At a House Homeland Security Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX) pushed back on Ranking Member Rep. Bennie Thompson’s (D-MS) claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was not present during July’s Central Texas floods.
00:00The man, recognized for five minutes of his questioning, Mr. Pflueger from the great state of Texas.
00:06Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Never been so disappointed to sit in a partisan hearing.
00:12I mean, what a joke.
00:16And let me just correct the record for the gentleman from Mississippi talking about the floods in Texas.
00:28And FEMA not being there. False.
00:35Completely false.
00:37They were there. I don't think the ranking member was there.
00:42I was there. Several people on this committee were there.
00:47So the assertion that FEMA was not there.
00:52You want to politicize something? Go politicize something else.
00:58But that's out of bounds.
01:01What a tragedy.
01:03And to try to take advantage of that in this space, the Homeland Security space, formed after 9-11.
01:10What a tragic statement to make.
01:16I mean, of all the things, and we kind of knew the politicization was coming, but for it to happen in this committee,
01:23the secretary was there multiple times.
01:27FEMA director was engaged everywhere.
01:30People on this committee were recovering and searching for bodies.
01:39I'm just shocked.
01:41Totally shocked at that statement.
01:43You know where else my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were not?
01:47But they weren't at the border for the last four years.
01:51I was there.
01:53I'd like to seek unanimous consent to submit for the record two videos from the Darien Gap from a CODEL in 2023, Mr. Chairman.
02:01Without objection.
02:02These videos show the children that are walking through, and only one Democrat accepted the offer to go to that CODEL, to go see firsthand.
02:15Only one.
02:17The entire subcommittee was invited, and yet only one, and he's no longer a member.
02:22Only one.
02:23And you know how many hearings we had at the border from 2021 and 2022?
02:27Zero.
02:27You know how many hearings we had on border security from 2021 to 2022?
02:33Zero.
02:35So it's pretty rich to hear the assertions from the gentleman from Mississippi that the FEMA director is not involved in flooding,
02:44that DHS is not involved in flooding.
02:48Ms. Hopper, in your testimony, you talk about unprecedented trafficking due to lax sponsor vetting.
02:57And you also talk about alarming conditions and falsified records.
03:01I'm going to give you two minutes to describe the lack of sponsor vetting that led to the abuse of children at a level that is completely unprecedented.
03:15And be specific.
03:16Thank you for your time.
03:20When we're talking about sponsor vetting, when I spoke with a retired Border Patrol agent,
03:28he had said that the requirements to adopt a dog that was about to be euthanized were higher than the standards and the documents that needed to be provided for an adult to sponsor a child.
03:43He went through more hoops to adopt a dog than what people would go through to sponsor a child.
03:52When it only takes two phone calls to verify that someone picks up on the other line.
04:00Voice verification.
04:01Or you receive a photograph of an identification through WhatsApp with no facial match to the person sending the photograph.
04:09When people talk about doing better job in Photoshop with fake IDs than what the documents they received in a picture of an ID.
04:20And no meaningful background checks on these sponsors.
04:24When you have children that are unaccompanied, and as a mother, as a Christian, as a Hispanic, you have children being sent to known pedophiles, known gang members, known individuals with criminal backgrounds.
04:44That is what led to this.
04:47Every single person that was on this committee from 2021 to the end of President Biden's presidency went to the border multiple times, multiple times, and saw these atrocities that were happening firsthand, talked to these kids, saw the ones that were left in the brush.
05:07So, it's pretty rich to say that we shouldn't be looking at NGOs that had a role, that were culpable and complicit in not vetting people or not doing the appropriate work.
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