[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 14 (Wednesday, January 23, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H1001-H1002]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        STATIC WALLS DON'T WORK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.

[[Page H1002]]

  

  Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, well, the President is increasingly 
focused in messaging on the need for the wall as being the shipment of 
illegal drugs into the United States of America and the drug epidemic. 
I think we are all concerned about that, and we would all like to do 
something effective to deal with it.
  Now, as his current acting chief of staff said when he was a Member 
of Congress about a wall: You go under--tunnels--you go through or 
over, and what you need is more manpower, more technology.
  So the President says we need a stupid, static wall at extraordinary 
costs. Actually, we need something else. What we need are effective 
measures.
  The Department of Homeland Security says they need $5 billion to 
reconfigure our ports of entry and to bring in new technology.
  El Chapo's lieutenants and others have testified at his trial in New 
York they don't go across remote desert areas. They buy semi-tractor 
trailers and they reconfigure them and bring them through the ports of 
entry. They are very efficient. And that is how they are getting drugs 
into this country.
  We lack the personnel and the equipment to detect these shipments. So 
how about investing there?
  Oh, and by the way, the people who are screening at the ports of 
entry, 8 percent of the vehicles is all they can screen today. Probably 
less today because they aren't getting paid, and some of them can't 
show up to work because they can't hire childcare or they can't fix 
their car to get to work or something else.
  So the President is concerned? Really? I don't think so.
  And then there is another way that drugs are more and more frequently 
coming into our country. As you can see from this display of drugs 
here, the Coast Guard intercepted $5.6 billion of drugs coming in on 
maritime routes last year. But the retiring Commandant said that is 
only about 20 percent of the drug shipments we can identify. We don't 
have the personnel or the proper equipment to intercept the other 80 
percent.
  Oh, by the way, the Coast Guard, they are not getting paid either.
  But the President is concerned. Well, has he talked about the need to 
give more resources to the United States Coast Guard?
  So, hey, it would be great if they get $5.7 billion, and that is one-
fifth of the drugs they can identify. That would be $25 billion of 
drugs being intercepted next year if they had the equipment, the 
personnel they needed--five times the cost of a stupid, static wall.
  So if the President is truly concerned about cartels and Asian mobs 
shipping drugs into the United States, he should be talking about 
putting money where it is needed: at the ports of entry, the Coast 
Guard for maritime interception, and other places where it would be 
more effective.
  That is the position of the Democrats. We want to have effective 21st 
century border security, not a failed wall. That has been tried by a 
number of civilizations.
  Static walls don't work. Let's do real things to deal with the real 
problem.

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