Southern Border Issues

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Fleischmann).

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

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good) for the purpose of a colloquy.

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would now like to address several issues today and maybe give it a little bit of a different spin or a little bit of different observations than people are getting from some of the other congressmen.

I was glad today to vote to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and, hopefully, reduce the number of oil imports we are getting from that country.

Every day, you cannot help but be touched by the reports from Ukraine and what is happening to the civilians there.

Nevertheless, I am a little bit concerned about the public statements coming out of Washington. I believe we should all be working to end this war and wind up with a free Ukraine.

Nevertheless, to end this war, we will eventually have to get to the bargaining table, and I am afraid that statements being made by both sides will make it more difficult to reach an end result. The sooner the war ends, the more lives of Ukrainian troops will be saved, the more lives of Ukrainian civilians will be saved, and, quite frankly, the more lives of Russian troops will be saved.

To negotiate a final deal, both sides must realize and respect that deal, and both sides must feel that they came out of the negotiation with something.

I sure hope we are not in the current position we are right now 3 or 4 months from now. I would encourage all of my colleagues, and also the President of the United States, when they make public statements, to ask themselves: Are we getting closer to ending this war by my statements, or are we not getting closer to ending this war?

I suppose politicians always think about politics. But I sometimes think statements are made for political effect rather than reaching the serious goal of ending this conflict.

I would also like to follow up on what is going on on the border and the danger that we may soon end title 42. I think for the future of the United States, the most important thing going on--what is going on in Ukraine is important. The most important thing is what goes on at the border.

We all know that around the time President Biden took office, about 20,000 people a month, and sometimes well under 20,000 people a month, were crossing the border, for a variety of reasons. The major one is, I think the current administration isn't really thrilled about enforcing our laws. We have gone from having under 20,000 to 80,000 or 100,000 people a month cross our southern border, people who are not vetted, people who we, in many cases, would not want here under any circumstances.

There is a danger that in May, that 80,000 to 100,000 figure is going to jump to 400,000 or 500,000 people a month. People are not being vetted, and people are coming from all around the globe.

I will be there next week. When you get down there and you talk to the Border Patrol, you will find people not only coming from Mexico but more people from Central America, people from the Caribbean, people from South America, people from sub-Saharan Africa, people from eastern Europe, people from countries that are currently hostile to us are being waved through after they get a minimal amount of paperwork. We do not need to increase that to 300,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 people a month.

The last time I was down there, I noticed that there were a lot of photo IDs of people from Central America and South America being thrown away before they checked in. What does that tell you? It means people don't want us to know about their past. They are running away from their past as they enter our country.

I remember the statement of John Adams: ``Our Constitution is only fit for a moral and religious people.'' We have to make sure we are getting a moral group of people crossing our southern border, not to mention we have to make sure we are getting people who respect our laws.

We, right now, swear in over 800,000 people from around the world every year. That is fine. They are appropriately vetted. I encourage all citizens to watch as people come here legally and are sworn in.

Our economy cannot accept another 400,000, and we know a given number of these people, perhaps, have a criminal background and are not going to help our country.

Not to mention, no country as successful as ours, can accept an unlimited number of people. We are not prepared for them. They have not been adequately trained in the way of the American ideals, the importance of our Constitution, why we have our Constitution.

Furthermore, having been down there, the more people you let in, the more it strengthens the Mexican drug gangs, and those gangs make $3,000 or $5,000 or $9,000 or $20,000 per person who comes across here. We are strengthening their power. We are making them wealthy. Why would we want to expand the current fiasco south of the border?

Last time I was down there, the Border Patrol told me about fights between Mexican and Chinese gangs on our side of the border. How do these people from these gangs get here? They cross the border illegally. Is it helpful for the United States to have open warfare between Chinese and Mexican gangs? That is what we are getting more and more.

Our poor, underappreciated Border Patrol, more shots directly at them. And what does the administration do? Rather than strengthen the border, we propose legislation giving them free college, college that American citizens have to go $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 in debt to get.

Rather than hire more Border Patrol to enforce the border, we hire more people to investigate the Border Patrol. I am not sure what psychological problem we have going on here. It is the same psychological problem that looks at, say, a city like Milwaukee that is approaching 200 homicides a year, and saying we have to investigate the police, or we have to make it easier to sue the police.

That same mindset at the southern border says we have 100,000 people here who shouldn't come here every month? I know what we will do, we will hire more people to investigate the Border Patrol and make sure they are not doing anything wrong. They think the Border Patrol are the bad people.

Another problem, and I don't know whether this has occurred to President Biden's advisers, I don't know whether you wanted a war in Ukraine, but I don't believe that war would have started if we wouldn't have had an open borders policy. What do you think countries like Iran or China, or Russia make of us having an open border and not enforcing our border laws? Normal countries don't do that. They think it is because we have such a weak President who will never do anything. It invites trouble.

I have felt for a year-and-a-half or 2 years that the open borders policy was inviting mischief; and that is what we have now, mischief that I don't believe would have happened had we tried to enforce our border laws.

Please, Mr. President, keep title 42. Fire the Vice President from her position as border czar. That is another problem we have.

