[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 141 (Wednesday, September 11, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H5197-H5200]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BORDER CRISES FROM SEPTEMBER 11 TO TODAY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr.
Roy) for 30 minutes.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, as I come here to the floor tonight, we all
recognize that today is September 11, a date that will never sound the
same, a date that now means something totally different than it did
prior to 2001.
We have seen the continued recognition of those lives lost. We saw it
in New York today. We saw it in Pennsylvania. We saw it at the
Pentagon. We saw the flag unfurled.
I give special recognition to my good friend, Senator Brian Birdwell,
a State Senator from the State of Texas. A dear friend, Senator
Birdwell was perhaps the individual closest to where the airplane hit
the Pentagon in 2001, and he survived.
Senator Birdwell was burned across every part of his body. He was
hauled out, taken to the hospital. He didn't think he was going to make
it. He was praying. Assuming that he was leaving, he was saying good-
bye to his family. He survived. He is a great patriot.
Mr. Speaker, if you have a chance, look up his video called ``I Am
Second.'' Senator Brian Birdwell tells the story--it is about 7 to 10
minutes, I think--and it is well worth your time.
It is a testament to his faith, and it is a testament to his
patriotism. It is a testament to all those who went through those
terrible attacks that day.
Those of us who remember them, we remember them personally, closely.
We had friends who were affected, and it reminds us, of course, of what
happens when we leave our country wide open for attack.
We look back at September 11, and we tend to get wrapped up in the
horrors of the collapsing buildings, the horrors of a plane flying into
the Pentagon, but we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about the
fact that the individuals who carried out that attack overstayed visas
to stay in our country
[[Page H5198]]
because of our very broken system of border security.
Yes, ``border security'' I use broadly to include those individuals
who we permit to come into our country and are released into our
country on a visa or some other way, and they are in our country and
then carry out harm.
We remember every year the almost 3,000 Americans who died in that
southern part of Manhattan or in a field in Pennsylvania or in
Arlington, Virginia, but where was the recognition today for the 75,000
Americans who died from fentanyl last year alone, 25 times the number
of people who died on September 11? Where is the recognition of the
thousands of persons who have been targeted by criminals released onto
the streets of our country?
Just yesterday here in this complex, we had in the House Judiciary
Committee the mothers of three Americans killed as a direct consequence
of Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Secretary
Alejandro Mayorkas, their coordinated effort, their conspiracy to
ignore the laws of the United States and put dangerous individuals on
our streets that result in the deaths of Americans in real time as we
speak.
Alexis Nungaray is a 27-year-old young Texas woman who chose life 12
years ago when her daughter was born, her daughter, Jocelyn, who was
murdered. She was bound, raped, gagged, had her body thrown into a
creek in Texas outside of Houston by two Venezuelan men who were
released into our country in direct violation of our laws under parole
on purpose.
{time} 1930
Rachel Morin was murdered in Maryland. Her mother testified
yesterday. Kayla Hamilton. We have had other stories like Laken Riley.
There are dozens. There are hundreds. There are so many stories that I
had my office produce a report that we put out last week titled:
``America Invaded.''
In that report, if you look at what is listed, you will find two full
pages of 54 examples of Americans, headline stories, who have been
killed, raped, assaulted, all of these, and that is just the tip of the
iceberg. Where is the commemoration for those Americans?
In the wake of September 11, what did we do in all of our infinite
wisdom? We created a 250,000-person bureaucracy at the Department of
Homeland Security. We didn't used to have this massive bureaucracy. Now
we do.
Has that made us any safer or more secure?
If you are watching this as an American, do you feel more secure?
If you are an American in Springfield, Ohio, do you feel more secure
with 20,000 Haitians who have been dumped into your community?
Do you feel more secure if you are in Buffalo, New York, where just 2
weeks ago, a man was finally apprehended by ICE after having been
released into Texas from Peru, and we now know that he is wanted for 23
murders in Peru. We released him into the United States.
Every one of these examples I am talking about were specifically the
result of having individuals released into the United States from other
countries who then carried out a vicious attack, a vicious crime, a
vicious murder.
