Vicky Hartzler

Mrs. HARTZLER

Mrs. HARTZLER. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman. To the gentleman's point, a reminder that in 2006, 64 Democrats in the House joined the Republicans to pass the Secure Fence Act to build 700 miles of fencing along the border, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer. Then the next year there was some money in an appropriations bill for the wall, and both Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer voted for it. So I think the gentleman is right. It is time to work together to get this done. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Green), who is a new member of Congress. I am glad to see Dr. Mark Green. I am glad that he is here. We are excited to have the gentleman serving with us here in the body and being a former service member from the Army who is part of the elite unit that helped capture Saddam Hussein. The gentleman knows a little bit about security, so I appreciate the gentleman's sharing his thoughts on where we are at tonight.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much for his perspective, both as a doctor and as a military officer. His speaking of security means a lot. I think it is a good question. What number is it going to take? Are we really going to say: let's work together and let's do this? I think we need to sit down right now. I am hopeful maybe this week we will do that. Madam Speaker, I yield to my colleague from South Carolina (Mr. Norman) to come share what he thinks maybe we could do this week to get this government opened and at the same time secure our border.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Madam Speaker, I love the analogy that the gentleman just shared about the Clemson game and going into a football game and how you have a ticket and there is a fence and you go through a point of entry and how the system works that way. It is common sense for us. So I thank the gentleman for sharing that. I would like to visit with someone else who has a lot of common sense. We serve on the Committee on Agriculture together. We are from rural America, and we just have some common sense about these things. The gentleman is from Washington State, and I would love to hear his thoughts about the importance of securing our border as well as reopening government. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Newhouse).

Mrs. HARTZLER. Well said. This is so important. And we have a moment in time right now in the history of our country where we have had the government--part of it--shut down for 24 days, yet we have, like the gentleman said, all of these individuals coming into our country, some of them terrorists or gang members hurting our citizens. So here is an opportunity to come together and work in a bipartisan fashion to fix our broken immigration laws. I agree that the DACA situation needs to be taken care of, and we need more agricultural workers. We need to expand our visas. We need to expand in several areas. We need to streamline the process. Right now there are 600,000 individuals in the process of trying to come here legally into our country. I don't know if the gentleman has worked with some of the individuals. I know, in my own district, my office and I are helping some individuals who are trying to get their family members here legally. It has been very interesting to see the paperwork that they have to go through and the amount of work. The paperwork that I have seen has been even this high, the documentation that they have to submit. Then they have money that they pay along the way, and then there is such a large time frame. Some have waited over a year, 2 years, or more to go through this process legally. But it is worth it because they want to live the American Dream, and I applaud them. But we need to streamline it and help those individuals who are going through the process to get here and make it easier, the ones who want to be upright citizens and contribute. But the problem is that it is not fair, for those 600,000 individuals who are trying to come here, who are waiting in line, to just have somebody go across the border and not follow our laws, disregard our laws. It is just not right. So it is important that we build this wall, that we come together in a bipartisan fashion to find a solution to this, that we find $5.7 billion, which is hardly anything. You saw the chart earlier from Representative Norman about what a small sliver of our entire budget that would be. Surely all these lives of individuals and our families' security and safety are worth finding that sliver amount of money. We pay over $50 billion every year in foreign aid, and we want $5.7 billion for a wall. Madam Speaker, $50 billion we send to other countries, many times for them to secure their border, yet we can't find $5.7 billion or we can't get support for that from the other side of the aisle so that we can secure our own border. That just doesn't make sense. We can do better. I appreciate all of my colleagues who have come down tonight to have this conversation on this topic and to talk about how it can come about for us to come together to find this solution, reopen government, and to make sure that we have a secure border for our Nation, to stop the flow of drugs, and to keep our country safe. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mrs. HARTZLER