As mentioned, next week I will go and tour part of the border in San Diego and Yuma. I have been in many other parts in the past. But I go down there to learn more directly from the Border Patrol. As is common from all agencies, you learn a lot more from the people doing the work than the bureaucrats at the top, and I look forward to coming back and reporting whatever grim statistics I gather from talking about the Border Patrol and their suggestions to save our country.

I hope all Americans listening and paying attention are contacting their Representatives and Senators about what is going on on the border. I personally believe one of the reasons that President Biden is threatening to remove title 42 is because the news is dominated with what is going on in Ukraine, and now is the time you could get away with really opening the floodgates. But if we are going to save our country, we have to enforce the borders like we would in any normal country.

By the way, an excuse for removing title 42 is saying that they feel that COVID is no longer a threat. If you look, over 500 people a day on most days are dying of COVID. It is still a problem. Right now, or at least the last time I was down there, they didn't even feel they had the legal ability to test people as to whether or not they had COVID. As long as that situation is out there, I beg you to keep title 42 in place. It is bad enough having 80,000 to 100,000 people crossing here every month who we have not vetted.

The next crisis that I would like to address today is an ongoing crisis. It has been a problem in this country for 50 years, but I think things keep getting worse. And that is the decline in which Black Lives Matter would refer to as the Western traditional family. Again and again, bills are introduced around here to provide benefits, and the traditional nuclear family is left out of those benefits; be it an increase in the earned income tax credit or flooding more money into low-income housing, increases in food share, increases in Pell grants, increases in childcare.

All of these programs an average married couple are not eligible for because in the traditional family, usually at least one parent and sometimes two are working. In order to be eligible for these programs, you have to put yourself in a position in which you are considered in poverty, and if you are in poverty, you are eligible for governmental assistance.

I had a woman in my district who had two children who were both $30,000, $40,000 in debt from going to college complain why did her sister's kids get free college while her own kids are stuck paying off their debt? She was proud of her children; she was proud they were current on their student loans, but it didn't seem right to her that her niece, who was raised in a nontraditional family, or what Black Lives Matter would consider a traditional family, her niece got free college paid for by the government, whereas her kids had to work to pay off the student loans.

I hope in the future, as we dole more money out of this place, we stop discriminating against and showing hatred for the traditional family. I will point out, that I think over time more and more Americans are catching on to the idea that materially they can get benefits that they wouldn't get if they didn't get married.

I will point out some statistics on SNAP benefits. Between 1996 and 2016, a 20-year gap--and these are both years in which the economy is doing well, so I am comparing apples to apples--the number of people on SNAP jumped up from about 25,000 to 44,000. Taking those two years, about a 50 to 60 percent increase in the number of people on SNAP.

Now, we have to make sure people can eat. I realize all people can go through a tough time in their lives, where there are some people who may have mental problems or such, that makes it very difficult to hold a job, but when you have a 50 to 60 percent increase in 20 years on the number of people who have arranged their life that they are eligible for SNAP, people better wake up because we are destroying the traditional family in America.

I hope in the future the majority party, as they put together more budgets, or if the Republicans ever get the majority, when they get the majority, that they would begin to look at this problem. It is not a new problem that gets press like a surge at the border will get press or a disaster in Kyiv will get press, but it is an ongoing problem as we eat away at the traditional nuclear family of this country, and it is being eaten away by the programs that are passed by this Congress. I hope if the Republicans take control, even though it is not a sexy issue because it is an ongoing issue, I hope they do something about this hatred or discrimination against the traditional family.

Now, I will make one more point, I make it as much as I can, before I leave this podium today. One more time I am going to talk about vitamin D. In part I am going to talk about it because there was an expert in vitamin D who I ran into last night from Maryland who, again, brought up that he felt he had a cocktail which was about 100 percent successful in curing people from COVID if they get it.

If any of the Speaker's office is paying attention, I would be happy to give them the name of this individual. Maybe it is something that should be given to the Speaker.

But the new cocktail, in part, is based on substantial amounts of vitamin D. A week and a half ago I talked to Dr. Dror of Israel who commented on the importance of being vitamin D sufficient. In his Israeli study, with a small number of people, he found that people who were vitamin D deficient were 11 times as likely to die of COVID if they were hospitalized as people who were not vitamin D deficient. He was using a very low threshold, 20 nanograms per milliliter. Eleven times more likely to die if you were vitamin D deficient.

I don't know what is wrong with our Department of Health and Human Services on this. I talked to Secretary Becerra. It is something that the American public should have been educated on 18 months ago. I personally have known nine people who have died of COVID. I always wonder how many of those would still be alive today if they had done half as much to push vitamin D as they did with all the other advertising, pushing masks, pushing social distancing, what have you.

But with 500 people dying a day, it is still something that should be publicized. I have written a letter to Secretary Becerra; and 14 times less likely to wind up with serious COVID once hospitalized. Among people hospitalized, of the people who didn't have enough vitamin D-- under 20 nanograms--25 percent died. If they had over 20 nanograms, 2.3 percent died who wound up hospitalized in Israel. Kind of dramatic numbers. News you can use.

Those are some of the comments or issues of the day that I think the press should be paying attention to. I thank the indulgence of staff for giving us the hour. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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