[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 15 (Thursday, January 24, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H1204-H1206]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN AND STATUS OF WALL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Underwood). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman 
from Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to address the current 
government shutdown and the status of the government wall.
  It is kind of a frustrating issue to address, because there is so 
much misinformation out there. The first thing I will address is the 
unpaid employees. We can pay the unpaid employees, particularly the 
employees who are working, if we would pass a bill now. We do not have 
to end this whole thing.
  There is a wonderful bill, H.R. 271, introduced by Congressman 
Brooks--I am a cosponsor--that will immediately pay all of the current, 
working Federal employees.
  I do not have the power to put that bill on the floor, because I am 
just a regular Congressman from Wisconsin. But the majority leader, if 
you see him, could put that bill on the floor any time. And if the real 
concern here is for the Federal employees who work in our airports, who 
work in the Coast Guard, who work in our prisons--many of whom I know 
and are great people--if these people really cared about them, that 
bill would be on the floor next Tuesday and winging its way to 
President Trump's desk by this time next week.
  It is a mystery to me why, when so many politicians purport to care 
about the Federal employees, they will not bring forth this bill to pay 
them without having the whole issue solved.
  The next issue I am going to address is these people who say 
President Trump cannot compromise. I don't know whether they haven't 
been paying attention the last 2 years, or whether they just love to 
make things up.
  For the public to understand, under normal circumstances if we are 
going to build a wall, the wall is in what we call an appropriation 
bill, or what people back home would refer to as a budget. President 
Trump ran on the wall, and the wall is necessary, and we will talk 
about that in a second. Nevertheless, President Trump would have wanted 
funding for this wall in some budget.
  For his first 2 years, President Trump was sent budgets by Congress, 
or spending bills by Congress, that did not contain a wall. That was 
frustrating to him, but because he did not want to shut down the 
government, and did not want to penalize the government employees, 
President Trump, particularly, with a big omnibus bill about a year 
ago, signed big spending bills without a wall because he compromised.
  You will recall that originally people talked about this wall being 
$20 billion. President Trump is now asking for $5.7 billion. In the 
last week, I have taken time to meet with the former head of the Border 
Patrol. I have been on the Arizona border, and it disappoints the 
experts in the field, the people on the border themselves, that Donald 
Trump has compromised so much as to want only funding for a fraction of 
the wall.
  So I would say, coming down from $20 billion to $5.7 billion is a big 
compromise. I would say twice signing entire appropriations for his 
first 2 years in office without the wall, is a big compromise by 
President Trump.

[[Page H1205]]

  President Trump, last Saturday, also decided to extend DACA, and 
decided to extend temporary protected status on people. Now, what I 
found out from listening to the Border Patrol is that when you talk 
about DACA, insofar as the President talks about it, it encourages more 
people to come here from south of the border because they will assume 
DACA is a permanent thing, and that more and more people will be added 
to it.
  But, despite the fact that it might have been irresponsible to talk 
about DACA and extending it again, President Trump, in an effort to 
compromise, decided to throw these other policy items in the mix on 
Saturday.
  I sometimes slip, instead of calling President Trump the Commander in 
Chief, I call him the compromiser in chief, because he has given so 
much to twice sign annual bills without funding for the wall and asked 
for funding for only a fraction of the wall.
  When I was down on the border, I saw places where the wall needed 
extensions. President Trump is not asking for enough money for the 
extensions that the Border Patrol needs. But in the interest of 
compromise, President Trump has asked for $5.7 billion. I will talk in 
a second about how much money that is. I know for me, $5.7 billion is a 
huge amount of money. But let's talk about what other people are 
willing to vote on around here.
  Madam Speaker, $5.7 billion for the wall is about one-seventh of what 
we spend every year on foreign aid. I never hear Congressmen come up 
here and rail against all the money we are spending on foreign aid and 
how we could do wonderful things if we only kept that money at home. 
But all of a sudden, with one-seventh of the cost of foreign aid, we 
have a battery of people on the other side of the aisle saying we could 
do so many better things with that money, when in the wink of an eye, 
they are going to pass appropriation bills spending seven times that 
much, year, after year, after year, after year on foreign aid.
  President Trump greatly increased the defense budget--more than I 
would have liked. I complained about it a little bit. The funding for 
the wall would be about one-twelfth of the increase--not the total 
budget--the increase in the defense budget under President Trump.
  Again, I objected. Almost nobody around here, however, objected to 
this large increase in the defense budget. But now it comes to the 
wall, and all of a sudden, they can't bring themselves to vote for it.
  Is this a crisis? You bet it is a crisis. Like I said, I was down on 
the border last week in Sasabe, Arizona. First of all, we have a huge 
cost to the government at the border. People are coming across the 
border using our medical facilities. The Governor of California has 
outright said he will be happy to have all of the immigrants. I guess 
everybody in the Western Hemisphere can come to California and have the 
government, which to a certain extent means the Federal Government, pay 
for medical costs.

