Failed Border Policies

Floor Speech

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Mr. BURCHETT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the vice chair for yielding, first of all, and I thank his dedication to this country and his friendship to me, and he will be missed. He is a good dude.

Mr. Speaker, the State Department has been giving out cash vouchers to illegal aliens. Now, imagine this. There are veterans living, literally, under bridges in the district I represent, yet they are giving folks that come over our border yours and mine hard-earned tax dollars. We don't know who the heck they are.

They have never been able to provide an actual number or amount. That is by design, Mr. Speaker. I have heard it stated, our country has been flooded with 10 million, 11 million, but I think it is probably closer to 15 million illegals in the last almost 4 years, and nobody knows exactly how many. Again, that is by design.

You add to that list the answers we don't have. Not only do we not know how much they have received in assistance, dadgummit, we don't even know how many people have received this assistance. The White House will not give us this information. We have all had the phone calls and the emails and the letters. We have seen the pictures of the buses unloading folks when they drop these folks, illegals, out into our districts, and no one can tell us who the heck they are, where they came from, or if they are expected to return anywhere. All you can count on is more tax dollars being spent.

We are $35 trillion in debt. Every 100 days we add another dadgum trillion dollars, and neither party has a plan to pay it back. You cannot put a pin down on how much money we have doled out. We have got some serious problems.

Caravans travel fast and word of mouth travels even faster. These people know about the benefits that they are going to get before they even start their journey. They are more educated at it than, I daresay, any State Department official that is supposed to know what the heck is going on.

We are incentivizing illegal immigration, which means we are incentivizing breaking the law. Everybody knows it is wrong. They know it is wrong. We know it is wrong, but they are willing to forgo it. They know these folks are going to be voting. They know they are going to add to their rolls. One way or the other, they are going to get a driver's license, and then they are going to go to another State, and they are going to present that driver's license, and they are going to get a voter registration card, or they are going to do it within their own State.

The abject failure to secure our border is severely straining our communities. I can remember when I was mayor of Knox County, we had one school that had over a dozen different languages, and the population of that school was under 300. We are required to provide services for those children. Now, dadgummit, it is not the kids' fault. It is the breakdown of this town, the breakdown of the system that has caused this problem.

The people who actually pay taxes in this country are the ones who are paying for this. Our healthcare system, education, social safety nets, et cetera, are all breaking down. We don't even know what people are buying with this cash that they are getting or where they are sending it. There is no way of telling.

Does it make it back to the cartels? I suspect it does. Who the heck knows? Nobody knows. Our State Department has a terrible track record under Secretary Blinken. That track record is bought and paid for with the American citizens' tax dollars. It is not in my notes, but it is on my heart. One thing I think we ought to remember if we read our Scripture: Jesus was talking, and he said, how you treat the least of these is how you treat me. Those 300,000-plus children that have come over our dadgum border, Mr. Speaker, nobody knows where they are, they don't know what hell those kids are in. I think our minds don't have to wander very far to know what conditions they are living in if some of them are even still living. We will pay. God will rebuke this Nation for that.

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