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March 1, 2023 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
41:46
Episode 91 LIVE: Detain or Remove (feat. Rep. Chip Roy) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
In battle, Congressman Matt Gates.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem for the Democratic Party.
He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing the clause.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
You are in the right place!
This is the movement for you!
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
Welcome back to Firebrand.
We are broadcasting live out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building here in Washington, D.C., our nation's capital.
And today's episode is going to bring you behind the scenes into the negotiations and the specific policy prescriptions for this border crisis.
And we know we're going to get no help from the Democrats at all, so it's critical to know what the leading Republicans are thinking, where the pushback is coming from, what we think we can do, where we see Poison pills and red lines.
Chip Roy, the author of some of the best legislation to deal with the border crisis, joins Firebrand.
We're going to have a great discussion for you.
And we have got folks tuning in from everywhere.
Just during our preview, folks checked in from Texas, Alaska.
A lot of people from Ohio, Missouri, had some New Yorkers, Pennsylvania, a Californian, Oklahoma, Tennessee guy.
And of course, the best state in the country, the Sunshine State, my home state of Florida.
So last week, I left Florida, went to Yuma, Arizona, where the House Judiciary Committee held a field hearing on the condition of the border.
And Americans living on the border are tired of being neglected.
They want their voices heard.
And before the hearing, We had this opportunity to get a grasp of the situation on the ground, seeing how services were stretched, how people were treated.
And we visited the border itself, a hospital, a food bank.
And believe me, what I discovered will absolutely shock you or even will it anymore with how much we've seen our border turned into a turnstile.
Millions of people here without permission or process.
When we went, the first thing we did when I landed in Yuma was tour the regional hospital.
Now, you've heard Democrats talk about hospital access and healthcare and a whole lot of elections, but they don't seem to mind when the hospitals are overrun by illegals in communities on the front line of this crisis.
And that's exactly what was going on in Yuma, Arizona.
Newborn babies are not getting the care that they need to stay alive because illegal immigrants are clogging up the hospital.
These illegals are coming in sick with some diseases that we didn't even know existed in the United States anymore.
And they're speaking So many different languages.
It is not just Spanish anymore.
It's like the United Nations down there, and the hospital has to divert time from patients to go find translators for every language under the sun, from Russian to Cyrillic to Mandarin, you name it.
1,900 migrants were treated during the last surge at just this one hospital in Yuma, and many of them were admitted due to pregnancy.
These illegals are coming in pregnant, oftentimes so that they can have anchor babies and take advantage of our entitlement systems.
In fact, the Mexican illegals in particular like to cross the border, have their babies in America, then go back and live in Mexico where it's cheaper, all the while sending their kids to our schools, collecting our welfare.
Utilizing all of the privileges that we ought to preciously hold for Americans.
Now, the cartels do this a lot.
They actually go have their mamacitas have the next generation of cartel talent born in our country.
And some of these kids, these students, these minors that are going from Mexico to the United States are carrying and smuggling fentanyl because they know if they have not reached the age of majority, there will be a different penalty structure.
So they bake that into their business plan.
This is why.
I am going to lead the fight in the Congress to end birthright citizenship by fraud.
And a lot of Republicans don't talk like that, but President Trump did, and he was right.
Birthright citizenship is not this universally accepted construct in the Western world.
It just isn't.
And we ought to protect and care about our birthright so much that we don't just hand it out willy-nilly.
Americans continue to see our citizenship that is precious diluted.
And this happens as our services are strained.
The hospital beds that these illegals are taking are forcing American mothers to either wait to give birth in cases where you have a scheduled inducement or have babies at home.
Terrible.
These Americans are paying taxes oftentimes to support the healthcare in their communities.
And yet, it's being overrun.
Now, the hospital we visited doesn't have enough neonatal intensive care unit beds to support all of the illegal alien babies and the babies who are there as a consequence of the citizens and legal residents of Yuma.
That is because 25% of illegal births end up in the NICU. Let me say that again.
25%.
