[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 21 (Wednesday, February 2, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S474-S476]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Border Security

  Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am here today to discuss the crisis 
at the border. Unfortunately, it is not getting any better. In fact, it 
is getting worse by any measurement. The flow of illegal drugs and 
illegal migration continues to surge.
  As the lead Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental 
Affairs Committee, I recently traveled to the U.S.-Mexican border in 
Nogales, AZ, just south of Tucson, to learn firsthand from Border 
Patrol and Customs officials and Border Patrol agents who are on duty 
24-7 trying to protect our Nation from illicit narcotics, unlawful 
immigration, and terrorism.
  It was my third trip to the border in the last year, and, like other 
trips, what I saw was alarming. Officials at the port of entry told me 
about the increasing and more sophisticated efforts to smuggle illegal 
and deadly drugs into the United States. They showed me some of the x 
rays that have been taken of some of the vehicles where the smugglers 
are cleverly hiding these illicit narcotics into compartments.

  By the way, this is deadly stuff. This is mostly now the illicit drug 
called fentanyl, which is a synthetic form of opioid that, according to 
the Centers for Disease Control, is probably killing two-thirds of the 
people who are dying from overdoses. The number of overdose deaths in 
this country is at record levels. During the year of 2021, we believe 
it is going to exceed 100,000 individuals--record levels.
  So why aren't we scanning more of these vehicles for drugs and other 
contraband? The best numbers we have are that, currently, less than 2 
percent of the passenger vehicles and less than 20 percent of the 
commercial vehicles coming into the United States are scanned for 
illegal drugs like this deadly fentanyl we talk about.
  That is just unacceptable. A smuggler with multiple pounds of 
fentanyl concealed in hidden compartments needs to know that there is 
no chance of getting across our border without some kind of search. It 
is not just a gap in our security; it is a gaping hole in our security, 
and it is resulting in lives being lost in my home State of Ohio, where 
we have a big issue with opioids, and also all across America. In a 
sense, every State is a border State now.
  Last year, Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 10,000 pounds 
of deadly fentanyl. That is a 40-percent increase from 2020. But, as 
officers on the line told me when I was down there recently, most of it 
is getting through.
  A year ago, Congress mandated that the Department of Homeland 
Security give us a plan and a strategy to scan all vehicles at the 
ports of entry for deadly narcotics such as fentanyl. Unfortunately, 
even with this crisis that demands these new approaches, the Biden 
administration has failed to deliver this report, which was due more 
than 6 months ago. Let's get that report done. Whether it is crystal 
meth or cocaine or whether it is fentanyl--sometimes pressed into pills 
to make it look like something else--it is flowing across the southern 
border. Let's have a plan to stop this.
  We also face challenges between the ports of entry. In Nogales, the 
Border Patrol agent in charge rode with me to look at the border. What 
he described was an overwhelming, recordbreaking number of unlawful 
migrants and a recordbreaking number of drugs like fentanyl and these 
other drugs coming into the United States. He talked about the urgent 
need for more Border Patrol agents to be able to cover the border; new 
vehicles--vehicle maintenance is a huge issue for Border Patrol right 
now; and technology, particularly cameras and sensors.
  There is a lot of discussion here always about the wall, but what is 
really important about a fence or a wall is the technology that goes 
along with it. When the Biden administration came in and they stopped 
