Congressional Record, Volume 163 Issue 17 (Wednesday, February 1, 2017)

[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 17 (Wednesday, February 1, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H865-H872]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

CONDITIONS AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my honor to address you here
on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And I came
here to the floor with a bit different topic in mind, but as I listened
to the gentleman from Texas, I thought it would be a good idea, while
there still was a captive audience on the topic, to refresh some things
with perhaps a bit different perspective.
And that would be that, from my time and experience, I have traveled
most every mile of the southern border, that would be 2,000, all
together. I think it would be true that I have traveled every mile of
California and Arizona and New Mexico, and most all the miles in Texas.
I have flown a lot of it. I have driven a lot of it. I have been out on
the water on some of it. And I have spent some nights down on the
border, a number of them in some of the dangerous crossings, like San
Miguel's crossing on the Tohono O'odham Reservation. It is one of those
without any night vision and without what we would call official
security.

So when I hear that the border is as secure as it has ever been and
that there is no security threat to the U.S., which is what we have
just heard here in this previous hour, Madam Speaker, I absolutely
don't agree with that.
And if there is no terrorism that is any factor at all, that there
has never been a terrorist attack on the southern border, I would point
the gentleman to the five heads that were lined up on the Mexican side
of the fence across from the people that were driving to church in New
Mexico a few years ago. I think those children that looked out the
windows of their cars as they were getting a ride to church were
victims of the terror that was created by heads stacked along the side
of the highway within feet of our U.S. border.
As I spend time with the Border Patrol agents that have made a career
out of protecting our border down there, they tell me that there are
murders on the Mexican side of the border, where they just throw the
body over the fence on to the U.S. side; and other cases where they
identify bodies on the Mexican side of the border, and they will call
the Mexican security people, whom they have good relations with, as a
rule, and they will see the equivalent of an S-10 pickup pull up and
just throw the body in the back of the pickup and drive away, with zero
forensics and very little attempt to identify who the perpetrators
might be that have committed these murders there so close to the
border.
I have made surprise visits down to the border on a number of
occasions, and I make it a point to drop in and see what is going on
and talk to the people that are there protecting and guarding our
border.
I recall one of those visits down to Sasabe, Arizona, at a relatively
rural crossing there. I pulled into that port of entry and port of exit
for us, and I got out and I decided on the spot that, well, I should
let them know who I am for reasons of courtesy, and so I introduced
myself.
Madam Speaker, I said: I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa.
That agent immediately said: I can't talk to you. And he turned and
walked away.
And so I went to the next agent and I introduced myself: I'm Steve
King from Iowa.
And he said: I can't talk to you, but talk to Mike. Mike is the
supervisor here tonight, and he's ready to retire, and he has terminal
cancer. He will talk to you.
And I went and spoke to Mike. The gentleman's name is Mike Crane. It
was Mike Crane. He did have terminal cancer. That is verified. And he
has since passed away.
But as we were speaking about the difficulties in securing the border
and the illegal crossings, both one east and one west of the crossing
at Sasabe, he got a phone call, and he said, Excuse me, and stepped
away, and he was gone for a couple of minutes outside the circle.

[[Page H866]]

He came back in and he said: There's been a knifing on the Mexican
side of the border, and so there will be an ambulance coming through
this border and this crossing in a few minutes. And I've called in U.S.
ambulances with oxygen on them, and I've called in a helicopter to fly
this victim out and to the Tucson University Hospital.
So we waited there for a few minutes. The Mexican ambulance came
across the crossing. I did have an EMT with me and I asked him to do
what he could to lend a hand to help save this victim's life, so he was
in the middle of that process.
In the Mexican ambulance there was only one glove--just one glove--
and a roll of gauze and nothing else, no oxygen, no medical equipment.
It was an ambulance as far as the shell of it was concerned, and the
painting on the outside said ``ambulance,'' but inside, it was just the
same thing as an old home bread truck.
So they took him out of that Mexican ambulance. The U.S. ambulances
had arrived fairly close to that period of time and they put him on
oxygen and stabilized him, and then we loaded him off on to a
helicopter and flew him up to Tucson University Hospital.
I went to Tucson that night, and the next morning I went to Tucson
University Hospital and, essentially, talked my way in to visit this
victim that had been stabbed in the liver with a knife or a shiv that
was--I just recall it was 3\1/2\ inches wide at the hilt. That was the
width of the wound in him.
I went to the room that he was in and they said: Okay, here he is
behind this curtain.
It was a two-patient room. When I walked behind the curtain, the
individual there who had been knifed the night before was not the one
that I had seen and been part of taking care of at Sasabe. It was a
different victim that had been wounded under the same circumstances,
probably a different location in a different fight and brought into
Tucson University Hospital to be stabilized.
As I was, I will say, looking at the situation, the patient whom I
knew had been wounded the night before was rolled down the hallway in a
wheelchair. He had been stabilized. He looked a lot better. We didn't
know if he was going to live.
So then I assessed the situation and, Madam Speaker, I then met with
the chief financial officer of the Tucson University Hospital and other
leaders there in the hospital and collected a whole series of
narratives about the cost of the medical care that has been assumed by
the United States, even from people who have injuries in a foreign
country.
This cost on this particular incident was $30,000 to bring the
wounded Mexican into the United States--parole him into the United
States is the legal term that we use--and then to send him back to
Mexico once he was stabilized. And they had to post an agent with him
to guard him during that period of time.
Now, I am not here on the floor tonight taking a position on whether
that is right or wrong. From a moral standpoint, it is right. But we
should be aware of what is going on. This is not a stable border. It is
not a safe border.
I have sat on the border at the other crossing in Tohono O'odham
Reservation, San Miguel crossing, and there, throughout the night, I
heard vehicles coming through the mesquite brush, and you can listen
and hear the doors open. You hear the individuals get out and drop
their packs on the ground. They will close the door and you can hear
them talking and whispering to each other; pick their packs up and walk
off through the brush.