Of the births that these illegal migrants are having and engaged in, 25%, one in four require the NICU. That's really something.
Way higher, obviously, than the average that we see as the standard of care in the United States.
This is why some NICU babies are being sent hours away to the closest hospital all the way in Phoenix.
It's 170 miles away.
Just imagine the fear and the wave of emotion that parents have to go through when they're traveling 170 miles away to a NICU bed in Phoenix.
I cannot imagine putting people in such a vulnerable situation in life itself in a worse position.
So watch this clip from our field hearing where we discuss the NICU situation with the president of the Yuma Regional Medical Center, Dr. Robert Trenchell-Ticholissen.
Now, Dr. Trenchell, about one in four of the migrants who use birthing services at your hospital need neonatal intensive care unit services, NICU, right?
That is true, yes.
And that rate, one in four, is way higher than with the non-migrant population, right?
Very much higher, correct.
You've got about 20 beds at any given time.
Correct.
And they fill up sometimes, don't they?
Yes, they do.
And so when you have those beds that are full up because of the pressure of these migrant communities, where do you have to send the residents of Yuma when they have a baby that needs NICU? We would have to fly them to Phoenix or another venue.
And that's 170 miles away.
Yes, it is.
There are few prayers that I have ever seen more sincere and deeper than the prayers of parents when their little babies are at the NICU. And for all the folks on the left who want to lecture to us about how humane an open border is, there is nothing humane about putting a parent on a 170-mile journey when they need NICU services.
So we're back live in just one hospital in Yuma alone.
There's $26 million in uncompensated care that the hospital just has to eat as a consequence of these illegal aliens.
Who knows how many Americans haven't gotten the care that they need to stay alive.
Why should Americans pay astronomically high hospital bills when illegals are getting treated for free?
They don't even get a bill.
They just go in and it's socialized medicine for them.
It's not sustainable and it's not fair.
Misguided charities also play their role.
They're getting illegal aliens into the hospital and then their work is done.
They just ditch them.
They're not part of the cost structure or the finance structure.
They just bring illegal aliens to the hospital, dump them off there.
The hospital staff told me that they're having to take extra shifts because they are so overwhelmed by this phenomenon.
And part of the reason they're so overburdened is because they aren't allowed to discharge illegal alien patients When there's follow-up care or outpatient care needed.
That's because we don't know where the migrants will show up next.
So think about that.
Two patients.
Patient A, patient B. They both present precisely the same symptoms.
They get exactly the same care and they would both be ready for discharge.
They'll discharge The non-illegal alien, but if there's like a two or three day follow-up that's medically necessary afterwards, they don't really believe that the illegal alien maybe is going to come back or whatever.
They don't want to get sued for not providing aftercare.
So they will keep that person in the hospital bed, meaning that it's not available for an American citizen.
And all the while we're bending over backwards for illegals, I'm told The stories of how ungrateful some of them are.
Not all, but some.
Time and again I heard stories in Yuma that some of the Haitians that are crossing our southern border are behaving the worst.
They demand that the hospital staff, in some cases, secure their travel to a destination of their choice.
It's not like It's not a travel agency.
It's a hospital.
Some of these Haitian immigrants have even threatened cab drivers.
They destroy the motels and hospitals that had been resourced for them.
Think about that.
The hospital goes and they're treating a family member.
They get a motel or hotel bed for other family members and they go and trash the place.
I'm starting to understand why Haiti is such a mess.
But the trip did not end there.
Next we visited a food bank and we met with the chairwoman of the food bank and local farmers that were generous enough to donate their extra crop to this non-profit out of community service and duty and obligation.
The chairwoman of this food bank started off telling us how ungrateful so many of the migrants are.
Apparently the migrants are picky about the type of food they want to eat and how much they get.
Unsurprisingly, oftentimes we were told that it's the Haitians who are the worst offenders again.
Everywhere they go, we seem to hear similar complaints.
Meanwhile, as if dealing with this mess wasn't enough for the food bank, they're understaffed.