construction of the wall, what they really did was they stopped the 
technology.
  In the El Paso Sector where I have been, as an example, only about 10 
percent of the technology had been completed for the fence that was 
being erected there. So they stopped building the fence--and you can 
see all the metal on the ground, which is very demoralizing for the 
Border Patrol because they have to fill the gaps 24-7 or figure out 
other ways to stop people--but most importantly, only 10 percent of the 
technology had been done, and they cut off all of that. We have already 
paid for it, by the way. Taxpayers have paid for all of that.
  My thinking is, Democrats and Republicans alike talk about the need 
for technology--this is, again, monitors of some kind; there are 
various kinds out there that are very effective--cameras, and the 
ability to respond quickly.
  I toured the border area that had huge gaps in the fencing, too, 
which I don't get. Why would you want to spend all this money to build 
the border barriers and then leave the gaps in the middle? I saw broken 
areas of fencing that need repairs. I saw the need for new fencing in 
some areas.
  I walked up to one large gap only several miles from the city of 
Nogales. There is 15- to 20-foot fencing on either side of this gap, 
and then there is about 40 feet with just a four-strand barbed wire 
fence to keep cattle from coming into the United States and vice versa. 
So that is where human smugglers go. They know about these gaps.
  I saw lots of evidence of foot traffic, lots of plastic bottles and 
plastic bags discarded in the area from migrants who crossed right 
there.
  Leaving these gaps is one of the reasons we face a crisis.
  We just learned in December that the Border Patrol apprehended more 
than 170,000 unlawful migrants in December. That is the highest number 
ever in December. And the Biden people say: Well, this is seasonal so 
it will stop in December and January because it is colder and people 
aren't going to go or when it is really hot in July and August. That 
has not happened.
  For the first time ever, we see a continual flow of people. It is not 
slowing down at all. These dramatic increases in unlawful entries and 
illegal drugs in the last year are clearly due to the policy changes, 
again, that were put in place on day 1 of the Biden administration--not 
just fewer deportations and a more lax approach to immigration 
generally but a specific issue of stopping the installation of this 
technology and fencing.
  Also, they made a major change immediately with regard to asylum 
policy. So now people know if they claim asylum, they will be released 
in the United States pending a court date, which, on average, is going 
to be 5 or 6 years away. They say the backlog is at least 1.3 million 
people now--the backlog.
  Now, is there any wonder that when people come to my home State of 
Ohio or go to my colleague's State in Missouri or go to Nevada, with 5 
or 6 years ahead of them, that it is sometimes not possible to find 
them when the court date comes up, and that is happening, obviously, 
increasingly.
  So we need a policy that just makes sense, that doesn't tell the 
smugglers, hey, if you get somebody in the United States, you can tell 
them that they can get in; they can work; they can get their kids in 
school. And that is what the smugglers do to people all over the world. 
It is not just Central America. In fact, there are more people coming 
from Ecuador now than there are from Honduras. I am told in the last 
week there were five Syrians who were apprehended coming across the 
border.
  It is a lot of people from around the world who are being told by 
these smugglers who are exploiting them and their families, hey, just 
come on with me, and we can get you in. Pay me 10,000 bucks or whatever 
it is. That is one reason we have right now this pull factor because of 
a policy issue we have got to address.
  The administration also chose to end the ``Remain in Mexico'' policy, 
which says to people, hey, you can come and apply for asylum, but you 
have got to

