[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 10 (Thursday, January 12, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H229-H230]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. 
Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, first of all, I would like to start out 
with some housekeeping.
  A lot has been said over the last few days about the huge number of 
IRS employees that are intended to be added by the Biden 
administration, and I just want to clarify some numbers.
  There are new employees who are going to replace retired employees, 
but there are still 25,000 new employees who are going to be added to 
the Internal Revenue Service.
  I should point out that, over time, you would expect--and this 
apparently surprises some people--you would expect the number of IRS 
employees to drop.
  I used to do taxes. I haven't done those for over 25 years now. Even 
at that time, as things became more computerized, if you got interest 
income or dividend income or capital gain income, the IRS would match 
up those numbers with what appeared on your tax return.
  If you got from U.S. Bank $1,000, and you didn't put it on your 
return, you could expect a letter in the mail: Where is the $1,000? 
Please give us another $300 in taxes.

  You do not need more employees to do that sort of thing. Again, when 
you talk about 25,000 more employees than the past, for a State the 
size of Wisconsin, that is really a small army of 500 new employees.
  Sometimes, it is easier to bring down to the State level because we 
deal with such big numbers. Whether you are talking about 
Massachusetts, Maryland, Missouri, or Washington State, they all can 
expect about 500 new employees. While there may be some people 
cheating, an increase of that size is just inappropriate.


                              Immigration

  Mr. GROTHMAN. Let's look one more time at the new numbers that were 
released over Christmas break as far as the immigration situation in 
this country.
  We have a new all-time record for the number of people coming here in 
November, over 200,000, 210,000 people. These numbers were released, by 
the way, late on a Friday, Friday as always, so the mainstream press, 
which already does a bad job of covering this issue, does not bring 
them up.
  A lot of the focus has been on title 42. While that didn't go into 
effect, it didn't stop there from becoming an all-time high.
  When I talk about 210,000 in November 2022, a year before that, we 
were at 131,000 for November. The year before that, before President 
Biden took office, we were around 20,000. We have gone from 20,000 to 
210,000.
  I am somebody who believes in intact families. Just as scary is the 
callousness of the Biden administration to the degree to which the open 
border situation tears apart families. In November, there were over 
9,000 unaccompanied minors released to sponsors apart from their 
parents. A year ago, instead of 9,000 people being broken away from 
their parents, we had about 10,000, again, the Biden administration. A 
year before that, the final year of another administration was 1,200. 
There were months in which we had under 200 unaccompanied minors enter 
the country. We are now over 9,000.
  Please, I wish we remembered that when we have our open borders 
policy, we are causing so many children to be raised apart from their 
parents.
  I also want to point out the number of got-aways, which is a 
particularly dangerous subgroup of people coming here illegally.
  So that you folks understand, there are two big groups of people 
coming here illegally.
  There are people who ask for asylum. They don't deserve it, but they 
ask for asylum and turn themselves in to the Border Patrol. At least we 
get to do a little medical checkup on them. We are allowed to get a 
little bit of information on them. If we have the right name, which we 
may or may not, we can do a little bit of criminal background check on 
whether they have committed crimes in the United States or Canada.
  There is another group of people called got-aways that race across 
the border and take advantage of the fact that, right now, so many 
Border Patrol agents are just doing paperwork. We have, as far as I can 
see, the all-time high, 73,000 got-aways in November 2022.
  So that you understand, if you are somebody who is sneaking fentanyl 
across the border, if you are somebody who has a criminal record, how 
would you come here? Would you turn yourself in to the Border Patrol? 
Not likely. You would rather sneak across the border.
  The fact that that subset is increasing even greater than the people 
who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol should scare every American 
to death.
  It is time for President Biden to do a little bit more than a 
perfunctory stop at the border. He has to look at 2 years ago, in 
November 2020, when that 210,000 figure was under 20,000. It can be 
done once; it can be done again.
  The American people and the press corps in America ought to hold him 
accountable and ask him to explain why we used to--as a matter of fact, 
earlier in 2020, we were under 10,000 people a month--why we used to be 
able to hold these numbers under 10,000 a month and now we are over 
200,000, and why we used to be able to keep the unaccompanied minors 
under 1,000 and now they are over 9,000.
  When I talk about unaccompanied minors, I am not including minors 
that were rented by other people because they felt it would be easier 
to get here with a family. The Border Patrol knows that is happening, 
as well. Maybe you rent little Johnny to somebody who says we want to 
be a family. That is another thing that is not even showing in these 
numbers. We don't know how often it happens. We just know that it 
happens.
  I realize that Black Lives Matter has been hostile to the traditional 
nuclear family. I realize that is an important group for a lot of 
Members on the other side of the aisle, but I will tell you, I don't 
like it at all when I see over 9,000 unaccompanied minors coming into 
this country.