We had a witness yesterday testify to the rape and murder of a
beautiful, little, 11-year-old girl. I think her name is Maria
Gonzalez. If not, I will correct the Record, but I believe that is her
name. She was killed, again, by someone who was released here into the
United States who then preyed on her. Where is the commemoration?
I am going to be very blunt. I appreciate that we commemorate
September 11 every September 11. That is a good thing to do. I have
heard the bell now ringing for these 23 years.
Who is ringing the bell for Jocelyn Nungaray? This is a serious
question.
Kamala Harris was up where the World Trade Center once stood along
with a bunch of other people, including former President Trump, current
President Biden, former Mayor Bloomberg. Who was commemorating Jocelyn?
Will they be there next June--I think it was June--for the
anniversary of her mother's pain when she woke up on Monday morning and
her daughter wasn't in the house, and she ran down to the convenience
store where there were police sirens and tape to find out that her
little girl had been murdered? Who is commemorating that?
Who is paying attention to that? She is a devastated young mother.
Like September 11, where we failed, where we allowed visa overstays
to stay in this country and then grab planes and fly into buildings,
Jocelyn Nungaray is dead today because of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden
and radical, progressive Democrats who don't give a whit about whether
your streets are safe, America.
Wake up. Wake up and know what the elections are about. Wake up and
know what is happening in your country because your leaders in this
country are failing you. Worse than failing you, they are purposefully
endangering you. There is no other way to put it.
I am tired of listening to this garbage. Come up here to Washington.
They say: Oh, why can't you just sit here and get along and go across
to the other side of the aisle and shake hands and say: Why can't you
guys just come together and solve problems? I will tell you why. I have
done bipartisan bills. I have them right now, and I have friends on the
other side of the aisle.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, almost to a man and a
woman, don't give a damn about the borders being wide open because, if
they did, they would do something about it. That is the truth.
We should start acting like that is the truth. We should stop
pretending that we don't have such a wide gulf between that side of the
aisle and this side of the aisle.
We have a choice right now. What world view are you choosing for your
kids and your grandkids?
Again, continued tough love for my colleagues on this side of the
aisle. For decades, we have been complicit by allowing the chamber of
commerce to use cheap labor as their excuse for wide-open borders,
which set the stage for what we are dealing with right now.
Well, those days are over. When all of the corporate whores around
this town come begging for their tax breaks, I want them to come
explain to the American people why we should do it when their
boardrooms are chock full of radical, progressive Democrats and
liberals who want ESG and want their quarterly reports to do well so
their stock portfolios grow, and they come in here begging for tax cuts
so they can get richer while America gets screwed.
If you are living in Springfield, Ohio, right now, you don't give a
damn about the guys in the corporate boardroom over in New York City,
in Manhattan, or maybe in the tall buildings in Cleveland. You don't
care about how rich they are getting, but you care that there are now
20,000 Haitian migrants sitting in your community, that your
grandfathers and your grandmothers and your moms and your dads worked
hard to build and now is being trashed.
I could promise you, if you are like those young women who were
testifying at the Judiciary Committee yesterday, who were migrants
themselves--a young woman talking about her dad who came here from
Mexico and fought and worked hard and didn't take government handouts.
He said he was going to do it the right way and that the American Dream
wasn't about being given something from government. Then he had to sit
here and watch his granddaughter get murdered because of my colleagues
on the other side of the aisle, every single one of them, own it.
Every single one of them should march their happy rear ends down to
Texas and beg for forgiveness. Beg for forgiveness from Alexis Nungaray
and Alexis Nungaray's father because Jocelyn Nungaray got raped, bound,
gagged, murdered, by the people released by Democrats in the White
House.
Let's not pretend that there isn't a mile of difference between
Republicans and Conservatives and Democrats and radical Progressives.
There is a mile of difference.
I am not going to sit here and pretend, let's all get in a room and
talk to each other nicely, pat each other on the back and say: Oh, man,
can't we just have these halcyon days of old, have a beer like Tip
O'Neill and Ronald Reagan?
Not if you don't believe in America. Not if you don't believe in
sovereignty. Not if you don't believe in the rule of law. Not if you
believe it is okay to release 5\1/2\ million people into our country,
utterly disregarding how many criminals you are releasing and allowing
Americans to get slaughtered.
