[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 10 (Thursday, January 18, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H233-H236]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1800
                   GOVERNMENT FUNDING AND IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Biggs) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. 
Johnson). We appreciate him. I played with him on the baseball team. He 
was the catcher, and we will miss his catching abilities. God bless him 
in his future endeavors.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).
  Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding 
to me. I, too, wish our friend from Ohio well in his future endeavors 
and appreciated serving with him in the Chamber and appreciate the same 
sacrifices with respect to our family, our children, and our wives when 
we are here traveling and the things that we miss out on. I do wish him 
well.
  Today, in the House of Representatives, we voted by suspension of the 
rules what is called a continuing resolution to continue the funding of 
government at its current levels. Now, that is just another way in 
D.C.-speak of saying we aren't doing our job to pass appropriations 
bills through what we call regular order, the way that you would expect 
us to do it, send it to the Senate, negotiate back and forth, and then 
take that and do our job to do the work of the people on how we spend 
their money.
  Last year, we set out to change the way the House works, the 
gentleman from Arizona knows. We made some progress actually. I had 
hope. We had moved in the right direction. We passed 10 appropriations 
of 12 out of committee. We had two ready to go. Seven we passed off the 
floor of the House.
  We passed them not at the level I would prefer--a lower level--but we 
did pass them at the agreed-upon level last year under the FRA, the 
debt deal that capped spending. Again, we should have capped it a lot 
lower. It represented a mere 1 percent cut from last year's bloated 
level of spending under Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed at the eleventh 
hour in December of 2022.
  Every member of the Republican Conference here today except for two 
opposed that bill, voted against that omnibus spending bill. They spoke 
out against it and put out press releases against it. They said that it 
was enormously expensive, adding up to our debt, passing policies we 
didn't agree on, done at the eleventh hour right before Christmas. 
There was massive opposition. Only two in this Chamber on the 
Republican side voted for it.
  Fast forward. Last year, a deal was made and caps were put in place. 
We got our appropriations bills sent over to the Senate trying to do it 
at those levels, even though it was a mere just 1 percent cut. I would 
like to see a 10 percent or 20 percent cut. We wanted to get to pre-
COVID spending levels, but this body on a bipartisan basis--a majority 
of Republicans and a majority of Democrats--sent to the Senate a debt 
deal, lifting the debt $4 trillion. For that, we were supposed to get a 
1 percent cut.
  Then there is something in this town called side deals.
  Does that sound swampy? It is.
  There were side deals, agreements saying, no, no, no, that won't be 
the real deal.
  Do you know how I know that? Because the Democratic ranking member on 
the Appropriations Committee appeared before the Rules Committee about 
a month ago and said: Well, I voted against the FRA, the debt deal, 
because the side deals weren't written in it.
  Now, she only admitted that after she had said you are not following 
the law. I said: Well, where in the law are the side deals? Oh, well, 
they are not in the law. In fact, in her public statement last year, 
she voted against it and said: I voted against it because they weren't 
in the law.
  Yet today, Senate Democrats and House Republicans were negotiating 
spending at the level of not the caps, but the caps plus the side 
deals. That is to say, in plain English, Pelosi spending levels plus 
another $30 to $40 billion. That is what is happening in the swamp.
  However, they couldn't get it done. They couldn't get it done fast 
enough. So here we are again after we have twice extended Nancy 
Pelosi's spending levels without getting the appropriations bills done, 
not getting our job done, not getting the work finished, and today we 
just agreed--the Senate sent over here another continuing resolution to 
fund government at Nancy Pelosi's levels, and we concurred in that.
  Now, it is not just the debt. It is not just the spending. It is not 
just the fact that we are $34 trillion in debt. It is what we are 
funding. It is the policies we are continuing. That is the problem.
  Here are just a few. The continuing resolution that we just voted 
for, a near perfect divide down the Republican Conference, 107 to 106. 
House leadership had to scurry around to whip up the votes to ensure a 
majority of Republicans supported this terrible bill.
  What did we fund? Again, spending at the level of $1.6-something 
trillion, Nancy Pelosi's levels, we funded Biden's border crisis while 
we are currently trying to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security 
for failing to secure the border, ignoring his duty to maintain 
operational control and endangering Americans. Fentanyl is pouring in. 
We are empowering China, empowering cartels. He lied to us under oath. 
We are giving him the money. Let's impeach him, but let's keep giving 
him the money.
  A weaponized IRS, an Internal Revenue Service targeting the American 
people.
  A weaponized Department of Justice and FBI that targeted Scott Smith 
in Loudoun County and Mark Houck, a dad in Philadelphia. Give them the 
money. Build them a brand-new headquarters. Give them the money.
  EPA, electric vehicle mandates. We are piling up electric vehicles on 
the lots of car dealerships around the country. We have a mandate going 
into

