MISSION, Texas - Four Republican senators held a press conference at Anzalduas Park in Mission last week to denounced President Biden’s border security policy.
With the Rio Grande and Mexico as a backdrop, Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Mike Lee of Utah, and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska claimed the president has an “open borders” policy and all migrants from across the world have to do is show up on the US-Mexico border and they will be admitted into the country. Lee gave most of his remarks in Spanish.
Here are their remarks in full:
Later, Sen. Cornyn delivered these remarks from the floor of the Senate:
Madam President last Thursday, I traveled back to my home state of Texas. But this time to the US Mexico border along with Senator Cruz, my colleague from Texas, as well as three of our non-Texas senate colleagues, Senator Barrasso, Lee and Ricketts joined us for a series of tours and meetings in the Rio Grande Valley, which is unlike any other place in America.
This is been one of many times that Senator Cruz and I have welcomed our colleagues to the border. Because every time I hear people in Washington, DC, talk about the border, it's most likely something they've gleaned from movies or a novel that they've read somewhere. It's not based on reality.
And the truth is the reality at the border has changed substantially from years ago when illegal immigration was primarily people coming to the United States to work and send money home. It's changed entirely to a global human smuggling enterprise that enriches the criminal organizations who organize it and are charging tens of thousands of dollars a head to people they smuggle into the United States. And if you come from special interest countries like Iran, Syria, for example, you may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars, but you can still make your way in because of the broken border policies of the Biden administration, which I'll talk about here in a moment.
It really is a shame that such a beautiful, vibrant region of our country that has benefited tremendously from the opportunities that come from living along an international border have been damaged and hurt in such an unfortunate way by a flood of humanity and drugs coming across.
Legitimate trade and travel has shaped the unique culture of our border and serve as a boon not just to local economies, but to the entire American economy.
But like so many other areas along the US-Mexico border this region has become overwhelmed by the weight of the current border crisis. Last month alone, the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector, just one of many sectors of the Border Patrol, logged more than 45,000 border crossings. In the last year, nearly 340,000 migrants crossed in the Rio Grande Valley sector. And overwhelmingly the Biden administration has simply just released them into the interior of the United States, which has, in turn, proved to be a magnet for more people to come.
If in fact the Biden administration wanted to deter illegal immigration, they would stop people from coming to the border and entering the country illegally. And it would send people back who somehow have made it over. That would act as a deterrent. But right now, not withstanding the messages of people like Mayor Adams from New York City - when he recently went to Mexico City he said don't come, don't come. Well, the people who make the dangerous journey from their home to the border and into the interior of the United States, they frequently have access to this thing called television and to this instrument we call a telephone. So they can see people making their way across the border successfully. And they can talk to relatives who've made the trip on the telephone who say I made it, you can too. And thus we've seen this huge flood of migrants across the border swell into a virtual tsunami.
It used to be the overwhelming number of migrants came from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries. And that's when I hear Vice President Harris and others talk, (and) Secretary Blinken talk about root causes. Like they want to go in and nation-build in order to discourage people from those countries to come to the United States. Which tells me they really don't understand the nature of the current phenomenon because it's not just people coming from Mexico and Central America. President Biden's border policies have made it so that people from virtually anywhere in the world can come to the southern border, say the magic words and be released into the United States.
In fact, we learned on our most recent trip that many migrants don't even claim asylum before they're released because there simply isn't enough capacity to hold them once they cross the border, and then to return them where they came from.
And there aren't anywhere near enough removal flights to deport migrants without valid legal claims to stay here. So it's no surprise that people are traveling from all over the world, literally, to take advantage of this open border policy.
Agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector told us that they've apprehended recently migrants from China, from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and other countries around the globe. America's southern border is the world's worst kept secret.
When we arrived on Thursday night we witnessed the sheer volume and diversity of migrants arriving at the border. Some of my colleagues spoke with a family from Moldova. You'll have to look that up on your on your map. But it's not. Mexico is not Central America, but they just crossed over the border moments earlier. You might ask yourself what would a man and his wife are there two or three year old daughter, how do they make it from Eastern Europe to Texas's Rio Grande Valley? And the answer is simple. With human smugglers.