[[Page H5199]]
Why don't you get in the car, drive up here to Aberdeen, Maryland,
and talk to Kayla Hamilton or Rachel Morin's family.
Why don't you beg for forgiveness, get on your knees in the House
Chamber and say: I am sorry that I was so focused on my own political
well-being that I would endanger the American people, because that is
what you are doing.
Finally, my colleagues on this side of the aisle, in getting H.R. 2
passed, has finally forsaken the chamber of commerce's death grip on
the Republican Party saying: we need our cheap labor.
We haven't even scratched the surface.
We haven't even begun to do what is necessary to take our country
back because, when President Trump talks about mass deportations, he
means it. I mean it. I hope to hell Republicans on this side of the
aisle mean it because 5\1/2\ million people dumped into the United
States without vetting, without knowledge of who the hell they are. We
have the House Judiciary Committee recognizing 99 people on the
terrorist watch list released into the United States, and 35,000
Chinese nationals this year, and the year is not even over.
Who are these people?
I flew out to Aurora, Colorado, last week. I went to an apartment
complex area, met with the people who were there, talked to one of the
residents of the building, talked to the tenant who put a camera on her
door; she is not lying. Yet, we have Colorado Democrats who are trying
to say it is a lie that Venezuelan gangs are running those apartment
complexes. They get on Twitter, and they say: Not true. It is a figment
of their imagination.
That is why I flew to Aurora, talked to the woman. She walked me
through the fact that the manager of the apartment complex isn't there
anymore.
The manager of the apartment complex left and fled and feared for his
life. For 2 months, there was no manager there. They put the cameras
up. The cameras then showed what the entire world has now seen, which
is armed thugs running around the apartment complex. We are told they
smashed doors down, changed the locks on the building.
We had a businessman who was there who helped the woman move out and
said he basically stepped into the Third World for a number of hours
while he was helping her move out.
This is coming to every street in America. Wake up.
We play up here, playing Tiddledy Winks, talking about CRs, and
nobody even knows where the hell they are. We go around talking about
all these different things. Let's get together and pass a resolution
and a messaging thing this week.
What are we going to do to finally just say no?
You don't have to take this, you know?
We are supposed to be a free people. We are supposedly endowed by our
creator with certain inalienable rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. We established this government in the very preamble of
the Constitution.
What does it say? It lays out the purpose of the government being to
secure the blessings of liberty. It is not to give crap away. As I have
said before on the House floor, we are not supposed to be the United
States House of free stuff. We are not the United States Congress here
to give you a check. We are killing the American Dream.
Congress, the administration, are actively killing the American Dream
in real time. We voted on another bill for another program that spends
more money that we don't have. We rack up more debt. We increase the
interest. At no point are we actually securing the country.
We have been at war for a quarter of a century in some form or
fashion. I don't even know how many trillions: 8, 9? I have lost count
on how many trillions we have spent engaged in conflict, directly in
Iraq and Afghanistan, only to tuck tail and run when Biden and the
current brass bailed and left those 13 heroes stranded to die.
How many trillions? How many American men and women were injured,
lost their legs, lost an eye, PTSD: 80,000, 100,000, or more with PTSD?
How many suicides a day?
We have been at war for a quarter of a century.
In this town, we can't even fight for you, the American people, to
actually secure you with a secure border, with secure communities, and
with an economy that isn't blown to hell by irresponsible government
spending.
Do you want to know why? In the false name of defense and in the
false name of securing this country because the defense world tells me
every year, if I don't vote for one of these bloated spending bills, we
won't get a new submarine.
{time} 1945
We won't get a new carrier. What the hell are we trying to defend?
What is left of the United States to defend? A school where I can't
send my child to pray to God without spending $20,000 a year on top of
the taxes I pay. A school that my friend sends her sixth grader to with
a trans music teacher asking her kid to do some dance in class. Yes, it
is a true story.
Is that what we are defending with carriers and missiles and endless
wars? Are we defending a country where Jocelyn Nungaray gets raped and
murdered, or Rachel Morin gets raped and murdered because we release
dangerous migrants into the streets of America?
Since I literally released this 40-page report last week, I can't
even keep up with the news stories since we put it out.