I sat there and tried to count the shadows, and I won't give you
those numbers because none of us are sure what we see when it is pitch
black out, but I know what I heard. And we counted a good number of
people that were delivered down there to that crossing who came through
the fence, which it would be rare for that to hold an old cow as they
walk a four-barbed wire fence with the barbs pushed down where they
have been continually crossing in the path through there, you can
easily see.
When the gentleman from El Paso tells us that we are down to the low
crossing level of kind of a modern history lowest crossing level of
roughly 400,000 people last year, compared to not quite 1.6 million in
the year 2000, I would point out that we count those who we can count,
those who we see and those who we willingly see.
If we are not looking for them, if we are not guarding the portion of
the border that they are pouring through, and we say we have counted
400,000 attempts coming into the United States, that doesn't mean that
there are only 400,000 attempts; that only means we counted 400,000.
The same goes with the interdiction of roughly 1.6 million. They were
more aggressive then. And I will say that Bill Clinton was successful
in interdicting more border crossing attempts than any other President.
I don't know that that was his goal or his objective, but I believe
that was the statistical results.
To that extent, Madam Speaker, I don't disagree with the gentleman
from Texas. And I agree that the border crossings have slowed down. Ten
years ago they were greater than they are today, but it is not logical,
in fact, it is not rational to assert that the border is as secure as
it has ever been. Neither is it logical or rational to say that it is
no security threat.
In the times that I have been on the border, I have encountered the
incidents of seven different persons of interest from nations of
interest. That is our vernacular that we use when we see people that
are coming from--I will call them--terrorist-spawning states. If an
Iranian or an Iraqi or a Yemeni shows up at the southern border and
they are interdicted by our Border Patrol, they are then placed into
the hands of the FBI. At the moment that that happens, it becomes a
classified incident.
I doubt if the gentleman from El Paso encounters this. I am down
there for the purpose of hearing some of those things, one of the
purposes. And I have seven of them that I have logged in my time that I
have been down there. And if there have been seven incidents of persons
of interest from nations of interest, and I am only going to learn
about that in that window between the time they are interdicted and the
time that they are taken into the custody of the FBI.

{time} 1800

So how many hundreds are there and perhaps more that are terrorists
that are crossing into the United States? We know the easiest way to
get into the United States illegally is to cross our southern border.
So these assertions that we don't have a border security problem and
that it is not a security threat are false. Their idea is that we
should just simply leave the border open.
I heard hire more agents not to secure the border, but to facilitate
crossing through legal crossings. I think there are some things we can
and should be doing with facilitating legal crossings to and from the
United States of America.
I don't disagree with the full breadth of that statement, Mr.
Speaker, but the facts are 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs
consumed in America come from or through Mexico--80 to 90 percent. It
is more than a $60 billion annual business pouring into the United
States. Out of that $60 billion worth of drugs, a lot of that is
laundered in the United States and brought back into Mexico and points
south down toward--and for cocaine, for example, from Colombia. We saw
a big bust of Colombian cocaine that was smuggled into the nose of an
airplane that was found by the maintenance crew when they diverted the
plane for maintenance. But 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs come
from or through Mexico.
It is an American problem. It is a demand we have on the streets of
America for more than $60 billion of illegal drugs that kill thousands
of our citizens. We have seen the addiction. We have seen the heroin
addictions that have emerged in the United States and become part of
the news in the last few years, but the people who die from overdoses
of drugs has accelerated to more than die because of car accidents in
the United States.
Now, that is alarming when you consider most all of us travel in cars
in this country. Not a very big percentage of us are addicted to drugs,
but it is a very high percentage of those who are drug addicted that
are dying because of the drugs they are getting and the

[[Page H867]]

