Fixing the Border Crisis

In Congress, I represented a district that covered a significant amount of America’s Southern border. Spending time in border communities along the Texas border and working with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), I know first-hand the challenges we face at the Southern border.

Politicians love to talk about the border crisis, but inaction on both sides of the aisle speaks louder than their sound bites. To achieve real homeland security, we need a border security policy that:

• Cracks down on cartels and human smugglers operating across our northern and Southern border,
• Puts in place strong disincentives to curb illegal crossings of our southwest border,
• Eliminates long-term root causes of illegal immigration

The Southern border crisis caused by failed policies of the Biden Administration makes President Biden one of the worst border security presidents in the last two decades. However, this current crisis began under Donald Trump.

I hunted terrorists in the Middle East. We should be hunting those who cross our border illegally using the full capabilities of the intelligence community to dismantle their networks in Mexico and the Northern Triangle of Central America.

We must treat the cartels and transnational criminal organizations the same way we treated the ISIS and al Qaeda: as terrorist organizations that pose a direct national security threat to Americans. They are at the heart of this border crisis and Border Patrol and local law enforcement needs help against this threat.

Fentanyl killed over 109,000 Americans last year alone while Mexican drug cartels raked in hundreds of millions of dollars flooding the U.S. with the dangerous drugs. This poison is eroding our homeland security and fueling the border crisis.

The smuggling of illegal drugs like opioids must face penalties equivalent to those imposed on terrorists who manufacture, possess, or use a weapon of mass destruction against our citizens.

We must improve our ability to secure and achieve operational control of the southern and northern borders. The federal government needs to do more than just build a border wall for border protection. The men and women of Border Patrol need a digital shield using state of the art technology like drones, sensors and artificial intelligence to keep us safe.

As the first proponent on Capitol Hill to advocate for the provision of automated sentry towers to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to monitor and track illegal border crossers, I understand first-hand the need to give our border patrol agents the ability to harness new technology to secure each mile of our border.

Further, we must audit the natural impediments that make visual detection more difficult, invest in current points of entry to shore up infrastructure, create new ports of entry to alleviate congestion and enhance security scans, and shore up partnerships with state and local law enforcement through greater investments in Operation Stonegarden.

The 5.5 million people who have come into our country illegally have abused the asylum process and our immigration laws.

President Joe Biden continued Donald Trump’s policy of treating everyone coming to the country illegally as an asylum seeker, which has caused the situation at the border to morph into the humanitarian crisis it now is and strained the resources of Health and Human Services (HHS), Border Patrol and the immigration court.

Millions of asylum seekers are leaving places like the Northern Triangle – El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – and overwhelming our borders and the Biden Administration is incapable of turning the tide.

We must properly use existing foreign aid programs to these countries to help prevent the root cause of our border being overwhelmed: violence, lack of economic opportunity and extreme poverty. It’s a fraction of the cost to solve problems there before they show up here.