In Virginia, just 30 miles from here, a teenage girl was abducted by
a Peruvian illegal immigrant, arrested, who had been released into the
interior by this administration. A Palestinian migrant accused of
beating a Jewish New York man, released into America because he claimed
he wouldn't be safe.
We had two of the people in Aurora, Colorado, where I said I went to
that were apprehended by ICE after they had been released into the
country, arrested, released on bond because we can't detain them
because our entire policies have been turned on their head.
We sit here in September, and we have this grand debate about whether
we are going to do a continuing resolution for 75 days or 6 months or a
year. Will we include the SAVE Act to ensure that American citizens
vote? Heaven forbid that we stand up and say, only American citizens
should vote in American elections. It is an 80 percent issue.
We have legislation that would fix it. We had a hearing yesterday in
which Secretaries of State, experts on the matter, all acknowledged you
need the law to guarantee that only American citizens vote in American
elections.
Now, we are having a debate about that. What can we put forward on
the floor? With all due respect to some of my conservative colleagues
that gag on an add. I can't support a CR because 12 appropriations
bills must be passed. Okay. Five have been passed. Now, what?
We actually have to figure out how to proceed. I think maybe we could
just fund the government for a few months and try to make sure
elections are secure, or let's pick a different fight.
Why don't we actually stand up and do something to make this country
better? If we do get a CR to December and if Republicans do win the
elections in November, what the hell are we going to do with it? Will
we fight? I would like to go to the American people over the next 60
days and say, yes, we are going to fight, and you can believe us this
time.
I would like to say that Republicans will be bold enough to do what
our Democratic colleagues have done repeated times in the last two
decades, which is risk your precious, risk your election certificate.
Stop starting off every Congress saying, well, if we do this, we risk
our majority makers. What good is it to be in Congress if you don't do
something with your election certificate and then go sell it to the
people you represent as being the right thing to do?
I have been in tight districts. I have done that. Every single
constituent that I represent are fed up. They are fed up with a country
that they no longer recognize. They love their country, but the
government that they have entrusted to maintain that country, that
their fathers and grandfathers fought, bled, and died for has been
turned into something they no longer recognize.
I am glad that we have people today on September 11 commemorating
those
[[Page H5200]]
lost. I am glad that we show patriotism. I am glad that we put the flag
on the Pentagon, but until we recognize that every single day because
of our policies in this Chamber and in the other Chamber and at the
other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Americans are suffering with high
inflation, with houses that they can't afford, and with their own
people getting murdered and slaughtered on the streets or in their
homes.
I cannot imagine just 2 months ago, Alexis Nungaray waking up and her
12-year-old daughter not being in the house, only to find out she is
dead after having been raped while the mom was sleeping in the house.
This has all happened because Kamala Harris and all of her cronies in
the administration chose and still choose, as I speak, to release
dangerous individuals on the streets of our country.
I am sure I am going to get some sort of admonition for directing
some of my venom to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue; but the fact
is, the leaders of this country need to be warned. We better get busy
fixing this country or the American people are not going to take it
anymore, and I will be right there supporting them.
I am sick and tired of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle not
showing up and not doing what we said we would do. I am particularly
sick of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle daring to lie to
the American people that they somehow believe in securing the border
when they put forward legislation that would have codified the very
parole policies that have, since they introduced the dang bill, been
used to slaughter and kill innocent American citizens.
This is not a negotiation. You don't negotiate for your safety and
your security. You just get busy doing it. I can promise you that
whatever happens with this election, I am going to be a loud voice for
the State of Texas to stick their middle finger up at this godforsaken
city and say we are going to secure our State. All of the other people
in all of the other States be damned because we have an obligation to
do it.
When our people are dying and our people are hurting and we are
spending $13 billion of our own money, where the hell is this Congress
and this Senate backing up the people of Texas? When we joined this
Union, we were promised something, and we are being denied it.
On behalf of every single one of those moms that come to my office in
tears because their kids died from fentanyl or because their little
girl was raped and murdered, and for every one of those tombstones that
I drive by in Arlington coming to office every day, who either gave or
risked the last full measure of devotion, they didn't do it for this.
They didn't risk it for this.
They risked it to live free and secure and have opportunity in a
country that is sovereign and safe. It is time for us to do our job,
and it is time for the American people to do their job this fall and
make sure that the right leaders are running this country.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________