[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1537-1544]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         CONDITIONS AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, it is my honor to address you here 
on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And I came 
here to the floor with a bit different topic in mind, but as I listened 
to the gentleman from Texas, I thought it would be a good idea, while 
there still was a captive audience on the topic, to refresh some things 
with perhaps a bit different perspective.
  And that would be that, from my time and experience, I have traveled 
most every mile of the southern border, that would be 2,000, all 
together. I think it would be true that I have traveled every mile of 
California and Arizona and New Mexico, and most all the miles in Texas. 
I have flown a lot of it. I have driven a lot of it. I have been out on 
the water on some of it. And I have spent some nights down on the 
border, a number of them in some of the dangerous crossings, like San 
Miguel's crossing on the Tohono O'odham Reservation. It is one of those 
without any night vision and without what we would call official 
security.
  So when I hear that the border is as secure as it has ever been and 
that there is no security threat to the U.S., which is what we have 
just heard here in this previous hour, Madam Speaker, I absolutely 
don't agree with that.
  And if there is no terrorism that is any factor at all, that there 
has never been a terrorist attack on the southern border, I would point 
the gentleman to the five heads that were lined up on the Mexican side 
of the fence across from the people that were driving to church in New 
Mexico a few years ago. I think those children that looked out the 
windows of their cars as they were getting a ride to church were 
victims of the terror that was created by heads stacked along the side 
of the highway within feet of our U.S. border.
  As I spend time with the Border Patrol agents that have made a career 
out of protecting our border down there, they tell me that there are 
murders on the Mexican side of the border, where they just throw the 
body over the fence on to the U.S. side; and other cases where they 
identify bodies on the Mexican side of the border, and they will call 
the Mexican security people, whom they have good relations with, as a 
rule, and they will see the equivalent of an S-10 pickup pull up and 
just throw the body in the back of the pickup and drive away, with zero 
forensics and very little attempt to identify who the perpetrators 
might be that have committed these murders there so close to the 
border.
  I have made surprise visits down to the border on a number of 
occasions, and I make it a point to drop in and see what is going on 
and talk to the people that are there protecting and guarding our 
border.
  I recall one of those visits down to Sasabe, Arizona, at a relatively 
rural crossing there. I pulled into that port of entry and port of exit 
for us, and I got out and I decided on the spot that, well, I should 
let them know who I am for reasons of courtesy, and so I introduced 
myself.
  Madam Speaker, I said: I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa.

[[Page 1538]]

  That agent immediately said: I can't talk to you. And he turned and 
walked away.
  And so I went to the next agent and I introduced myself: I'm Steve 
King from Iowa.
  And he said: I can't talk to you, but talk to Mike. Mike is the 
supervisor here tonight, and he's ready to retire, and he has terminal 
cancer. He will talk to you.
  And I went and spoke to Mike. The gentleman's name is Mike Crane. It 
was Mike Crane. He did have terminal cancer. That is verified. And he 
has since passed away.
  But as we were speaking about the difficulties in securing the border 
and the illegal crossings, both one east and one west of the crossing 
at Sasabe, he got a phone call, and he said, Excuse me, and stepped 
away, and he was gone for a couple of minutes outside the circle.
  He came back in and he said: There's been a knifing on the Mexican 
side of the border, and so there will be an ambulance coming through 
this border and this crossing in a few minutes. And I've called in U.S. 
ambulances with oxygen on them, and I've called in a helicopter to fly 
this victim out and to the Tucson University Hospital.
  So we waited there for a few minutes. The Mexican ambulance came 
across the crossing. I did have an EMT with me and I asked him to do 
what he could to lend a hand to help save this victim's life, so he was 
in the middle of that process.
  In the Mexican ambulance there was only one glove--just one glove--
and a roll of gauze and nothing else, no oxygen, no medical equipment. 
It was an ambulance as far as the shell of it was concerned, and the 
painting on the outside said ``ambulance,'' but inside, it was just the 
same thing as an old home bread truck.
  So they took him out of that Mexican ambulance. The U.S. ambulances 
had arrived fairly close to that period of time and they put him on 
oxygen and stabilized him, and then we loaded him off on to a 
helicopter and flew him up to Tucson University Hospital.
