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March 2, 2021 - Epoch Times
14:05
Rep. Chip Roy: A Secure Border Is Pro-Immigrant | CPAC 2021 | American Thought Leaders
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There are immigrants in stash houses being abused.
There are immigrants being abused on the journey.
There are cartels that are using these people for profit.
That is happening right now.
And it is happening because Democrats are irresponsible and refuse to secure our border.
A secure border doesn't mean anti-immigrant.
A secure border is actually pro-immigrant because it's a safe means for immigrants to come to the United States under our laws, respecting the rule of law.
So we're here at CPAC 2021 with Congressman Chip Roy.
It's great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Yeah, great to be with you guys.
It's obviously a great weekend.
We've got the former president coming in.
I'm going to go speak on a panel on debt and spending with my good buddy Russ Vogt, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget.
And it should be a good finish to the conference.
You're very active in a number of different issues.
Top of mind for me, actually, is immigration.
Of course, you're in Texas, and this is something that's very top of mind to you, and you've been very vocal about some of the policy changes.
Well, what we're seeing right now from this administration is an abject failure, a refusal to actually, you know, do their job.
The president is basically not, as the Constitution suggests or orders, taking care to faithfully execute the laws of the United States to secure the borders of the United States.
And what is that doing?
It's causing an empowerment of cartels.
And it is causing an attraction of human beings to come here where they think they're going to get here and get amnesty and a rush to our border.
And that endangers the lives of American citizens.
But importantly, it endangers the lives of immigrants who are seeking to come to our country.
And I understand why they do.
And all of us do.
But this is a total irresponsibility from the left.
And they do it in the false name of compassion.
We have 3,500 people a day coming.
And then you've got Biden, who, by the way, it was Obama and Biden who set up the facilities that then the radical left later deemed as kids in cages when President Trump was using it to try to deal with the influx of children.
Now what do you have?
You have President Biden and their same policies saying, we've got to pull these kids and put them in these facilities, and this radical left is going after them.
But it's irresponsible what they're doing at the border, and it's going to really, truly harm immigrants and harm our country.
Well, so why do you think these policy changes are coming so quick, so fast, and all basically in an administration-type way?
Well, I think this question actually really gets under my skin.
President Biden knows full well, okay?
He was kind of a law enforcement guy.
He understood.
He voted for the, I think, the Secure Defense Act back in 05.
I mean, you go back and look at his track record.
You know, he came at it from a perspective of, while still being to the left of where I would be, you know, at least some sort of rational consideration in the past about what we need to do at our border at times.
He is completely allowing the radical left to just decide what this policy is going to be.
And doing so really is, I want to go back to being tragic for the immigrants.
There are immigrants right now today, as we're speaking, while this conference is going on and while the president is sitting in the White House in Washington, there are immigrants in stash houses being abused.
There are immigrants being abused on the journey.
There are cartels that are using these people for profit.
That is happening right now.
And it is happening because Democrats are irresponsible and refuse to secure our border.
A secure border doesn't mean anti-immigrant.
A secure border is actually pro-immigrant because it's a safe means for immigrants to come to the United States under our laws, respecting the rule of law.
It's better for America, better for Mexico, better for Central America, better for everybody around the world, but most importantly, better for our country.
Exactly.
I know you as being someone that is actually pro-immigration but very anti-illegal immigration because of the cost.
You've been very big on the human trafficking issue.
How does that equation change under these types of policies?
Well, what happens is when you empower the cartels, and look, let's be very clear, cartels make lots of money moving human beings for profit.
And they do so doing it to just get them across the border, using coyotes and so forth.
But also, that's all integrated in then what turns into human trafficking, sex trafficking.
Basically, slavery, modern-day slavery in the United States where people are being forced to work against their will or being forced to be in sex trade against their will.
And you've got human beings being used for profit by dangerous illicit organizations.
This administration's policies encourage that.
This administration's policies encourage and empowers them because it's basically saying, hey, wide open borders, but I mean not really, right?
Because it turns DHS into a catch-and-release processing welcoming committee.
So you have what happens when people come across our border, they seek Border Patrol agents because they're going to get caught, they're going to go to a facility, and they're going to get immediately released into the United States, either because they're going to know they're going to get amnesty or because they're just going to kind of go off in the United States and then not show up to hearings later.
That's dangerous.
And it's dangerous because then fentanyl comes into our country.
It's dangerous because it's bad for the immigrants.
