January 15, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 8 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session

[Page H548]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    LET'S HAVE SMART BORDER SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the President has really made his wall 
argument on the basis of stopping illegal drugs from coming into the 
country.
  Last week, I talked about the Maginot Line in France, an impenetrable 
defense. The Germans went around it.
  If drugs were being smuggled across the desert, another section of 
wall isn't going to stop them. They will go around it. But that is not 
the way drugs are coming into the United States of America. They are 
coming through our legal border crossings. I talked about that last 
week.
  We need more personnel. We need more technology there to inspect a 
larger number of the vehicles, all the vehicles coming across, with 
high technology, to find the human smuggling, the drug smuggling, and 
the weapons smuggling that is coming in that way.
  But there is another way that drugs are pouring into the United 
States of America, and here is, last year, just one of the incidents 
that the Coast Guard intercepted. They intercepted $5.6 billion of 
illegal drugs being smuggled in through maritime pathways.
  The recently retired commandant said that is only about 20 percent of 
the shipments. We could intercept more if we had more personnel. If we 
had more and modern helicopters, if we had more fast-pursuit boats, we 
could stop a much larger percentage.
  But today is a really special day. These brave men and women of the 
United States Coast Guard will miss their paychecks today, the first 
time that I know of in recent history that members of the uniformed 
military are not being paid by their government.
  41,000 Active Duty coasties won't be paid. And guess what? The first 
of next month, 50,000 retired coasties won't be paid. In addition to 
that, there are 8,000 Coast Guard critical civilian employees who are 
not being paid.
  So if the President really wants to talk about intercepting drugs, 
and he wants to talk about real border security, he should be talking 
about giving more resources to the United States Coast Guard, not 
stiffing them on their paychecks and not making them fly ancient 
helicopters and 50-year-old cutters.
  But he wants to waste $5 billion on a wall across part of the desert 
that you can go around, if that is the way they were smuggling in 
drugs. But as I said earlier, they aren't.

  Let's have smart border security. Let's use our precious tax dollars 
in an intelligent, 21st century way, not a vanity wall.

                          ____________________