[[Page H234]]

place to mandate two-thirds of all vehicles will be EVs by 2032, which 
will massively create inflation for the American people, make goods and 
services more expensive, and make getting cars more difficult.

  The average electric vehicle is about $16,000 more expensive, and 
where the heck are you going to charge it? The Governor of California 
actually told people with EVs recently: Please don't plug in your EVs 
between the hours of 4 and 8 o'clock.
  What are you supposed to do if you can't take your car to go do your 
job?
  EPA rules killing coal and natural gas power plants. China has got 
1,100 coal-fired plants. We have 250. We are building none; they are 
building two a week. We are going to kill our own power supply chasing 
unicorn energy policies. But guess what, we are funding it. Every 
Republican in this Chamber who campaigns against these things just 
voted today to fund it.
  The World Health Organization, anybody think that is doing us any 
good besides getting us involved with anti-American sovereignty and 
undermining our own ability to maintain health policy and our national 
security? We are funding it.
  We are funding the pro-China, anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights 
Council. We are funding UNRWA, through which dollars flow to the 
Palestinians--that is Hamas; that is the enemies of Israel. We are 
going around saying: ``We stand with Israel.''
  How many Republicans wear the little pins, ``We stand with Israel''? 
They are funding opposition to Israel.
  ATF rule banning pistol braces. Unconstitutional, unlawful, executive 
tyranny, not getting congressional approval. We are funding it.
  Over here, we are funding the Department of Education's student loan 
scam. The Supreme Court says you can't do that. The administration does 
it anyway. Lawlessly. We are saying: Here you go, here's more money.
  We are funding the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA. No accountability for 
COVID tyranny, no restrictions.
  We are funding the Department of Veterans Affairs vaccine mandate. I 
introduced legislation today to say we shouldn't do that. We should get 
rid of that mandate. We are funding it.
  We are funding the chief diversity officers, DEI, critical race 
theory at the Pentagon and throughout the Federal Government.
  The Pentagon's abortion travel fund, transgender surgeries at the 
Pentagon, funding sex changes.
  I could go on and on the number of things that we are funding, but I 
want to be mindful of my colleague's time.
  I will end by going back to the border crisis because it is the 
number one thing that galls me that Republicans complain about and 
continue to fund. Our borders are wide open. Our people are in danger. 
It undermines our national security. Texas and Arizona take it on the 
chin. We are spending the money to do what the Federal Government is 
supposed to do. Our people are getting absolutely decimated.
  Ranchers are getting killed. Livestock are getting out. Children are 
dying from fentanyl. Cops are having to go do the job of the Feds. 
Migrants are dying, dying in the river, in the Rio Grande, dying along 
the border in Arizona, and we are funding it.
  I just don't understand the logic of my colleagues campaigning about 
these things. I will close with this: Federalist 58, the Founders gave 
us the power of the purse in the House Chamber to stop an out-of-
control executive branch. We should dang well use it.
  Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks. I 
appreciate his very prescient comments. Before I get on too much more, 
I have a bill that pulls us out of the World Health Organization. I 
would encourage all of my colleagues to sign it.
  If you watched the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, 
today speaking at the World Economic Forum, they are planning to use 
the next epidemic to impose world governance. I mean, he basically said 
that. I invite you to watch that. That is the head of the World Health 
Organization.
  Let's talk about what my good friend from Texas talked about. He has 
been a leader on this issue, and we have both been fighting this for 
some time. That is border security. I can't help but recall the words 
of President Biden, who was then a candidate for the Presidency, and he 
was asked in the debate on the Democrat side, they said: What do you 
tell people at the border? He said: I would urge them to surge to the 
border if he became President.
  There is a reason that in the Zocalo of Tijuana people had T-shirts 
on saying: Joe Biden, let me in. The reason is because he said he 
would. There is a reason that the first month after Joe Biden issued I 
believe it was 90 executive orders undoing the border policy of the 
Trump administration on the first 24 hours, by the way, that you had 
the first record of border crossings or these encounters, and that was 
150,000. Think about that, 150,000.
  Our minds were blown. Wow, we were saying, that is more than 5,000 a 
day, a little over 5,000 a day for that, that is incredible. Then the 
next month was more, February was more. March of 2021 exceeded that. 
Record after record after record until we end up last month with 
302,000 encounters.
  You begin looking at it and you say, well, how does this happen? Is 
it just policy?
  I used to think it was incompetence. I really did. That is giving 
them the benefit of the doubt. I thought after the first three months 
in a row of records, they are just incompetent, they don't quite know 
what they are doing. Then we got to meet Secretary Mayorkas, he finally 
came in and he testified. At first, before he testified, he came into 
the Border Security Caucus and talked to us there, and he said: The 
border is secure.

