Andy Biggs

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join me in calling upon our leadership to do something that I think is critical. What is it that we need? We need the leverage to get enforcement, not the leverage to enact policy. I believe this is a lawless administration. They are not going to enforce the policies that we invoke. They instead will go around them. For instance, H.R. 2. When we go to H.R. 2, a lot of my colleagues say we need to stick H.R. 2 on everything. Well, the problem with sticking H.R. 2 on anything is, even if H.R. 2 passes--it is a great law, by the way. I have written most of the provisions in that H.R. 2 one time or another, introduced those one time or another. It is a good law. I am the cosponsor of that bill. It takes care of a lot of issues, whether it is on asylum, whether it is on Flores, whether it is on any of these other technical issues we have. Guess what? Even if it becomes law, I believe that the administration will paper over it, and they will go around the law. They will go around the law because they want an open border. That is what they want. I thought I would share with you just a couple of other, I think, interesting anecdotes. I got a call recently from a friend of mine down on the border. He is working in the area of the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation. The Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation has 62 linear miles on the border between Arizona and Mexico. In the middle of that area, you have the mountains that are coming on down, and then you have this area, what we call the San Miguel gate. This gate is really isolated. There is nothing else out there. A little bit--about a mile--I am thinking to myself--south, moving this way, so that would be west. You are going to have the wash. People can just flow across the wash. There is no fence, per se. There is a four-strand wire fence there. A few months ago, when I was down there, we are driving down the road, and what do I see? I see what looks like five or six kids playing in the dirt road. I mean, there is nothing there. We had been driving for miles, didn't see anybody, no CBP agents or anything. We get up there, there is a group of 25 people, mostly family units. We asked them where they came from. They said: We were down in Caborca. That is about 40-50 miles south of the border. That is where we met up with our coyote. Did you know any of these people? No, we didn't know each other. We all had to hire this coyote. We came together. The coyote brings us up, drops us off several miles south of the border, points up and says: Just keep walking toward that mountain, and when you get across the wires, step across, sit alongside the road, and then, sooner or later, CBP agents will come. We asked them how long they had been there. They had been there four hours, hadn't seen any agents. We happened to be down there. I had some Members of Congress with me. I tell you that because that is how remote this place is, but do you know how many people they are getting there? Groups of 700 to 800 a day, with single groups. This is busloads that are being organized in Caborca. They are bringing them up, dropping them off, and here they come through the San Miguel gate. Guess what happens at that point? Every agent that is on duty is now processing and moving those people up to a soft-sided facility to await further processing and ultimately, within 72 hours, released into the United States of America, with parole status, which means they can work after 6 months' period of time. They are going to get legal papers, yet they entered the country illegally. I asked them: What is happening otherwise? It just so happens that that is the sector that has the highest rate of known and suspected unknown got-aways. Why don't they want to just surrender? It is so easy now. You just surrender. They are going to process you and release you and pay for you to go wherever you want to go in the country. What the deal is, they are carrying drugs, or else they are Chinese and nationals of military age, or they are from other nations that are special interest, that sponsor terrorism. They are coming through, and how do we know that they are coming through in these groups? We do have some sensors in some of those places. We still are using tracking. We have agents who still track. The score, if there is more than 20 in that group, they don't write 35. They write 20-plus, so even that is inaccurate. I enjoin my colleagues. Please, we have to use the purse strings that we have and stop funding a government that is spying on us and is emasculating our southern border. We no longer have a border. That is the only way you are going to get enforcement on the border. Policy is good, but enforcement is the goal. Mr. Speaker, thank you, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, James Iredell, one of the Founders from North Carolina, talking about this impeachment clause said: ``The power of impeachment is given by this Constitution, to bring great offenders to punishment. It is calculated to bring them to punishment for crime which it is not easy to describe, but which everyone must be convinced is a high crime and misdemeanor against the government.'' For instance, corruption. ``Its exercise''--the impeachment--``will arise from acts of great injury to the community, and the objects of it may be such as cannot be easily reached by an ordinary tribunal.'' That is why you have impeachment. It is necessary here because what you have is a Secretary who came into Judiciary, he was given the language from the Secure Fence Act of 2006. I said: Is the border under operational control? He says: Well, no. We have redefined it ourselves. We are comfortable with the new definition that we have made. That is a violation of the separation of powers.

Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, this is the same Secretary who tells his ICE agents you cannot remove 1 million, 1.2 million people who have actually had due process through the courts and have active removal orders. He is the same Secretary who said that we don't have to adhere to title 8. That has resulted in great injury to our communities, and that is why he must be impeached--because he falls on the definitions that one of the Founders, James Iredell, said. He is right on the money, and I urge everyone to support this movement to impeach.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Johnson). We appreciate him. I played with him on the baseball team. He was the catcher, and we will miss his catching abilities. God bless him in his future endeavors. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks. I appreciate his very prescient comments. Before I get on too much more, I have a bill that pulls us out of the World Health Organization. I would encourage all of my colleagues to sign it. If you watched the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, today speaking at the World Economic Forum, they are planning to use the next epidemic to impose world governance. I mean, he basically said that. I invite you to watch that. That is the head of the World Health Organization. Let's talk about what my good friend from Texas talked about. He has been a leader on this issue, and we have both been fighting this for some time. That is border security. I can't help but recall the words of President Biden, who was then a candidate for the Presidency, and he was asked in the debate on the Democrat side, they said: What do you tell people at the border? He said: I would urge them to surge to the border if he became President. There is a reason that in the Zocalo of Tijuana people had T-shirts on saying: Joe Biden, let me in. The reason is because he said he would. There is a reason that the first month after Joe Biden issued I believe it was 90 executive orders undoing the border policy of the Trump administration on the first 24 hours, by the way, that you had the first record of border crossings or these encounters, and that was 150,000. Think about that, 150,000. Our minds were blown. Wow, we were saying, that is more than 5,000 a day, a little over 5,000 a day for that, that is incredible. Then the next month was more, February was more. March of 2021 exceeded that. Record after record after record until we end up last month with 302,000 encounters. You begin looking at it and you say, well, how does this happen? Is it just policy? I used to think it was incompetence. I really did. That is giving them the benefit of the doubt. I thought after the first three months in a row of records, they are just incompetent, they don't quite know what they are doing. Then we got to meet Secretary Mayorkas, he finally came in and he testified. At first, before he testified, he came into the Border Security Caucus and talked to us there, and he said: The border is secure. Now, mind you, just on the encounters alone for that first 3 months, you were pushing 430,000. For known got-aways, you were pushing about an additional 110,000. Unknown got-aways are estimated to be at least another 75,000. So, you have 600,000-plus illegal border crossings in his first 3 months that he was running DHS, and he sat there and told us that the border was secure and that we have operational control. I will remember when my colleague asked him: Do you have operational control pursuant to the Secure Fence Act of 2006? He said yes. Then we got the language out. I think Mr. Roy got the language out and said: Let's read the language. He still insisted. He knew that they were not in compliance with the law. He knew it. Yet, he persists to craft a narrative that the border is secure. Of course, it is not secure, which is why you had about 450,000 people enter our country illegally last month. I am suggesting to America that this country cannot take 12 more months of the Mayorkas security plan on the border because 12 more months would be over 5 million people getting into this country illegally. What is happening now is they are releasing approximately 80 percent of everyone who comes in. They release them into the country. I was in Lukeville the week before Christmas. Lukeville is the hub right now and has been. Over a 2-week period, they had 30,000 people come through Lukeville--nowhere else, Lukeville. I was down there in the heart of that, and I was allowed to talk to people who had not been formally arrested yet. I would go up and ask them: Where are you from? Where are you going? Why did you come? Those were my three questions. We had the gentlemen from Burkina Faso, another few from Senegal, and another few from Guinea. Those are all African nations. Then, we had folks from India and Pakistan. That is South Asia, India and South Asia. Pakistan is considered to be the Middle East, although in my mind, they are still South Asia. That is interesting. Of course, we always have some folks from Guatemala. You have to understand where Lukeville is. The reason that you have a port of entry there is because it is on kind of a highway that goes from Phoenix, from Ajo, down to a place called Rocky Point, Mexico, which is on the Sea of Cortez. People go down there and recreate down there. When we asked them where they are going, why they are here, I would say: Where are you going? Everyone that I asked starts fiddling around in their backpacks and pockets, and they pull out a card. On that card will be two or three names with phone numbers and an address somewhere in the country. It is laminated. It is not like this. This is not laminated. Theirs are laminated. I said: Where are you going? We have a guy going to the Bronx. We have people going to Missouri, Oklahoma, Houston. If you are going to Houston, why are you crossing into Lukeville? You should have been over in Del Rio or RGV. I don't know why you are here. When you ask them that, it is because they were directed to come there. The coyotes, the cartels, tell them this is where you are going to go, where you are going to come in. They release them, and they are in good shape. They are in good shape. They haven't walked. They haven't come through the Darien Gap in Panama. Those folks are the folks that are ending up over in Del Rio or Eagle Pass right now. Those coming to Lukeville, they have flown into Mexico. They have been bused up. They get bused. How did you get here? Well, we came in from--there is a gap in the gate, in the fence down here. The border wall that President Trump put up 30 feet high, just on the other side going down to the Sea of Cortez, like I told you, there is a freeway. The cartels will come up and run a real quick couple of cuts. They will remove two slats from the fence, pull them down, and just start flooding people through. I talked to the guy who repairs them. That morning, in about 4 hours' time, they had already repaired six breaches. I tell you these things so you understand how real this is. Our lever as Members of Congress is the purse strings. We are not going to have success with just policy because this is a lawless administration. We have to have enforcement as a condition of funding this government. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Harris).

