'The Laws Didn't Change...The Presidency Did': Tom McClintock Slams Biden's Border Security
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) spoke about Biden's enforcement of immigration laws.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Chair now recognizes the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Mr. McClintock, from California.
00:07Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for coming today.
00:11Mr. Clem, during a visit with Border Patrol agents last year in Yuma, I reminded them Congress has no power to enforce the law.
00:20Our role is to write the laws, and I asked them what laws they needed us to write to be able to better do their jobs.
00:27And they answered unanimously, we don't need new laws, we need to enforce the laws we already have.
00:34Obviously, we can and we have written laws to make it easier for future presidents to secure the border, as Donald Trump did,
00:43make it harder for them to open the border, as Biden has done.
00:48But is this still mainly a question of enforcement?
00:53Yes, sir, I would agree with that.
00:55The laws and the books that have been written over the last decades allow us to do our job.
01:00It is the policy and the direction coming out of the executive branch that directs how we're going to do things.
01:068 U.S.C. 1325 clearly says if you cross the border outside of a port of entry, it is against the law, regardless of your intent.
01:14And so, yeah, I don't believe we need new laws.
01:17I think we just need new leadership and direction to encourage us to continue to enforce the laws.
01:22As I recall, on Inauguration Day, our borders were pretty much secure.
01:26The Remain in Mexico policy of the Trump administration had slowed phony asylum claims to a trickle.
01:32The border wall was nearing completion.
01:34We were actually enforcing court-ordered deportations, returning illegals to their own communities.
01:41Where word got out very quickly, it's not worth paying the cartels thousands of dollars because you're just going to end up back here.
01:48The laws didn't change on Inauguration Day.
01:52The presidency did.
01:54And on that first day, Joe Biden rescinded the executive orders that Trump had issued to enforce our laws.
02:02What differences did you see on the ground between the days before the inauguration and the days we're seeing today?
02:10I can tell you that in October of 2020, Yuma sector averaged where I was going to be 25 arrests a day.
02:18It went up in November to 34 a day, up to about 54 a day in December, 119 in January.
02:25And by May of 2021, it went up to over 500 a day.
02:30And as I mentioned in my opening statement, we went from 8,800 arrests in 2020 in Yuma to 114,021 to 312,022.
02:41So that is a direct result of the executive orders that pretty much undermined and undid everything that we had worked towards over a culmination of several years.
02:54And on the ground, as a law enforcement officer, what change did you have in the orders you received from on high when the administration changed?
03:02It wasn't so much of any direct orders to stop doing or do anything.
03:07It was just the fact that the floodgates had been open.
03:10When you are dealing with a thousand arrests a day and you only have a couple hundred border patrol agents working in a 24-hour cycle, it quickly adds up and it ties our hands.
03:22Our agents were pretty much relegated to process transportation and processing and getting people processed and out as quickly as possible.
03:32That was really what kind of the direction we were heading.
03:36Current law requires that asylum claims be detained until their claims resolved.
03:40The Trump administration implemented the Remain in Mexico policy and the Safe Third Countries policy that allowed claimants to remain free in those countries while their claims were being heard.
03:51What was the effect of this policy on the number of illegals claiming asylum that you encountered?
03:57And was the rescinding of this policy by Biden largely responsible for the influx that you just described?
04:05Yeah, I have no doubt in my mind that the rescission of the microprotection protocol led to the mass incursions we started seeing.
04:14I want to make something very clear.
04:16The majority, and I would say an overwhelming majority, I don't recall people in my custody actually seeking asylum.
04:23It was through the removal process, while we were processing them, did they claim fear, which offers them an asylum hearing.
04:31And they're all trained to do that.
04:32Right, they're trained.
04:33These are all folks that are not seeking asylum.
04:36They are using it as a defense.
04:38When you end the microprotection protocol, which basically was closing the loopholes, that word got out so quickly that if you make it, you get to stay and ultimately put us back in a catch and release mindset.
04:50Mr. Karchner, what have you seen in Cochise County with respect to criminal cartels and affiliated gangs?
04:55Are they now operating here in American communities?
04:58And what does that mean for the safety of our neighborhoods?
05:05As far as the criminal cartels, as in my statement, the criminal cartel, or the Mexican cartels, control the border.
05:16And they control that from both sides of the line.
05:18Have they now permeated into our country?
05:21The majority of what I've seen through investigations and everything else, there are players within the Phoenix area, within the Tucson area.
05:32Where the coordination for these load drivers comes from is from people that are already in the U.S.
05:38A local law enforcement in my community in California told me of one of the nearby rural towns that became a place where MS-13 brought its victims from Los Angeles to murder.
05:50And there are absolutely gruesome stories of faces being carved off, of fingers severed digit by digit.
05:57Do you expect this sort of violence to proliferate here as MS-13 and other violent gangs establish stronger footholds in our communities?
06:05I can speak to what I've seen here in Cochise County, and Cochise County is not where people are staying.
06:10The cartels do operate there, but we're simply a pass-through.
06:16Further out in the country, in Ohio, in California, in New York, that's where I believe that you're going to see probably some of that cartel.
06:25Border Patrol agents have been warning us for years to warn our communities outside of the international boundary that every community is becoming a border town.
06:36Yes, correct.
06:37Thank you.