[[Page S475]]

wait over in Mexico until we adjudicate this. That discouraged a lot of 
people. A lot of folks went home because they were trying, obviously, 
to come to the United States, but that policy was ended.
  But, generally speaking, the right policy is adjudicate these cases 
immediately. Let people know, we don't want to have a 1.3 million 
backlog of people in the United States, 5 or 6 years waiting for a 
court case. It just doesn't make sense.
  Anyway, with these policy changes since the President's inauguration, 
the southern border has faced the worst unlawful migration crisis in 
decades and the worst drug crisis ever. To help the Border Patrol do 
their job, we are working on bipartisan legislation to increase the 
number of agents, address retention challenges of the existing 
workforce, and respond faster to these humanitarian crises that come up 
by doing things like having a Border Patrol reserve that can respond to 
surges.
  I am always impressed with the men and women of Customs and Border 
Protection and the Border Patrol that I meet on my trips. They have 
tough jobs right now--really tough jobs. A lot of them are overworked. 
A lot of them are being pressed into doing processing and other things 
that they weren't hired to do or trained to do. It is tough. And we are 
making it even tougher with policies that we are putting out here in 
Washington.
  The ongoing crisis is clear and persistent, no longer seasonal. I 
urge the Biden administration to change course, stop the policies that 
send the green light to these human smugglers to be able to exploit 
migrants and families from all over this hemisphere and elsewhere now 
and stop giving a green light to the drug traffickers. Instead, provide 
Congress with a plan to deter illegal immigration, to detect and deny 
deadly drugs from crossing our border. America's national security 
depends on it. American lives depend on it.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. The ability to secure your border--to follow my good 
friend from Ohio, the ability to secure your border is actually one of 
the fundamental responsibilities of a legitimate government.
  Even former President Obama, within the last few months, has looked 
at what was happening at the border, and I believe the word he used was 
``unsustainable.'' We cannot continue to let this happen. It is a 
border crisis, whether the administration is willing to call it a 
border crisis or not.
  There are drugs coming across, and I know my friend from Tennessee is 
going to talk about that, as the Senator from Ohio did. More than 2 
million people were apprehended trying to cross the border last year. 
Of that number, more than 171,000 were unaccompanied children. The year 
before it had been 37,000. In 2020, it was 37,000 people.
  It should have been a warning sign. Thirty-seven thousand children is 
bad enough, let alone 171,000--almost four times the number who came 
the year before.
  We need to ask ourselves, what are we doing to encourage that? Why 
would parents let their children come or send their children or why 
would children come on their own to the border at the numbers of 
171,000?
  Obviously, we don't know exactly how many people actually entered the 
country illegally. So if 2 million people were apprehended entering the 
country, some of them may have been making repeat efforts to come into 
the country, but there is no real evidence that very many people get 
sent back, but let's assume some do.
  So some of the apprehended people may have been multiple offenders, 
if you will, of trying to violate our law by coming in. I think it is 
more reasonable to believe that more people weren't apprehended than 
were apprehended multiple times, so we have a huge problem here.
  The policies have already been discussed. Why would the number--just 
over 2,035,000 last year--be 272 percent greater than the year before?
  Things happening in the countries they come from aren't different, 
substantially, than they were the year before. The weather is not in 
crisis in any way different than it was the year before.
  So let's look at day 1 of the Biden administration, where one of the 
first decisions is, we are going to stop building the barrier that is 
in the process of being built--not we are going to debate whether we 
should do more of it or not, but we are going to stop building the 
barrier that Congress has appropriated the money for, that the 
equipment has been bought for, that the necessary metal and fencing and 
other things have been bought for, and they are delivered, and after we 
get that up, let's decide if we need to do more.
  I have never been of the view that every inch of the border needs to 
have a barrier, but I have always been of the view that a barrier or a 
fence or a wall, whatever you want to call it, has to be helpful, 
particularly if it has the technology that was going into this fence.
  So, you know, just watching that great investment that the American 
people made sit there and not be completed is a problem. Some wall and 
fence had been torn down already so the new wall and fence could be put 
back up. We have areas that don't have the kind of fence they had 5 
years ago or 10 years ago or under the Clinton administration because 
we said, no, we are just going to stop doing what the Congress has 
already provided money and the authority to do.
  And then the ``Remain in Mexico'' policy, which, frankly, I thought 
was one of the most amazing things that our government got the 
Government of Mexico to agree to. It was a major step on their part to 
help us not only secure our border but discourage people from 
needlessly coming all the way through Mexico. You know, most of our 
immigrants are not Mexican immigrants anymore; they are Central 
American immigrants; they are the immigrants whom others have talked 
about today from all over the world. But they come through Mexico, and 
Mexico doesn't like that either.
  So why would ``Remain in Mexico'' work? ``Remain in Mexico'' was 
working because people, when they see that they are not going to be let 
loose in the United States or delivered somewhere in the United States 
and told to come back in 90 days or 5 years later, when they see that 
is not going to happen, and they talk to anybody who understands the 
law, 9 out of 10 of them know that they have no chance for an asylum 
claim.
  And they are in Mexico. It is not that they have no chance for an 
asylum claim and they have arrived and been taken somewhere in the 
United States and told to return at a later date. It clearly just did 
not work. The ``Remain in Mexico''--we could have put more money there. 
In fact, we put quite a bit of money there but then walked away from 
the facilities that were just about to begin to serve the purpose in 
the way that the American people--the most generous people in the world 
about people coming to our country and some of the, I think, most 
liberal immigration laws in the world for legal immigration.

  We could have made an investment so that people could have safely and 
securely understood that you are not going to be able to advance this 
asylum claim.
  The easiest thing in the world to do is show up at the border and say 
we are claiming asylum. The U.S. Government sends you somewhere in the 
United States to wait and come back later for a hearing. Now we see 
people--single adults--getting on planes in the middle of the night and 
being flown to other airports and getting off in the middle of the 
night.
  I have even heard--surely this can't be really accurate--that you are 
told to use your arrest papers as your identification to get on the 
plane. If we have come to the point where our border policy is use the 
arrest papers to get on the plane so wherever we take you, you are able 
to then be part of our society until somebody catches you and tells 
you, you can't be part of our society, it is a huge problem.
  The border is out of control. There is clearly a border crisis. I am 
a major supporter of legal immigration. I am a major supporter of kids 
who were brought here by their parents illegally, grown up in America 
and not gotten in trouble. I think they should be able to stay, and we 
should want them to stay.
  I am not a supporter of this blatant violation of the law and sending 
a message to the whole world, here is how you get done what you want to 
get done, even though it is against the

