[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 120 (Thursday, July 13, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2450-S2452]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Southern Border

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, under President Biden's leadership, the 
United States has shattered virtually every record in the book when it 
comes to uncontrolled illegal migration flows across the border. We 
have seen new records in border crossings in a single month, a single 
year, and in a single day, all on President Biden's watch.
  The busiest day on record came 2 months ago, just before title 42, 
the public health title that was imposed as a result of the pandemic--
the busiest day came just 2 months ago, just before that title was 
lifted or expired, when Border Patrol apprehended 10,300 migrants a 
day.
  The pace of migration exceeded anything we have ever experienced 
under previous Presidents, and of course law enforcement, not knowing 
exactly what would happen once title 42 expired, braced for the worst.
  Federal officials and immigration experts predicted an increase in 
border crossings when it was lifted. At one point, even the President's 
Department of Homeland Security said we could expect up to 18,000 
migrants a day. Just to remind you, at its height, it was 10,300, but 
even President Biden's Department of Homeland Security said that could 
go to 18,000 now that title 42 went away.
  It is not as if the President and Homeland Security don't have the 
tools necessary to control illegal immigration, but they simply lack 
the will to do so.
  Fortunately, that surge that could have happened didn't happen, and 
we are left with a lot of opinions and guesses as to why that is true. 
One possibility is the drop could be seasonal. It is really hot in 
Texas and along that border triple-digit numbers and traveling across 
the open range of South Texas can be downright dangerous. If you have 
gone to the border crossing or Border Patrol in Falfurrias in Brooks 
County, which is just about 70 miles from the border, where the 
coyotes--the smugglers--will tell the migrants to get out of the 
vehicle, give them a jug of water and maybe a PowerBar, and they will 
say: You can walk around the border checkpoint, and we will catch you 
on the north side.
  Unfortunately, as the cemetery in Brooks County will attest, many of 
those migrants don't make it because they simply die from exposure to 
the elements, particularly after experiencing a long trek from their 
homes.
  So we don't know, due to the hot weather, whether in the fall and in 
the spring these numbers will jack back up again. So the lull could be 
temporary. Migrants may be waiting to see how some of the cases are 
handled under President Biden's new border policies now that title 42 
is gone.
  Plus, we have to recall that we are dealing with very shrewd and 
smart operators in the criminal cartels. They understand that a massive 
flood of migrants may well finally trigger some reaction from the 
administration and authorities, and they may be just metering the flow 
of migrants across the border so as to not attract undue attention.
  Well, it could be that this lull in numbers is just gimmicky 
accounting. The administration has set up what it calls new legal 
pathways in order to reduce the number of illegal migrants it 
encounters. In other words, it has quit counting some of the migrants 
who come across the border.
  For example, the Biden administration, as part of this program, said: 
We are going to allow up to 30,000 migrants from Central America to 
come into the United States, give them a work permit, and we will make 
this for the next 2 years. The problem is, there is never anything 
temporary about temporary status, and in fact this is part of the 
gimmicky accounting. You simply subtract 360,000 migrants admitted 
under this new program over the course of a year, and it makes your 
numbers look a whole lot better than they really are. It remains to be 
seen whether this program is legal at all.
  I can't imagine Congress, which has been given the main authority to 
deal with immigration law matters--whether this could be considered 
within the President's authority or power, but that remains to be 
decided perhaps in a court of law.
  But I suspect that this drop in encounters is a result of a 
culmination of factors. My own personal opinion, living in Texas and 
having spent a lot of time at the border and talking to a lot of 
experts who serve there, like the Border Patrol--my own view is this is 
not likely to last long, this lull, but it is long enough for some of 
the mainstream media to accept what the administration is selling, 
which is that their new border policy is solving the problem.
  I will go back and say what I said earlier, which is, even at 3,360 a 
day, that is more than three times what Jeh Johnson, the former 
Secretary of Homeland Security under Barack Obama, said was a real 
problem. Back in that day, he said if there were 1,000 people 
encountered at the border, that would be a serious problem. But the 
Biden administration, apparently, has no problem with more than three 
times the number of migrants currently being encountered at the border, 
even if it is temporary.
  Well, you can see the administration trying to spike the football. 
Last May, the Department of Homeland Security said the drop in numbers 
is proof--

[[Page S2451]]

proof--that the administration's plan is working as intended. They 
boasted that the number of unlawful entries between the ports of entry 
had declined more than 70 percent since title 42 ended. Well, that may 
be true, but it is tough to brag when the starting point is an alltime 
record that happened on this administration's watch.
  In other words, the argument of the administration seems to be: Well, 
it has been as high as 10,000 a day. Now that it is down to only 3,400 
a day, it is not as bad as it could be so let's pat ourselves on the 
back and say: Job well done.
  Well, 4 years ago, in July of 2019, Customs and Border Protection 
apprehended an average of 2,600 migrants a day. The July prior, we saw 
fewer than 1,300 a day, and the July before that, only about 800 
migrants were apprehended per day. So, in other words, the argument the 
administration is making and the celebratory popping of the champagne 
cork that all of a sudden their new policies have solved the problem 
is, I think, an illusion. We have gone from 800 migrants a day in 2017 
to 3,300 a day in 2023.