  I went to Tucson that night, and the next morning I went to Tucson 
University Hospital and, essentially, talked my way in to visit this 
victim that had been stabbed in the liver with a knife or a shiv that 
was--I just recall it was 3\1/2\ inches wide at the hilt. That was the 
width of the wound in him.
  I went to the room that he was in and they said: Okay, here he is 
behind this curtain.
  It was a two-patient room. When I walked behind the curtain, the 
individual there who had been knifed the night before was not the one 
that I had seen and been part of taking care of at Sasabe. It was a 
different victim that had been wounded under the same circumstances, 
probably a different location in a different fight and brought into 
Tucson University Hospital to be stabilized.
  As I was, I will say, looking at the situation, the patient whom I 
knew had been wounded the night before was rolled down the hallway in a 
wheelchair. He had been stabilized. He looked a lot better. We didn't 
know if he was going to live.
  So then I assessed the situation and, Madam Speaker, I then met with 
the chief financial officer of the Tucson University Hospital and other 
leaders there in the hospital and collected a whole series of 
narratives about the cost of the medical care that has been assumed by 
the United States, even from people who have injuries in a foreign 
country.
  This cost on this particular incident was $30,000 to bring the 
wounded Mexican into the United States--parole him into the United 
States is the legal term that we use--and then to send him back to 
Mexico once he was stabilized. And they had to post an agent with him 
to guard him during that period of time.
  Now, I am not here on the floor tonight taking a position on whether 
that is right or wrong. From a moral standpoint, it is right. But we 
should be aware of what is going on. This is not a stable border. It is 
not a safe border.
  I have sat on the border at the other crossing in Tohono O'odham 
Reservation, San Miguel crossing, and there, throughout the night, I 
heard vehicles coming through the mesquite brush, and you can listen 
and hear the doors open. You hear the individuals get out and drop 
their packs on the ground. They will close the door and you can hear 
them talking and whispering to each other; pick their packs up and walk 
off through the brush.
  I sat there and tried to count the shadows, and I won't give you 
those numbers because none of us are sure what we see when it is pitch 
black out, but I know what I heard. And we counted a good number of 
people that were delivered down there to that crossing who came through 
the fence, which it would be rare for that to hold an old cow as they 
walk a four-barbed wire fence with the barbs pushed down where they 
have been continually crossing in the path through there, you can 
easily see.
  When the gentleman from El Paso tells us that we are down to the low 
crossing level of kind of a modern history lowest crossing level of 
roughly 400,000 people last year, compared to not quite 1.6 million in 
the year 2000, I would point out that we count those who we can count, 
those who we see and those who we willingly see.
  If we are not looking for them, if we are not guarding the portion of 
the border that they are pouring through, and we say we have counted 
400,000 attempts coming into the United States, that doesn't mean that 
there are only 400,000 attempts; that only means we counted 400,000.
  The same goes with the interdiction of roughly 1.6 million. They were 
more aggressive then. And I will say that Bill Clinton was successful 
in interdicting more border crossing attempts than any other President. 
I don't know that that was his goal or his objective, but I believe 
that was the statistical results.
  To that extent, Madam Speaker, I don't disagree with the gentleman 
from Texas. And I agree that the border crossings have slowed down. Ten 
years ago they were greater than they are today, but it is not logical, 
in fact, it is not rational to assert that the border is as secure as 
it has ever been. Neither is it logical or rational to say that it is 
no security threat.
  In the times that I have been on the border, I have encountered the 
incidents of seven different persons of interest from nations of 
interest. That is our vernacular that we use when we see people that 
are coming from--I will call them--terrorist-spawning states. If an 
Iranian or an Iraqi or a Yemeni shows up at the southern border and 
they are interdicted by our Border Patrol, they are then placed into 
the hands of the FBI. At the moment that that happens, it becomes a 
classified incident.
  I doubt if the gentleman from El Paso encounters this. I am down 
there for the purpose of hearing some of those things, one of the 
purposes. And I have seven of them that I have logged in my time that I 
have been down there. And if there have been seven incidents of persons 
of interest from nations of interest, and I am only going to learn 
about that in that window between the time they are interdicted and the 
time that they are taken into the custody of the FBI.