And I kept thinking an obvious good solution here would be to have work requirements.
If people are able to provide something to contribute or help, that they should get the benefit of that holistic engagement with the food bank.
I think, federally, if you want other people to pay for your Medicaid or Your SNAP or your food stamps or whatever, there should be work requirements for able-bodied adults.
Not the sick, not the infirm, not senior citizens, but like able-bodied adults who want help from others that are able to volunteer at a food bank, like the one I went to in Yuma, Arizona, should do so.
Mexico has work requirements.
Mexico.
So why can't we?
You want food from the food bank?
Get to work.
The poor farmers we met with, oh my gosh.
They tell me that they have to destroy massive amounts of crop every season because illegal aliens tread through their fields and defecate everywhere.
When even so much as a human footprint is found, these farmers have to destroy all the crops in a five-foot radius.
They put up no trespassing signs, but of course that doesn't stop illegal immigration.
The people across the border illegally don't have much respect for private property rights.
I can assure you of that.
The Biden administration and Secretary Mayorkas need to step up and protect our farmers and our food supply and the safety of what we're eating.
Chances are, if you're eating a green leafy vegetable that grows during the winter months, you're probably eating something farmed around our southern border.
This is not a joke.
And our current administration is treating it like one.
Now, for the grand finale, we visited the border itself and it too was shocking.
We headed out at about 3 a.m.
and immediately ran into a large group of illegals being processed at a gap in our wall.
Now, why would there be a gap in the wall?
It's because where President Trump's wall runs right up to an Indian reservation.
And lo and behold, we had a recalcitrant Indian tribe that said, no wall!
Through the area that adjoins our reservation.
And the result is that we know where to go every night where we're going to find hundreds of people coming through a drop house.
Now, these weren't Mexicans.
They were Central Americans, Georgians, Dominicans, Chinese, and others.
This is new.
I had not seen a whole lot of Chinese in the migrant populations previously.
Now, Border Patrol agents were telling me That nine out of every ten groups has someone from China.
Think about that.
Watch this footage that we took that night in Yuma.
Listen to what we uncovered.
Play the clip. - So we're hearing from the Border Patrol that these groups are never homogenous.
It's never all from one country.
Here you've got people from South America.
You've got folks from Asia, China.
China.
Beijing, where from China?
- - - - So they went from China to Turkey?
Yeah.
To South America?
Yeah.
None of these folks look like they've had a particularly arduous trek.
What you'd say a lot of times these are three to five days maximum.
They fly from their country of origin to Mexico City, Mexico City to Mexicali.
Some of them actually fly into Tijuana, and then they take an Uber.
That's where the majority of the Russians are going.
It's a better flight.
Just this side, there's a large date grove of trees right there, and inside of that is one of the drop houses.
And so they will come from the Mexicali Airport, they will wait right there, and then they will cross in groups.
I mean, how many people do you think have been processed through that drop house?
Because you and I have been to this exact spot.
500,000 people.
At a minimum of $6,000 a person.
Right?
At a minimum.
About $77,000 is what they paid.
$77,000?
Yeah.
That's a lot of money.
And where are you going?
In a family In what state?
Florida Florida?
In what city?
I'm from Florida Where?
Miami Beach?
Florida Beach?
It said Florida Beach.
Venice?
Venice.
What is a sheet of paper everyone seems to be holding?
They all seem to be holding kind of a similar paperwork.
And that probably is their travel itinerary, so they can prove where they've been because this is, hey, we just got here.
We haven't been in a safe country.
Are these people all going to say, I'm here seeking asylum?
Only 35% are claiming asylum.
So what are the rest of them?
The rest of them are just...
What's the permission structure to allow the rest of them to not be detained or removed?
We should ask the president.
And how many hours will most of these people be released to me?
48 hours.
48 hours.
I mean, the hundred plus certainly that you see here will be walking among our fellow Americans.
We are back live.
The live stream was fired up with that report.
Peter on Facebook has seen enough and wants to see articles of impeachment.
