Chip Roy

Mr. ROY

Mr. ROY. Mr. Chairman, I have great respect for my colleague on the other side of the aisle from Texas. On this matter we disagree. The Secretary of Homeland Security has entirely abdicated his responsibility to follow the laws of the United States. He has done so purposely, he has done so with complete disregard to his constitutional obligation to run the Department of Homeland Security, which by definition means he is supposed to secure the homeland--having released some 2 million people into the United States. He has come before the House Judiciary Committee, and literally said, yes, we have operational control of the border, while staring directly at a statute defining operational control of the border under the Secure Fence Act. He later went back to the committee and said, no, no, no, that is not the definition I was talking about. He knew full well what he was doing. He is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people that he is somehow following the laws. That he is somehow following asylum laws and parole laws when he is using parole--which is supposed on a case-by-case basis--to literally dump hundreds of thousands of people into the United States. Americans are dying. Kids are dying from fentanyl poisoning. The very migrants that my colleagues say this is supposed to be helpful for are dying in the Rio Grande or dying on south Texas ranches or getting sold into the sex trafficking trade, or dying, or getting abused in stash houses. This is a blatant disregard of his duty. He should be removed from office. We sure as hell shouldn't be funding his salary. The Holman rule exists for us to exercise our Article I authority over an abusive Article II executive. It is time for Congress to reassert its authority, to reclaim control, to use the power of the purse to stop the abusive authority by this Secretary to endanger the American people, to endanger migrants, and to undermine our Homeland Security.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, the amendment I put forward prohibits funding in this act to President Biden's executive orders that put needless limits on immigration enforcement, scale back sound asylum policies, and establish its own set of immigration directives that Congress has not passed. The executive orders that President Biden put in place as soon as he got into the White House have had an enormous negative impact on the ability of Border Patrol and ICE to carry out their job--in particular, ICE. The results are pretty clear. Deportations of criminal aliens plummeted by 62 percent between fiscal year 2020 under President Trump and fiscal year 2021 under President Biden. It went from 150,000, 103,000, all the way to 38,000 under Biden. The fact of the matter is this is not shocking. When you issue executive orders that place restrictions on the ability of ICE to do its job, shockingly, it can't do its job. Congress, Article I in the Constitution, has not only the power but the duty to tell Article II in the Constitution: Hey, you don't get to use the funds that we are appropriating to not do your job. This amendment would simply say to the President of the United States and the Secretary that we have this crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, the President should follow the law instead of issuing executive orders to undermine the ability of law enforcement personnel to do their job, leaving the American people exposed to dangers, fentanyl pouring into our communities, and criminal aliens being able to carry out crimes on the streets of the country. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, the amendment before us is pretty simple. It prohibits funding from this Act to carry out the Department of Homeland Security's memo titled ``Guidelines for Enforcement Actions in or Near Protected Areas.'' The Biden administration issued a memo prohibiting ICE from arresting illegal migrants in most public places. If you look at a map, there are literally circles drawn that pretty much cover an entire geographic region. Effectively, they are making it impossible for ICE to do its job. It is purposeful, and this amendment is pretty simple: Don't use money to do this stupid thing. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, the termination of this program resulted in a decrease by 64 percent for illegal alien apprehensions between ports of entries or found inadmissible at ports of entry. Border encounters with Central American families--the main driver of the crisis for the better part of the first 2 years, comprised the majority of the MPP-amenable aliens--dropped by 80 percent. A report found MPP to be ``an indispensable tool in addressing the ongoing crisis at the southern border and restoring integrity to the immigration system.'' The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that we are not continuing to fund the ending of the kinds of programs that could be successful-- that is the point. We are putting restrictions on the extent to which the administration can ignore the tools that it should be using. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, the amendment that I have offered increases funding for the inspector general by $20 million for an Office of the Special Inspector General for Ukraine Assistance, if authorized, to enhance the oversight and accountability measures for funds appropriated for Ukraine, increasing the inspector general by $20 million. Over the last year and half, Congress has appropriated approximately $113 billion in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I am one of these individuals that believes that we did have agreements with Ukraine, and we have got to recognize those from the mid-1990s when we asked them to denuclearize and work with our partners in Eastern Europe. I also don't believe that we ought to be just providing an endless supply of funds to Ukraine with no clear mission, with no clear accountability of the dollars, and without clear accountability of whether NATO and our European allies are upholding their end of the bargain. This is a step to try to rectify at least one part of that: by making sure there is a fully empowered inspector general, to make sure that the information that we have is complete, and that we have a full understanding of every dollar that has already been appropriated and might be appropriated in the future, and to make sure that we are tracking it to the level that is necessary. There have been a number of different issues that we have identified in the past. For example, if you look at other conflicts like Afghanistan, the lead for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan found at least $19 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds sent to Afghanistan was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse from 2002 to 2020. It is critically important that we track this and follow it and understand it. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I thank the gentlewoman for her comments, and I think we have a general agreement on what we are trying to accomplish. I would note that in the NDAA we passed an authorization for this, and this would be the appropriation necessary to carry it out. That was the desire of our efforts to try to put a birds-eye view on this across agencies to ensure that dollars are being spent the way they are supposed to. Madam Chair, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Womack).