                              {time}  1815

  Now, mind you, just on the encounters alone for that first 3 months, 
you were pushing 430,000. For known got-aways, you were pushing about 
an additional 110,000. Unknown got-aways are estimated to be at least 
another 75,000. So, you have 600,000-plus illegal border crossings in 
his first 3 months that he was running DHS, and he sat there and told 
us that the border was secure and that we have operational control.
  I will remember when my colleague asked him: Do you have operational 
control pursuant to the Secure Fence Act of 2006? He said yes.
  Then we got the language out. I think Mr. Roy got the language out 
and said: Let's read the language.
  He still insisted. He knew that they were not in compliance with the 
law. He knew it. Yet, he persists to craft a narrative that the border 
is secure.
  Of course, it is not secure, which is why you had about 450,000 
people enter our country illegally last month.
  I am suggesting to America that this country cannot take 12 more 
months of the Mayorkas security plan on the border because 12 more 
months would be over 5 million people getting into this country 
illegally.
  What is happening now is they are releasing approximately 80 percent 
of everyone who comes in. They release them into the country.
  I was in Lukeville the week before Christmas. Lukeville is the hub 
right now and has been. Over a 2-week period, they had 30,000 people 
come through Lukeville--nowhere else, Lukeville.
  I was down there in the heart of that, and I was allowed to talk to 
people who had not been formally arrested yet. I would go up and ask 
them: Where are you from? Where are you going? Why did you come? Those 
were my three questions.
  We had the gentlemen from Burkina Faso, another few from Senegal, and 
another few from Guinea. Those are all African nations.
  Then, we had folks from India and Pakistan. That is South Asia, India 
and South Asia. Pakistan is considered to be the Middle East, although 
in my mind, they are still South Asia. That is interesting.
  Of course, we always have some folks from Guatemala.
  You have to understand where Lukeville is. The reason that you have a 
port of entry there is because it is on kind of a highway that goes 
from Phoenix, from Ajo, down to a place called Rocky Point, Mexico, 
which is on the Sea of Cortez. People go down there and recreate down 
there.
  When we asked them where they are going, why they are here, I would 
say: Where are you going? Everyone that I asked starts fiddling around 
in their backpacks and pockets, and they pull out a card. On that card 
will be two or three names with phone numbers and an address somewhere 
in the country. It is laminated. It is not like this. This is not 
laminated. Theirs are laminated.

