House Dems Skip On-Site Border Meeting
Labeling it “a political stunt,” House Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee abdicated their constitutional responsibility.
It was the image of a woman that stuck with him.
“What the cartels do is when they sneak people in, they put them in stash houses,” said Tennessee Republican Congressman Mark Green after a recent trip to the border with House GOP freshmen. “And then to pay the cartel back, those people have to commit crimes in the United States — basically sell or traffic drugs or people. Well, if you refuse to do that, you wind up dead. And this one woman did, and she was raped, scalped, and dropped at an elementary school in the United States.”
So the border crisis isn’t just about the 5.6 million illegals we’ve encountered at our southern border during Joe Biden’s disastrous tenure, or the 1.4 million additional border crossers who got away without being apprehended.
It’s also about the barbarism and the human carnage that the Biden administration continues to allow.
It’s against that backdrop, then, that Green, a former Army flight surgeon and the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, convened a field hearing in McAllen, Texas — right on the border, right in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, right where the catastrophe is at its worst.
The hearing included testimony from Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who, when asked by Chairman Green, admitted that our Department of Homeland Security doesn’t have operational control of our southern border. While hardly a surprise to those in attendance, Chief Ortiz’s admission was an inconvenient one for our nation’s deeply dishonest, woefully incompetent, and curiously unimpeached DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was featured by Green in a video snippet testifying under oath that we do have operational control of the border.
🚨I’m at the Homeland Security Committee hearing at the US-Mexico border.
— Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (@RepCarlos) March 15, 2023
Border Patrol Chief Raúl Ortiz just stated that the United States DOES NOT have operational control at the southern border. pic.twitter.com/HZFuFZfEoB
Somebody’s lying. And it ain’t Chief Ortiz.
Ortiz also publicly defended the Border Patrol agents who’d been wrongly and despicably smeared by Biden and Mayorkas and others within the administration of having whipped Haitian immigrants in 2021. Said Ortiz: “As a former horse patrol agent, I can attest to how vital horse patrol units are in responding to remote and harsh locations. Last year’s mass migration event in Del Rio was chaotic. We had over 20,000 people show up in one place in a short period of time. Even so, we were able to provide food, water, and medical care without a single loss of life.”
During his opening statement, Ortiz noted, “You’ve recognized the tremendous strain and pressure the border security situation has caused our personnel, and we have seen a rise in suicides.”
A rise in suicides? Sadly, yes. Last year, a stunning 17 Customs and Border Protection employees killed themselves, he said.
Others would testify, too, including Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, who said his county was “under siege by illegal aliens and smugglers.”
Too bad not a single House Democrat was there to hear it. Indeed, they skipped the meeting, calling it “a political stunt.” As Chairman Green noted:
Now, this was supposed to be a full committee, but as you can see, the Democrats are not here. They decided to not show. Why? Well, they said coming here was just a political stunt. You tell me: taking a hearing to the point of the crisis for a firsthand view, or boycotting a hearing because … we’re going to shine a light on the truth. Which of those is a political stunt? I’d say the political stunt is these empty chairs.
As we’ve noted before, the cost of Joe Biden’s open border is incalculable, and not only in terms of the human and financial costs. Even harder to calculate is the cost to the American fabric, which is irrevocably altered over weeks and months and years and generations as an influx of people unlike any in American history is forcibly distributed across the land, often without notice and in the dead of night.
Article 4, 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” (emphasis ours).
Maybe Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats should revisit the oaths they took.