overdoses and the bad drugs that they are getting, and we need to shut
that down and shut that off.
It isn't a final solution, I would agree, because, Mr. Speaker, there
are two sides to this equation. One of them is that we need to address
the supply of drugs, the transport of illegal drugs into the United
States and the delivery of them in the United States to their retail
destination. But the other side is we need to shut down the demand on
those illegal drugs. That is a topic that this Congress has not taken
up in the time that I have been here. I have stood here on this floor a
number of times and discussed the need for us to shut down the demand
for illegal drugs.
Mr. Speaker, I will set that component aside for a moment and
acknowledge that part of this problem is the United States' demand for
illegal drugs. The deaths in the United States aren't solely the
responsibility of the drug dealers. It also is the responsibility of
our society to restigmatize illegal drug use and abuse and to clean up
our society using a number of tools that we haven't yet developed: the
will in our society to address the drug consumption problem in America.
Nonetheless, we have developed the will, I believe, especially with
the election of Donald Trump, to address the illegal drug supply coming
into America and to shut off the smuggling of drugs into the United
States.
So when I hear from the gentleman from El Paso that he wants open
borders and he thinks walls and fences insult people and they damage
the relationships between us and Mexico, what about 100,000 dead
Mexicans that die in the drug wars? Doesn't that damage our
relationship between the United States and Mexico far more than the
size of a wall that would probably save tens of thousands of Mexican
lives by drawing a line, creating a barrier, and keeping the illegal
drugs on the south side of that border away from the $60 billion-plus
demand in the United States? I think that damages our relationship a
lot more if we continue to allow that to happen.
The flow of illegal drugs flows this way into the United States. This
is from the Drug Enforcement Agency. I said to them that I want to know
about the drug distribution in America, who controls it. I know the
answer, but I asked the question so I have got their response.
It is the Mexican drug cartels that control almost all of the illegal
drug distribution in the United States of America. They are the cartels
that operate in every major city, that control the illegal drug supply
in nearly every major city; and if there is a significant exception, it
is the southern tip of Florida--Miami--where more of those drugs come
out of South America, across, through Haiti, and are smuggled into the
United States. A lot by boat come through the Caribbean and into Miami
and points along Key West. That is more a Haitian connection, South
American connection, and to some degree a Cuban connection. But the
balance of illegal drugs distributed in America are done so by the
Mexican drug cartels.
I asked the Drug Enforcement Agency, I said to them: What would be
the result of the illegal drug distribution chains in America if,
magically, everyone who is illegally in America woke up in their home
country tomorrow morning, what would that do to the illegal drug
distribution system in the country? Their answer is: It would sever at
least one link in every distribution chain of illegal drugs in America,
at least one, and in many cases every link of that chain of
distribution of illegal drugs.
In other words, for a brief time, if that magical miracle thing
happened that everybody woke up in their home country, say, tomorrow
morning, there would be an instantaneous suspension of the transfer of
illegal drugs through that chain into America and into the hands of the
users, where tens of thousands are dying because of the drug abuse that
they are committing. That is how bad this drug stream is in America.
I cannot be convinced that it is not a national security problem. I
can't be convinced that it is not a social problem, a law enforcement
problem, a criminal problem, and an economic problem. We are allowing
these crimes against the humanity of the United States and turning a
deaf ear--a deaf ear--because we don't want to speak about how bad this
is because somebody over on that side will start calling names again.
Well, I don't think I ever got up in the morning without a bunch of
them calling me names before I ever got up--no matter how early--and I
am immune to that, but I think we need to speak the truth.

With regard to the offensiveness of fences and walls, and having
traveled almost all of this border and examined it for the prospects of
the need to build a fence, a wall, and a fence on our southern border,
I would recount, Mr. Speaker, to you what I saw from the helicopter
over El Paso.
The gentleman spoke and said that El Paso is the safest city in
America. I have to check the data on that, but I do recall that El Paso
is unusually safe in comparison to the other border cities between
Texas and Mexico or even between New Mexico, Arizona, California and
Mexico. Why would El Paso be an unusually safe city if it sits on the
border in the fashion that it does? And it does.
The gentleman from El Paso recounted that it is because they get
along with each other and because they have 25 percent immigrants in
his constituent population, and somehow they have reached this balance
of comity that they get along and so they don't commit crimes against
each other. I didn't hear him address the drug problem at all. He may
have and I missed it.
But I will submit that is not the reason why the crime rate is low in
El Paso. Anybody who would like to fly over the border and take a look
at that in El Paso can see why the crime rate is low. I recall
President Obama going down there and standing within about a mile of
the border a few years ago and making remarks. He said that some people
want to build a wall on the border, some want to build a fence, some
want to build a moat, and some way want to put alligators in it. That
was President Obama's statement. He was standing there, by the way,
facing north with his back to the border. Not very far away is a fence,
a canal, another fence, a security road, the Rio Grande river, another
fence, another security road, and another fence.
So if you have to get through all those fences and two bodies of
water that were flowing--when I looked at it--at a pretty brisk pace,
and I know it slows down during the low season, that would be the
reason they don't have a lot of illegal activity in El Paso because
they have probably the best security structures that we have between us
and Mexico. It is a testimony to why we need to build a fence, a wall,
and a fence. It is not a testimony as to why we don't, but a testimony
as to why we do.
If anybody wanted to look, and look at this objectively, perhaps the
gentleman from El Paso would show us the crime data on what the crimes
were in El Paso before they built the fence, the canal, the road, the
fence, the river, the road, and the fence. It is pretty hard to get
through that. You have got to be able to climb, swim, and maybe burrow
underneath one or two, and then you have got the traffic, the security
traffic that travels inside of that. The Border Patrol has that
traveled with their white with green striped vehicles there.
This is a secure barrier between El Paso and Mexico, and it has kept
El Paso safer than other border cities. I believe you will find, if you
look at the years before the security was built, that the crime rate
was higher than it is today in El Paso.
So if we want to really do this from an analytical perspective,
perhaps we could extrapolate some of those numbers and project that
kind of security to, oh, Laredo, for example, McAllen, Brownsville, and
maybe San Diego, which already has better crime rates now after they
built their barriers across Smuggler's Gulch. Everybody who has a fence
admits they are safer than before they had one.
There is another tragedy, Mr. Speaker, that I recall the gentleman
speaking to. He said that we should tear down the 600 miles of barrier
that we have. Well, it is the opposite. We need to build them up. But,
in any case, he said that those who study walls say they don't deter
illegal traffic coming across them. Indeed.
I wonder if the gentleman studied what was going on in Israel, the
fencing that they built in Israel, and if he