                              {time}  1800

  So how many hundreds are there and perhaps more that are terrorists 
that are crossing into the United States? We know the easiest way to 
get into the United States illegally is to cross our southern border. 
So these assertions that we don't have a border security problem and 
that it is not a security threat are false. Their idea is that we 
should just simply leave the border open.
  I heard hire more agents not to secure the border, but to facilitate 
crossing through legal crossings. I think there are some things we can 
and should be doing with facilitating legal crossings to and from the 
United States of America.
  I don't disagree with the full breadth of that statement, Mr. 
Speaker, but the facts are 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs 
consumed in America come from or through Mexico--80 to 90 percent. It 
is more than a $60 billion annual business pouring into the United

[[Page 1539]]

States. Out of that $60 billion worth of drugs, a lot of that is 
laundered in the United States and brought back into Mexico and points 
south down toward--and for cocaine, for example, from Colombia. We saw 
a big bust of Colombian cocaine that was smuggled into the nose of an 
airplane that was found by the maintenance crew when they diverted the 
plane for maintenance. But 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs come 
from or through Mexico.
  It is an American problem. It is a demand we have on the streets of 
America for more than $60 billion of illegal drugs that kill thousands 
of our citizens. We have seen the addiction. We have seen the heroin 
addictions that have emerged in the United States and become part of 
the news in the last few years, but the people who die from overdoses 
of drugs has accelerated to more than die because of car accidents in 
the United States.
  Now, that is alarming when you consider most all of us travel in cars 
in this country. Not a very big percentage of us are addicted to drugs, 
but it is a very high percentage of those who are drug addicted that 
are dying because of the drugs they are getting and the overdoses and 
the bad drugs that they are getting, and we need to shut that down and 
shut that off.
  It isn't a final solution, I would agree, because, Mr. Speaker, there 
are two sides to this equation. One of them is that we need to address 
the supply of drugs, the transport of illegal drugs into the United 
States and the delivery of them in the United States to their retail 
destination. But the other side is we need to shut down the demand on 
those illegal drugs. That is a topic that this Congress has not taken 
up in the time that I have been here. I have stood here on this floor a 
number of times and discussed the need for us to shut down the demand 
for illegal drugs.
  Mr. Speaker, I will set that component aside for a moment and 
acknowledge that part of this problem is the United States' demand for 
illegal drugs. The deaths in the United States aren't solely the 
responsibility of the drug dealers. It also is the responsibility of 
our society to restigmatize illegal drug use and abuse and to clean up 
our society using a number of tools that we haven't yet developed: the 
will in our society to address the drug consumption problem in America.
  Nonetheless, we have developed the will, I believe, especially with 
the election of Donald Trump, to address the illegal drug supply coming 
into America and to shut off the smuggling of drugs into the United 
States.
  So when I hear from the gentleman from El Paso that he wants open 
borders and he thinks walls and fences insult people and they damage 
the relationships between us and Mexico, what about 100,000 dead 
Mexicans that die in the drug wars? Doesn't that damage our 
relationship between the United States and Mexico far more than the 
size of a wall that would probably save tens of thousands of Mexican 
lives by drawing a line, creating a barrier, and keeping the illegal 
drugs on the south side of that border away from the $60 billion-plus 
demand in the United States? I think that damages our relationship a 
lot more if we continue to allow that to happen.
  The flow of illegal drugs flows this way into the United States. This 
is from the Drug Enforcement Agency. I said to them that I want to know 
about the drug distribution in America, who controls it. I know the 
answer, but I asked the question so I have got their response.
  It is the Mexican drug cartels that control almost all of the illegal 
drug distribution in the United States of America. They are the cartels 
that operate in every major city, that control the illegal drug supply 
in nearly every major city; and if there is a significant exception, it 
is the southern tip of Florida--Miami--where more of those drugs come 
out of South America, across, through Haiti, and are smuggled into the 
United States. A lot by boat come through the Caribbean and into Miami 
and points along Key West. That is more a Haitian connection, South 
American connection, and to some degree a Cuban connection. But the 
balance of illegal drugs distributed in America are done so by the 
Mexican drug cartels.
  I asked the Drug Enforcement Agency, I said to them: What would be 
the result of the illegal drug distribution chains in America if, 
magically, everyone who is illegally in America woke up in their home 
country tomorrow morning, what would that do to the illegal drug 
distribution system in the country? Their answer is: It would sever at 
least one link in every distribution chain of illegal drugs in America, 
at least one, and in many cases every link of that chain of 
distribution of illegal drugs.
  In other words, for a brief time, if that magical miracle thing 
happened that everybody woke up in their home country, say, tomorrow 
morning, there would be an instantaneous suspension of the transfer of 
illegal drugs through that chain into America and into the hands of the 
users, where tens of thousands are dying because of the drug abuse that 
they are committing. That is how bad this drug stream is in America.
  I cannot be convinced that it is not a national security problem. I 
can't be convinced that it is not a social problem, a law enforcement 
problem, a criminal problem, and an economic problem. We are allowing 
these crimes against the humanity of the United States and turning a 
deaf ear--a deaf ear--because we don't want to speak about how bad this 
is because somebody over on that side will start calling names again. 
Well, I don't think I ever got up in the morning without a bunch of 
them calling me names before I ever got up--no matter how early--and I 
am immune to that, but I think we need to speak the truth.
  With regard to the offensiveness of fences and walls, and having 
traveled almost all of this border and examined it for the prospects of 
the need to build a fence, a wall, and a fence on our southern border, 
I would recount, Mr. Speaker, to you what I saw from the helicopter 
over El Paso.
  The gentleman spoke and said that El Paso is the safest city in 
America. I have to check the data on that, but I do recall that El Paso 
is unusually safe in comparison to the other border cities between 
Texas and Mexico or even between New Mexico, Arizona, California and 
Mexico. Why would El Paso be an unusually safe city if it sits on the 
border in the fashion that it does? And it does.
  The gentleman from El Paso recounted that it is because they get 
along with each other and because they have 25 percent immigrants in 
his constituent population, and somehow they have reached this balance 
of comity that they get along and so they don't commit crimes against 
each other. I didn't hear him address the drug problem at all. He may 
have and I missed it.
  But I will submit that is not the reason why the crime rate is low in 
El Paso. Anybody who would like to fly over the border and take a look 
at that in El Paso can see why the crime rate is low. I recall 
President Obama going down there and standing within about a mile of 
the border a few years ago and making remarks. He said that some people 
want to build a wall on the border, some want to build a fence, some 
want to build a moat, and some way want to put alligators in it. That 
was President Obama's statement. He was standing there, by the way, 
facing north with his back to the border. Not very far away is a fence, 
a canal, another fence, a security road, the Rio Grande river, another 
fence, another security road, and another fence.
  So if you have to get through all those fences and two bodies of 
water that were flowing--when I looked at it--at a pretty brisk pace, 
and I know it slows down during the low season, that would be the 
reason they don't have a lot of illegal activity in El Paso because 
they have probably the best security structures that we have between us 
and Mexico. It is a testimony to why we need to build a fence, a wall, 
and a fence. It is not a testimony as to why we don't, but a testimony 
as to why we do.
  If anybody wanted to look, and look at this objectively, perhaps the 
gentleman from El Paso would show us the crime data on what the crimes 
were in

[[Page 1540]]