[[Page H235]]

  I said: Where are you going? We have a guy going to the Bronx. We 
have people going to Missouri, Oklahoma, Houston.
  If you are going to Houston, why are you crossing into Lukeville? You 
should have been over in Del Rio or RGV. I don't know why you are here. 
When you ask them that, it is because they were directed to come there. 
The coyotes, the cartels, tell them this is where you are going to go, 
where you are going to come in.
  They release them, and they are in good shape. They are in good 
shape. They haven't walked. They haven't come through the Darien Gap in 
Panama. Those folks are the folks that are ending up over in Del Rio or 
Eagle Pass right now.
  Those coming to Lukeville, they have flown into Mexico. They have 
been bused up. They get bused.
  How did you get here? Well, we came in from--there is a gap in the 
gate, in the fence down here.
  The border wall that President Trump put up 30 feet high, just on the 
other side going down to the Sea of Cortez, like I told you, there is a 
freeway. The cartels will come up and run a real quick couple of cuts. 
They will remove two slats from the fence, pull them down, and just 
start flooding people through.
  I talked to the guy who repairs them. That morning, in about 4 hours' 
time, they had already repaired six breaches.
  I tell you these things so you understand how real this is. Our lever 
as Members of Congress is the purse strings. We are not going to have 
success with just policy because this is a lawless administration. We 
have to have enforcement as a condition of funding this government.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Harris).
  Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for 
yielding.
  The gentleman is from a border State, but, Mr. Speaker, it is true 
that every State is now a border State. Our communities are being 
deluged with individuals who are in this country illegally. That is the 
bottom line. Every community realizes it.
  I had the opportunity to go with Speaker Johnson to Eagle Pass. Mr. 
Speaker, I will tell you, it was eye-opening. It was eye-opening 
because, as you know, right now, as we are standing here on the floor 
today, the Biden Department of Justice is literally suing the Texas 
Department of Public Safety because Texas actually wants to defend the 
border. Yes, you heard that right.
  The President, who comes out of the meeting yesterday with the 
Speaker and the leaders over in the House and the Senate and says, oh, 
we have to do something about the border, yes, he is doing something 
about it. He sent his lawyers into court to actually tell the Texas 
department to stand down from defending our border. Those are the 
facts. I was there.
  We got briefed by the directors of the Texas Department of Public 
Safety, who will tell you that, yes, in fact, they watched the Border 
Patrol--look, great men and women. They raised their hands and said 
they were going to obey what their orders were. They are functioning as 
social workers. That is it. They will tell you.
  Mr. Speaker, one of the most revealing facts was the day when they 
had 6,000 people come to Eagle Pass. We stood in the facility. They 
will tell you that this facility was originally designed to process 
about 100 people a day, maybe 200.
  It is not a permanent facility, by the way. It is a soft-sided 
facility. It is a tent. They had to do it that way because nobody could 
have projected that we were going to process thousands of people a day.
  They said, well, we expanded it and can process about 1,000 people a 
day. What happens when 6,000 people cross the border, and this 
administration doesn't turn them back, doesn't have a return to Mexico 
policy?
  By the way, just to review the geography, the day we were there, the 
people who were crossing the border, who were wading through the Rio 
Grande, were young Venezuelan men. Just to review the geography, I 
doubt they swam from Venezuela up the Rio Grande, which means they had 
to come by land and had to pass through all the countries of Central 
America and then Mexico to get to the United States.
  They were claiming asylum, or they could have been paroled into the 
interior. I don't know. I don't know how Border Patrol handled them, 
but Border Patrol was not turning them back.
  They will tell you that most of the people who come claim asylum. 
They said it was like 80 percent of the people are claiming asylum. 
They know the magic words to say. They come to the border and say that 
they face some kind of persecution and threats of violence in their 
country and are claiming asylum.
  They will also tell you that a large number of those people are 
actually coming from Mexico. It is not the most now. Most are from 
Venezuela, but number two is Mexico.
  Picture this, Mr. Speaker. We have a trade agreement with Mexico. We 
have a peaceful border with Mexico--at least with the Mexican 
Government, not with the cartels. Yet, we are accepting people who are 
telling us they have to be here on asylum from our neighboring ally, 
Mexico.
  How ridiculous is that? There is no civil war going on in Mexico. 
There is none of that. Why in the world would we be taking asylum cases 
from Mexico?
  The Texas border people said that the problem is that Border Patrol--
and confirmed by Border Patrol--are instructed to process these people 
into the interior.
  Mr. Speaker, when those 6,000 people crossed the border, they took 
all the Border Patrol agents from 243 miles of border that the Eagle 
Pass-Del Rio sector is responsible for--they took them all into the 4 
miles of that area around Eagle Pass, leaving 239 miles of Texas border 
wide open.
  The administration will tell you all the fentanyl is crossing at the 
ports of entry. Really? On a day when 239 miles are unpatrolled, you 
think that a few pounds of fentanyl worth millions of dollars that 
could kill tens of millions of people--you think that they are going to 
risk taking it through a port of entry when the border is wide open? It 
is not believable.
  This administration does not want to enforce the border. They don't 
care about 70,000 people dying from fentanyl every year and that number 
going up, not down.
  We can't stand for it anymore. The gentleman from Arizona is 
absolutely right. Our lever is funding. We ought to take advantage of 
that.
  Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. 
Good).
  Mr. GOOD of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, as our colleague, our good friend 
from Maryland, just noted, this administration claims they don't have 
the resources or manpower to secure the border because MAGA 
Republicans, conservative Republicans, haven't given him those 
resources. Yet, as Texas has tried to stand in the gap and do the job 
that the Federal Government won't do, they are suing and fighting, 
literally trying to prevent Texas from securing the border.
  Just yesterday, we had 14 Democrats vote with every Republican to 
condemn, denounce, and call for an end to the President's open-border 
policies, the President's border invasion. We then had the opportunity 
to try to attach border security today to the government funding bill, 
to use the leverage of the government funding to secure the border.
  I saw a poll today that shows a majority of registered voters--not 
Republicans, mind you, but a majority of registered voters--support 
shutting down the government in order to secure the border. Yet, we 
voted today to continue to give billions of dollars to Secretary 
Mayorkas to continue to facilitate the border invasion and, frankly, to 
give millions of dollars to the U.N., which is literally using the 
resources we gave them to coach illegals on how to cheat our asylum 
system.
  We must not even consider the Mayorkas-Lankford deal, which is worse 
than doing nothing. It is worse than doing nothing to give the false 
sense of border security to give political cover to those who are 
literally facilitating the border invasion, those who would call it a 
good border deal to allow 5,000 illegals a day before they start to try 
to prevent those above 5,000; to put no limits on parole, which would 
allow Mayorkas to allow anyone else he wants to illegally come into our 
country; and to give work permits to