I think he's talking about Joe Biden, but certainly Mayorkas deserves impeachment.
But I'll give you the tea.
We do not have the votes to impeach Joe Biden or Mayorkas right now.
We have a four seat majority.
And if there's going to be a sincere impeachment effort regarding the border, and by the way, there should be the American people.
Have to get on their members of Congress and on their senators to indicate that that is their demand.
And the people have to demand that or it will not happen.
Washington will not generate that outcome.
Ed on Rumble says, finish the wall.
And one thing I could tell you, you didn't see these massive groups of hundreds of people coming where there was wall.
The wall and the wheel, the two things that will never go out of style.
Now, what's interesting from that video, you will see, is that these were not poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free air.
These are people wearing designer jackets, nice shoes.
They paid tens of thousands of dollars to cartels to be allowed to cross.
These illegals...
Likely flew into Mexico several days before and Ubered to a cartel stash house before they crossed.
That is how broken our system is.
And these aren't even the worst of the illegals.
Border Patrol tells me that some illegals who can't afford the trip are forced to have to make a deal with the cartel.
Maybe they have to carry drugs.
Maybe they have to become unindentured servants after they cross.
Some are even raped to exact that last toll before they cross.
When we do not secure our border, we are perpetrating rape and smuggling and human slavery.
And the funny thing is, securing our border shouldn't be hard.
It isn't for a whole lot of countries on the planet Earth.
The Biden administration has turned the Border Patrol into a concierge service for illegal aliens.
They meet the illegals at the border.
Usher them into the country.
Give them paperwork that allows them to get a job and work.
And they let them loose in our neighborhoods and in our communities.
The only thing stopping Border Patrol from doing their job and securing their border is the political will of political leaders.
Because the people who work at Border Patrol, they have patriotism and will and determination to get the job done.
But we have them shackled to a broken system.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told local leaders that he would plug the gaps in the wall and secure the border.
But apparently that was just talk.
Listen to this exchange I had with the supervisor of District 2 in Yuma County, Jonathan Lyons.
Take a listen.
Supervisor Lyons, we hear Secretary Mayorkas come to us all the time on the Judiciary Committee and testify that the most important partnerships above all else for the Department of Homeland Security are the partnerships with local officials.
We hear it time and again.
And so here is my simple question for you.
Has Secretary Mayorkas ever lied to you?
Yes.
And what was the substance of that lie?
So the mayor and I had the opportunity to visit with Secretary Mayorkas and the Yuma sector chief, as well as the chief of the entire Border Patrol at sector headquarters almost a year ago.
And during that meeting, he committed to, after reviewing the border, both from the ground and the air, to specifically address, quote unquote, nine of the 11 Yuma gaps.
And how many of those gaps have been addressed?
To date so far, none.
We see infrastructure on two, and yet they will not deter anyone.
This is my fourth time here with you.
I think if I come any more often, I'm going to be eligible to vote on you, McKenna.
Thank you for coming back, Matt.
But in these circumstances, it seems as though it's not a great mystery where the pressure points are, where we have gaps in the wall, and where we have recalcitrant.
Tribes.
And so in those circumstances, should we observe that this is a lack of capability or a lack of will to go and plug those holes?
A lack of will.
We've followed up multiple times, as well as Yuma Sector Border Patrol staff and with undersecretaries, and we were told time and time again that they were issuing contracts, that we would have it no later than June of last year, then no later than September, then no later than November.
Every time it kept getting pushed out.
So would a reasonable person observe that this is on purpose?
My wife says I'm not a very patient person, but I was patient every time that I called.
And they continued to push this process out.
It's not reasonable.
Well, the American people are losing their patience.
We ought to be losing ours.
And while we greatly appreciate the three of you being here to answer our questions, the day will come soon when Secretary Mayorkas has to come and answer our questions.
And to my colleagues, if he'll lie to Mr. Lyons and lie to the community here, then he will lie to us and he will lie to the American people.
And that's why I'm very proud to co-sponsor Representatives Big's Articles of Impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas because this is not a lack of ability.