Mrs. HARTZLER. Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mrs. HARTZLER

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, tonight, we are here to have a conversation about the situation at our southern border. The President calls it a border crisis and a humanitarian crisis, yet others call it immoral to give more funding to secure our Nation at the southern border. So what really is the situation? We are in the 20th day of a government shutdown over the question of: Is the security of the American people at risk because of what is happening at our southern border? And, if it is, what should we do about it? Tonight, my colleagues and I want to share the facts regarding the situation, and some stories from our districts, that illustrate why we support building a wall, as well as securing our border in other ways. For me, it is a matter of three things: The need to stop the flow of illegal drugs; The safety of innocent families in our districts, as well as the safety of innocent individuals who want to come here and immigrate to our country; and Third, I believe it is a matter of fairness. Let me share what I mean. I believe, and I think most people agree, that we have a drug crisis in our country. I see it every week when I am back in my district, when I talk to my law enforcement, when I talk to my families who have lost a child through a heroin overdose, when I see the rising foster care numbers in our State because their parents are drug addicted. We have a crisis. I recently had a chance to travel to the Nogales-Mariposa port of entry that is south of Tucson, in Arizona, and boy was it eye-opening. There I learned from our Border Patrol agents that the drug cartels are waging a war, basically, against our country, and, sadly, in many ways, they are winning. They have more money, they have more manpower, and they are using drug mules to carry drugs across the unsecured part of our border. They are involving the gangs that come down, and then those travel up into our districts. I am from Missouri, and we see it there in Missouri. Last year, sadly, more than 72,000 Americans died from a drug overdose. That is more than died in the entire Vietnam war, the entire war, and this happens every year. That is also more deaths than people who passed away in our country from traffic accidents and homicides combined. Think about it. When we hear the nightly news and there is a homicide, that somebody has been shot and killed, it is tragic. Or we hear a report about somebody dying in a car accident, it is terrible. But all of the people in America who died from the traffic accidents and every person who died in a homicide, if you put those numbers together, that does not come close to the number of people who have died from drug overdoses. We have got to do better. I have got some pictures of some individuals who are victims of this drug crisis that is a result of our open borders. But they are not just statistics. The reason I put up their pictures here on this poster is because they are not a number. They have names. They lived. People loved them. They were sons, daughters, coworkers, and they were friends. The lady on the far side with her little boy, her name is Victoria and her son is Andrew. Now she didn't pass away, but she has been addicted to meth, so that when she gave birth to Andrew, he was addicted and had to go through withdrawal symptoms, and she struggled with a drug addiction. The young man in the middle is named Eamon, and he, sadly, passed away from a heroin overdose. The mother here and her daughter, she is still alive, but she is struggling with drug addiction, through heroin, and she has lost custody of her little girl. Like I said, we have a record number of foster kids right now in America because of parents losing their children to drug addiction. A large number of the people have drug addictions due to opioids. In fact, according to the CDC, of more than 72,000 drug overdoses, many of them were due to fentanyl, which is also coming across our southern border. In fact, fentanyl killed 30,000 Americans last year. The Border Patrol is doing a great job with the resources they have, but they need more help. They found and interdicted 1.2 tons of fentanyl--1.2 tons. That is enough to kill every American. It takes only 2 milligrams of fentanyl to kill an individual. If you add up how much damage 1.2 tons of fentanyl could do, it adds up to over 500 million people who could be killed. It is unbelievable. Then cocaine, they seized enough cocaine at the southern border last year to fill 141 1-ton pickup trucks. I made a poster just to show this because a lot of us are familiar with pickup trucks. We have 1-ton trucks, \3/4\-ton trucks. 