[[Page S476]]

laws of the United States to do what we are clearly helping you do.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, it was such a joy to be in Tennessee 
last week and visit with so many of our local officials, and I had the 
opportunity to spend some time with some of our sheriffs. And one of 
the sheriffs made a point that I think deserves attention in this body 
today.
  He said: Marsha, for years, we have measured the drugs we have 
apprehended in grams or ounces, but today everything is in pounds. That 
is the uptick in volume that our local law enforcement is seeing in our 
communities.
  Now, the question is, Why is this happening? How is it that so much 
more is getting across that southern border? And my colleague from Ohio 
and my colleague from Missouri have each mentioned the problems that 
exists there--no ``Remain in Mexico,'' no wall.
  And we are at a time here in this country where our supply chains are 
really being stressed, but the supply chains of the cartels seem to be 
doing just fine. Fortunately, our Border Patrol has been able to cause 
some blips and some problems with those supply chains, and they have 
been able to apprehend some of the drugs coming across our border.
  In January, in a period of 7 days--1 week--our Border Patrol caught 
47 pounds of methamphetamine in California, 3,800 pounds of marijuana 
in two raids in Texas, and 20 pounds of cocaine in Texas.
  The street value was about $7 million that they pulled off of the 
street, but this is, unfortunately, a blip for the cartels--just a blip 
on their radar. These thousands of pounds of drugs are a footnote in 
the long history of the ``got-aways'' and the drug mules who keep these 
cartel supply lines flowing from South and Central America and into the 
United States.
  Now, as my colleagues have said, until this administration decides 
they want to get serious about protecting our Nation's sovereignty and 
securing this southern border, this is going to continue.
  Now, what does this cause in our country? What it means is every town 
is a border town, and every State is a border State. Until the Biden 
administration decides they are going to get serious on that border, it 
means that your town will function like a border town, your State like 
a border State. Nashville, Knoxville, Memphis are all experiencing some 
of the same problems that you are seeing on our Nation's borders.
  And whether the State is Maryland or Wisconsin or Nevada, whether 
these are other States--Illinois, Colorado--what you are seeing are 
these problems that are brought about by an open border: gangs, 
cartels, human smuggling, sex trafficking.
  So I would ask my Democratic colleagues, and I would hope they would 
ask the President: Where else do they think these thousands of pounds 
of drugs are being headed?
  That is right. It is a rhetorical question, but they are coming to 
your neighborhoods, and your local law enforcement agencies are going 
to find themselves dealing with this.
  Now, the Biden administration has said, repeatedly, that they want to 
focus their border policy on finding the root causes of illegal 
immigration. So Vice President Harris recently took her second trip to 
the Northern Triangle so she could try and figure out what the root 
causes are.
  But while she is there and meeting with diplomats, the cartels' drug 
trade, along with their human trafficking trade, is booming. It is 
booming. The number of apprehensions across this southern border are at 
an alltime high.
  And as my colleague mentioned, the ``got-aways''--the hundreds of 
thousands of ``got-aways,'' the hundreds of thousands of ``got-aways'' 
that are now in your communities--the hundreds or maybe even thousands 
of pounds of different drugs are coming into your communities.
  We have been down this road before. We have made investments in the 
Northern Triangle to try and beat back the poverty, the corruption, and 
we are having the same problems. They are the same that they were years 
ago.
  There is no buy-in on a policy. The only buy-in that this 
administration has managed to earn is the buy-in of corrupt officials 
and drug lords who have invested in our wide-open border.
  Why is it that you have to pay the cartel to come in? Why is it that 
the cartels are moving these sex trafficking rings onto U.S. shores? 
Why is it that the cartels are setting up distribution centers in our 
cities? It is because this administration has that border wide open, 
and they see the opportunity to make big bucks, to really enrich 
themselves.
  How can we expect to fight corruption when we encourage them to set 
up these business operations?
  I would encourage my Democratic colleagues to take a look at the 
numbers that are coming from that southern border, look at numbers that 
were there from 2021, look at the numbers of not grams and ounces but 
pounds of illicit drugs that are being apprehended, talk to their local 
law enforcement about what they are finding on their streets, and then 
ask themselves: Are you doing everything you can to keep our 
communities safe? Are you doing everything that you can to keep our 
children and our grandchildren safe in their communities?
  If you had to answer that question today, if the administration had 
to answer that question today, the answer would be an emphatic, no, 
they are not because the border is open. That policy is failing the 
American people; it is failing our communities that are truly 
struggling to keep drugs out of the hands of kids; and it is failing 
the thousands upon thousands of people who took you at your word--and 
then you have seen this border turned over to the cartels.
  I yield the floor.

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