John Katko: “I want to thank the gentlewoman from Arizona for her wonderful career serving our country. You are serving your country…”

“I want to thank the gentlewoman from Arizona for her wonderful career serving our country. You are serving your country in a much different capacity now, but I want to honor you for what you have done for your country in the past. I also want to thank you for taking a leadership role tonight and having this session so we can discuss the border security bill in more detail. I also want to thank Chairman McCaul for his great leadership and his ability and desire to empower the young Congressmen and Congresswomen, such as you and I, to take leadership roles with respect to the Homeland Security Committee. I talk about the border security bill from a law enforcement perspective. For the last 20 years, before I came to Congress, I was a Federal prosecutor for the United States of America in the Department of Justice. I started my career in 1994 and, soon thereafter, was sent to the southwest border in El Paso, Texas, as part of the Southwest Border Initiative. Back then, it was just simply to try and stem the incredible tide of drugs coming across the border. When I got there, I was stunned to see how wide open the border was. To my understanding, it remains so to this day. When I was down there, I was prosecuting cartel-level drug trafficking cases. We could get on the roof of the U.S. attorney's office and look across the border and see a cartel member's house on a bluff overlooking the United States. It was wide open, and it remains so. It was dangerous for Border Patrol.…”