[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 2892-2893]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 BORDER WAR CONTINUES--NO END IN SIGHT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, the border war continues, and there is 
no end in sight. This week, President Calderon of Mexico is coming back 
to Washington D.C. He is going to meet with our President. It will be 
interesting to see if he continues to blame America for his problems.
  You remember the last time he was here, he stood here on the House 
floor and dressed us down as Members of the United States House of 
Representatives, blaming us for his problems, blaming us for the 
corruption, blaming us for the drugs that are in Mexico, blaming us for 
the violence in Mexico, blaming the folks in Arizona for trying to 
protect their own border. I wonder if he will continue the blame game.
  The problem is the situation is worse, not only on the border, but in 
Mexico. Corruption along the border with Mexican law enforcement 
continues, even though the Mexican military is doing a fairly good job 
of reining in the drug cartels.
  And he blames the United States for the guns that are in Mexico. You 
must remember, Mr. Speaker, just some of the guns that go to Mexico are 
from the United States. Guns from all over the world end up in Mexico. 
There are a lot of reasons for that. One of those is Mexico doesn't 
protect its borders any better than we do.
  People throughout the world know if you can get to Mexico by any 
means, whether you want to bring contraband, drugs, guns or people, you 
can eventually get into the United States. Mexico, like the United 
States, doesn't have operational control of the mutual border between 
the United States.
  Even the General Accountability Office, who are the people who keep 
up with statistics, made this report recently, that on the United 
States border with Mexico, only 44 percent of the border is under the 
control of the United States and only 15 percent is airtight.
  So who controls the other 56 percent of the U.S. border with Mexico? 
If it's not the United States, it's not Mexico, who controls it? We 
don't know. Probably the outlaws, the drug cartels. They are the ones 
that have operational control of both sides of the border because the 
situation on the border continues to get worse.
  Mexico doesn't protect its border from people going into Mexico from 
any direction, and the United States doesn't protect its border 
adequately to keep drugs and violence from coming into the United 
States.

                              {time}  1100

  Unfortunately, this is continuing to get worse. Last year, 65 
Americans were killed in Mexico, and to my knowledge, none of those 
cases was solved. You see, Mexico has a terrible record of solving 
crimes not only against Americans, but against Mexican nationals. Over 
3,000 people were

[[Page 2893]]

killed in Juarez last year. That's more people than were killed in 
Afghanistan last year. It is a serious, violent situation.
  And will it continue to come across the border? Some say, oh, it 
won't come to America. Let me give you one statistic. The 16 border 
counties in Texas that border Mexico, on any given day, about 35 
percent to 40 percent of the people they have in their jails are 
foreign nationals charged with crimes in the United States. These are 
not immigration violations. These are crimes, some of them violent 
crimes--35 percent to 40 percent. So the crime is already pouring over 
because people can go back and forth across the U.S.-Mexican border at 
will because there are parts of the border that no one controls.
  In fact, the situation is so bad this year that the Texas Department 
of Public Safety today has made a statement telling young people about 
spring break. And here is what they say: ``Various crime problems exist 
in many popular resort areas of Mexico such as Acapulco and Cancun, and 
crimes against U.S. citizens often go unpunished.''
  ``The safety message is simple: avoid traveling to Mexico during 
spring break and stay alive.'' So, we are even being warned not to let 
your kids go to Mexico during spring break because it is not safe.
  So what do we do about this? Well, there was raids recently this week 
because of an ICE agent that was killed in Mexico. Raids were made in 
the United States, and 676 drug cartel members were arrested, $12 
million was seized, lots of drugs and lots of guns. And it's a point 
that we need to understand as citizens, that the drug cartels operate 
in Mexico, but they operate in the United States as well. They bring 
those drugs to other gang members throughout the cities of America, and 
they sell those wares here in the United States. So the crime does 
occur on both sides of the border. And we need to understand that.
  It is important that we deal in reality and understand that the 
border is a war zone. A Texas Ranger once told me, he said, 
``Congressman Poe, after dark on the Texas-Mexican border, it gets 
western.'' Those days need to end. We need to put the National Guard on 
the border and secure the border. It will protect the United States and 
Mexico. And that's just the way it is.

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