Cartels and other criminal criminal organizations have hit the jackpot with the Biden border crisis. Indeed, you could say that President Biden has outsourced US immigration policy to these criminal organizations because they are running the show, not President Biden. In 2021 alone, they made an estimated $13 billion from human smuggling operations. That's just the human smuggling alone. Since then, the number of border crossings, of course ,has skyrocketed. They get paid by the head, so that's good for business for the cartels. And I imagine their profits have skyrocketed even further.
Cartel smuggling operations aren't limited to Mexico and Central America. For the right price these criminal organizations will help anyone from anywhere reach the United States and make their way into the interior.
As those who have made the journey can attest, it's an extremely dangerous one, particularly for vulnerable women and children. Human smugglers don't view these migrants as fellow human beings. They view them as a commodity. Migrants are abused, neglected, extorted for more money. Women are often raped or sold for sex. Some migrants have been simply abandoned and left for dead if they become injured or unable to continue their travel.
At one checkpoint, which is about 100 miles into the interior, in Falfurrias, Texas, it's called Brooks County, they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in this little, relatively poor, Texas county burying the bones of dead migrants who have died from exposure in their county. Because what happens is once people come across the border, the smugglers, sometimes called coyotes, they put them in stash houses. Actually, we saw one stash house and then, when the time is right, they are loaded into vans and then transported up the highway. That's the reason for the checkpoint about 100 miles inland.
Well, what the coyotes do is they tell the migrants get out of the vehicle before we reach the checkpoint. Walk around the checkpoint, and we'll meet you on the north side. Well for migrants who have come hundreds of miles or further, already suffering from exposure to make it the hot Texas summers where it frequently exceeds 100 degrees, it should be no surprise that some of them, many of them, unfortunately do not make it.
So that's another consequence of the Biden border crisis and open border policies.
And even after they (have) crossed the border many migrants still owe massive debts to the cartels who will not hesitate to use them for forced labor or sex trafficking. In fact, if you go to parts of Houston, Texas, you will see women who basically are sex slaves because they're working off their debt to the people who smuggled to get them into the interior of the United States in the first place.
As I mentioned, we also visited a stash house where we saw the migrants waiting for the next step of their journey. I hate to imagine what the cartels have in store for these individuals.
We know that these migrants are not the only victims of the border crisis. While agents are busy processing and transporting migrants, it creates an open highway for cartels and criminal organizations smuggling drugs into the United States. They, of course, have spotters, they use drones for technology to see where the Border Patrol is and where they're not. And they use that knowledge to smuggle fentanyl, heroin, and God knows what else across the border and into our communities.
Here's a shocking statistic, at least it was to me. I don't know whether the president of the United States even knows this. But the number one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 is a synthetic opioid called fentanyl. (The) leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45. We know where it comes from. The precursors come from China. They make their way to Mexico where the cartels mix them up, run them through industrial capacity pill presses, make them look like relatively innocuous pharmaceuticals. And then when a young man or young woman who is, let's say, in high school, like Sienna, whose father gave me this rubber wristband at the Carrollton Farmers Branch Independent School District last April, they take this, thinking, well, it is this relatively innocuous pharmaceutical like Percocet or Xanax, but then they don't wake up the next day. And, of course, leaving grieving families wondering what in the world happened and how this could this happen to them and their child.
Drug overdoses alone are taking the lives of about 110,000 Americans a year currently. And as I said, fentanyl is responsible for about two thirds of it.
Of course we aren't just worried about substances coming across the border but dangerous people too, criminals, people on the terrorist watch list. People coming from special interest countries like the ones I mentioned.
It used to be the number of the number of people on the terrorist watch list, who were apprehended along the southern border by the Border Patrol was in single digits. In the past year at least 169 were apprehended and that doesn't account for the the got-aways. The got-aways are the one and a half million people who have been seen on cameras or detected on censors, but who evaded capture by the Border Patrol. And you can bet that they're up to no good because they simply... if they actually wanted to make their way into the interior of the United States and didn't have a criminal record or worked, transporting drugs, or on a terrorist watch list, they can just, like almost everybody else, under the Biden administration just come to the border, say the magic words and the Biden administration would release them into the interior of the United States.
