During the last four years, communities along the southern border have been ground zero for illegal immigration. Stretching over 800 miles of the Rio Grande, my congressional district includes places like Eagle Pass, Del Rio, and El Paso. These places have all been ravaged by the Biden administration's "America Last" agenda, which has led to the worst border crisis in our nation's history. It has also empowered transnational criminals like never before.
Not a week goes by that I am not either at the border or in touch with our law enforcement on the front lines— they all relay the same haunting message. Terrorists are streaming across our borders, and the cartels are having a field day.
Earlier this year, I pressed the Biden administration for specific answers about how many criminal aliens reside within our borders. Six months later, I finally received a response. It confirmed a chilling reality that we have long suspected.
As of July 2024, 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories were on ICE’s national docket.
Over 100,000 individuals on this docket had a pending assault charge, and over 13,000 had been convicted of murder. To exacerbate the problem, removals of convicted criminal migrants dropped by 74% under the Biden-Harris administration. In FY2017-2020, ICE removed over 526,000 criminal migrants compared to the 137,617 criminal migrants deported in FY2021-2023.
Our mandate is clear: we must make America safe again and send a clear message that our country is not a haven for the world’s bad actors. To accomplish that, we must focus our resources on deporting criminal aliens as soon as humanly possible.
Gaps in our border security have allowed dangerous criminals to slip through the cracks, allowing the murderers of university student Laken Riley and 12-year-old Joselyn Nungaray to gain entry into the United States. Had strong, Trump-era guardrails been left in place by the Biden administration, these violent criminals may have never stepped foot in our country. Instead, the Biden administration has worked overtime to reverse nearly every single one of President Trump's effective border policies. The results have been a disaster to our national security and have led to over 10 million encounters of illegal aliens at our nation’s borders.
The facts don’t lie—nine out of ten migrants who claim asylum in the United States do not qualify. And yet a historic number of people, the majority subject to deportation, have been released into our communities. At the same time, our immigration courts are more backlogged than ever before, meaning these hundreds of thousands of individuals have court dates that are years down the line.
Not only is this unsustainable, it is unacceptable.
As the representative of the largest border district in Congress, I welcome President Trump's push to invest in our border security, close asylum loopholes, and deport criminal aliens. We can do all of this while maintaining opportunities for all those who aspire to become American citizens the right way, the legal way.