                              {time}  1300

  I want to point out another number that doesn't appear on here, and I 
wish we would keep track of it, and that is the degree to which we 
separate the family. Maybe one parent comes here with the kids but not 
two parents.
  In America, our family court system--if people get divorced, we try 
to keep both parents around the area for the children. It breaks the 
heart of Border Patrol that they see no effort being done at the 
border.
  In other words, if one parent shows up with the kids, maybe dad, 
maybe mom is left home in Guatemala, El Salvador, or wherever, we don't 
care. It really bothers the Border Patrol because, of course, when it 
comes to American children, we love them enough that we try to keep 
both parents involved. But when it comes to the policy at the border, 
we don't care.
  I am also told, by the way, that this policy bothers governments of 
the countries that these people came from because they themselves have 
family

[[Page H230]]

courts and they would like to keep both parents involved in their 
children's lives. They don't like the callousness of the United States, 
how they don't care whether the family is apart or not.
  There is another side to this story, as far as what is going on on 
the southern border as well, and that is the number of deportations. 
You know, people say, Oh, we all have such wonderful people crossing 
the border, blah, blah, blah. Well, they are all not that wonderful. 
They are people that commit crimes, people that we catch doing wrong 
things.
  And while our immigration system is relatively weak, our deportation 
is weak compared to what it should be, at least some people 
historically have been turned back south of the border. If you look, 
that number was usually over 200,000 under President Trump, 250,000, 
260,000. It slipped to 185,000 in President Trump's final year, in part 
because of the COVID. We recently got the numbers for fiscal year 2022, 
where it is 72,000.
  The COVID crisis is not exclusively but largely over, so here we are 
in a situation in which we have under a third of the number of 
deportations which we used to have. So not only are we letting 
everybody come here and not only are we encouraging the breakdown of 
the families by having so many unaccompanied minors coming here, we are 
not deporting people like we have in the past.
  I have talked to a Federal attorney, and it disappointed him because 
he knows the rules they could have operated under in which you are able 
to now commit more crimes, do more bad things, and apparently the U.S. 
Government doesn't care.
  Of course, eventually, as we let more people commit crimes in this 
country, there is going to be an increase in the crime rate. It is 
going to be a less civil America.
  I wish and I beg the Biden administration to find some of the 
officials left over from the past administration and have them show 
them how it is done so we don't continue to have so many people who 
have criminal records wind up in the United States.
  Now, speaking of things that have happened since the new year, we 
finally have the murders in Milwaukee--the city which I was born in. I 
love Milwaukee so much. When I was a child, Milwaukee had the lowest 
murder rate of the 25 biggest cities in the country, depending on the 
year, it was either them or San Diego.
  This year, we exploded to a new record. We went up from 197 to 224 in 
1 year. That is 27 more than the previous all-time high. I can remember 
when Milwaukee had a much smaller population, but that number was under 
40.
  Well, what happened?
  Part of it, of course, is the police hatred that goes on in our 
society. I think that really began around Ferguson, Missouri, where it 
was called the Ferguson effect, and police began to become afraid to 
enforce the law. No matter how much they were in the right--and, of 
course, the Justice Department did investigations in Ferguson, and they 
found out the policeman was in the right in that tragic death--they 
still were attacked by opportunistic politicians and opportunistic 
clergy.
  We had a situation in Ferguson, they called the policemen racists. 
The Justice Department, even under Barack Obama, felt nothing had been 
done wrong. The opportunistic and offensive Al Sharpton showed up and 
attacked--or verbally attacked--the police in that area, rather than 
