On the recordMarch 17, 2021
I want to thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. Mr. Speaker, America's border is under siege, and it is a siege that this administration continues to encourage with each passing day. They say it is not a crisis or an emergency, even as they have dispatched FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to help manage the disaster that they have created. In February alone, the shortest month of the year, overwhelmed border patrol agents encountered more than 100,000 illegal aliens crossing our southern border, including 30,000 unaccompanied children and minors. And that does not include the countless illegal aliens that slipped through undetected. Mr. Speaker, as many as 25 percent of the illegal aliens that the border patrol apprehends are testing positive for COVID--and not all are being tested. Thanks to the administration's catch-and-release policies, many of these aliens immediately board buses and fan out across the country, making every State a border State. That includes my State in the far north, Wisconsin, because I hear it from sheriffs and law enforcement all over northern Wisconsin, especially the drugs that flow in, the fentanyl, the methamphetamines, that flow into our communities killing our citizens. Drug seizures were up more than 50 percent last month driven by huge spikes in meth and heroin, deadly poisons that ravage our families.…





