Glenn Grothman: “Well, Mr. Speaker, while we were on break for the last 2 weeks, I spent some time at the southern border in three…”

“Well, Mr. Speaker, while we were on break for the last 2 weeks, I spent some time at the southern border in three sectors, the San Diego sector, the El Centro sector, and the Yuma sector. And I think it is important that we try to educate the Chair of what is going down there. I will start off by just talking about raw numbers that were recently released. And so our listeners understand, when you talk about the border, there are two groups: There are people who want to find the Border Patrol and check in and get a future date for a hearing as they ask for asylum; and there are people who sneak across, which we refer to as gotaways. For certain reasons that I will soon address, the number of gotaways recently went up dramatically. And the number of gotaways is always an estimate because we don't catch them, we don't interview them. They are people who got away into the interior of the United States. But we believe right now, or the Border Patrol believes, that in March, there were 62,000 gotaways; people who were not interviewed; people who we don't know who they are, who snuck in the country. We also believe in March there were 90,000 people let in the country by the Border Patrol, usually asking for an asylum claim. When we combine these two numbers--and by the way, there are other people who are turned around, and that is why you sometimes hear people say there were 220,000 contacts in March, which is true, but not all of those people were let in the country.…”