[[Page H236]]

those who are here illegally now. That is literally worse than nothing.

  The American people deserve nothing less than genuine, true border 
security, and we ought to have the resolve to deliver that for them.
  Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to how much time is 
remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 2 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I want to point out really quickly, on 
parole, which my colleague mentioned, parole by statute is meant to be 
a case-by-case humanitarian administrative remedy. This administration 
has granted parole to more than a million people.
  What parole does is it actually gives you a work permit. You are 
supposed to be here. You have a relative that needs surgery. You are 
going to be here for 2 weeks. Extraordinarily, before Biden, it was 
about 15 a year. In this administration, it is over a million.
  I also want to talk about CBP because those line agents are working 
their tails off. They are doing everything they can, but they are being 
undermined by Secretary Mayorkas and this administration.
  I have been down there many times and talked to them. Their morale is 
so low. They want to enforce, but like in Eagle Pass and Lukeville, 
both places I have been, once you get away from the crowd where they 
are processing, you can drive along the border for miles. We drove 
along Lukeville literally for miles.
  The only people we saw was the guy in charge of rebuilding the fence 
and the hundreds of people that were walking along the border road who 
had come through those holes illegally.
  We need to use our lever that our Founders gave to us. It is the most 
effective. I urge our colleagues to reconsider, as we go forward, using 
that lever to prevent this administration from avoiding its duty to 
enforce our border security.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for joining me, and I yield back 
the balance of my time.

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