Carlos Gimenez

I do have concerns with H.R. 903, the Rights for the TSA Workforce Act of 2021.

I thank the men and women at TSA for their hard work and determination over the last 2 decades.

Placing TSA into Title 5 would go against Congress' intent and force employees into an antiquated 20th Century system.

I am pleased that the subcommittee is holding this hearing today on the important challenges facing the TSA work force.

I agree with you, there are places where the wall is appropriate, and there are places where the wall is not appropriate.

So are you going to be asking the President to finish the wall, the wall that has already been appropriated by Congress?

Are you going to be asking for additional personnel in your budget request to the President?

Do not come. Unequivocally, do not come.

Especially, we need to look at our younger population that we know had a tremendous spike in their positivity rate, which in turn has infected other people.

If he comes to Miami-Dade County, I would expect that he wears the mask because that's what we make him do down here.

I want to make sure - the first thing we're taught is contain the fire. And so right now we're trying to contain the virus before we try to beat it.

I'm satisfied with what I'm seeing, but again, there are always going to be some people that will not heed the warnings, and so, you know, that's all we can do.

Now a great number of our gas stations actually have emergency power. You couldn't get any food because none of our supermarkets had emergency power. Now a great number of our supermarkets have emergency power.

Well, the problem that we have is that because the storm may be going from south to north, it's difficult for the state or the federal government basically to, you know, pre-locate so that they can come down quickly and that's an issue…

My advice is like I tell everybody is, A, have three days of water and food, you need to be self-sufficient for about three days because if we do have a major storm coming through, we may not be able to get to you for about three days.

Miami-Dade County is very well prepared. We've had experience with hurricanes, you know, forever here, and we've learned a lot from Hurricane Andrew. So we're much better prepared than before. Our state partners and our federal partners…

We're not in the business of enforcing immigration law per se, we have a lot of other things that we have to police in Miami-Dade County.

I'm not going to put millions of dollars in federal aid in jeopardy simply because we want the federal government to reimburse us for maintaining these prisoners.

We expect to be starting our services, normalizing life here in Miami-Dade County as much as possible -- as early as possible tomorrow morning.