El Paso before they built the fence, the canal, the road, the fence, 
the river, the road, and the fence. It is pretty hard to get through 
that. You have got to be able to climb, swim, and maybe burrow 
underneath one or two, and then you have got the traffic, the security 
traffic that travels inside of that. The Border Patrol has that 
traveled with their white with green striped vehicles there.
  This is a secure barrier between El Paso and Mexico, and it has kept 
El Paso safer than other border cities. I believe you will find, if you 
look at the years before the security was built, that the crime rate 
was higher than it is today in El Paso.
  So if we want to really do this from an analytical perspective, 
perhaps we could extrapolate some of those numbers and project that 
kind of security to, oh, Laredo, for example, McAllen, Brownsville, and 
maybe San Diego, which already has better crime rates now after they 
built their barriers across Smuggler's Gulch. Everybody who has a fence 
admits they are safer than before they had one.
  There is another tragedy, Mr. Speaker, that I recall the gentleman 
speaking to. He said that we should tear down the 600 miles of barrier 
that we have. Well, it is the opposite. We need to build them up. But, 
in any case, he said that those who study walls say they don't deter 
illegal traffic coming across them. Indeed.
  I wonder if the gentleman studied what was going on in Israel, the 
fencing that they built in Israel, and if he happened to even notice 
the tweet that came out from Prime Minister Netanyahu just a couple 
days ago. He said that they built a barrier to protect them in Israel, 
and it is nearly 100 percent effective. Their lives depend upon it. So 
they built an effective barrier, Mr. Speaker. Anyone who is watching 
history knows this.
  I hear the other side refer to a wall that we will build on the 
Mexican border as they compare it to the Berlin Wall. I wonder if they 
know enough about history to relate any other walls that have been 
built in history.
  Not quite a year ago, we had Victor Davis Hanson, one of my top two 
favorite authors in the country and one of the deepest, most 
thoughtful, well-read, and prolific writers of history that goes far 
back to the Greek Peloponnesian era and beyond. He has a terrific 
understanding of the history of the globe and how it unfolded, 
especially to Western civilization and came to us. I said: Mr. Hanson, 
I would like to know, I can think of the Berlin Wall as a wall that was 
built to keep people in. It was built by Communists to keep people in. 
Can you think of another wall in history that was built to keep people 
in?
  I look across the history that I know, the rest of the walls were 
built to keep people out. Victor Davis Hanson thought for a little 
while. He said: Well, one could note the wall, the fence, the barrier 
between North and South Korea is at least in part built to keep people 
in North Korea.
  I don't disagree with that. It is just another case where Communists 
had to lock their people up to keep them from freedom.
  So I would challenge anyone who is listening, Mr. Speaker, dig 
through your history books, Google this to the end of the Earth if you 
like. I would like to know if there is another example of a fence or a 
wall that has been built by a nation-state on its borders that is built 
for the purpose of keeping people in--other than Berlin and the barrier 
between North and South Korea.
  In both cases, it was keeping Communists locked in a Communist nation 
and keeping them from accessing the God-given liberty and freedom that 
we enjoy here in this country. The rest of the walls throughout 
history, including the Great Wall of China, were built to keep people 
out.
  The examples of that, in the Great Wall of China, would be that the 
segments of the Great Wall of China were built by different emperors. 
In fact, they were not a unified China during those years. I am going 
back several hundred years before Christ. Different emperors built 
different segments of the wall. They built them because they concluded 
the Mongols were coming down from the north and were raiding the 
Chinese. The Chinese decided they didn't want to be the subject of 
those raids any longer.
  When you are not defended like that, you have a couple of choices. 
One, of course, is to submit and be killed, and that is not an option 
for the survivors at least. Another is you can run raids up into the 
Mongolian area and provide them a punishing deterrent to ever coming 
back into China again. A third alternative was to build the Great Wall 
of China.
  They built it in segments. It had gaps in between it. By about 245 
B.C., the first emperor of China, the unifier of China, Qin Shi Huang, 
decided to connect all of these segments of the Great Wall of China, so 
we have got one continuous wall. You could pull a chariot on top of it, 
it was so big and so well built. That wall--we believed up until the 
last few years--was 5,500 miles long, at least 2\1/2\ times as long as 
we need to build on the Mexican border.
  He connected that together. I am sure he had cheap labor. I don't 
have any doubt about that. They may have worked for free and board and 
room, but they connected the great walls of China. Their emperor, Qin 
Shi Huang, established the continuity of that wall that now, by 
satellite, Chinese scientists have identified it as it really was--
13,000 miles long.

                              {time}  1815

  That is 13,000 miles. We need to build a dinky, little 2,000-mile 
wall here--a fence, a wall, and a fence--and people say it is too 
expensive. It doesn't cash flow. We can't possibly do that. It is too 
hard. There are mountains on the border. There are complications. There 
are little toads that need to jump across the border. There are long-
nosed bats that get confused if they have to fly over the top of it. 
There are these little species out here that we should worry about. And 
we have got an Indian reservation that spans both sides of that border. 
That is Tohono O'Odham.
  All of these complications right away would be too expensive. The 
woe-is-me people come out. They have been manufacturing all these 
reasons why it doesn't make sense to build a fence, a wall, and a fence 
on the southern border, creating every kind of difficulty that you can 
imagine.
  I will just tell you, Mr. Speaker, in my lifetime, I started a 
construction company in 1975. We are in the business of earthmoving and 
structural concrete work. We do underground utilities of all kinds. We 
know pretty well what it takes to do a job.
  We bid jobs nearly every week, and we are out there with, let's say, 
two underground utility crews, a farm drainage crew, and an earthmoving 
crew, mix and match, according to the needs of the job we are doing.
  Throughout the last more than 10 years, I have drawn up a design that 
I think is the most effective way to build a wall on the southern 
border, one that is cheap and effective and that will stand and last a 
long time with very low and very little maintenance. I will just 
briefly describe that for the Record, Mr. Speaker.
  We have an ability to slip formed concrete. A lot of the curbs and 
gutters that you see around on our streets aren't forms that are set up 
and poured any longer with a concrete worker with a board pulling that 
up on the edge of that 2-by-12 on the back. Instead, it is slip form, 
where you simply drive the machine along, it scrapes the concrete off, 
and you pour it with a low enough slump that it will stand in the mold 
that you leave it in.
  I propose that we go in and trench that 5 or 6 feet deep, and as we 
do so with the trencher, we pull the slip form along with that. Pour 
the trench full of concrete, 5 to 6 feet deep, so it is hard to dig 
under it, and it also becomes a wall that stabilizes the vertical 
sections that will go up above the Earth, and leave a slot in there so 
we can drop in precast panels.
  When that is done, you have got a footing that is 3 to 4 feet wide. 
It has got a notch in it that drops down a foot or 18 inches that has a 
6- or 7-inch gap to receive the precast concrete panels.
  The precast concrete panels are poured pretty much on site, where 
they