becoming persona non grata. Rather than being pushed aside, we see 
politicians still trying to ingratiate themselves to Al Sharpton, and 
still trying to promote his divisive world view.
  So it is not surprising, as the police back off, despite the 
population falling, the number of murders continue to go up.
  I beg the Members of this body to reject the Al Sharpton 
divisiveness. Stop standing up on the dais with him. Stop attending 
joint meetings with him and promoting that lying clergyman. It is an 
embarrassment to Christianity. It is an embarrassment to America. I 
can't believe there are Members of this body who think he is somebody 
to promote his view to the world.
  Then we have what I think is the root cause. We have a continued 
break-down of the family in America. We know that Black Lives Matter, 
that played such a big role in the 2020 elections, hates the nuclear 
family. But I wish our social scientists would do a little more 
investigation on the role of the break-down of the family and the 
anger, particularly of the young men, the fact that so many men don't 
have a family to take care of because the government takes care of all 
the families. And we work our way back to what the murder rate was in 
the 1960s before you had the huge war on the family initiated by Lyndon 
Johnson.
  I ask the social scientists and I ask the journalists to demand 
information on the background of the murderers that are caught--not 
enough are caught--who are committing the murders in Milwaukee, and 
also the family backgrounds of those unfortunate souls who have died 
because of the Ferguson effect and the police hatred that is fomented 
by Members of this body.
  My final comment here is with regard to another year gone, another 
year we will wind up--we will get the numbers shortly--with over 
100,000 people dying of illegal drug overdoses.
  We all know two things that politicians should do immediately, 
because almost all these drugs come across the border, we should shut 
down that border and prevent any more Americans from dying.
  Big numbers are kind of easy to gloss over, and it is important to 
remember when we are talking about 107,000 or 108,000--I am old enough 
to remember the Vietnam war--we are having twice as many people die of 
illegal drug overdoses in this country than has died in the Vietnam 
war. The Vietnam war went on for 12 years, there were protests, there 
was so much commentary on the number of people who died, and they were 
all heroes and we should talk about it.
  But we have twice as many people dying in 1 year in this country as 
died in 12 years in Vietnam.
  Do you think any increased effort is made to close the border?
  No. Politicians don't care about that 108,000.
  Remember, they all had parents, some had children, some had siblings, 
some had friends, but we are so callous, we don't care, another 
107,000. What difference does it make?
  The other thing you should do--because it is up to the police to find 
these drug dealers--we, one more time, should have a little more 
respect for the police.
  I will shortly be introducing a bill to allow the Border Patrol to 
hire more drug-sniffing dogs. Anybody who takes the tour down there--I 
am sure Joe Biden didn't hang around long enough to find this out--
would find out how tremendous those dogs are. They are not cheap.
  When I think of all the people who died because of the drug 
overdoses, I really hope in the upcoming budget we maybe find more 
money by getting rid of all the new lawyers we are hiring to represent 
the people coming here illegally. Instead of hiring more lawyers, we 
hire more drug-sniffing dogs. Maybe we can reduce the numbers of 
Americans who are dying of drug overdoses as people come across the 
border.
  So those are a few things for the American people to digest, some 
more things the mainstream media ought to be taking up. A little more 
headlines, even if the administration releases the immigration numbers 
on a Friday, publicize, you know, the huge numbers of people who are 
coming across the border.
  Do not get anesthetized and stop caring about the huge numbers of 
ever-increasing Americans who are dying of illegal drug overdoses. 
Please, take action.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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