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I want to point out really quickly, on parole, which my colleague mentioned, parole by statute is meant to be a case-by-case humanitarian administrative remedy. This administration has granted parole to more than a million people. What parole does is it actually gives you a work permit. You are supposed to be here. You have a relative that needs surgery. You are going to be here for 2 weeks. Extraordinarily, before Biden, it was about 15 a year. In this administration, it is over a million. I also want to talk about CBP because those line agents are working their tails off. They are doing everything they can, but they are being undermined by Secretary Mayorkas and this administration. I have been down there many times and talked to them. Their morale is so low. They want to enforce, but like in Eagle Pass and Lukeville, both places I have been, once you get away from the crowd where they are processing, you can drive along the border for miles. We drove along Lukeville literally for miles. The only people we saw was the guy in charge of rebuilding the fence and the hundreds of people that were walking along the border road who had come through those holes illegally. We need to use our lever that our Founders gave to us. It is the most effective. I urge our colleagues to reconsider, as we go forward, using that lever to prevent this administration from avoiding its duty to enforce our border security. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for joining me, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I get a kick out of listening to the gentleman from New York who doesn't know a darn thing about the border crisis and gets to stand up and say: Oh, by golly, 90 percent of the fentanyl they are catching right there is in the port of entry. Do you know why they catch it at the port of entry? Because that is where you have x-rays for the vehicles coming in. You have dogs that sniff. Most of the vehicles are getting picked up and looked at. It is the same with the pedestrians coming across. Do you know why you don't find it between the ports of entry where 1.9 million people have come across the border, Mr. Speaker? You know why they don't find it? Let's say, right now if you are on the Tohono O'odham reservation, they have 62 miles right there along the border. You can drive that, and you are going to see maybe one or two agents in that entire area. Do you know why? Because the rest of them are processing all of the people that the agents have had to encounter. They are out at these facilities. When I was down in Lukeville right before Christmas, I was standing there and I asked, hey, where you from? Guinea. How about you? Burkina Faso. How about you? Senegal. How about you? India. How about you? Pakistan. They are coming from all over the world to Lukeville, Arizona. I happened to be there during a 2-week period where 30,000 encounters took place in that area alone. Oh, yeah, this border is secure. It is closed. What they don't tell you is that you have got a bunch of people coming in between the ports of entry that we can't even catch. When I was down in Lukeville, we couldn't catch them. Why can't we catch them? We sense them. In some places we have sensors. Why couldn't we catch them? As I drove along for miles along that border, I didn't see a single agent. Why? Because they are all back at the facility processing. That is what they are doing. That is what these guys have done. That is what the Democrats have done. When they say, parole is a good thing, the statute is real clear: It is supposed to be particularized. It is supposed to be case by case. We actually heard in Oversight today that the million-plus people who have received parole are all being adjudicated on a case-by-case basis. I asked the witness: Have you ever been down there and watched the process before they grant somebody parole? I saw it on video. Go with me sometimes. Stand down there, visit, watch it, and you will be stunned to know that there is virtually no vetting whatsoever. Why? We are relying on those individuals to tell us where they are from and who they are. That is how open this border is. Mr. Speaker, I will say that the gentleman from New York also explained the reason that they support this illegal migration is because they want people to pick our vegetables. That is how they view people coming in from all around the world. Mr. Speaker, I support this resolution, and I urge my colleagues to do so, as well.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor the life and service of United States Army Sergeant Andrew Paul Southard. Andrew was a husband; a father; a son; a brother; an elite Nightstalker with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment; and a resident of Apache Junction in Arizona's `Fighting Fifth' District. Tragically, his life was cut short as one of five Special Operations soldiers aboard a Blackhawk helicopter that went down in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea on Friday, November 10, 2023. His sacrifice, like that of all our courageous fallen, is the culmination of a life of duty and honor. Andrew was born to Kim and Randy Southard in Spokane, Washington in 1996, and moved to Apache Junction, Arizona at the age of 11. From a young age, he embodied the integrity and compassion instilled in him by his family and tight-knit community. A former high school teacher shared this about Andrew after his passing: ``He didn't do things because he thought people were going to give him gratitude for doing it. He did it because he thought it was right.'' And from a long-time classmate: ``My mother was battling cancer and it made it hard sometimes at school. I will never forget the compassion Andy showed me through the hard days at