[[Page H868]]

happened to even notice the tweet that came out from Prime Minister
Netanyahu just a couple days ago. He said that they built a barrier to
protect them in Israel, and it is nearly 100 percent effective. Their
lives depend upon it. So they built an effective barrier, Mr. Speaker.
Anyone who is watching history knows this.
I hear the other side refer to a wall that we will build on the
Mexican border as they compare it to the Berlin Wall. I wonder if they
know enough about history to relate any other walls that have been
built in history.
Not quite a year ago, we had Victor Davis Hanson, one of my top two
favorite authors in the country and one of the deepest, most
thoughtful, well-read, and prolific writers of history that goes far
back to the Greek Peloponnesian era and beyond. He has a terrific
understanding of the history of the globe and how it unfolded,
especially to Western civilization and came to us. I said: Mr. Hanson,
I would like to know, I can think of the Berlin Wall as a wall that was
built to keep people in. It was built by Communists to keep people in.
Can you think of another wall in history that was built to keep people
in?
I look across the history that I know, the rest of the walls were
built to keep people out. Victor Davis Hanson thought for a little
while. He said: Well, one could note the wall, the fence, the barrier
between North and South Korea is at least in part built to keep people
in North Korea.
I don't disagree with that. It is just another case where Communists
had to lock their people up to keep them from freedom.
So I would challenge anyone who is listening, Mr. Speaker, dig
through your history books, Google this to the end of the Earth if you
like. I would like to know if there is another example of a fence or a
wall that has been built by a nation-state on its borders that is built
for the purpose of keeping people in--other than Berlin and the barrier
between North and South Korea.

In both cases, it was keeping Communists locked in a Communist nation
and keeping them from accessing the God-given liberty and freedom that
we enjoy here in this country. The rest of the walls throughout
history, including the Great Wall of China, were built to keep people
out.
The examples of that, in the Great Wall of China, would be that the
segments of the Great Wall of China were built by different emperors.
In fact, they were not a unified China during those years. I am going
back several hundred years before Christ. Different emperors built
different segments of the wall. They built them because they concluded
the Mongols were coming down from the north and were raiding the
Chinese. The Chinese decided they didn't want to be the subject of
those raids any longer.
When you are not defended like that, you have a couple of choices.
One, of course, is to submit and be killed, and that is not an option
for the survivors at least. Another is you can run raids up into the
Mongolian area and provide them a punishing deterrent to ever coming
back into China again. A third alternative was to build the Great Wall
of China.
They built it in segments. It had gaps in between it. By about 245
B.C., the first emperor of China, the unifier of China, Qin Shi Huang,
decided to connect all of these segments of the Great Wall of China, so
we have got one continuous wall. You could pull a chariot on top of it,
it was so big and so well built. That wall--we believed up until the
last few years--was 5,500 miles long, at least 2\1/2\ times as long as
we need to build on the Mexican border.
He connected that together. I am sure he had cheap labor. I don't
have any doubt about that. They may have worked for free and board and
room, but they connected the great walls of China. Their emperor, Qin
Shi Huang, established the continuity of that wall that now, by
satellite, Chinese scientists have identified it as it really was--
13,000 miles long.

{time} 1815

That is 13,000 miles. We need to build a dinky, little 2,000-mile
wall here--a fence, a wall, and a fence--and people say it is too
expensive. It doesn't cash flow. We can't possibly do that. It is too
hard. There are mountains on the border. There are complications. There
are little toads that need to jump across the border. There are long-
nosed bats that get confused if they have to fly over the top of it.
There are these little species out here that we should worry about. And
we have got an Indian reservation that spans both sides of that border.
That is Tohono O'Odham.
All of these complications right away would be too expensive. The
woe-is-me people come out. They have been manufacturing all these
reasons why it doesn't make sense to build a fence, a wall, and a fence
on the southern border, creating every kind of difficulty that you can
imagine.
I will just tell you, Mr. Speaker, in my lifetime, I started a
construction company in 1975. We are in the business of earthmoving and
structural concrete work. We do underground utilities of all kinds. We
know pretty well what it takes to do a job.
We bid jobs nearly every week, and we are out there with, let's say,
two underground utility crews, a farm drainage crew, and an earthmoving
crew, mix and match, according to the needs of the job we are doing.
Throughout the last more than 10 years, I have drawn up a design that
I think is the most effective way to build a wall on the southern
border, one that is cheap and effective and that will stand and last a
long time with very low and very little maintenance. I will just
briefly describe that for the Record, Mr. Speaker.
We have an ability to slip formed concrete. A lot of the curbs and
gutters that you see around on our streets aren't forms that are set up
and poured any longer with a concrete worker with a board pulling that
up on the edge of that 2-by-12 on the back. Instead, it is slip form,
where you simply drive the machine along, it scrapes the concrete off,
and you pour it with a low enough slump that it will stand in the mold
that you leave it in.
I propose that we go in and trench that 5 or 6 feet deep, and as we
do so with the trencher, we pull the slip form along with that. Pour
the trench full of concrete, 5 to 6 feet deep, so it is hard to dig
under it, and it also becomes a wall that stabilizes the vertical
sections that will go up above the Earth, and leave a slot in there so
we can drop in precast panels.
When that is done, you have got a footing that is 3 to 4 feet wide.
It has got a notch in it that drops down a foot or 18 inches that has a
6- or 7-inch gap to receive the precast concrete panels.
The precast concrete panels are poured pretty much on site, where
they don't have to be moved very much. As you do that, you move along
and pour the concrete panels. When they are cured, you just take a
crane or an excavator and pick them up one at a time to drop them into
the slot. Drop the next one into a slot.
They are tongue and groove. You lay that all out along the border.
And yes, you have to tie it in so that it doesn't tip on you
vertically. You have to engineer it. The strongest force on that wall
isn't going to be people trying to get through or over it, it is the
wind force on the full face of the wall that you have to design for.
We can do all of that, and it is simple. Then, with that kind of a
pace, even the crews that we have today in our little, old construction
company--and I will say for the record, Mr. Speaker, I am not proposing
that King Construction build this, but I am asserting that it is not
expensive, it is not complicated, and many companies in America have
the full capability of building a good wall on the border that will
stand for a long time. But, in any case, we slip form that footing
foundation with the open slot in it, and then we drop the precast
panels in. They can be whatever height the President of the United
States would like. If he wants a 12-foot wall, we can build that, and I
can price that out and put an estimate in place.
As I mentioned to the Secretary the other day, we are not proposing
that we build it for the price I put into his hands, but if you call my
bluff, we will. His answer was: Well, will you build 10 miles? I said:
No, we want a thousand miles.
That is how good I think my estimate is. Our word would be good. But
we will find cheaper bids out there if we put this together right. So
we can put this together for substantially less

