Gregory Meeks: “I just say that the President said yesterday that that oil was the United States' oil, not the Venezuelan people. I…”

“I just say that the President said yesterday that that oil was the United States' oil, not the Venezuelan people. I thank the gentlewoman for her passion, though. I only wish she had the same passion to speak out against the Trump administration's mass deportation of Venezuelans legally in the United States of America. Mr. Speaker, if this truly was about addressing drugs, then tell me why the administration pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who ran one of the largest online drug marketplaces in history and was serving a double life sentence. Why did the President pardon the former President of Honduras, whom a U.S. court convicted and sentenced for flooding the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine and bragged? He said: `` . . . shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,'' and he was pardoned by the President of the United States into our districts. I am a former special narcotics prosecutor, and I know this to be a fact. You don't run a serious counternarcotics strategy by carrying out the death penalty for those who are at the bottom of the drug trade while freeing those who are the very top and ordering them to come. At the same time, the administration asks us to believe that deploying fighter jets, an aircraft carrier, and more than 15,000 troops to the Caribbean is merely a counterdrug mission. This is the largest U.S. military buildup in the region since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”