school. He never treated me differently, but always had a joke to keep me laughing and my mind off of what was going on at home. I will always he grateful for that.'' Andrew graduated from Apache Junction High School in 2015. Coming from a military family he eagerly enlisted in the United States Army at the age of 18 and was assigned as a `15T' UH-60 Black Hawk Repairer stationed with the 1st Armored Division's Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Bliss, Texas. In this role, Andrew deployed to Egypt for a 13-month rotation as part of Task Force Sinai in support of peacekeeping operations, and deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Wherever he served, Andrew's unit members recognized both his selfless service and the energy and time he dedicated to those around him. Andrew was the type of soldier and man who, while at Fort Bliss, pulled a woman from a burning vehicle without even telling his friends about it. When asked about his heroism, Andrew simply responded: ``I feel like anyone would pull over. It was just my time and place where I was that day.'' A friend and fellow soldier who completed Army basic training with Andrew shared: ``It's a statement to who he was. You ask anyone; if they knew him for seven years or just seven days, you understood the type of person he was and how much he would be there for you, how much he would invest in you and expect nothing in return.'' Never content with the ordinary, Andrew stared down one of the most grueling challenges any military service member can endure by volunteering for the Army's legendary 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. After completing Green Platoon, the regiment's rigorous training and assessment program in 2023, he earned his place with the First Battalion, 160th SOAR as an MH-60M Crew Chief based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. After the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, elements of the 160th SOAR were assigned to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea in support of our allies in Israel. On November 10, during a refueling training exercise over the Mediterranean between Cyprus and Lebanon, Andrew's aircraft crashed after suffering a catastrophic malfunction. Tragically, he and four of his teammates were killed. We mourn them: Chief Warrant Officer Stephen R. Dwyer, Clarksville, Tennessee; Chief Warrant Officer Shane M. Barnes, Sacramento, California; Staff Sergeant Tanner W. Grone, Gorham, New Hampshire; and Sergeant Cade M. Wolfe, of Mankato, Minnesota. Though we grieve, we celebrate Andrew's life along with his devoted wife Ashley, his sweet children Jack, Gavin, and Hallie, and his parents, brother, grandparents, and friends. But we also recognize that his sacrifice epitomizes the way he lived his life; defending the defenseless, standing by his fellow soldiers, and doing what was right without the thought of recognition or reward. May each of us follow his valuable example of courage, service, and friendship.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. No. Let's pick up with Mayor Adams of New York. Here is a guy who presides over a sanctuary city--that is awesome, that is awesome--but he doesn't want to experience what is a daily occurrence along the border, for those who live in a border community. They got some rain and wind in New York. It was blowing down the tents that the illegal aliens were dwelling in in New York at a park, so he decides this is what we are going to do: We are going to clear out a school. We are going to tell those 4,000 kids with no notice to the parents really, no notice to the teachers, no notice to the district. Boom, all these families, all these individuals--they are not all just families; you have got men of military age--2,000 of them plus--they are going to dwell in the school that your kid was getting ready to go to. He is like: What could go wrong? Why is everybody so upset? He says about that, the illegal aliens: I didn't see illegal migrants. I saw children. I saw children, and this community will always stand with children. What about the 4,000 kids at the school? What about those families? I didn't see children. I mean, he didn't say that, but that is really what he is implying: You are only a child of value if you are in the country illegally. You are not a child of value if you are going to a New York public school. That is the very attitude of this administration. Mr. Perry was down in Eagle Pass, and I was down in Eagle Pass with Representative Good. When I talked to the Speaker, he was a little miffed with me. He said: Why aren't you coming with us on our tour? Why are you going on your own tour? I said: Because I have got to go back to Arizona a little early, I am going to need to leave the bus. His staff tells my staff: Oh, Biggs can't come then because he has got to be on the bus the whole time. I said: I am going down a day early. I am going to rent a car and invite a few friends. Scott is a friend, but I am sorry, the car filled up too fast. We went down early. You know what CBP did? Because I go down often, I know a lot of people in CBP. They routinely take us on tours, but in this instance they said they had a new guy coming in, he hasn't been sworn in yet. He says, look--he tells my staff--you can come, but then he says, no, no, you can't come. We reached out to the chief judge of the Western District of Texas. We said: Look, we are going to be down there, we would like to visit with you. We want you to tell us what is going on. She says: Are you going to take them to the border? I said: No, they withdrew the border. She makes the call and says: I will be with Biggs and his group; we want a tour of the border. That night you did not see anything; you didn't see a lot of people crossing, did you?