  Madam Speaker, 90 percent of the heroin comes across the southern 
border. Now, you hear people say that most of that is at selected 
points of entry. But the reason most of the heroin comes in at selected 
points of entry is because we are not catching virtually anybody 
between the points of entry. They are just walking in where there is no 
wall.
  I don't know--given the huge number of people who die of heroin every 
year--that we can say that not putting walls in the gaps in the current 
system is not something that is necessary and not something that we 
need to do to solve that heroin crisis.
  There are a lot of parts of that heroin crisis, but when that amount 
of heroin is coming across south of the border, part of the answer is 
to complete the wall.
  We are getting more and more children on our border. What is going on 
right now, so people understand, is parents are sending their children 
to the border. And if the children come to the border, which is all the 
easier, because they may have somebody escort them to the border, we 
will take those children and deliver them to a relative around the 
country.
  I would say if a child is taking the hazardous trek, albeit helped 
along the way, to come to the United States, and the parents are 
sending the children with somebody who may not be their relative, 
sending their children because once the children are here, the children 
can say they are living in America, and the parents can come here under 
the family rules and join them; it is a huge crisis.
  Other people coming and trying to get between the points of entry are 
frequently found dying. I have been told--I haven't confirmed it--that 
in the Tucson sector alone, in the last 15 or 16 years, over 2,000 
people have been found dead of dehydration, starvation, and what have 
you. That is what you call a humanitarian crisis.

                              {time}  1830

  The overall cost on our overburdened government--different people can 
argue how much illegal immigrants cost this country. The Heritage 
Foundation--some people may not agree with them--feels it is over $50 
billion a year.
  Madam Speaker, when it is costing us $50 billion a year between the 
healthcare costs, the welfare costs, the education costs, and the 
criminal justice costs, how can you not spend $5.7 billion to begin to 
solve this crisis?
  The next thing to address, it is sometimes said, and people say it to 
my right, that everybody wants to do something about the border. I 
question that, given what other people are saying.
  It may surprise Americans out there to know that there are a lot of 
people out there who buy into the idea that the United States can be 
kind of like Europe and we can have open borders and everybody can walk 
wherever they want.
  How do we know this? All around the country we have sanctuary cities 
in which mayors or sanctuary counties in which county executives or, in 
the case of California, a whole State in which local officials are 
forbidden to ask people whether they are here legally or not. The only 
explanation for that is Americans are electing people around the 
country who do not believe in borders and who are perfectly happy to 
have tens of millions of people come across our southern border, some 
good, some not so good.
  But, obviously, these people do not believe in border security. If 
you believe in border security, Madam Speaker, the Governor of 
California would not be openly inviting everybody to come to California 
for free medical care.
  It is clear that a lot of people out there do not want a closed 
border.
  Another piece of evidence for that, Madam Speaker, is you have 
Members of Congress saying we should get rid of ICE and get rid of 
immigration enforcement. People who publicly say we should get rid of 
immigration enforcement--even though it is a preposterous idea, of 
course--border security is not a priority for them. They are the type 
of people who, on examining the situation, can see no reason why we 
cannot accept 5, 10, 15, or 20 million other illegal immigrants across 
the border.
  By the way, one other thing I found out talking to Border Patrol is 
nobody knows exactly how many illegal immigrants are in the country. 
Madam Speaker, you sometimes heard it said 11 million, 12 million. It 
could be 15 million, or it could be 20 million. We really aren't 
counting, and the people on the border, Border Patrol themselves, will 
admit that they don't know how many people are coming across the 
border.
  Now, Madam Speaker, the next thing you hear is: Oh, I care about 
border security. I just don't believe in the wall.
  Why don't I believe that? I don't believe that they really care about 
border security because walls work.
  Now, behind me, I have pictures of four parts of a wall in other 
parts of the world.
  Here we have a wonderful wall which cut illegal immigration by over 
90 percent in the San Diego-Tijuana area. That wall works.
  I was in Nogales, Arizona. Here is a wall that was recently 
refurbished, and that wall works. Unfortunately, as you will notice, 
the wall ends, and the Border Patrol and the ranchers who live near 
this area, one of whom I recently talked to, said all of a sudden MS-13 
showed up and they had to give them dinner at the ranch. These people 
desperately want this wall to be extended a little bit.
  Here we have more wall in Sasabe, Arizona.