141 of them, picture them filled with cocaine. That is how much was caught by our Border Patrol at the southern border. We have no idea how much more is not caught. Next one I want to talk about is methamphetamine. They seized 124 tons of methamphetamine. Here is a face, and maybe you have seen these posters or pictures before. This is what meth does to individuals in a very short amount of time. It is awful. It is so addictive. At one time, Missouri was called the meth capital of our country. It tied with California for several years. It is a terrible distinction to have, but there were meth labs everywhere. Our law enforcement was doing as good a job as they could, interdicting and shutting down these meth labs. Now when I talk to my law enforcement at home, they say that we have hardly any meth labs, but the reason is sad. The reason is because the meth is still there, but it is coming from across our border. It is part of this tonnage coming up. That is why we have to build a wall and secure the border. I could talk about heroin. They seized 6,500 pounds of heroin. That is over 3 tons. In Missouri, in my State, we lost 380 people to heroin overdose last year. This is the fact: 90 percent of the heroin in our country comes from across the southern border. The drug cartels aren't backing off. They don't care. They see this as a revenue opportunity. They don't care about people. Just in 2 years, there has been a 73 percent increase in fentanyl that they have shoved across our border, a 38 percent increase in methamphetamine, a 22 percent increase in heroin. That just is what is seized. Our Border Patrol needs some help. We have to stop this drug crisis. But there is more. Besides drug deaths, there have been numerous deaths linked to illegal immigrants that come here. Now, all of us support people coming here legally. Almost every one of us in the body have some story about a relative who came here, maybe they went through Ellis Island. I support legal immigration. But when we have an open border, anybody can come across. Last year, they caught 17,000 people coming across the border who had criminal records. The ones who didn't get caught end up in our communities and, sadly, kill people like Officer Singh. Our hearts were broken the day after Christmas when we heard this story of this legal immigrant who did it right. He came from Fiji. He immigrated here, and his goal was to become a police officer. He wanted that so much, first to be a citizen, but then he traveled 4 hours every day to attend his police academy. He learned English. He took English classes to learn the language, so that he could be a good police officer. And he was a good one. He was an honorable one. An illegal immigrant who came across our southern border shot and killed him. This is why we have to secure our border, and we can do it. I am also concerned about the innocent people who are being told a lie by the drug cartels. They are giving their life savings to a coyote to come here. They are brought to the border and then travel across the border. Doctors Without Borders tells an upsetting statistic to me, and to anybody who is listening, that one-third of all the women who try to make that trip are sexually assaulted. This current system is incentivizing them, with an open border, to try to make that trek, and they are being harmed. Instead, we have to close that border and give them the tools that will help them come here legally, come here safely. That is what we all want. Lastly, I want to talk about the issue of fairness. Right now, there are 700,000 people who are in the process of becoming legal citizens of our country, trying to come here and be an immigrant, following our laws. In my district, I am working with some families who are trying to get relatives here through the legal system, and it is amazing what you go through. First of all, it takes years. It takes years, but they fill out the paperwork. I have seen the pictures of the stacks of paperwork that they have to file with our immigration system to get them here. There are 700,000 people right now trying to do that. It is just not fair to allow people to jump the line and to just walk across. Because of the way our laws are now, if you bring a child into our country, they can hold them only 20 days, and then you have to let them go. So they know that. I learned that the drug cartels at the border actually have attorneys. They are a big business. They are something else. They know the laws. They know they are going to be let out, and they are here. That is just not right. We can do better. We can secure the border. $5.7 billion in the scheme of things is not that much. We give $50 billion every year for foreign aid, so it is about a tenth of the foreign aid we give to other countries to secure their borders. Why don't we secure our country? We can do that. I wanted to share some of those facts and invite some of my colleagues to come here tonight to share their thoughts on this very important issue that is before us as a nation and to hear their stories. The first person I want to yield to is the gentleman from Montana, Greg Gianforte.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I appreciate his comments. They were spot on. We are seeing the same thing in Missouri with that meth coming up from Mexico and the record number of people in foster care. It just breaks your heart, and it doesn't have to be that way.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Yes, we must act. Mr. Speaker, I would now like to invite my friend from Louisiana, Mike Johnson, to share what he is seeing down there in Louisiana, what his constituents are saying, and what his thoughts are. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Johnson).