Mr. BIGGS. Right. Right. I will tell you why in a second. That night it was cold, really cold, unseasonably cold in south Texas. It was raining cats and dogs. We are in the van, and they are taking us down there. I have been down there many times. We see it. It is cleaned up. They have moved 12,000 people in 24 hours because you guys, you yahoos are coming down there the next day and Secretary Mayorkas was down there yesterday. They cleaned it up. We can't have this. The media is coming down, a big gaggle of media, they can't see this. We can't have this, so they cleaned it up. They actually mowed the grass. I asked the guy, I said: Where's the garbage, man? I know there is garbage. I know there is clothing. As we are driving along, there is this massive pile of clothing. Did you see it, Bob? I said: Hey, is this one of the piles of clothing? Yeah, that is one of the piles right there. As we are going down, there are people all along the way there, right? That is what you see. Now, why did you not see anybody? We met the next day with a lot of folks you didn't get to meet with-- sorry--one of which informed us very clearly that the flow of people at the ports of entry are controlled by the CBP One app, so they will give you a green light.

Mr. BIGGS. If you want to come into the country illegally, they want to slow--they want to get some of you to come into the port of entry, so they have created an app. You preregister as an illegal alien say: I am going to be coming, and I want to be able to declare asylum, which is also illegal, by the way. That is not what the law is. So you have got an app.

Mr. BIGGS. The gentleman is correct. The reason is because they want to facilitate you getting through faster and we want to distribute you throughout the country, at least this administration does. You register with the CBP One app. Well, they are going to tell you where the green lights are, and they are going to gray out where you can't come. So they started graying out Eagle Pass. This bridge we are talking about, there is a port of entry on the bridge. They said: No, we are not going to take any more people that way. You are going to need to go to some other port of entry, and so they do. That is how they slow that down. However, in the meantime, between the ports of entry, they are coming in droves.

Mr. BIGGS. The record number for apprehensions was 302,000 plus-- 302,000 people. That would have put it clearly within the top 20 largest cities in this country, when you think about that.