  The Biden administration wants to argue that this is a good thing. 
They are supposed to applaud--stand up and applaud the Biden 
administration's failed efforts to deal with uncontrolled immigration 
and the flow of drugs across the border.
  As I said, former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson once 
said that even 1,000 a day overwhelms the system, and we are currently 
operating at more than 3,000 a day.
  Even Attorney General Merrick Garland acknowledged that flooding the 
border with migrants, as we have seen--obviously, that is a big 
moneymaker for the cartels that smuggle these people from their country 
of origin, across the border, into the United States--that overwhelming 
the Border Patrol and requiring then some of the Border Patrol--in my 
experience, as many as 40 percent of the online Border Patrol officers 
then have to go off the frontline to take care of the migrants, to 
transport them, to feed them, to house them, to clothe them, to take 
care of the unaccompanied children who are coming across the border, 
which means they are not on the frontlines when the drug smugglers 
bring the drugs through.
  This is a pretty shrewd business model, and the Biden administration 
is accepting it hook, line, and sinker.
  When migration levels are as high as they are, it impacts all of our 
missions at the southern border, even those that have nothing to do 
with migration. Since President Biden took office, Customs and Border 
Protection has seized more than 1.6 million pounds of illicit drugs, 
including more than 41,000 pounds of fentanyl.
  Now, we talked about this in Judiciary Committee today, the scourge 
of fentanyl and the fact that last year alone it took 71,000 American 
lives. Unfortunately, many of those lives were the age of some of our 
pages--high school students who thought they were taking something 
relatively innocuous only to find out it was a counterfeit drug laced 
with fentanyl which took their lives tragically and prematurely.
  Some would point to the seizures of drugs and say: We are successful. 
We are being successful. We are stopping the drugs from coming across, 
which I submit is looking at this the wrong way. We ought to look at 
the volume of drugs seized and recognize that there is a whole lot more 
that has gotten through.
  Just during the Biden administration there have been what the Border 
Patrol calls 1.5 million ``got-aways.'' These are people who are not 
turning themselves in, claiming asylum. These are people who are 
fleeing from law enforcement who are being picked up on cameras and 
other sensors but then simply evading detention and detection by the 
Border Patrol.
  I can't possibly buy the argument that these people are up to good. I 
think they are up to no good. They are either people convicted with 
criminal records--or other law enforcement problems--or simply drug 
mules carrying more of this poison across the border.
  I am grateful to our hard-working officers and agents who interdict 
these drugs, but we know these data points do not tell the full story. 
These are only the drugs that they were able to identify and to stop. 
Given the fact that countless agents were taken off the frontlines in 
order to care for the flood of humanity--what President Obama said even 
under much smaller numbers, he called it a humanitarian crisis--there 
is no question that more drugs have slipped through the cracks. While 
the agents are busy processing and transporting migrants, it clears a 
highway across the border to smuggle fentanyl, heroin, and heaven knows 
what else across the border.
  So there is no way to know what we don't know. The fact that we are 
losing more than 108,000 Americans a year to drug overdoses is proof 
that we are not being successful in interdicting the drugs that come 
across the border. That seems obvious.
  One of the many victims of fentanyl poisoning was a 17-year-old from 
Texas named Kevin McConville. Last fall, just 2 weeks before the start 
of the school year, his senior year, Kevin took a pill he thought would 
help him fall asleep. Little did he know that it was laced with a 
deadly dose of fentanyl, and he didn't wake up the next morning. His 
mom Shannon found him the next morning. It was too late.

