Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I won't keep you here for 60 minutes.

There are a couple of issues I think that I have dominated discussion here the last couple of weeks, or should have dominated the discussion, that I think deserve a little bit of attention today.

I am going to address, one more time, our crisis at the southern border. I am a little bit afraid that, as the weeks and months roll on, people are being accustomed to what is going on at the southern border. But as with every tragedy that happens in our society, if a tragedy happens every week or every month, we ought to talk about it every month.

Now, recently, the Biden administration changed the way we allow people from certain countries, Cuba, Haiti, one of the Central American countries, to be able to come in here. But we have to look and see how many people are crossing the southern border and, if we look, including people coming across in the new administrative fashion, every month we continue to hit all-time records of people coming into the United States.

The most recent month available is May. We are still waiting for the June numbers. There we have a total of 227,000 people crossing our southern border. If we compare that to last May, it was 142,000; and if we compare it to the first May under President Biden, it was 74,000.

So things are going up dramatically, but it seems as though the press is not as appropriately concerned as they should be. In other words, we are succeeding in getting them bored; the greater the concern should be.

I want to point out as well that as the total number of people come across, different subgroups continue to come up. We, right now, have unaccompanied minors at approximately 7,000 people.

Now, recently, The New York Times reported we have lost tens of thousands of young people coming here. We have almost 7,000 people crossing the border every month, not being supervised by their parents or, quite frankly, any other adult. The Border Patrol will tell you that sometimes if you do a DNA test, children that are coming across with people who purport to be their parents, purport to be their aunts or uncles, are not. This should be a cause of great concern here in this Chamber.

When children were left to spend a week or 2 weeks apart from their parents, that was considered a major concern and something we all had to bring up.

But no, I believe that there is a new committee formed, and one of the things we will have to look at is what we can do to make sure that people who are entering the United States have not one but, in most cases, both of their parents with them.

It is not a good idea for the United States to be part of a system which is causing people, young people, to be separate from, in many case, both parents, in other cases, one parent. Hopefully, we can change our policy down there, a little more family oriented, and the United States will not act as a kind of coconspirator with the drug cartels in breaking up these families.

I think it is also important that we not only check this out when people are crossing into our border but check them out when our Department of Labor finds young people, as they do, working maybe third shift, maybe working illegally. We had a committee hearing on this. It wasn't publicized as much as it should have been, but we find the Department of Labor expresses no interest at all, as far as we can tell, when they find a child working third shift, when they find a child working in such fashion against the law. They do not look for the parents at all, and this is something that should change if the administration was all concerned about these parents.

Nobody can tell me if a child was working illegally, working too late, working at too young an age, and they were an American citizen, and this were found out, the appropriate authorities would not be contacting the parents and wondering what was going on. But, under the Biden administration, we don't care.

Of course you are setting up a situation of human trafficking. When you have children who are unaccompanied by parents, that is an obvious result.

We always refer to human trafficking. We should--frequently, I think the phrase ``human trafficking'' is used to kind of nicen up what is really going on, and that is prostitution.

In any event, I call on the press corps to report on the new migrants coming in in the May numbers and sometime in the next couple of weeks, we should get new numbers in June. Last year, in June, we had 140,000 people cross across the southern border, and I hope the press corps takes a little bit of notice as to whether one more time we hit a record for the month.

Right now we have numbers for the first 9 months of this fiscal year. Every one of the 9 months has hit a high in the number of people coming here, at least in recent history. We will find out within a couple of weeks whether we are on the tenth month in a row of record number of people coming in.

The next issue that I would like to address--it was touched upon this week in some of the diversity talk--is that with regard to the transgender issue. It is an issue I never thought we would discuss here in Washington. It is an issue I don't think that even crossed people's minds 15 or 16 years ago.

There are a variety of topics that people bring up here. Do transgenders get to use a girls' bathroom?

Do transgenders get to use a girls' locker room if they are in sports?

Do transgenders get to play on women's sports?

But I think the most important issue, and it is one that should be more obvious, is what is society doing to reduce this problem?

What they found out in Europe is that over time, the number of transgenders go up. If we didn't have this obvious increase in number of people, we wouldn't have anywhere near the problem in the first place.

Now, why is it going up? I think the more you read, one of the reasons it is going up is this subgroup of our population is kind of held up as heroes.

I would suggest that some people interested in this topic read an article by a woman by the name of Heather Mac Donald in which she discusses the transgender situation and the fact that all of the coverage in the press and all of the favorable comments from American politicians, particularly our President of the United States, referring to people who question the proliferation of the transgender movement, he says they are motivated by hate and fear.

I don't know anybody who is hating anybody. I do think there are people who feel sorry for these people.

But obviously, the number is increasing the more politicians and the news media pays attention to this subgroup and makes them out to be some sort of heroes. It gives people attention and, of course, all young people like attention.

It gives people a sense of belonging, a sense that they are part of a cause. And, of course, young people like to be part of a rebellion of some nature.

But the people who are being hurt by this more than anybody are, of course, the people who would not have gone down this path but are going down this path and it is brought to people's attention more and more. This is a group that was nowhere near as common in this country in the past and, quite frankly, I do not believe this is common in other nonwesternized countries. That is because in these nonwesternized countries it is not discussed as something that we ought to do.

Now, I recently met with a young lady who was convinced that the reason she was unhappy is because she really should have been a boy. She now credits it entirely to looking on the internet where they told her if she was unhappy--and many, many young people are unhappy. They told her the reason she was unhappy is perhaps she should be a boy.

So they took this young lady and, at the age of 12 or 13, they gave her powerful puberty blockers. They gave her testosterone, and eventually they removed her breasts. She, of course, came to regret it.

I don't know what sort of doctor would look at a 15-year-old, knowing very well that people's opinions and idea of the world change so dramatically between 15 and 20 and 25 and 30, and decided to do something as irrevocable as remove this young gal's breasts. But this is happening all the time in this country.

This gal was from another State, but I know of two hospitals in Wisconsin who would make this dramatic change to somebody. They wouldn't--I don't know why. Money. I can't imagine why they wouldn't say, why don't you come back when you are 23 or 24 and we will talk to you then. That wouldn't be a good idea then--but to a 15-year-old?

Again, the reason she did it is because she got a lot of affirmation on the internet, people encouraging her, people telling her she is a hero, people telling her that she should be so proud of herself if she was going down this route.

I think it would be good if we would start in this Chamber, among politicians here--and, hopefully, even the President--and stop encouraging people that this is an option.

By the way, if people have these surgeries, they have to continue to take medications costing a great deal every month. If it were really true that this gal should have been a boy, she wouldn't have to continue to take medications even after she had the surgeries; however, she would have to take these medications for the rest of her life.

I hope, in the future, people in this Chamber are a little bit more measured in their words before they imply to people that they are some sort of special heroes by getting their sex changed.

So, in any event, these are two topics that I will say the other side has not been brought up to the degree in which it should be by the mainstream media and not brought up enough by my colleagues.

So I hope when we return from our break over the weekend that these issues are brought up a little bit more in the future.

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