Mrs. HARTZLER. Thank you so much. I appreciate your perspective down there from Louisiana. You bring up the great point of the number of children coming across. I heard yesterday how Health and Human Services, which gets custody of these children, just does not have the capacity to house them and to take care of them. It is a crisis. That is why the President says it is a humanitarian crisis. So we have got to act. Mr. Speaker, we started off in Missouri; we had Montana; we have gone down to Louisiana to hear their perspective; and now we go to North Carolina to hear from Representative Ted Budd. I appreciate your being here, Representative Budd, and we would love to hear what your thoughts are on this very important topic. I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Budd).

Mrs. HARTZLER. Well said, Representative. Mr. Speaker, now we have my colleague and friend to the south in Arkansas. Representative French Hill wants to share a little bit. I appreciate his being here tonight. I yield to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Hill).

Mrs. HARTZLER. Thank you, gentleman, that was excellent; and I appreciate you bringing a picture so we can all see that what the Border Patrol and others are running into is that individuals, clearly, are here from other countries illegally, and that is why we need to secure this border. It is very concerning what is happening as a result of having an open border. Mr. Speaker, I am glad that my colleague from Florida has shared a little bit of his time this evening to come join us. John Rutherford, I appreciate your being here, and I look forward to hearing what you have to share tonight. I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Rutherford).

Mrs. HARTZLER. You sure know what you are talking about because of the lifelong service that you have given to law enforcement. I loved what you shared. It is time to listen to those people on the ground and in operations. That is who we need to listen to. You are right. When I had a chance to go to the border, the Border Patrol are saying we need this. They are there every day risking their lives trying to keep us safe. So thank you for sharing your firsthand perspective from law enforcement and what you are hearing. I appreciate it. Now, Mr. Speaker, I would like to turn to another colleague of mine, whom I actually had to travel to the border with back in October. She is from Arizona, which is where the port was in Mariposa, Nogales, that we went to. Debbie Lesko, thank you for joining us tonight. I really appreciate your sharing with America and with our colleagues here about what you are seeing from Arizona and your perspective on the need to build this security wall at the border. I yield to the gentlewoman from Arizona (Mrs. Lesko).

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her excellent summation of what is important. It was so touching. I thank her for bringing the pictures of Arizonans who have lost their lives due to Congress' failure to build the wall and keep us safe. That is why we are here tonight, saying now is the time. We have to stop this. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota, Pete Stauber. He is new to Congress. I am so glad to have him here. I appreciate him coming, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say from a Minnesotan's point of view.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman has that law enforcement background that is so critical right here in Congress. That is why we are glad he is here and appreciate him sharing. I can't imagine what he has gone through so many times, having to go to somebody's home--the parents--and face a mom and dad to tell them that their child has died. That is why we are here today. I appreciate the gentleman's passion for this issue. I share it. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois, Mike Bost, a colleague to the east. I thank him for being here tonight and appreciate him sharing about this important crisis that we have at our border.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is right. We can do both. We are all committed to doing that. That is why we are here. We are working for the American public, and I believe we will get this done. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague and good friend from Alabama, Martha Roby.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Thank you for coming and sharing. You made so many great points. And just the sheer number of people who are coming across, we just say those numbers, but I heard the other day, it is like 2,000 a day. In my district--I have a very rural district--there are a lot of towns that don't have 2,000 people in them. So if I picture one of my towns that has 2,000 people in it, that is how many that are coming across every day, the southern border, 2,000 people a day. We have just got to address this. I agree with you, we have got to do it now. And thank you so much for coming. I would like to now yield to the gentleman from South Carolina, Representative Duncan, my good friend, to come here and share his thoughts from South Carolina and why he thinks this is a real crisis, and then why we need to deal with it right now.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Well said. Well said. I thank the gentleman; that was great. Now, I yield to the gentleman from Texas, Representative Brian Babin. He is right there at the border. So what does the gentleman have to say?

Mrs. HARTZLER. Really?

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague from North Carolina, Representative Rouzer, to share. And while he is coming, I just want to thank the gentleman from Texas for sharing that. That is just heartbreaking that 500,000 Texans were killed at the hands of illegal aliens. But we can fix that. So I thank Representative Rouzer for being here. What does the gentleman have to say tonight about this?

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the conversation that we have had tonight, sharing with the American people the facts and the stories of some people in our district about why this is so important. General Leave

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the topic of this Special Order.

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mrs. HARTZLER

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, on Friday December 21, 2018, I was unable to vote on rollcall No. 490. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mrs. HARTZLER

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, On Tuesday, December 11, 2018, due to a death in my family, I was unable to vote. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: on roll call no. 428, YEA; on roll call no. 429, YEA; and on roll call no. 430, YEA,

Mrs. HARTZLER

Mrs. HARTZLER. Mr. Speaker, on Wednesday, December 12, 2018, due to a death in my family, I was unable to vote. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: on Roll Call no. 431, YEA; 0n Roll Call no. 432, YEA; on Roll Call no . 433, YEA; and on Roll Call no. 434, YEA.