Mr. BIGGS. Yes, I will speak to that for just a second. A couple weeks ago now, I took a group of people to Lukeville, Arizona. Now, Lukeville is an incredibly remote port of entry, 35 people or so live by there. You come through Ajo, if you are coming from Phoenix or Tucson, and you are going to go to Rocky Point down in Mexico, it is very heavy traffic. Well, they actually had to close that port of entry. Why? Because the number of people pouring through, cutting holes in the fences, and we had to bring these people--we are talking multiple thousands a day, multiple thousands a day, 30,000 people in the last couple weeks, right? Think about that. What do they do? All they could do is take the personnel that they have, and they start working the line, right? No, they don't. They actually start transporting them to an off-the-border facility, a soft- sided facility kind of like the one you saw except smaller for the first wait, because it is so remote, it literally takes hours to get to a soft-sided facility in Tucson, Arizona. They will go there, and they will spend a few hours, maybe a day or two before they are distributed. What happens? When I was there, I thought, oh, man, we missed the flood because we got there a little late in the morning. I went and talked to these people. I said: Where are you from? Guinea, Burkina Faso, Senegal, India, Pakistan, a few from Guatemala. Where are you going? You know what they do? They look around, they find a paper, it is a laminated card. It has the names of the people they are going to be in contact with, with phone numbers and an address where they are going to be taken. Everywhere from the Bronx to Missouri, to L.A., to Houston. They are going all over. Anyway, I said: This is interesting. Let's go on down, and we will drive the border road for a while. We drive the border road. There is a family of 10 people or so. I said: How did you get here? We came about 2 hours ago. No, they were 4 hours. We came 4 hours ago. We came through a hole in the fence down here that the coyote showed us, and we walked on up and we are just waiting. We haven't seen a CBP agent. In 4 hours? No, we haven't. We are just waiting. We are assured that someone will be along. They were from Mexico, within Mexico, so we were able to speak Spanish and talk to them. Then we go on down, and as we are going along, there isn't anybody. There is no CBP agent. We go a few miles, and we stop. We are like, you know, we have kind of missed the rush. One of the people I am with said: That looks like a group right there, over here, down to the right, on the road. Sure enough, there's 30 or 40 people walking, right? We wait, and they get by, and there is another group right behind them and another group and another group. We asked them where they were from. They are from all over. Where are you going? All over. How did you get in? There is a hole in the fence right down here a couple miles. We drove down there. Again, no CBP agents. Why? They are working their tail off having to transport and process. They can't do what they were hired to do, what we need them to do. We happened to run into a contractor: Hey, what are you doing? He has got a truck, and we had just seen the welding guy, who I knew was fixing the fence, and he had just driven by. We talked to this guy and said: What is up? Well, you know, he gets this notebook out and starts showing us all the holes in the fence they have had to repair. He said on this day--I can't remember the actual day; I think it was December 14--there were something like 28 holes in the fence that they had to repair. We were there at 10:30, 11:00 in the morning, they had already repaired six holes in the fence. I asked: What is happening? How does this happen? He says: Well, you will see along the Mexico side there is a highway. The coyote will come in, controlled by the cartel. He has got his own torch to cut the holes in the fence. They will wrap chains around it, they will pull out the slats, and people will just flood through, and that is what you saw. That day they had already repaired six holes, and we said: Well, where's the agents? We were looking for agents, as well. I love the agents; I talk to them all the time. They said: Oh, they are back at the facility processing.

Mr. BIGGS. Because they can't get there. You know what? My colleagues on the Democrat side, they will tell you that there is no problem down on the border because they really don't think there is. I think this is an existential crisis.

Mr. BIGGS. Three days.

Mr. BIGGS. One hundred fifty years ago.

Mr. BIGGS. Can I interject something? We have been talking about Eagle Pass, and I have a bit of breaking news for you. Those who were with me, we actually drove through the golf course to get to a couple of our points.

Mr. BIGGS. The breaking news is this: That park area has now been-- today, Governor Abbott of Texas, because he feels so overrun, has declared a state of emergency, and that property has been taken over by the State of Texas. They will arrest anybody who enters that property for criminal trespass and prosecute them. I guess it underlines kind of a finer point that we have been talking about. Is this a crisis? Are we chasing phantoms, or is this a real crisis? Well, it is a real crisis, and as we sit here, this administration is a lawless administration. They are not going to do anything to actually enforce the border. I say this often. We can pass every kind of policy we want, but believe me, title 8 forbids Mayorkas from doing what he is doing. He can't catch and release. Courts have told him to reinstate MPP, the migrant protocol protections. He won't do that. This administration is lawless, and I can only think of one thing, and the Founders gave it to us. They were crystal clear. They said: Your check, legislative branch, is the purse strings. It is the funding. I do not know how we can continue to fund an administration that chooses willfully to facilitate an invasion of the United States of America. How can we?