It is a lack of will.
There you have it.
Mayorkas lied through his teeth.
He has no intention of doing this job.
So Congress needs to do its job and impeach him.
We need to hold the executive branch accountable.
For real.
Lives and livelihoods are at stake.
Think about those parents who can't get access to their NICU beds, if nothing else.
The crisis at our southern border is unsustainable.
It's time we found the will to put a stop to the madness, and we need to secure our borders, and we must do it immediately.
The time to act has but passed, and any Republican who refuses to do our critical oversight work It's certainly not serving the interests of their constituents.
Now, one member who is is my good friend, Congressman Chip Roy of Texas.
And there's specific legislation.
So in the first part of the show here, we've gone through the problem, laying it out, where the blame lies, what the consequences are.
But I want you to get an understanding of what the possible solutions are, who's backing them, and who's standing in the way.
This is my conversation moments ago with Chip Roy of Texas.
We're here with Chip Roy of Texas.
Congressman Roy, describe the legislation you've put forward to deal with this border crisis.
Yeah, great to be with you, Matt.
Thanks for everything you do.
I put together a bill last year in the last Congress.
I introduced it last fall.
It is in this Congress, H.R. 29. And the bill's purpose was actually to try to capitalize on the fact that all Republicans seem to agree that we should enforce Title 42 during a pandemic.
So my thinking was, why should that be limited to pandemic, right?
Why don't we want to have the Secretary of Homeland Security have the power to be able to say, hey, if we've got a flood at our border, maybe we should be able to say we can use the same power that we were using under Title 42 and that President Trump very successfully used in his administration to turn away at the border unless...
You've got the capacity and the beds and the ability to process asylum claims.
That's it.
It's an end encounter and release bill.
It's a follow existing laws bill.
And the vast majority of Republicans, and certainly our constituents, fully support it.
It's a handful that are raising some questions, and hopefully we'll go through regular ordering committees.
Yeah, no, I want to understand the objections and lay them out in a moment.
But first, everyone gets it.
Is it fair to assume, then, that if the royal legislation were a law, That everyone we encountered at the border, we would either detain or turn away.
Correct.
And again, I want to be very clear.
That is analogous to how we're enforcing Title 42 under the pandemic laws, but also inconsistent with what President Trump was doing with respect to the return to Mexico migrant protection protocols, saying, hey, if we're not going to be able to process you, you're going to stay there.
And then we'll do the best we can to process you.
And guess what?
The numbers plummeted.
Yeah.
If we had detain or turn away, how would Mexico respond?
Would they let everyone just traverse their country?
Of course not.
Of course not.
And by the way, when they say, well, Mexico wouldn't agree to do this.
Of course they would if we say so.
Right?
That's what President Trump did.
He basically told them.
Hey, we're going to actually affect trade policy.
We could say, for example, we're going to shut down traffic coming across I-35 in Texas or the gas lines or whatever you want to do and get Mexico to the table.
But they'll do it.
They have to do it.
And at the end of the day, it would be better for migrants.
It would be better for Americans.
I'm sitting sick and tired of Americans dying from fentanyl and little girls and little kids getting sold into the sex trafficking and human trafficking trade because we refuse to do our job.
Do you think that the detain or turn away policy gets communicated internally with the cartels and the human trafficking networks?
Of course, because here's the thing, and the human beings involved, who's going to want to pay $5,000 or $10,000 to a cartel?
To be transported up to the border to then be told, sorry, you can't come in and claim asylum and get released.
They're in fact going to go through the whole effort of processing it.
We just got data that for fiscal year 22, when they looked at all the reports, that it was about 10% of the total that had any kind of an asylum claim that would allow them to come in.
And that's probably a pretty liberal interpretation of it, to be honest.
But at the end of the day, there are people who deserve it.
For example, I was in South Florida.
And I got picked up in an Uber.
Nice guy.
He heard me on an interview with AP talking about H.R. 29 and asylum.
And so I hang up and he goes, what was that all about?
