situation comes the three-fold increase.

Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama said at one time that 1,000 encounters a day at the southern border was a bad number. We now have three times what was considered a bad number under Barack Obama.

The next thing we are doing is, we are getting rid of the agreements we had in Central America. President Trump maybe tweeted too much, but he engaged in negotiations with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras so that people stayed down there, rather than coming through Mexico to the United States. He did it, to a certain extent, with the carrot and stick of foreign aid which the United States had sent to those countries. That policy has also changed. And with the change in that policy people are streaming up through Central America.

Again, from year to year there has been a 61 percent increase in unaccompanied children. People purport to say that they care about children being separated from their parents. Well, when you have more and more unaccompanied children showing up at the border, what do you think that means? These children inevitably are going to wind up separated from their parents, keeping families apart.

I should point out, by the way, another thing that I am told bothers Central American countries. In this country in an effort to sometimes keep a child with both parents, if the parents don't get along that well, courts make an effort to keep both parents in the same region.

I am told that the Central American countries do not like the fact that the United States sometimes will take children with even one parent, leaving the other parent behind. I think it would be better if we improved our relationship with those countries by trying to keep children with both parents.

Other things that have been done is, sadly, we stopped the border wall construction. When I was down at the border we learned, with regard to the border wall, it takes four or five agents to man 2 miles of the old wall, which was sometimes little more than minor fencing. Now, with the new wall we need one Border Patrol agent for 2 miles, so there is a substantial savings there, as well.

The catch and release policies are back, and with it a crisis is coming. America has to apply more pressure or tell the Biden administration, please, there is a reason why we have tripled the number of people, the number of encounters our Border Patrol is having today compared to this time last year. It is the policies that have been implemented in the first month and a half of the Biden administration.

Please, President Biden, go back to the old policies in which people are held on the southern border and people can get a good hearing on their asylum claims, rather than creating a system in which, as a practical matter, people come here illegally and wind up just blending into the background.

It is unfair to the people who are trying to access our country legally that people are coming here illegally and skipping ahead of them. Inevitably, as we take people without vetting them, we are getting a given number of people taking advantage of our benefits, and we are getting a number of people who are sneaking illegal drugs across the southern border.

So, again, we have sent letters to President Biden, and I please ask him to respond to these letters and let the American public know: What is your plan to stop 100,000 people a month coming across the border before that 100,000 becomes 200,000 or 300,000?

And it will become 200,000 or 300,000 because people around the world are watching the President, and if the President continues to make it clear he does not intend to enforce the border, people from all around the world will be coming here.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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