[[Page H869]]

than I am hearing from this gentleman. I don't know where he is getting
his numbers. Mine are real. We cranked them out in the sophisticated
software bidding package that King Construction uses for multiple jobs
that are going on. Every week, we are bidding some kind of jobs.
When I stood on the floor here 10 years ago and said that we will
build a wall with a 5-foot foundation in it, a slot in it, and precast
panels, a functional 12-foot height, 6-inch wide concrete with wire on
top, and we can do that for $1.3 million a mile. That is for the
foundation, the wall only. That is not for right-of-way acquisition,
that is not for maintenance roads, that is not for all the bells and
whistles that we need, or for the fence on either side that I believe
we need, but that is what the wall would cost--roughly in the area of
$1.3 million a mile.
If that doesn't sound plausible, Mr. Speaker, I will put this in a
perspective for everybody that is listening here. We are just finishing
up, and will here, I guess, a year from this fall, almost 300 miles of
highway across the middle of Iowa through expensive cornfields. It is
interstate-equivalent. It is four lanes. It is all built with the
medians and the ditches.
When you look at an interstate highway, first, you have to by the
right-of-way. Then you have to do the environmental and archeological
tests. Then you do the engineering. Then you have the contracts. Then
you have to do the clearing and grubbing. You strip the topsoil,
stockpile it, move the Earth, and then when that is done, you go in and
put in any subgrade that you have got.
Then you pave, then you shoulder it. Then you seed it. While all this
is going on, then you paint the stripes on it, put the signs up, and
you put a fence on either side of that. Then you cut the ribbon, and it
is open to traffic. You are hearing people talk about a $20 or $30
billion project to build a 2,000-mile wall on the southern border.

I will submit, Mr. Speaker, this: we built that highway through the
center of Iowa for roughly 300 miles for an average cost of something
slightly less than $4 million a mile. That is buying the right-of-way
going through Iowa cornfields, not the desert, and that is all of the
engineering, the earthmoving, the paving for our highway strength
structure.
Can anybody think that, at $4 million a mile to build an interstate,
you can't build a fence for about $1.3? I will tell you that, in the $2
million a mile category, we will have a fence, a wall, and a fence on
80 percent of that southern border.
And there will be maybe 20 percent of that, and probably not more
than 20 percent of that, that is tougher than that, and that is rock
and it is mountain. Some of it is semivertical. What I have long said
is: Let's build that fence, the wall, and the fence until they stop
going around the end.
You don't have to commit to a thousand-mile barrier right away and
build it out into the Gulf at the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico
where the Rio Grande dumps in or run it into the Pacific Ocean in San
Diego, although those are probably good places to have it. You build it
until they stop going around the end.
If you build it into the mountain and the stone and they decide it is
too hard to travel all that way and climb those mountains, you don't
need to build it any further. But when they start going around the end,
then you build it.
We can build right over the top of the mountains, if we need to. We
can put that foundation in there and drop the panels in right up nearly
vertical face, if we need to. It is a lot more design and is expensive.
Or, we can build the wall around the base of the mountain, where it
makes more sense to do that.
In some places, we probably won't need to build one for a long time,
if ever, but let's build it where it's cheap and fast and where there
is a lot of traffic. Let's shut it all off, Mr. Speaker, and let's do
so for a cheap and economic price of a good concrete wall that will
last for a century or more standing there with very little maintenance.
And yes, I think we should have vibration sensors, and I think we
ought to have infrared where we need it. I think we ought to have
cameras where it makes sense. We need people to patrol that. That all
goes with the package.
I will say, as I said to President Trump more than a month ago, we
build the wall until they stop going around the end. This is the
centerpiece of our border security. And then all of the other things we
do with sensors and lights and sensing wire on top of the wall, all of
that are accessories to the centerpiece, which is the concrete wall.
Donald Trump never said a fence. I am going to build you a fence. He
said wall. Some of his people, usually it is the ones that come from
more to the left of the Republican center than those who come from the
right of the Republican center, will say: Well, he really meant
virtual. He didn't really mean that we are going to build a wall. It
might be a fence, or there might be places where we don't really need
to do anything. You will hear all of that. They are saying that because
they never believed in border security.
If you remember, Mr. Speaker, there was a document that was put out
shortly after the election in 2012, in November of 2012, called the
autopsy report. That autopsy report gave an assignment to Republicans
that said you have to do outreach to certain groups of people, and you
have to play identity politics. Don't be caught pandering, but play
identity politics, and we shouldn't be securing the border because that
offends people that want to cross it legally.
That was the message that was driven out of there. It wasn't based on
polling and data and statistics--at least not the data that I watched.
Instead, it was a product of the party itself.
I bring this up not to turn any heat up on anyone but to illustrate
that the very election of Donald Trump as President of the United
States refutes that autopsy report received in 2012. It says that all
people want to live in a lawful society, except for the people who are
breaking the law.
We want to live in a lawful society. We want a peaceful society. We
don't want violence. We don't want drugs. We don't want heads lined up
on the border. We don't want to have the kind of slaughter over drug
wars in the United States that has been taking place in Mexico far too
many years.
When they report 100,000 people killed over the last decade or so in
the drug wars in Mexico, and, by the way, the $60-plus billion of drugs
a year that come into America, there is also that same amount of money
that is wired back to Mexico. That is either laundered drug money or
the fruit of the wages of people who are working in America sending
their wages out of the United States.
That is not necessarily an economic boon for us when you see $60
billion worth of drugs ruining the lives of American drug addicts and
$60 billion worth of wages or drug money going back to funnel into and
fuel the economy of Mexico. That is stupid for the United States of
America to accept that kind of transfer of a massive transfer of wealth
and that destruction of our own people.
As bad as it is, 100,000 Mexicans killed in the drugs wars over the
last decade or perhaps a little less than that, many more Americans
have died because of drug overdoses in that period of time. And do we
shed a tear for them? We should. And there are others we should shed a
tear for, Mr. Speaker.
There are others like Kate Steinle, a beautiful brown-haired, blue-
eyed, 32-year-old lady out with her father along the wharf in San
Francisco. If I can remember his name--Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is
his name--was deported at least five times from the United States for
committing felonies.

