By Congressman Josh Brecheen
I recently returned from El Paso, where as a member of the House Homeland Security Committee (that has jurisdiction over the border), my colleagues and I witnessed the impact of our border crisis firsthand.
Since President Biden has been in office, there have been nearly 4.7 million illegal crossings at the Southern border, that’s more than the population of the entire state of Oklahoma.
As the House Committee on Homeland Security concluded in a recent report, we have seen the highest illegal encounter numbers in history—more than the previous two presidential administrations combined and caused by the removal of federal policies that give the tools to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel to enforce the law.
President Biden’s decision to adhere to radical immigration ideology is in direct violation of the rule of law. Article IV Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.”
Under President Trump’s Administration, more than 400 miles of border wall were constructed. An additional 250 miles of wall was fully funded until the Biden Administration shut it down by Executive Order. Piles of construction wall materials lie rusting at the border—abandoned after contracts were settled, yet the work was halted.
We saw firsthand the devastating consequences of the Biden Administration’s decision to end construction of the wall. Border patrol agents took my colleagues and I in a helicopter to get a birds-eye view of the crisis. What we saw were migrants lying in cover waiting until darkness of night to cross into America illegally, only hundreds of yards away from where the Trump Administration’s wall construction ended. These migrants were going to enter where no boundary wall existed because they understand that walls work.
We also witnessed a drug bust where an individual was trying to smuggle narcotics into the United States, hiding them under a carpeted trunk. If not for the heroics of our border patrol agents, these drug smugglers will continue to make our nation’s drug crisis even worse—a crisis Oklahomans are all too familiar with. In 2021, 299 Oklahomans were killed by fentanyl, while that number was 39 just three years earlier in 2018.
Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds in the U.S with more than 70,000 overdose deaths in 2021. The cartels are getting rich while Americans are dying, many times overdosing unknowingly with fentanyl hidden in pills thought to be another substance. Two milligrams of fentanyl can be enough for a lethal dose, which is a tiny fraction of the size of a penny.
The short-term costs of this crisis are staggering, not to mention the long-term costs. The single processing facility we visited in El Paso (built for 1,000 people) cost the American taxpayer $68 million for just the first four months of this fiscal year (that’s $17 million per month or more than $200 million for the year). There are nine such facilities along the Southern border that process illegals once apprehended.
In addition to the above costs, to return migrants to their home countries or even move them to different sectors of the border—it costs $90,000 per flight for approximately 130 travelers. Just the one processing facility we visited is averaging one flight removal per day. Only three of these seven flights per week are returning migrants to their home countries (due mainly to Title 42). The remaining four flights per week are simply sending migrants to other sections along the border to keep El Paso from being overrun. Once released at other sectors, this Administration’s policies are allowing them to move into the U.S. interior.
Here are some startling statistics just for the month of January:
- Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded 156,274 illegal crossings along the Southern Border last month. That’s the highest January total in more than 20 years.
- 1,400 pounds of fentanyl was seized at our southern border last month, making January the seventh month in a row with over a thousand pounds of fentanyl uncovered by Border Patrol agents.
- 15 suspected terrorists were apprehended at our southern border in January alone.
So, what can we do about the crisis at our Southern border?
Congress must fulfill its constitutional duty to protect states from invasion by sealing the border, finishing the wall, and completing the wall system technology to include ground sensors.
We must change course on the Biden Administration’s asylum policies that are fraudulently used by illegals and reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy as implemented under President Trump.
We must also continue the success of Title 42 (slated to be ended by President Biden on May 11th), and pass Rep. Chip Roy’s Border Safety and Security Act, which I am a proud cosponsor.
The crisis at the border is a reflection of bad policy choices that can and must be reversed.
