Border Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. TUBERVILLE. Madam President, sometimes setting records is a good thing. Forty years being a college football coach in this country, you try to set records. But the records this current administration has been breaking aren't exactly worth celebrating.

For example, we are seeing record crime and record price increases. President Biden even threw a big party last week at the White House to celebrate record-high prices, the same day there were record market losses in the market.

But even those stats pale in comparison to the record-shattering crisis at our southern border, another thing that they declared victory on without attempting to solve the problem. We could solve it, but Democrats don't want to solve this problem.

I guess they would rather listen to James Taylor on the White House lawn, but the people of Alabama haven't forgotten what is going on at the southern border because we are seeing the same influx in our State.

Let's look back into the 2 years of recordbreaking that we have seen since the Biden border crisis began and the solutions that Democrats refuse to use to fix the problem.

When President Biden took office, he rolled back as many policies as possible that secured our southern border. This immediate reversal in security measures was something he had promised on the campaign trail, so we expected it. Migrants from around the world were prepared to take advantage of the new administration's soft-on-security approach at our border. Since then, the border crisis has set record after record.

In this fiscal year alone, we have surpassed 2 million apprehensions of illegal immigrants at our southern border for the first time ever in the history of our country. Last year, that number was over 1.7 million--showing the crisis at our border is accelerating, not slowing, under this administration.

This is after almost 2 years of the Vice President's work to address what they call the ``root causes'' of migration. It has been a disaster. Some will try to twist those numbers to use as proof that enforcement is working, but that is obviously a red herring.

The staggering--staggering--encounters and arrests only highlight that even more shocking number of illegal immigrants we never see-- those who get away, what we call the got-aways. Those are whom we release into the United States and they never come back. The truth is, we will probably never, ever get a true number of those who have entered our country illegally. We are a country of immigrants--we like immigration--but come here legally.

But we do know that this surge was stretched, and the resources have been thin ever since the border has been open. We cannot follow up with the illegal immigrants we do encounter to properly screen them and begin immigration proceedings. You can't have proceedings on people whom you do not recognize and know where they have gone.

Almost one-third of illegal immigrants processed in the time immediately after Biden took office--one-third--have never returned for their check-in with officials, as called for by law; meaning, we have no idea where these people are, and they have no intention of coming back and checking in.

Meanwhile, Secretary Mayorkas has repeatedly told Congress-- repeatedly--that the border is secure. While bureaucrats in DC may be sticking to that ridiculous spin, our own agents at the border know the truth.

The head of the Border Patrol has admitted advising his agents to release illegal immigrants into the country--who would typically be apprehended--because they do not have the resources to handle the influx of the people coming into the country. We just turn them loose. In fact, the Border Patrol Chief said he has never seen anything like this current situation in his 31 years of working for the Agency.

This position we are putting our law enforcement officials in is unacceptable, but this administration does nothing--does nothing--to stop anything that is happening. Instead, they just tell us the border is secure when our President has not even visited the border in his 19 months in office.

However, we know people aren't the only thing flooding across the borders and into our communities. Unthinkable amounts of deadly fentanyl and other drugs are being smuggled into this country every single day. Drug cartels are more emboldened than ever to send as many deadly drugs as possible to the border because they know they can take advantage of the crisis that has been unfolding here for 2 years. Just in the past week, officers have seized $211,000 worth of cocaine and $2.3 million worth of meth coming across the Texas border--and 187 pounds of fentanyl pills hidden in a vehicle in one single bust in Arizona. To put that in perspective, that is enough fentanyl to kill more than 42 million people, nearly 10 times the population of my State of Alabama.

And that is what our Border Patrol agents have stopped. Imagine what has gone undetected through this new open-border policy. More than 71,000 Americans died so far this year of fentanyl overdoses--71,000. That is 195 people a day in this country who are dying because we refuse to stop the fentanyl from coming into our country.

And, along with that, the drug cartels are becoming more and more rich and more and more compelled to do exactly what they want to do. It is yet another problem Democrats refuse to discuss or address out of fear of backlash from the radical, open-bordered ideologues running this administration and its immigration policy. Somebody has got to control this. One day we will find out.

But Democrats are quick to call out the problem when it ends up on their front porch. Mayors in New York, Chicago, and right here in DC have cried foul and even declared an emergency when the border crisis was delivered here to this city and others. They have no problem ignoring, excusing, and misrepresenting the facts of the crisis when it is hitting small towns far away in Texas, Arizona, and their southern neighbors, but when those illegal immigrants streaming across the border become problems of theirs, they suddenly see an emergency. But whom do they blame? Obviously, it is the Republicans, not the leader of their party.

President Biden has created this mess. They blame local and State leaders who are drowning in a humanitarian crisis that the Democrats are making every day and refusing to stop. Even as news reports how his own DHS planned to ship illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities across the country, President Biden condemns Republican leaders for doing the same. It is hypocrisy at its highest degree.

What is worse is their refusal to fix the problem, even though they are well aware of the steps that could be taken to secure the border. First and foremost, finish the wall that they have stopped building. Although the wall itself will not solve everything, it could certainly help address the number of people who get away--a number averaging 1,000 per week in some locations.

Secondly, fully reinstate the wildly successful migrant protection protocols which require individuals awaiting asylum proceedings to wait in Mexico--not come over into the United States and wait; wait in Mexico, and let's go through your process. If people know they will not be allowed into the United States, they will not make the journey to our border knowing that they will have to wait. As of last week, we had accepted into this country people from 180 different countries. That is a long travel if you know that you may not get in.

And, lastly, Democrats could do a much better job of supporting law enforcement to address human smuggling and trafficking efforts at the border. As long as the border is wide open, cartels will take advantage of the situation. They are making billions of dollars a year by moving people and drugs into the United States, and it is getting worse every day.

Americans are dying. Cities are being overrun. Criminals are getting rich. Those are the consequences of President Biden's border crisis. Those are the problems that our Democratic colleagues have to fix.

While President Biden and Democrats celebrate the White House with celebrities, Americans are suffering because of these failures--most notably, their inability and unwillingness to keep our country safe.

So here is to the Democrats' recordbreaking year: record inflation, record crime, record drugs, record-shattering illegal immigration. We can only hope they run out of things to celebrate in the very near future.

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