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, the United States military is one of the few institutions in America where the skills of the men or women on either side of you could mean the difference between life and death. At the end of the day, it embodies I think Dr. King's notion of judging men and women on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Yet, the Biden administration is infatuated with divvying us up by race, with divvying us up by our immutable characteristics. The fact is, with all due respect--and I appreciate the gentlewoman's remarks and the tone in which they were offered--corporate America is slashing DEI officers amid a backlash of diversity programs across the country. There is a story right here about the numbers of how many offices have been slashed over the last year, in part because they don't add much value to the bottom line in which the economy is hurting and people are suffering; and also in part because they are getting a backlash from having so much focus on divvying us up by race and all these characteristics--it is not actually good. We are seeing this in countless corporations across the country. There is story after story, if you just Google it and see what is going on out there. I think the Department of Defense should be in line with where we are seeing our society recoil at this divvying us up by race. This is one way to accomplish that objective. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, the amendment I am offering reduces the salary of Cyrus Salazar, the director of the Department of Defense's Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to $1. You might ask why we would do that. It is a power that we have in the House of Representatives under the Holman rule to try to restrain the executive branch, both in terms of expense, dollars and how they are being used, and in terms of what they are being used for. The American people are frankly getting a little tired of a Department of Defense that is being taken far too often off mission, I hear it all the time. I hear it from veterans. I hear it from Active- Duty servicemembers. I hear it from recruits. With recruiting numbers at low levels, with morale at questionable levels, we need to re- instill in our military a crystal clear focus on mission first. Importantly, when we are--to use the gentlewoman's term, which I take to heart--pinching pennies and trying to find dollars, we need to stop racking up $33 trillion in debt when we can't even figure out how to fund the salaries of our rank-and-file men and women in uniform at the level that we might need to when we are dealing with issues of increasing health costs, when we are dealing with issues of having a fully armed military with the latest and greatest technology to defeat China. It would seem questionable that, for example, we would have positions like the following: The Air Force is looking for a supervisory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion accessibility officer in Arlington, Virginia, that will pay between $155,700 to $183,500 per year. Another one, the Air Force is looking for a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion manager to work at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, that pays between $94,199 to $122,459 per year. There is another position in Alaska. There is another position in Alabama. I could go down the list, and this is the top of that pyramid. What we are trying to say is we shouldn't do this. We need to stop this. We need to stop diverting the mission of the military, which is a laudable goal of ensuring you got a workforce that is representative of the population of this country. You don't need an entire bureaucracy within the Pentagon to do it that is then perpetuating a lot of divisive policies. For example, West Point Academy slides told cadets that ``whiteness'' is ``a location of structural advantage, of race privilege,'' is ``a standpoint or place from which White people look at themselves and the rest of society,'' and ``refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.'' There is another, Kelisa Wing, former chief diversity officer at DOD's schools. ``I'm so exhausted at these White folx in these PD [professional development] sessions. This lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that Black people can be racist too.'' This is not the kind of thing that should be going on at the United States military and the Pentagon. This is one step of many that we need to take to return the military to its core mission and end this social engineering wrapped in a uniform, rather than doing the job of defending this great country. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY

Mr. ROY. Madam Chair, I rise in strong support of this amendment because it is extremely important. The reason there isn't a mandate at the Department of Defense right now is because we demanded that it end. That is the truth. We forced it through on that ridiculous omnibus spending bill last December. Here is the reality. We have a doctor here in the building right now speaking to a group of members from Johns Hopkins University talking about the extent to which the current iteration of the COVID vaccine has been tested on 10 lab rats. It hasn't gone through any human trials that are necessary. When my father had polio and the vaccine came after, it was a decade of testing and trials. We have stuck this vaccine out because of panic. We have undermined the health and well-being of our soldiers, airmen, and marines. We should stop it. We should prohibit it in the future, and we should make backpay available to our former members of the military that were kicked out.

Mr. ROY

Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, the only people being held hostage are the American people by Democrat leadership in the Senate and in the White House; holding them hostage to a wide open border, endangering them every single day, including the 110,000 some-odd migrants that have been sent to and gone to New York City, and that are endangering our people on the streets. The American people are, in fact, being held hostage because this Democratic leadership refuses to do their job to secure the border. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), my friend and colleague.

Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Johnson), my good friend.

Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, how much time is remaining on both sides?

Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Madam Speaker, I have absolutely no idea what the gentleman from Massachusetts was just talking about. We have four bills before us here in the House of Representatives, four bills that, when combined with the MILCON-VA bill that we passed in July, would fund upward of 75 percent of our discretionary spending of government. That is what is on the floor of the House. The fact is, the four bills we have before us represent this body doing its job. The gentleman says the Senate is going to be the adults who save us. This is a Senate that has passed not one appropriations bill. This is a Senate that today dropped on the floor of the Senate a bill that no one had seen 45 minutes prior to the vote, a bill which would continue to spend at the levels adopted last December that are yielding $2 trillion a year in deficit spending. If that represents the adults, I think I want to hang out with the kids because that is not the job that we are supposed to do--$2 trillion a year of deficit spending when we are $33 trillion in debt, continuing to fund an administration completely at war with the well- being of the American people and a Department of Justice weaponized against the people like Mark Houck, a father who wakes up with a raid at his home for defending his son, for exercising his free speech rights, completely not pursued by local authorities, taken to Federal court, and summarily dismissed within an hour by a jury. That is your FBI and Department of Justice at work. This is the same Department of Justice that wants to label Scott Smith a domestic terrorist. That is your Department of Justice at work. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would say the Senate being adults and writing another check to that Department of Justice is a good use of your money. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would say it is a good idea to continue to rack up $2 trillion in deficit spending, to borrow more money, to increase inflation, to devalue the dollar, to spend money we don't have to fund a Department of Homeland Security that refuses to secure the homeland. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to do this while thousands of Americans die from fentanyl poisonings, while cartels are empowered, while China is empowered, while China is selling the printing presses and the fentanyl pills to the cartels, while thousands pour into Eagle Pass, while 11,000 people just the day before yesterday poured across into Eagle Pass, while people are in railroad cars, while children are dying, while children get sold into the sex trafficking trade, where migrants are being held for ransom so their little girl doesn't get raped in a stash house in Fort Worth, Texas. All of that, I suppose, is from the adults we have in the Senate. They want to continue to fund a lawless administration, exposing our people to danger and exposing migrants to danger, all in the false name of compassion. Well, if that is what adults look like, count me out. I am going to stand up for the American people who sent me here to stand up for them. Madam Speaker, we are going to pass these four bills. We are going to work hard to do the work for the American people while the Senate can preen and posture with yet another swamp game by putting forward another continuing resolution of the status quo rather than trying to change this place, rather than trying to stand up for the people who sent us here to do something different: to reduce spending, to secure the border, to fund our troops at a higher level than we have ever funded them; a $28 billion increase for the Department of Defense while we undo the social engineering experiment and refocus the military on its mission to defend the United States. I am proud of these four bills. I am proud to stand up here and advance them forward but let me be very clear: We are going to secure the border of the United States. It will be up to Democrats to make a choice. Will they shut down this open border or will they shut down the government of the United States.

Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, one of the previous speakers from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talked about victims, and I would note the extent to which we have countless victims, as we have talked about before, from the scourge of fentanyl poisonings across this country. Two weeks ago, 1-year-old Nicholas Feliz Dominici died from fentanyl exposure from a kilo of fentanyl at an at-home daycare in the Bronx, New York, that, reportedly, a new arrival from the Dominican Republic was renting out. More than 25,000 pounds of fentanyl have been seized in FY23. I spent time in August sitting on panels with moms and dads who lost their children to fentanyl poisonings--six children in the school district in which I reside. It is commonplace in Texas. It is becoming, unfortunately, more commonplace around the country. How about the woman who was stabbed 28 times by an illegal immigrant with a criminal record in Pennsylvania, or the 10-year-old boy who was on a schoolbus on the first day of school killed by an illegal immigrant who ran into the bus? How about the father in Florida who opened his home to a supposedly unaccompanied alien child, who was 19 years old, and he stabbed and killed the father of this family who opened his home? This is happening every day to the American people, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle do not care. They watch Secretary Mayorkas completely ignore his duty to secure the border of the United States, leaving us entirely exposed to cartels and to the flood of fentanyl pouring into our communities. Border Patrol is overwhelmed, trying to manage numbers at the border, which is completely avoidable if the Secretary and the President would actually follow the law. Republicans have responded with a bill that would force the Secretary to follow the law and that would improve the laws of the United States to secure the border of the United States, as we are constitutionally required to do. We have made that a condition precedent for giving more money to the Secretary of Homeland Security as he ignores his job and endangers the American people. We will continue to do that. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, again, my colleagues don't want to focus on the issues the American people care about, and they certainly don't want to talk about the issues that are, frankly, pretty embarrassing to the track record of my Democratic colleagues. As I said, they don't want to talk about Hunter Biden. They don't want to talk about the Department of Justice and how it has been weaponized against the American people. They don't want to talk about a Strategic Petroleum Reserve that has been decimated and the high cost of gasoline and electricity. They don't want to talk about inflation. They don't want to talk about housing prices. They don't want to talk about a Department of Defense that is more focused on social engineering than carrying out the mission that it is given. They don't want to talk about crime. They don't want to talk about woke policies in which men are swimming against women in swimming meets. They don't want to talk about the border. We are going to talk about the border, but I assure you, they do not want to talk about the border. They talk about consequences. Last Thursday, Texas authorities recovered the bodies of two migrants, including a 3-year-old boy who tried crossing the Rio Grande. Then 2 weeks ago, a 10-year-old migrant boy drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande. Last year, 853 migrants died crossing the southern border; 53 in a tractor-trailer in the city of San Antonio, which I represent. Thousands of Americans are dying from fentanyl poisoning. There are moms that I have to talk to, dads that I have to talk to in Texas who have to bury another child because we refuse utterly to secure the border of the United States. Again, the President of the United States, the Democratic leadership of the Senate, and the Democrat minority in the House utterly refuse to do their job to shut down the open border of the United States to secure our people. They are perfectly content with then shutting down the government because they refuse to do their job. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, as I said, this is a dilatory tactic by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I wouldn't want to speak about what is going on either. I wouldn't want to speak about the story this afternoon of Hunter Biden receiving a $250,000 wire originating in Beijing with the beneficiary address listed as Joe Biden's home. I wouldn't want to talk about that. I wouldn't want to talk about what we have been learning in the Committee on the Judiciary. I wouldn't want to be learning about what is going on or talking about what we have heard from the whistleblowers or from Devon Archer. I wouldn't want to talk about that at all. I would want to sweep that aside. I wouldn't want to talk about the Department of Justice that targeted Scott Smith and put him on the domestic terrorism list. I wouldn't want to talk about a Department of Justice that targeted Mark Houck and have used the FACE Act to go after pro-life Americans. I wouldn't want to talk about anything that this administration is doing. I would want to delay. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Johnson), my good friend.