[[Page H1206]]

  Here we have a wall that has cut illegal immigration down to almost 
nothing in Israel.
  I was not able to find a wall, which has also been successful--I have 
got to get a picture. We will be back next week with a picture of a 
wall between Jordan and Syria.
  Madam Speaker, you might say: Why are you talking about a wall 
between Jordan and Syria? Because a lot of that wall was paid for by 
the United States.
  Now, why did the United States have no problem funding a wall in San 
Diego or a wall in Sasabe or upgrading the wall in Nogales? Many of my 
colleagues on the right side of me here had no problem voting for these 
walls. But there is something different about these walls from the 
walls President Trump wants. These walls were proposed by somebody 
other than President Trump.
  When it was President Clinton proposing to build a wall in San Diego, 
people didn't say it was immoral to have a wall.
  When President Obama was extending or upgrading the wall in Nogales, 
Arizona, people didn't say: ``President Obama is an immoral person. 
Walls look bad.'' You never even heard about it. I didn't know about it 
until a couple weeks ago.
  When you have a wall going up in Sasabe, which desperately has to be 
extended, that wall was built under President Bush, under appropriation 
bills, and not a peep. Nobody said it was immoral when President Bush 
built a wall.
  So, Madam Speaker, now we get down to, I reluctantly conclude, 
because I have to wonder when you have these other successful walls 
around the world, when we have no problem voting for walls for Jordan 
for goodness' sake, why, all of a sudden in this large budget--and 
every budget has things in it we don't like. Why, all of a sudden, do 
we go through all this heartburn, put all these Federal employees 
through financial distress, why do we do it when, in the past, we have 
built walls all the time? I have to conclude, sadly, part of it is some 
people want President Trump to fail.
  The fact that not building a wall means all that much more heroin 
across the border, it means many more people sneaking across the border 
or escorted across the border by the Mexican cartels--and, by the way, 
today the Mexican cartels run the border.
  So to come in this country means you are hostage for awhile to the 
Mexican cartels, which may be one of the reasons why they don't do a 
very good job of protecting the women down there. It is why it can be 
very expensive for people. It is why people who try to escort you 
across the border who aren't a member of the cartel, if they are 
caught, will be killed and, apparently, in some cases, skinned alive. 
But we don't want to stop the current situation.

  Again, the folks back home will have to wonder: Why can people build 
a wall in Jordan, why can we let President Clinton build a wall in San 
Diego which is very effective, why can we let President Bush build a 
wall, why can we let President Obama upgrade our walls, but all of a 
sudden, President Trump becomes President and we have to have a 
shutdown because we can't vote for a budget with a wall in it?
  I have voted for spending bills under chief executives who were 
Democrats and Republicans, and I usually agree with the Republicans, 
but it never occurred to me to vote against a spending bill because I 
didn't like other policies of the chief executive.
  So here we have it, Madam Speaker. We will refresh your memory one 
more time: walls work. They work in Israel; they work in San Diego; and 
they work in Nogales.
  We have paid for many walls both in this country and in other 
countries; and other countries build walls, and they are successful.
  If we do not build a wall, we will continue to have people starve as 
they try to come in here inappropriately. We will continue to have bad 
people come across the border who commit crimes. We will continue to 
have people come across the border who are here for our generous 
welfare benefits.
  This is something that didn't occur to me until I got down to the 
border and talked to Customs. They said that, when you look in people's 
wallets and you look in people's purses, they find food stamps--EBT 
cards--in those purses. In other words, people are coming here to get 
our welfare benefits.
  It would be much better if we completed the wall and funneled people 
through the normal entry points so we could keep some of the criminal 
element out of the country, so we could keep people who are coming here 
just to take advantage of our generous medical systems--all with 
Federal dollars going into this that our Governor of California and 
mayor of New York are so eager to give away--so we can solve this 
crisis.
  All it takes is somebody to be willing to pass a budget, a budget 
that is too free-spending otherwise, by the way. I don't like all the 
excessive spending in the budget, but every budget is a compromise, and 
we are willing to build the wall.
  I hope, in the interim, that my colleagues who at least are 
pretending now to care about the Federal employees will bring a 
separate bill to the floor, which they can do at any time. A wonderful 
bill, H.R. 271, Mo Brooks, a great guy, bring that bill to the floor so 
we can pay the Coast Guard, we can pay the guys and gals working in the 
Federal prisons, and we can pay the TSA guys. So, Madam Speaker, even 
if you don't feel like spending anything on the wall today, at least 
they can get paid for the work they are doing.
  Madam Speaker, you are crying crocodile tears if you do not cosponsor 
those bills and bring those bills to the floor but then claim that you 
have sympathy for the Federal employees. We do not have to solve the 
other issues to get these people paid.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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