Mr. BIGGS. You are being asked to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security today with no policy changes even. That is what you are being asked. But more than that, you are being asked to continue all the other programs, the crazy subsidies for Green New Deal stuff, which was forecast at $350 billion, which is now forecast at $2.5 trillion. But they are asking you to basically get on board that. So you are getting a weak sauce plan from the Senate that even Senators are rebelling against, saying this will do nothing, which it won't do anything.

Mr. BIGGS. Well, so the question is really then are you content with approximately 5 million more people illegally entering the country over the next 12 months or are you going to try to do something about it? Because 302,000 plus at least--they acknowledge 50,000 on the got- aways. They don't know what the unknown got-aways are, but--a lot of people don't this, but I am going to explain it. When you have a group that you can't catch up to--and we get that a lot in Arizona. Arizona is the number one known got-away place. Why? Because it is rugged. It is really desolate. If you see a group, and you can't tell how many it is, do you know what you get to mark down? Twenty plus. They count it as 20. It may be 75. It may be 50. It may be 22. But it is inaccurate. And the people I talk to tell me it is at least one for one. If it is 50,000, it is 100,000 because they don't know what the real number is. That is 402,000 last month alone. And do you want to continue that? How can we as a country continue that? And they are coming from 170 different nations.

Mr. BIGGS. I will tell you this: There may be three people over here I can name. I won't name them to protect them because they always talk like they are going to help us out, but they don't ever help us out. I love them to death, but they never quite can deliver it. But I will tell you, when you go along the border from RGV to San Ysidro, which is San Diego, and you go talk to the local folks, many of whom are Democrat leaders of those cities and those counties, they want something done. They will stand with you. And do you know what you guys heard in your group, and we happened to be there? They said shut the government down until you shut the border down. And do you know what? That is a common sentiment all along the border. It is common in my district in Arizona. And I have got a great plan for that, but I can't introduce it in 2 minutes, but, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you, that is the facts. Even the Democrats who are facing the brunt of this--and I don't care what New York is doing. You go tell the people down in Ajo, Arizona, why they are getting overrun right now. They would like to hear it from you.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I appreciate him holding this Special Order to discuss this most existential of issues. Talk about nihilism for a second. Nihilism is where you actually are fostering programs and activities to ensure your demise. I can tell you, what is happening on the border is unbelievable. When my colleague, Mr. Ciscomani, starts talking about Lukeville, he is talking about the Lukeville port of entry. Thirty-five people live in Lukeville. This is a port of entry people from Phoenix and southern Arizona use to transport down to Rocky Point on the Sea of Cortez and vice versa and our friends from Mexico come up and go shopping in Arizona. It is a very synergistic type of relationship. What happened, more than 10 days ago, that resulted in the closure 10 days ago of that port of entry, is that there were so many illegal aliens coming there and entering our country that the Border Patrol couldn't process them. We couldn't keep enough people there to process legal traffic and deal with the influx of over 1,000 a day. Wow. Now, we have that port of entry closed, and you still have 1,000 to 1,600 people a day coming there from all over the world. That is one of the distinctions from my friends in Texas. Eagle Pass, which is also being inundated right now in the Del Rio sector, most of those folks coming across there speak Spanish, because they are coming from Central American and South American states. What happens is, when you have these people coming in from Mali, Mauritania, Madagascar, West Africa, Somalia, Syria, or the Middle Eastern countries that are coming through Lukeville, we don't even have translators for them. Our port agents down there can't even communicate with these folks. That is just one port of entry. I am going to give you one more example. Yuma is a town of about 80,000, 85,000 people, sits right on the border across from San Luis, Mexico. They have got one hospital in Yuma. By the way, what is Yuma? You need to understand what it is. Almost every piece of lettuce that you eat, or other green leafy vegetable, in the wintertime, for about 6 months out of the year, comes from Yuma, Arizona. It is an agricultural community. They work well together. During planting and harvesting, 7,000 to 10,000, sometimes 12,000, people a day come across legally to help the farmers in Yuma. What happens now? What happens now is if you are a lady and you are going to give birth to a baby, many times you can't even get into the maternity ward at the Yuma Regional