And what did he do? He came back into the United States, and he went
to a sanctuary city, San Francisco, that had put out the beacon in the
advisement that said: Come to our city. We will protect you. We will
not let Federal immigration officials disturb your life here. We have
hearts for people who are criminals, who are felons violating American
laws with impunity being deported and coming back into America.
So he is living in a sanctuary city in San Francisco. He shot Kate
Steinle in the back, and she fell and died in her father's arms, this
beautiful young lady. When I saw that story, when it came up on my
Twitter account that day, I looked at that and re-tweeted the story
with a quote that said: This will make you cry, too.

[[Page H870]]

Just sitting alone, reading my email, when I saw that story, it made
me cry, Mr. Speaker, because I know that Kate Steinle is not 1 of the
124 who her father, Jim Steinle, spoke of when he so courageously
testified before the House Judiciary Committee. I give him great credit
for having the courage to do so, and to commemorate his daughter's
life. She is not 1 of 124, which were essentially undocumented who were
documented to be released who committed homicide after they had been
released by our previous administration.
That number is not 124. Mr. Speaker, that number is in the thousands.
It is in the thousands--the Americans who died at the hands of criminal
aliens who are in the United States illegally committing crimes
against. And I call them Americans. Sometimes they are green card
holders, lawful permanent residents.

{time} 1830

Sometimes they are here on a visa. They are legally in the United
States. Sometimes they are illegal aliens that also crept into America
that die at the hands of those who should not be here.
Now, from where I stand, every life that has been sacrificed, that
has been taken at the hand of someone who is unlawfully present in the
United States of America, every life could have been saved. Every crime
is a preventable crime, and I have lived that and believed that for a
long time, Mr. Speaker.
As I came to this Congress some 14 years ago, I listened to the
witnesses before the Immigration Subcommittee, and the witnesses would
continually testify about how many lives were lost in the Arizona
desert as people were trying to sneak into America. Having snuck across
the border and they are trying to creep through the desert, often the
heat will affect them, and they will be without water and they will die
of exposure or exhaustion. The numbers went from roughly 200 a year in
the Arizona desert, I recall them going up to as high as 450. That
testimony would come almost every hearing, someone would come in and
testify to the number of lives lost on an annual basis in the Arizona
desert.
I began to wonder, as I would hear the news stories in the United
States of the Kate Steinles and the Jamiel Shaws--Jamiel Shaw's son,
Jas Shaw, a 17-year-old high school football star who was killed on the
streets in southern California at the hand of a Mexican drug gang
member who had been given the assignment to go out and kill a Black
person. Jas, the son, had just spoken to his father on the cell phone
and said: I will be home in just a few minutes, Dad.
But he never came home because he was shot in the head and killed up
the street a block or two from his home because he was Black, because
the assignment to his murderer was to go kill a Black person. Jamiel
Shaw will never, never forget those days. Neither will Jas's mother,
who was serving in the military and, I believe, deployed at the time.
Both of them have testified here in the United States Congress.
There are others. Sarah Root from Modale, Iowa, a perfect 4.0 grade
point average, studying criminal investigation at Bellevue University
in Omaha. I believe the date that she graduated would have been January
30, 2016. The next day she was run over and brutally killed by a drag
racing, illegal alien, Mejia--Eswin, I believe his first name was,
Mejia--who had 2\1/2\ times the legal blood alcohol content. He was
drag racing, and he ran Sarah Root, this perfect young woman with the
beginning of her adult life set up perfectly in front of her, the only
daughter of her father, Scott, and her mother, Michelle. She had a
brother, Scotty. Sarah's parents have both testified also before the
House Committee on the Judiciary.
This is personal, Mr. Speaker. It is personal to these families that
have lost a loved one that they know would be alive today if the
administrations had enforced existing immigration laws.
When I read the very, very sad story in Cottonwood, Minnesota,
southwest Minnesota, not very far from my district, several years ago
where a schoolbus full of kids was taking kids home from school, from
after school, and an illegal alien who had twice encountered law
enforcement and twice been released on the streets because the local
law enforcement decided ``it is not my job,'' ran the schoolbus off the
road and into the ditch, and the bus rolled over. Four grade-school
children were killed up by Cottonwood, Minnesota: a brother and a
sister, and then separate children from two other families. Three
families grieving at the tragic, horrible death of their grade-school
children.
If we had enforced our immigration laws, those children would be
alive today. They would be living, laughing, loving, studying, maybe
teaching. They would be falling in love and doing all of the things
that we want them to do as Americans, but their lives were snuffed out
because we had an administration that refuses to enforce the law.
Others would say: Well, Congressman King, you cannot assert that it
is because of illegal activity or illegal aliens in America that
brought about the death of those four children in Cottonwood,
Minnesota, or the death of Sarah Root from Modale, Iowa, or the death
of Kate Steinle in San Francisco, or Jas Shaw, or Brandon Mendoza, or
Dominic Durden.
All of their lives and thousands more have been lost because we
refused to enforce immigration law.
They tell me: No, crimes will be committed, bad things will happen;
it has got nothing to do with not enforcing immigration law.
My answer to them is, Mr. Speaker: Then you go tell those parents in
Cottonwood, Minnesota, that their children would still be dead if we
had deported the perpetrator who killed them. You go tell the parents
of Kate Steinle that she would still be dead if Juan Francisco Lopez-
Sanchez had been effectively deported or locked up for a mandatory 5-
year sentence, as we have written into Kate's law, that Kate would
still be dead if we had enforced such a law on Sanchez. Or go tell the
mother of Brandon Mendoza that her fine and proud law enforcement son
would still be dead if we had deported the illegal who ran him down
that day. Or tell Jamiel Shaw that his son, Jas, would still be dead if
we had deported the illegal alien who murdered his son on the street in
his neighborhood.
We know better, Mr. Speaker.
This is personal. It is personal in the lives of thousands of
families in America who are suffering thousands of incidents of their
grief that will be part of their lives. For generations, they will look
back, and they will grieve for those lost family members who will not
be there on Easter or on Christmas or on Thanksgiving, and they will
grieve for the grandchildren who were never born, and they will call
upon their surviving brothers and sisters: Now you are responsible to
be the parents of the grandchildren for the parents who lost their
daughter or lost their son.
That is what is at stake here, Mr. Speaker.
We are a nation of laws, but we are, today, a nation of not yet fully
enforced laws, and we have had a President in the past who seemed to
want to bring in the maximum number of illegal aliens and leave them
here and keep them here. He never demonstrated a desire to enforce the
law as he opened up the borders of America to people who are coming
from terrorist-spawning countries. Now, thankfully, we have Donald
Trump, who has stepped up to close those borders back down again and
get a handle on this migration so that the American people can be
safer. But we will be a lot safer with a fence, a wall, and a fence on
our southern border.