And I said, well, talking about asylum policy.
And he said to me, I came from Venezuela.
I was in the military in Venezuela.
I came to the United States three years ago with my wife and two kids.
While I was here, my friend in the military, who was contra the government like I was, was beheaded and killed.
He then claimed asylum.
You know what?
That's what it's for.
When someone you know is going to be persecuted, they're going to be targeted by government for their political beliefs or religious beliefs, you and I both believe and Americans believe compassionate country, help them.
It is not a come here, flood into the country, turn our country upside down, and then make a mockery of the entire rule of law.
That guy's name was Daniel.
He asked me, what do you do?
I said, I'm in Congress.
He goes, are you a Republican or Democrat?
I said, Republican.
He put a thumbs up.
He said, good.
And he goes, you've got to protect this country because where else would I go?
Some of our Republican colleagues have said that your turn away or detain policy guts asylum and that doesn't provide asylum for people who are worthy.
And that's the reason we have Republicans, Texas Republicans, matter of fact, saying that they're not going to vote for your bill for that reason.
What's your response?
Well, it's Texas Republican.
It's one.
But the response is simply this.
It doesn't touch asylum law.
It doesn't.
It doesn't change the existing laws whatsoever with respect to someone being able to come to this country and claim asylum.
What it does is simply says you cannot be released into the United States until and unless we adjudicate your claim for asylum to make sure it's real.
So right now, the people who show up tonight at Eagle Pass— And come across.
They'll all say, you know, we're here for our official protection.
Right.
And when you're under the Roy doctrine, we'd say, okay, very well.
So you go wait in Mexico or some other safe third country for that assessment to be made.
Correct.
Or until we have the judges lined up, if that's in three months or six months, we'll pull you in and we'll then make your claim and process it.
But look, here's the truth, though.
The numbers would drop precipitously so that the people who have legitimate claims would still be able to come here and find a bed.
In a lot of ways, the people with legitimate asylum claims are the victims of an over-flooded system where they can never get that adjudication because you've got people who...
Let's face it.
For most of our lives, people have come to the United States across the southern border for fundamentally the same reason.
Life where they live is not as good as life here.
Correct.
And you know what?
God bless them for it.
Neither you nor I begrudge them.
I don't blame them.
No.
I blame us.
And by the way, by doing what we're doing, We're weakening our fellow neighbors in Central America and South America and the Western Hemisphere.
We should be exporting the rule of law, having a strong world in the Western Hemisphere.
That would push back on China without having to have endless wars abroad in the name of who knows what.
And we should have a strong border for our betterment and their betterment and migrants' betterment.
Frankly, it's much ado about nothing, but people are trying to wrongly claim things about this bill that are scaring people away, and it's intentional.
And that's the way this town works.
So let's talk about the Republican strategy on this, because I would put up your bill, and I would be willing to allow it to fail, even if we didn't have the votes.
And you know what?
Today we probably don't, to be honest.
We probably do not have the votes to pass your bill.
But I would like the American people to see who is willing to vote for detain or turn away, where the objections are, and then let's suss those out.
And you know what?
If we have to come back in a few weeks or a few months and attempt another bill, then we'll have to do that.
Correct.
Why will that not happen?
Well, I'm still hopeful that it could happen, but I think it's because in this town, everybody's always looking to figure out how they can get the perfect scenario, and we only want to put forward things that everybody can vote for because it might hurt them in an election, rather than saying, look, we just want to advance good policy.
You're going to have to either decide if you're with it or not.
And sometimes you've got to take tough votes.
I voted against a measure today on the floor that I generally supported the structure for, but I didn't think it went far enough.
It exempted the ability for us to get reports about how inflation is caused by national security or emergency-related spending.
I don't like our defense guys and others to be able to hide behind those important things to spend money we don't have.
Sometimes you've got to take tough votes in order to get change.
Yeah.
I even think the money we're sending to Ukraine is inflationary because that cash makes its way back into U.S. real estate markets through corrupt bank accounts in Switzerland and Dubai.