[[Page 1541]]

don't have to be moved very much. As you do that, you move along and 
pour the concrete panels. When they are cured, you just take a crane or 
an excavator and pick them up one at a time to drop them into the slot. 
Drop the next one into a slot.
  They are tongue and groove. You lay that all out along the border. 
And yes, you have to tie it in so that it doesn't tip on you 
vertically. You have to engineer it. The strongest force on that wall 
isn't going to be people trying to get through or over it, it is the 
wind force on the full face of the wall that you have to design for.
  We can do all of that, and it is simple. Then, with that kind of a 
pace, even the crews that we have today in our little, old construction 
company--and I will say for the Record, Mr. Speaker, I am not proposing 
that King Construction build this, but I am asserting that it is not 
expensive, it is not complicated, and many companies in America have 
the full capability of building a good wall on the border that will 
stand for a long time. But, in any case, we slip form that footing 
foundation with the open slot in it, and then we drop the precast 
panels in. They can be whatever height the President of the United 
States would like. If he wants a 12-foot wall, we can build that, and I 
can price that out and put an estimate in place.
  As I mentioned to the Secretary the other day, we are not proposing 
that we build it for the price I put into his hands, but if you call my 
bluff, we will. His answer was: Well, will you build 10 miles? I said: 
No, we want a thousand miles.
  That is how good I think my estimate is. Our word would be good. But 
we will find cheaper bids out there if we put this together right. So 
we can put this together for substantially less than I am hearing from 
this gentleman. I don't know where he is getting his numbers. Mine are 
real. We cranked them out in the sophisticated software bidding package 
that King Construction uses for multiple jobs that are going on. Every 
week, we are bidding some kind of jobs.
  When I stood on the floor here 10 years ago and said that we will 
build a wall with a 5-foot foundation in it, a slot in it, and precast 
panels, a functional 12-foot height, 6-inch wide concrete with wire on 
top, and we can do that for $1.3 million a mile. That is for the 
foundation, the wall only. That is not for right-of-way acquisition, 
that is not for maintenance roads, that is not for all the bells and 
whistles that we need, or for the fence on either side that I believe 
we need, but that is what the wall would cost--roughly in the area of 
$1.3 million a mile.
  If that doesn't sound plausible, Mr. Speaker, I will put this in a 
perspective for everybody that is listening here. We are just finishing 
up, and will here, I guess, a year from this fall, almost 300 miles of 
highway across the middle of Iowa through expensive cornfields. It is 
interstate-equivalent. It is four lanes. It is all built with the 
medians and the ditches.
  When you look at an interstate highway, first, you have to by the 
right-of-way. Then you have to do the environmental and archeological 
tests. Then you do the engineering. Then you have the contracts. Then 
you have to do the clearing and grubbing. You strip the topsoil, 
stockpile it, move the Earth, and then when that is done, you go in and 
put in any subgrade that you have got.
  Then you pave, then you shoulder it. Then you seed it. While all this 
is going on, then you paint the stripes on it, put the signs up, and 
you put a fence on either side of that. Then you cut the ribbon, and it 
is open to traffic. You are hearing people talk about a $20 or $30 
billion project to build a 2,000-mile wall on the southern border.
  I will submit, Mr. Speaker, this: we built that highway through the 
center of Iowa for roughly 300 miles for an average cost of something 
slightly less than $4 million a mile. That is buying the right-of-way 
going through Iowa cornfields, not the desert, and that is all of the 
engineering, the earthmoving, the paving for our highway strength 
structure.
  Can anybody think that, at $4 million a mile to build an interstate, 
you can't build a fence for about $1.3? I will tell you that, in the $2 
million a mile category, we will have a fence, a wall, and a fence on 
80 percent of that southern border.
  And there will be maybe 20 percent of that, and probably not more 
than 20 percent of that, that is tougher than that, and that is rock 
and it is mountain. Some of it is semivertical. What I have long said 
is: Let's build that fence, the wall, and the fence until they stop 
going around the end.
  You don't have to commit to a thousand-mile barrier right away and 
build it out into the Gulf at the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico 
where the Rio Grande dumps in or run it into the Pacific Ocean in San 
Diego, although those are probably good places to have it. You build it 
until they stop going around the end.
  If you build it into the mountain and the stone and they decide it is 
too hard to travel all that way and climb those mountains, you don't 
need to build it any further. But when they start going around the end, 
then you build it.
  We can build right over the top of the mountains, if we need to. We 
can put that foundation in there and drop the panels in right up nearly 
vertical face, if we need to. It is a lot more design and is expensive. 
Or, we can build the wall around the base of the mountain, where it 
makes more sense to do that.
  In some places, we probably won't need to build one for a long time, 
if ever, but let's build it where it's cheap and fast and where there 
is a lot of traffic. Let's shut it all off, Mr. Speaker, and let's do 
so for a cheap and economic price of a good concrete wall that will 
last for a century or more standing there with very little maintenance.
  And yes, I think we should have vibration sensors, and I think we 
ought to have infrared where we need it. I think we ought to have 
cameras where it makes sense. We need people to patrol that. That all 
goes with the package.
  I will say, as I said to President Trump more than a month ago, we 
build the wall until they stop going around the end. This is the 
centerpiece of our border security. And then all of the other things we 
do with sensors and lights and sensing wire on top of the wall, all of 
that are accessories to the centerpiece, which is the concrete wall.
  Donald Trump never said a fence. I am going to build you a fence. He 
said wall. Some of his people, usually it is the ones that come from 
more to the left of the Republican center than those who come from the 
right of the Republican center, will say: Well, he really meant 
virtual. He didn't really mean that we are going to build a wall. It 
might be a fence, or there might be places where we don't really need 
to do anything. You will hear all of that. They are saying that because 
they never believed in border security.
  If you remember, Mr. Speaker, there was a document that was put out 
shortly after the election in 2012, in November of 2012, called the 
autopsy report. That autopsy report gave an assignment to Republicans 
that said you have to do outreach to certain groups of people, and you 
have to play identity politics. Don't be caught pandering, but play 
identity politics, and we shouldn't be securing the border because that 
offends people that want to cross it legally.
  That was the message that was driven out of there. It wasn't based on 
polling and data and statistics--at least not the data that I watched. 
Instead, it was a product of the party itself.
  I bring this up not to turn any heat up on anyone but to illustrate 
that the very election of Donald Trump as President of the United 
States refutes that autopsy report received in 2012. It says that all 
people want to live in a lawful society, except for the people who are 
breaking the law.
  We want to live in a lawful society. We want a peaceful society. We 
don't want violence. We don't want drugs. We don't want heads lined up 
on the border. We don't want to have the kind of slaughter over drug 
wars in the United States that has been taking place in Mexico far too 
many years.
  When they report 100,000 people killed over the last decade or so in 
the drug wars in Mexico, and, by the way,