By the way, at this point now, the United States is spending,
annually, $13.4 billion a year--that is billion with a B--to secure our
southern border, and we are getting perhaps 25 percent enforcement
efficiency in that southern border--25 percent. That, by the way, is
the testimony of the Border Patrol before the Committee on the
Judiciary. It is not a number that is brought up from someone who wants
to be critical of them.
I salute the Border Patrol. They have got a tough job. But their
operation has not been managed for the purpose of securing our border
and achieving border security. They have tried to redefine it as to
something else.
Oh, $13.4 billion a year spent on our 2,000-mile southern border.
Now, somebody out there, Mr. Speaker, has done the math on that and
divided 2,000 miles into $13.4 billion. That comes to $6.7 million a
mile to secure our southern border, $6.7 million a mile for every

[[Page H871]]

mile every year, day and night--$6.7 million.
I would just ask people, contemplate that cost, that heavy cost, $6.7
million a mile. What can you buy for that?
Well, you can buy an interstate highway, and you can have $2.7
million left over and change per mile. We can take one annual budget of
our southern border--if we do what Mr. O'Rourke wants to do and open
the border, we can lay the Border Patrol off for a year, take that $6.7
million a mile, the $13.4 billion, and we can build an interstate
highway the full length of that and have $2.7 million a mile left over.
That is how much money is being spent on the southern border to get 25
percent efficiency.
You cannot convince me that if we spend $1.3 million a mile for the
wall--if we dial that up to 2 or a little more than $2 million a mile
so we can cover a fence on either side of that wall and access roads
that would be built out of necessity to build it and to maintain it and
to patrol it--a couple million dollars a mile on that, wouldn't give us
something pretty close to Israeli-level border security. That is nearly
100 percent. That is up into the 99 percentile and beyond that into the
efficiency of the security of our border. Of course we could get that
kind of security on our border.
It doesn't mean we just build it and walk away. People on that side
would like to have you think that, that somehow we would just build a
wall and walk away and we leave the ladders put up on the south side of
the border. No, we would maintain that. We would patrol it. We would
fly it. We would patrol it with vehicles. We would have vibration
sensors. We would put wire on top, and that wire on top would signal to
us if anybody grounded that wire, tried to breach that, touch that
wire, brought it to the ground. It would tell us in the control centers
exactly where that breach was attempted to take place. We would zero
our enforcement in on them and we would enforce it, and we would
maintain it so that it functions 100 percent all the time.
I see the fence we have got on the border now, and sometimes they
will come on the other side, take a set of wire cutters, cut themselves
a gate through a chain-link fence. I believe I saw this in Lukeville,
Arizona. There they take a chain and thread it through the chain-link
fence, put a padlock on it, and it is their personal gate to come and
go into America whenever they see fit, with a great, big huge brown
mastiff on a bigger chain yet laying there by that gate with a growl
under his throat waiting for anybody who might decide they want to walk
through that gate in the fence.
We can do a lot better. We will do a lot better, $6.7 million a mile.
Let me pose this another way for people who have a different way of
putting images in their head.
For me, I live out in the country in Iowa. We have gravel roads every
mile, in the flat country at least. From where I live, my west road
runs a mile out there to the intersection where it goes on in four
directions, gravel road.
So let's just say that General Kelly, Secretary Kelly, came to me and
he said: Steve, I want you to guard your west mile, and I want you to
secure that border so that 25 percent of the people that are trying to
get across there will be interdicted and won't be able to get across
that border. So what would you take to give me that level of security
for a mile of road and, say, a mile, the west gravel road from my
house?
He said: I have got a bid. I will give you $6.7 million--that is the
average going rate for a mile--and you will get that every year. By the
way, we do our budgets on a 10-year contract, so I will give you $67
million to secure 1 mile of Iowa gravel road.
Do you think I could secure that border for $67 million for 10 years?
And do you think that I would hire a lot of people to sit there in
their humvees and talk back and forth on the radio and let people walk
around them coming across that border if my job was to secure it? No. I
would build a fence, a wall, and a fence on that mile. I would spend
less than $2 million for that mile.
Yes, I would hire a border patrol, and I would put the bells and
whistles, the accessories on that wall so that we had the warning
signals that are there. I would minimize the labor; I would maximize
the technology. But I would put the resources there to get the job done
100 percent, not 25 percent, and I could do it for, you know, a lot
less than $6.7 million per mile per year. It wouldn't take a $67
million contract for a 10-year contract to secure that border.
Infrastructure does its job. You build the wall.
Remember President Obama, he said he had prosecutorial discretion,
and so he created these great classes of people and violated the
Constitution and granted a waiver for the application of our criminal
laws against people who had come into the United States illegally. And
he said: Well, we are doing this on a case-by-case basis.
Janet Napolitano wrote the memo. We have got the ICE memo or the
Napolitano memo that lays out the exemptions to the law. Seven times in
there she wrote, ``on an individual basis only.'' That is in there
because she knows that the court case turns on prosecutorial
discretion, which can only be applied if you are not going to enforce
the law, the prosecutors do have discretion. If it is not practical to
do so, if you don't have the resources, they should use the resources
to their best advantage. You can do that on an individual basis and be
within the law and be constitutional.
But once you have a President Obama creating huge classes of people
that number in the hundreds of thousands--in fact, in the millions--
then what you have, Mr. Speaker, is a violation of the law and the
Constitution, and it is the executive branch, the President of the
United States making up law as he goes along and violating the
separation of powers.