hospital. Why is that? Because of the influx of people from across the border, who are in the country illegally, and the women are going to have babies right there at Yuma Regional. Every maternity bed is taken up with someone who doesn't live in this country. Where do they go? They drive 3 to 3\1/2\ hours up to Phoenix or 3 to 3\1/2\ hours over to San Diego. We have known people who have had heart attacks and other really serious emergencies who could not even get into the emergency room in Yuma. They had to be transported by helicopter, Air Evac, up to Phoenix. Why is that? Because we are inundated at the southern border. This is a crisis of our own making. Not ours, but this administration's making. People say to me: Why do they do this? It is inexplicable. It is not incompetence. Surely, if you are incompetent, at some point you would say: Hey, almost 10 million illegal aliens in the country in 3 years, we have got a problem; we probably ought to change our policies. They don't want to change their policies. They do not want to enforce the law. There are laws on the books that would help slow this down immediately, if they would enforce them. You know what the first one would be? You actually take the 1.5 million people who are in this country illegally, who have received due process and have removal orders to leave the country but who refuse to leave the country, you would actually find those people and remove them. You know what happens when you are removing people? Then folks say it is probably not worth spending every dime that I have, every dime my family has, getting in debt to the cartels, and going across all of that hardship to get into the country. That is what they would say. How do we know that works? Because when President Trump said we are going to start removing people by their orders, it slowed it down. By the way, let's go back to Yuma for a second, Yuma, Arizona, where I was talking about the hospital. During President Trump's last year, the entire year, 8,600 people who were illegally entering the country were apprehended in the Yuma sector. It is like 120 miles long. They do that in a week now. That is about a week's worth of illegal aliens crossing. Trump had that for an entire year. You couldn't do that by accident or incompetence. It almost has to be by design. How do you stop it? You start enforcing the law. How do you get this administration to enforce the law? You tell them we are going to fund only certain aspects of the government, like the military, like the border patrol, like ICE, like air traffic controllers, and like the TSA. Let's make sure the country is safe, but we are not going to give Mr. Biden any more money than that. For all of the bureaucracy and the crazy programs that he has out there--by the way, they churn out 40,000 pages of laws on a regular basis from those bureaucracies--we are going to slow that down until they do something with measurable metrics that shows us that they are actually bringing down the number of illegal border crossings and bring it under control. That is how you settle this. We have to settle this. It is going to change this country. We can talk more about fentanyl. When my colleagues across the aisle say that 95 percent of fentanyl is seized at the ports of entry, why do you suppose that is? It is because, at the ports of entry, you actually have people waiting there, investigating and inspecting vehicles and individuals crossing. There are machines where they can look into a truck and see what is in there. They can see if there is something disorderly in there and then inspect it. Between the ports of entry is where we know that 1.75 million people have come across during the Biden administration. They are wearing camo and carpet shoes so they won't be detected. Our BuckEye cameras and field cameras pick them up, but we just can't get to them. Where Mr. Ciscomani and I live in the Tucson sector, the terrain is so rough and rugged that we might see somebody there, but it will take you 2\1/2\ to 3 hours to get your vehicle there, get out of your vehicle, and hike to where they are. They will then pop up south of Phoenix. They will go through the Tohono O'odham Reservation. They will pop up through Pinal County. When they come out, they are 40 miles, as the crow flies, from Phoenix, which is a major hub for transporting illegal drugs and human trafficking. That is what is going on between the ports of entry. Every hearing that we have held in the last 3 years where this has been brought up, the Democrats have said we interdict 95 percent of that at the ports of entry. No. You interdict 95 percent of the overall interdiction at the ports of entry, but you don't know what you are not interdicting. What we do know is that 1.97 million people carrying backpacks come into our country. What is in those backpacks? It used to be bales of marijuana. It isn't bales of marijuana now. It is small backpacks to bring in fentanyl pills. That is what is going on. I beg this administration to wake up. I beg my colleagues to join us. Let's entice this administration to do what is right and enforce our border laws. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for having this Special Order today. Let's join hands and defeat this wide-open border that is forever going to adjust our country.