[[Page 1542]]

the $60-plus billion of drugs a year that come into America, there is 
also that same amount of money that is wired back to Mexico. That is 
either laundered drug money or the fruit of the wages of people who are 
working in America sending their wages out of the United States.
  That is not necessarily an economic boon for us when you see $60 
billion worth of drugs ruining the lives of American drug addicts and 
$60 billion worth of wages or drug money going back to funnel into and 
fuel the economy of Mexico. That is stupid for the United States of 
America to accept that kind of transfer of a massive transfer of wealth 
and that destruction of our own people.
  As bad as it is, 100,000 Mexicans killed in the drugs wars over the 
last decade or perhaps a little less than that, many more Americans 
have died because of drug overdoses in that period of time. And do we 
shed a tear for them? We should. And there are others we should shed a 
tear for, Mr. Speaker.
  There are others like Kate Steinle, a beautiful brown-haired, blue-
eyed, 32-year-old lady out with her father along the wharf in San 
Francisco. If I can remember his name--Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is 
his name--was deported at least five times from the United States for 
committing felonies.
  And what did he do? He came back into the United States, and he went 
to a sanctuary city, San Francisco, that had put out the beacon in the 
advisement that said: Come to our city. We will protect you. We will 
not let Federal immigration officials disturb your life here. We have 
hearts for people who are criminals, who are felons violating American 
laws with impunity being deported and coming back into America.
  So he is living in a sanctuary city in San Francisco. He shot Kate 
Steinle in the back, and she fell and died in her father's arms, this 
beautiful young lady. When I saw that story, when it came up on my 
Twitter account that day, I looked at that and re-tweeted the story 
with a quote that said: This will make you cry, too.
  Just sitting alone, reading my email, when I saw that story, it made 
me cry, Mr. Speaker, because I know that Kate Steinle is not 1 of the 
124 who her father, Jim Steinle, spoke of when he so courageously 
testified before the House Judiciary Committee. I give him great credit 
for having the courage to do so, and to commemorate his daughter's 
life. She is not 1 of 124, which were essentially undocumented who were 
documented to be released who committed homicide after they had been 
released by our previous administration.
  That number is not 124. Mr. Speaker, that number is in the thousands. 
It is in the thousands--the Americans who died at the hands of criminal 
aliens who are in the United States illegally committing crimes 
against. And I call them Americans. Sometimes they are green card 
holders, lawful permanent residents.

                              {time}  1830

  Sometimes they are here on a visa. They are legally in the United 
States. Sometimes they are illegal aliens that also crept into America 
that die at the hands of those who should not be here.
  Now, from where I stand, every life that has been sacrificed, that 
has been taken at the hand of someone who is unlawfully present in the 
United States of America, every life could have been saved. Every crime 
is a preventable crime, and I have lived that and believed that for a 
long time, Mr. Speaker.
  As I came to this Congress some 14 years ago, I listened to the 
witnesses before the Immigration Subcommittee, and the witnesses would 
continually testify about how many lives were lost in the Arizona 
desert as people were trying to sneak into America. Having snuck across 
the border and they are trying to creep through the desert, often the 
heat will affect them, and they will be without water and they will die 
of exposure or exhaustion. The numbers went from roughly 200 a year in 
the Arizona desert, I recall them going up to as high as 450. That 
testimony would come almost every hearing, someone would come in and 
testify to the number of lives lost on an annual basis in the Arizona 
desert.
  I began to wonder, as I would hear the news stories in the United 
States of the Kate Steinles and the Jamiel Shaws--Jamiel Shaw's son, 
Jas Shaw, a 17-year-old high school football star who was killed on the 
streets in southern California at the hand of a Mexican drug gang 
member who had been given the assignment to go out and kill a Black 
person. Jas, the son, had just spoken to his father on the cell phone 
and said: I will be home in just a few minutes, Dad.
  But he never came home because he was shot in the head and killed up 
the street a block or two from his home because he was Black, because 
the assignment to his murderer was to go kill a Black person. Jamiel 
Shaw will never, never forget those days. Neither will Jas's mother, 
who was serving in the military and, I believe, deployed at the time. 
Both of them have testified here in the United States Congress.
  There are others. Sarah Root from Modale, Iowa, a perfect 4.0 grade 
point average, studying criminal investigation at Bellevue University 
in Omaha. I believe the date that she graduated would have been January 
30, 2016. The next day she was run over and brutally killed by a drag 
racing, illegal alien, Mejia--Eswin, I believe his first name was, 
Mejia--who had 2\1/2\ times the legal blood alcohol content. He was 
drag racing, and he ran Sarah Root, this perfect young woman with the 
beginning of her adult life set up perfectly in front of her, the only 
daughter of her father, Scott, and her mother, Michelle. She had a 
brother, Scotty. Sarah's parents have both testified also before the 
House Committee on the Judiciary.
  This is personal, Mr. Speaker. It is personal to these families that 
have lost a loved one that they know would be alive today if the 
administrations had enforced existing immigration laws.
  When I read the very, very sad story in Cottonwood, Minnesota, 
southwest Minnesota, not very far from my district, several years ago 
where a schoolbus full of kids was taking kids home from school, from 
after school, and an illegal alien who had twice encountered law 
enforcement and twice been released on the streets because the local 
law enforcement decided ``it is not my job,'' ran the schoolbus off the 
road and into the ditch, and the bus rolled over. Four grade-school 
children were killed up by Cottonwood, Minnesota: a brother and a 
sister, and then separate children from two other families. Three 
families grieving at the tragic, horrible death of their grade-school 
children.
  If we had enforced our immigration laws, those children would be 
alive today. They would be living, laughing, loving, studying, maybe 
teaching. They would be falling in love and doing all of the things 
that we want them to do as Americans, but their lives were snuffed out 
because we had an administration that refuses to enforce the law.
  Others would say: Well, Congressman King, you cannot assert that it 
is because of illegal activity or illegal aliens in America that 
brought about the death of those four children in Cottonwood, 
Minnesota, or the death of Sarah Root from Modale, Iowa, or the death 
of Kate Steinle in San Francisco, or Jas Shaw, or Brandon Mendoza, or 
Dominic Durden.
  All of their lives and thousands more have been lost because we 
refused to enforce immigration law.
  They tell me: No, crimes will be committed, bad things will happen; 
it has got nothing to do with not enforcing immigration law.
  My answer to them is, Mr. Speaker: Then you go tell those parents in 
Cottonwood, Minnesota, that their children would still be dead if we 
had deported the perpetrator who killed them. You go tell the parents 
of Kate Steinle that she would still be dead if Juan Francisco Lopez-
Sanchez had been effectively deported or locked up for a mandatory 5-
year sentence, as we have written into Kate's law, that Kate would 
still be dead if we had enforced such a law on Sanchez. Or go tell the 
mother of Brandon Mendoza that her fine and proud law enforcement son 
would still be dead if we had deported