It's dangerous because it empowers the cartels.
It's dangerous because then people get into our country because border patrol is overwhelmed, who we don't want to be here.
Whether it's people being backed by the Chinese or the Iranians or the Russians, we see it every day.
We find people that are not just workers from northern Mexico trying to come across the Rio Grande for a job.
And this is actually, you know, you're feeling this very directly in your community, right, in your district.
Absolutely.
The district I represent between Austin and San Antonio, it goes west and southwest, gets to within about 100 miles of the border.
And my district or the district I represent and Tony Gonzalez and Michael Cloud, my friend down in South Texas, we're all feeling it, right?
And the people we represent are feeling it.
You know, people who have ranches that have been in their families for years and they, you know, end up dealing with criminal activity.
They have people, they find bodies in the middle of their ranch because You know, it'll be a mom.
It'll be a woman or a child or something that dies from the heat in the summer, you know, whatever that they're facing.
And it's really tragic and it's avoidable, right?
I mean, where you have fencing, it works.
It slows down the traffic.
Where you have cleared cane and roads for Border Patrol to use, where you have the right resources, when you have the right policies in place, we still have a million plus people who can come here.
We still have people that can come to the United States, but we don't have the horrors that we're seeing today.
It is irresponsible and the blood is on the hands of Democrats who basically push open borders in the false name of compassion.
So, and from what you know right now, how much has that illegal border traffic changed over the last month or month and a half?
Yeah, so I don't have the most recent data for February yet because we're just now at the end of February.
Today's the last day.
But, you know, coming up through January, we were at 3,500 people a day, 100,000 a month.
Those are numbers far exceeding even a lot of the numbers that we saw in 2019, right at the height of that massive influx coming across the border.
And that number is difficult or impossible for Border Patrol and ICE to manage.
So they're now dealing with that influx.
They're trying to figure out what to do.
And here's the important part.
For a while in January and into February, we were using Title 42 under our health codes to hold the line because of the pandemic.
Now the administration is moving away from that.
They're not going to use that.
We were using our return to Mexico policies where we were working with Mexico to hold people in Mexico.
That reduces the pressure.
It gives people less incentive.
So we're now seeing more influx because people are going, wait a minute.
I'm not going to get caught.
I'm not going to get stopped.
And it's turning it now into a catch and release organization.
And like I said, now they're feeling it.
And Biden's going to start taking some heat because they go, well, what do we do with a child?
You can't just release a child.
And you can't just leave that child in a cell with someone claiming to be his or her uncle.
So you've got to have facilities to do that.
And so now the radical left, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others are saying, kids in cages, you're doing it too.
So hopefully they're going to kind of hang themselves with their own rhetoric, but we're going to have to keep fighting for these people.
And just briefly, so it's 3,500 at the end of January.
What was that at the end of December?
I'd have to go back and look at what the exact number was, but it was trending up, okay?
So whatever it is, you go back and look at the numbers from October, November, December, January.
Those numbers were trending up in anticipation of Biden amnesty and in anticipation of the policies that would change.
And then as the policies changed, those numbers are staying up.
So, let's talk about one other thing that I know you've been vocal about.
You have a kind of formulation which struck me as quite interesting.
The theme of the conference, of course, is America Uncancelled.
You described that you're seeing a kind of an ideological cleansing of America.
You called it a sickness.
Tell me about this.
Right.
Well, on the floor a couple nights ago, my friend Scott Perry, who I see right over there right now, and I and a few other colleagues, Warren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jody Heiss, we took to the floor to describe what I called ideological cleansing.
And if you go back and look at the history of mankind, right, this is not unusual for powerful governments, but what we're seeing, whether it's COVID, what we're seeing in terms of spending our schools, and then now, particularly with what we might call cancel culture with respect to big tech, we're seeing the silencing of dissent.
An ideological cleansing.
You will be made to bow down to the altar of the cultural elites in Washington, New York, LA. Frankly, now it's expanding into other areas where they're gonna tell you what to believe, tell you what to think.
And if you dare break from that, then you're gonna be punished.
You're gonna be canceled.
You're gonna be stripped of your social media accounts.
You're gonna have a hotel closed because the corporate boards will be attacked by the radical left and say that you're a bigot.
Am I a bigot because I believe in secure borders?
They'll say so.
My view, I believe that I'm pro-immigrant by believing in secure borders.
That's what a free debate should be.