So, we have had one and a half million got-aways evade law enforcement since President Biden took office, including 169 people on the terrorist watch list.
It seems like a long time ago to many people, particularly if you're relatively young, but it was September 11, 2001 when 19 people killed 3,000 Americans by flying airplanes into the World Trade Center. And taking down a plane over Pennsylvania. So, 19 terrorists killed 3,000 Americans back in 2001. We know that at least 169 people on the terrorist watch list have been apprehended so far. We don't know how many actually have made their way into the United States. But it's a safe bet it's people from countries all around the world where the prevailing ideology is to kill Americans and in the United States. So truth is really depressingly stranger than even fiction here. Because the potential for us to wake up some day and have a terrorist attack in our country as a result of uncontrolled migration across the southern border is very real, and it's growing by the day.
Yes, there is a humanitarian and security crisis at the border and it's impacting all of our country. That's the reason you have senators from Nebraska and Utah and Wyoming coming to to the border because as several of them said every state is now a border state.
Recently, one of our colleagues from Montana was there. And he said, you know, the fentanyl that comes across the border has made its way into the communities in my state in Montana, in the northern border of our country. So every state has become a border state as a result of the Biden open border policies.
Well, we know that migrants are being exploited and abused. American families are being terrorized by the opioid epidemic. Cities in Texas and across the country are struggling to keep up with the massive humanitarian needs of migrants. And yes, we've heard from Mayor Adams in New York. We've heard from Mayor Bowser here in Washington DC, the mayor of Chicago, the governors of Massachusetts and Illinois. This is a national crisis.
The situation is extremely complex, but the solution doesn't have to be. We need deterrence through consequences. That's what the Border Patrol tells me and tells anybody who will listen. If there are no consequences to entering the country illegally, people are just going to keep coming. And I think we all understand why.
But if we're going to deliver consequences, which means to deter more people from coming, that means ending catch and release, which is the policy of the Biden administration. And we need to actually remove people who have no legal reason to remain in the United States. That means expedited removal.
In other words, we need to send a message to people who have no legitimate reason to remain in the United States that if they come they will not be able to stay. It's really not any more complicated than that. Congress doesn't need to do a rewrite of our immigration laws in order to give President Biden the authority to do these things. He already has that authority under existing law. But, he won't use it.
Deterrence is a key component of a safe and secure border. Until the administration starts deterring would be migrants with fruitless asylum playing from even approaching our border we will remain in a constant state of crisis. And I predict it will get worse. We've just seen a record number of people coming across the border. That number is going to continue to grow as more and more people know that if they show up at the border, say the magic words, President Biden will say come on in.
The only way to truly understand what's happening at the border is to see it firsthand and to speak with the individuals who live and work in our border communities. I've had the pleasure as I said earlier of taking dozens of senators, both Republicans and Democrats down to the border to hear from these men and women firsthand. And I appreciate all of our colleagues who've made the trip to and continue to advocate for smart border policies especially most recently, Senators Barrasso, Lee, Ricketts and I want to thank the many men and women in the Rio Grande Valley who took the time out of their schedule to speak with us. Their input is absolutely invaluable to the work of the Senate. And I'm extremely extremely grateful to each of them.
I want to especially thank the law enforcement officers who are on the front lines of this crisis. Every day federal, state and local law enforcement put their lives on the line to safeguard our border and stop potentially dangerous individuals and drugs from reaching our communities. But they need our help, and they're not getting it today.
They deserve more than our gratitude. They deserve our commitment to fix this crisis in any way we can.
President Biden has not only proven himself incapable, but also unwilling to address this border crisis. So Congress needs to step in and fill the void. In the coming weeks, the Senate will advance legislation to address some of our greatest national security threats, including action to address the border crisis. As my colleagues and I saw last week, this crisis cannot be fixed with more no-strings-attached funding. We will not find current border policies under the Biden administration.
As long as a flood of humanity is coming across the border at this pace, it doesn't matter how many Border Patrol agents or immigration judges we have, it won't be enough. The only way to address this crisis was by deterring more illegal immigration. And the simplest way to do that is by delivering consequences for entering the country illegally. It's a tried and true strategy that has worked countless times before. So in the coming weeks, I hope Congress will step in where President Biden has refused and established deterrence once again.