[[Page 1543]]

the illegal who ran him down that day. Or tell Jamiel Shaw that his 
son, Jas, would still be dead if we had deported the illegal alien who 
murdered his son on the street in his neighborhood.
  We know better, Mr. Speaker.
  This is personal. It is personal in the lives of thousands of 
families in America who are suffering thousands of incidents of their 
grief that will be part of their lives. For generations, they will look 
back, and they will grieve for those lost family members who will not 
be there on Easter or on Christmas or on Thanksgiving, and they will 
grieve for the grandchildren who were never born, and they will call 
upon their surviving brothers and sisters: Now you are responsible to 
be the parents of the grandchildren for the parents who lost their 
daughter or lost their son.
  That is what is at stake here, Mr. Speaker.
  We are a nation of laws, but we are, today, a nation of not yet fully 
enforced laws, and we have had a President in the past who seemed to 
want to bring in the maximum number of illegal aliens and leave them 
here and keep them here. He never demonstrated a desire to enforce the 
law as he opened up the borders of America to people who are coming 
from terrorist-spawning countries. Now, thankfully, we have Donald 
Trump, who has stepped up to close those borders back down again and 
get a handle on this migration so that the American people can be 
safer. But we will be a lot safer with a fence, a wall, and a fence on 
our southern border.
  By the way, at this point now, the United States is spending, 
annually, $13.4 billion a year--that is billion with a B--to secure our 
southern border, and we are getting perhaps 25 percent enforcement 
efficiency in that southern border--25 percent. That, by the way, is 
the testimony of the Border Patrol before the Committee on the 
Judiciary. It is not a number that is brought up from someone who wants 
to be critical of them.
  I salute the Border Patrol. They have got a tough job. But their 
operation has not been managed for the purpose of securing our border 
and achieving border security. They have tried to redefine it as to 
something else.
  Oh, $13.4 billion a year spent on our 2,000-mile southern border. 
Now, somebody out there, Mr. Speaker, has done the math on that and 
divided 2,000 miles into $13.4 billion. That comes to $6.7 million a 
mile to secure our southern border, $6.7 million a mile for every mile 
every year, day and night--$6.7 million.
  I would just ask people, contemplate that cost, that heavy cost, $6.7 
million a mile. What can you buy for that?
  Well, you can buy an interstate highway, and you can have $2.7 
million left over and change per mile. We can take one annual budget of 
our southern border--if we do what Mr. O'Rourke wants to do and open 
the border, we can lay the Border Patrol off for a year, take that $6.7 
million a mile, the $13.4 billion, and we can build an interstate 
highway the full length of that and have $2.7 million a mile left over. 
That is how much money is being spent on the southern border to get 25 
percent efficiency.
  You cannot convince me that if we spend $1.3 million a mile for the 
wall--if we dial that up to 2 or a little more than $2 million a mile 
so we can cover a fence on either side of that wall and access roads 
that would be built out of necessity to build it and to maintain it and 
to patrol it--a couple million dollars a mile on that, wouldn't give us 
something pretty close to Israeli-level border security. That is nearly 
100 percent. That is up into the 99 percentile and beyond that into the 
efficiency of the security of our border. Of course we could get that 
kind of security on our border.
  It doesn't mean we just build it and walk away. People on that side 
would like to have you think that, that somehow we would just build a 
wall and walk away and we leave the ladders put up on the south side of 
the border. No, we would maintain that. We would patrol it. We would 
fly it. We would patrol it with vehicles. We would have vibration 
sensors. We would put wire on top, and that wire on top would signal to 
us if anybody grounded that wire, tried to breach that, touch that 
wire, brought it to the ground. It would tell us in the control centers 
exactly where that breach was attempted to take place. We would zero 
our enforcement in on them and we would enforce it, and we would 
maintain it so that it functions 100 percent all the time.
  I see the fence we have got on the border now, and sometimes they 
will come on the other side, take a set of wire cutters, cut themselves 
a gate through a chain-link fence. I believe I saw this in Lukeville, 
Arizona. There they take a chain and thread it through the chain-link 
fence, put a padlock on it, and it is their personal gate to come and 
go into America whenever they see fit, with a great, big huge brown 
mastiff on a bigger chain yet laying there by that gate with a growl 
under his throat waiting for anybody who might decide they want to walk 
through that gate in the fence.
  We can do a lot better. We will do a lot better, $6.7 million a mile. 
Let me pose this another way for people who have a different way of 
putting images in their head.
  For me, I live out in the country in Iowa. We have gravel roads every 
mile, in the flat country at least. From where I live, my west road 
runs a mile out there to the intersection where it goes on in four 
directions, gravel road.
  So let's just say that General Kelly, Secretary Kelly, came to me and 
he said: Steve, I want you to guard your west mile, and I want you to 
secure that border so that 25 percent of the people that are trying to 
get across there will be interdicted and won't be able to get across 
that border. So what would you take to give me that level of security 
for a mile of road and, say, a mile, the west gravel road from my 
house?
  He said: I have got a bid. I will give you $6.7 million--that is the 
average going rate for a mile--and you will get that every year. By the 
way, we do our budgets on a 10-year contract, so I will give you $67 
million to secure 1 mile of Iowa gravel road.
  Do you think I could secure that border for $67 million for 10 years? 
And do you think that I would hire a lot of people to sit there in 
their humvees and talk back and forth on the radio and let people walk 
around them coming across that border if my job was to secure it? No. I 
would build a fence, a wall, and a fence on that mile. I would spend 
less than $2 million for that mile.
  Yes, I would hire a border patrol, and I would put the bells and 
whistles, the accessories on that wall so that we had the warning 
signals that are there. I would minimize the labor; I would maximize 
the technology. But I would put the resources there to get the job done 
100 percent, not 25 percent, and I could do it for, you know, a lot 
less than $6.7 million per mile per year. It wouldn't take a $67 
million contract for a 10-year contract to secure that border. 
Infrastructure does its job. You build the wall.
  Remember President Obama, he said he had prosecutorial discretion, 
and so he created these great classes of people and violated the 
Constitution and granted a waiver for the application of our criminal 
laws against people who had come into the United States illegally. And 
he said: Well, we are doing this on a case-by-case basis.
  Janet Napolitano wrote the memo. We have got the ICE memo or the 
Napolitano memo that lays out the exemptions to the law. Seven times in 
there she wrote, ``on an individual basis only.'' That is in there 
because she knows that the court case turns on prosecutorial 
discretion, which can only be applied if you are not going to enforce 
the law, the prosecutors do have discretion. If it is not practical to 
do so, if you don't have the resources, they should use the resources 
to their best advantage. You can do that on an individual basis and be 
within the law and be constitutional.
  But once you have a President Obama creating huge classes of people 
that number in the hundreds of thousands--in fact, in the millions--
then what you have, Mr. Speaker, is a violation of the law and the 
Constitution, and it is the executive branch, the President of the 
United States making