{time} 1845

Well, through that, when the President says: I have prosecutorial
discretion, and anybody who walks across the border is not going to be
troubled. We will meet them with the welcome wagon and fly them to any
State in the Union they choose--that happens, Mr. Speaker--it is real.
That is not a fabrication or an embellishment. It is even worse than
that.
But what benefit does a wall have? In addition to, it provides
security of the United States of America. A wall doesn't have
prosecutorial discretion. We make up its mind when we build the wall.
And if they can't get across there, and we maintain and protect it,
then we get the effectiveness of it, regardless of who the President
is. And if we get a President in the future who doesn't secure and
maintain and enforce the wall, then we have a serious cause that we can
point to rather than a vague legal argument manufactured by a former
adjunct professor who taught constitutional law at the University of
Chicago.
And so, Mr. Speaker, building a fence, a wall, and a fence on our
southern border is a wise and prudent thing to do. It will pay for
itself before we can even get it built. It will dramatically slow down
the illegal drugs that are coming into America that come from or
through Mexico. Remember, 80 to 90 percent of them. Dramatically slow
them down. The illegal traffic that is coming in, it will shut off most
all of that. I would agree with the gentleman from El Paso that we
should then beef up our ports of entry so we can facilitate a faster
flow of legal traffic in and out of America.
But the American people need to decide who is coming into America and
who is leaving America. We should not have an immigration policy that
is established by the people who live anywhere but America or by the
people who are anything but citizens of the United States. The citizens
of America should make this decision through their elected
representatives by exercising the enumerated power in the Constitution
that Congress has to establish immigration laws.
Internally, our domestic laws need to be enforced. And we need to
recruit local law enforcement by expanding the 287(g) program and the
Secure Communities program. We need to incorporate the city police, the
county sheriff and deputy force, and the highway patrol, or Division of
Criminal Investigation--Department of Public Safety officers, as Texas
has--all to work with our Federal officers, so it is a seamless network
working together to provide secure communities in America, restore the
respect for the rule of law, shut down the flow of drugs

[[Page H872]]

into the United States, shut off the illegal traffic into America, shut
off the terrorists who are sneaking into America because the easiest
and most reliable way for them to get here is across our southern
border. If we do all of that, there will be respect for both countries
that will be established.
And I would say this to President Trump. And that is, he is a
builder, I am a builder. I don't have any doubt about how to build that
wall or to build the fences on the south and north side of that so that
we have two no-man's lands to patrol. I don't know that he has any
doubt about it either. He has said that he will build a big, beautiful
wall.
Well, I am looking for the architect's ideas on beauty. That is not
my forte. But the structural functionality and the efficiency of its
construction is my forte. And I encourage that we draw up the plans and
designs for this and let contracts to those contractors who can
effectively and efficiently do this in a competitive low-bid fashion
with a proper inspection, and we will build that barrier that can stand
for a long time, designed to keep people and contraband out, as every
other wall in the history of the world, including the Great Wall of
China and the walls that were built in northern England and those
across northern Germany. The Romans built walls there to protect
themselves as well.
Each wall, with the exception of those designed by communists to keep
their subjects in, has been designed to keep people out. There is a
huge moral difference between a wall to keep people in and a wall to
keep criminals, terrorists, and also decent people, and contraband out.
It is a simple equation.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention here this evening on this
topic. I look forward to the construction of the fence, the wall, and
the fence on our southern border, and the restoration of the respect
for the rule of law.
I yield back the balance of my time.

____________________