  Like many parents and family members who have lost a loved one to 
fentanyl, Shannon and her husband Darren are on a mission to end the 
fentanyl epidemic.
  As a matter of fact, in Farmers Branch, TX, a father who lost a young 
daughter gave me this bracelet, which says, among other things, ``One 
pill can kill.'' That is part of the public education efforts that many 
of our school districts and others and public health officials are 
undertaking to make sure our children understand that there is no such 
thing as an innocuous or a safe illicit drug.
  When I spoke with Shannon and Darren in February, Shannon was adamant 
about the need to do more to stop fentanyl from entering our country in 
the first place. The most critical place to do that is where it crosses 
our southern border, from Mexico, where it comes from. The vast 
majority of the fentanyl comes to the United States from Mexico, made 
from chemical precursors imported from China. If we are going to have a 
shot at ending the fentanyl epidemic, we have to go to the source 
rather than just deal with the symptoms.
  This morning, as the Presiding Officer knows, in the Judiciary 
Committee, we talked about people selling drugs by using social media 
platforms. Certainly, that is something we all abhor, and we ought to 
do what we can to stop it, and we will be debating that more. Yet, as 
important a step as that is, it is only one brick in the wall. It is 
only a baby step in terms of dealing with the fentanyl crisis because 
we have to stop it at the source, not deal with it once it has made its 
way into our country. Until that happens, law enforcement and drug 
treatment facilities across this Nation will be fighting a losing 
battle.
  Shannon told me that when it comes to the border, the Biden 
administration is failing, and I agree with her. President Biden has 
completely abdicated his border security responsibilities for more than 
2\1/2\ years, with its leading to catastrophic and deadly consequences: 
5.4 million border crossings; in addition to that, another 1.5 million 
``got-aways'' of the almost 7 million migrants transiting our southern 
border; 108,000 drug overdoses last year; 85,000 migrant children 
lost--lost--after having been placed with sponsors in the interior of 
the United States by the Biden administration.
  When officials tried to contact those sponsors to check on the 
welfare of those children, there was no answer, and there was also no 
followup by the Biden administration. We don't know whether these kids 
are going to school, whether they are getting the healthcare they need, 
whether they are being forced into involuntary servitude, whether they 
are being sexually abused or neglected. We just don't know, and the 
Biden administration cannot tell you.
  That is completely unacceptable. If any official did that to an 
American citizen child, they would be prosecuted and, I believe, 
convicted of child endangerment, human trafficking, and other sorts of 
offenses, but because these are migrant children, the Biden 
administration says: Hey, we have done our job. We put them with 
sponsors.

[[Page S2452]]

Now it is somebody else's responsibility.
  Well, there is nobody else to deal with that. The child protective 
services in New Jersey, in Texas, and elsewhere are already 
overwhelmed. So to say to the States ``now it is your job to protect 
these children'' once we have allowed 300,000 of them into the United 
States and placed them with sponsors because of misguided border 
policies is a complete abdication of responsibility.
  Well, 2\1/2\ years of failed border policies cannot be erased by a 
couple of months of reduced migration. It is premature, to say the 
least, to declare victory, to spike the ball, to pop a cork. The fact 
that we are not currently experiencing recordbreaking migration levels 
is, admittedly, a step in the right direction, but it is not a victory. 
There is still a crisis occurring. The number of border crossings is 
still historically high. Law enforcement remains under tremendous 
strain, and the southern border is far from secure. If the 
administration were to spend half as much time trying to solve the 
problem as it does trying to spin it, we would be in a much better 
place.
  I have to say that there are those of us here--the Presiding Officer 
included--who would like to be part of the solution. We have asked the 
administration. We have asked the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, 
Senator Durbin, to bring legislation to the Judiciary Committee, which 
has jurisdiction over these matters. Give Senators on the Republican 
side and the Democratic side a chance to debate it and amend it and 
pass a bill out of the Judiciary Committee that would address this 
crisis. We have asked the majority leader, Senator Schumer, to 
encourage the chairman of the Judiciary Committee to take a bill out of 
committee and bring it to the floor.
  Let us do our job. There is nobody else to fix this problem other 
than us--those of us who have the enormous privilege of serving our 
constituents here in the Nation's greatest deliberative body--the U.S. 
Senate--or in the House of Representatives, but all we get are 
crickets.
  I keep asking myself: What will it take? What will it take to get the 
President's attention? What will it take to get the attention of our 
Democratic colleagues who are in leadership positions and who are able 
to put this on the agenda and do something about it?
  Obviously, 6.9 million migrants coming across the border for the last 
2\1/2\ years isn't enough to get their attention. Obviously, 108,000 
dead Americans is not enough to get their attention. Also, 300,000 
unaccompanied children who have been lost to an administration that 
can't tell you where they are or what is happening to them has so far 
not gotten their attention. But it should get our attention. We are in 
a position of responsibility in our being given the privilege of 
serving in this body and in the U.S. Congress, and we ought to do 
something about it.
  So if it doesn't start at the White House, if it doesn't start with 
the leadership here in the U.S. Senate, rank-and-file Members of the 
Senate can do something about it. We can force the leadership--the 
White House and the Congress--to accept their responsibilities and do 
something about the devastation and death that is occurring as a result 
of these uncontrolled borders.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HAGERTY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Fetterman). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.