[[Page 1544]]

up law as he goes along and violating the separation of powers.

                              {time}  1845

  Well, through that, when the President says: I have prosecutorial 
discretion, and anybody who walks across the border is not going to be 
troubled. We will meet them with the welcome wagon and fly them to any 
State in the Union they choose--that happens, Mr. Speaker--it is real. 
That is not a fabrication or an embellishment. It is even worse than 
that.
  But what benefit does a wall have? In addition to, it provides 
security of the United States of America. A wall doesn't have 
prosecutorial discretion. We make up its mind when we build the wall. 
And if they can't get across there, and we maintain and protect it, 
then we get the effectiveness of it, regardless of who the President 
is. And if we get a President in the future who doesn't secure and 
maintain and enforce the wall, then we have a serious cause that we can 
point to rather than a vague legal argument manufactured by a former 
adjunct professor who taught constitutional law at the University of 
Chicago.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, building a fence, a wall, and a fence on our 
southern border is a wise and prudent thing to do. It will pay for 
itself before we can even get it built. It will dramatically slow down 
the illegal drugs that are coming into America that come from or 
through Mexico. Remember, 80 to 90 percent of them. Dramatically slow 
them down. The illegal traffic that is coming in, it will shut off most 
all of that. I would agree with the gentleman from El Paso that we 
should then beef up our ports of entry so we can facilitate a faster 
flow of legal traffic in and out of America.
  But the American people need to decide who is coming into America and 
who is leaving America. We should not have an immigration policy that 
is established by the people who live anywhere but America or by the 
people who are anything but citizens of the United States. The citizens 
of America should make this decision through their elected 
representatives by exercising the enumerated power in the Constitution 
that Congress has to establish immigration laws.
  Internally, our domestic laws need to be enforced. And we need to 
recruit local law enforcement by expanding the 287(g) program and the 
Secure Communities program. We need to incorporate the city police, the 
county sheriff and deputy force, and the highway patrol, or Division of 
Criminal Investigation--Department of Public Safety officers, as Texas 
has--all to work with our Federal officers, so it is a seamless network 
working together to provide secure communities in America, restore the 
respect for the rule of law, shut down the flow of drugs into the 
United States, shut off the illegal traffic into America, shut off the 
terrorists who are sneaking into America because the easiest and most 
reliable way for them to get here is across our southern border. If we 
do all of that, there will be respect for both countries that will be 
established.
  And I would say this to President Trump. And that is, he is a 
builder, I am a builder. I don't have any doubt about how to build that 
wall or to build the fences on the south and north side of that so that 
we have two no-man's lands to patrol. I don't know that he has any 
doubt about it either. He has said that he will build a big, beautiful 
wall.
  Well, I am looking for the architect's ideas on beauty. That is not 
my forte. But the structural functionality and the efficiency of its 
construction is my forte. And I encourage that we draw up the plans and 
designs for this and let contracts to those contractors who can 
effectively and efficiently do this in a competitive low-bid fashion 
with a proper inspection, and we will build that barrier that can stand 
for a long time, designed to keep people and contraband out, as every 
other wall in the history of the world, including the Great Wall of 
China and the walls that were built in northern England and those 
across northern Germany. The Romans built walls there to protect 
themselves as well.
  Each wall, with the exception of those designed by communists to keep 
their subjects in, has been designed to keep people out. There is a 
huge moral difference between a wall to keep people in and a wall to 
keep criminals, terrorists, and also decent people, and contraband out. 
It is a simple equation.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention here this evening on this 
topic. I look forward to the construction of the fence, the wall, and 
the fence on our southern border, and the restoration of the respect 
for the rule of law.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________