It's also like our friend Thomas Massey would say.
It's like every time you're printing money, which is where that money is coming from, we're printing it.
We're not offsetting it.
Then you're actually diluting the value of our dollars, which is effectively a tax.
You can buy fewer goods and services because of it.
What border bill do you think this Republican team could pass?
Because I'm starting to worry that the only border security bill that would have 218 votes today would just be legislation to increase the efficiency of processing people into our country.
Yeah, so that's the real problem, right?
So we'll watch and see what happens, what comes out of the Homeland Security Committee, even if it's in good faith.
They say, well, we need some more dollars and some more vehicles and some more technology and more spending for more Border Patrol agents and maybe be able to give them, you know, retention bonuses.
I can support some of those policies, but only if it's in conjunction with the policies that you need to provide Border Patrol to actually do their job.
Because otherwise, what you're paying for is more processing.
You're paying for more flow.
You're paying for more profits for cartels because you're incentivizing people coming to our country because your policy literally is encounter and release.
And that just says to the cartels, keep them coming.
There are only three things you can do with people.
Turn them away, detain them, or release them into your country.
Right.
And you're saying that that list of three should be reduced down to two.
Correct.
And look, it's one of those things where right now people don't understand we're using a power of parole to release people in the United States, which literally says in the statute, case by case basis for special circumstances, something to those words.
And this administration is just using parole to bring in blocks of people.
Directly contrary to law.
And then we're releasing people at the border directly contrary to law.
Our bill is designed to try to force us to actually adhere to the law.
That's nothing more, nothing less.
Yeah, it's really not that complicated at all.
Three pages.
Yeah, it takes three options down in two.
So one of the other arguments Republican colleagues make is we have to take whatever the, you know, border hawk, Chip Roy theory of the case is, and we have to lash that to some feature of amnesty.
Right.
Maybe DACA, maybe some work permit pathway to citizenship for people that have been doing that for a while.
What is your assessment of how much amnesty can be traded for how much border security?
I think it's important for your listeners to remember, and you were here and I wasn't.
I was campaigning for my first time to come into office.
In the summer of 2018, they had the famous debate over the Goodlatte Bill in July.
Most Americans wouldn't know it that way, but we just had a fight over border security and immigration.
Little known to most people is that almost every Republican, including Freedom Caucus members and conservatives, voted for an amnesty.
They actually voted for it.
800,000 for DACA recipients, the kids.
Almost a million.
As part of a package to try to improve our immigration system, end chain migration, end the diversity visas, fix it so it's skilled labor, and have an actual border security solution, which would have prevented a lot of what we're seeing now.
But it fell short because the Republican leadership at the time, fully in the hip pocket of the Chamber of Commerce, wanted something a lot softer.
And so the idea that we get attacked often and saying, you guys are just closed-minded.
You'll never compromise.
Not true.
We literally compromised that summer for an amnesty for a million people.
Look, this time, we are not going to start with amnesty.
That is a non-starter.
So DACA is a poison pill to any border security.
We should not go down that road until we secure the border of the United States.
Ronald Reagan in 1986, he says one of his biggest mistakes, which was cutting a deal for a future promise of security for an amnesty then.
We are not going to go down that road.
That is non-starter.
Our job is to secure the border of the United States.
Pathway to citizenship is a non-starter?
It is a non-starter for me.
Pathway to legal status.
We can have that conversation after we secure the border.
We're not going to play that game anymore.
The American people are tired of that game.
But in the first vote that we take, you're not going to take a first vote that isn't a border security bill Full stop.
Correct.
I completely agree with that assessment.
It's one that I think most of our viewers and listeners will agree with.
Chip, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for being a warrior, not just on the border, but on our fiscal issues that we face.
And hope to have you on some time in the future to talk about war powers and how we put our country first.
Let's do it.
I think the AUMFO2 is moving right now in the Senate.
Let's go do it.
We've got a lot of work to do, but thank you for being a voice for freedom and for standing up for the American people.
Sounds great.
Be back soon.
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