They're going to say, nope, you're a bigot, right?
And that's what they do.
They try to sign anything you believe.
You are suddenly a bigot.
If I believe that there is man and woman and that they marry and then they produce children...
Bedrock of civilization for millennia.
If I believe that, I'm a bigot.
They passed the Equality Act this week.
We pointed out that that law, if it were to be enacted, and hopefully it won't be, I think Joe Manchin understands that that bill is not good in West Virginia.
But that bill would do horrible things by redefining sex, by making it to where boys can run against girls in track meets or in swim meets or in athletic competitions in a high school or college.
It'll destroy Division I athletics for women.
Importantly, though, it will trample in the rights of churches, private Christian schools, Any school.
It could be a Muslim school.
It could be a secular school.
But it's going to trample on your right to be able to teach people something that is, to what I described, out of step with the orthodoxy of the radical cultural elite.
That's the ideological cleansing, and it's happened right before our eyes.
And this afternoon I'm going to speak about spending with my friend Ross Vogt, like I said earlier.
And one of the things we're going to talk about is, why are we funding this?
We're funding the very institutions that are trying to take away our liberties.
Not trying, they are taking away our liberties and our ability to speak freely, to engage freely in the free sharing of ideas, to practice our faith, to teach our children, to frack, to do the things that we want to do to have our businesses open rather than having our government shut them all down.
We're funding all that.
We should stop.
And which institutions specifically are we funding?
Well, we're funding the United States government.
And the United States government is using its power now through the Equality Act, if it were to become law, but even before that, without the Equality Act, using its power to shut down activities like right now, ban on federal lands for fracking.
Well, that harms our economy.
Right now, we get $500 billion in the $2 trillion bill we passed on Friday going to state and local governments who have been shutting down businesses across America, forcing Shelley Luther in Dallas, Texas, not to be able to open her barbershop to be able to put food on her plate.
You can go down the laundry list of things that we're doing.
We are funding schools that the teachers' unions refuse to teach our kids.
Federal dollars, $100 billion that were added to the pot on Friday.
Why are we doing that?
Why would we fund schools that are not even open?
And then if they do open, they teach our kids that America is evil.
They teach our kids there is no God.
They teach our kids that even if there is a God, you can't talk about him.
That's what we're doing, right?
We're funding endless wars.
We're 20 years into a war in the Middle East, and we haven't had an authorization of force since 2001.
Why are we continuing to fund that $1.5 trillion later?
That's what we're doing.
We're funding the very tyranny that's taking away our liberties.
Fascinating.
And so, you know, obviously, right now you're in the minority in the House.
Republicans are in the minority in the Senate.
The administration, of course, is Democrat.
At least for the next two years, what are you going to do?
Well, we're going to be making the points that I just made, but we're going to be making very loudly the idea that in 22 and 24, it's time to reclaim our American inheritance.
It's time to go on offense.
We're not just going to play defense against the Biden administration.
We're going on full offense on a liberty agenda to make sure that the American people know what we're going to reclaim for our kids and grandkids.
And are we going to get anything passed?
No.
This is a messaging war.
When you're in the minority, it's about messaging and going to the American people and selling ideas.
Every step of the way in Washington, we'll throw up every roadblock we know how to to their radical leftist agenda.
But, you know, whatever they pass out of the House goes to the Senate.
And I just have one message for every human being who lives in West Virginia.
Make sure Joe Manchin knows you don't agree with this radical left agenda.
Because Joe Manchin and then a few others in the Senate have the ability to hold the Senate in check.
The filibuster should be honored.
And that means it's a cooling saucer.
We slow down this stuff and we can have a real debate about the issues that matter.
Any final thoughts?
Look, I mean, I think right now, you know, a lot of people are frustrated about some of the current events and so forth, particularly if you're a conservative.
And I understand it.
I am, too.
It's easy to sort of get down or sort of cynical.
The fact of the matter is the American people are awakening.
They're seeing what's going on.
They're seeing the veil lifted on a public school system that is for too long been indoctrinating our kids.
They're seeing the veil lifted on higher ed.
They're seeing the veil lifted on the defense industrial complex.
And a lot of that has to do with the Trump agenda and attacking the swamp in Washington.
And so we're going to get on offense on those issues and carry that agenda forward in a way that I think mobilizes people.
And I really appreciate the opportunity to visit with you.
Well, Congressman Chip Roy, great to have you.
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