UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES / From the desk of Tom Cole
In January of 2021, President Biden assumed the presidency with an aggressive immigration agenda. In just his first 100 days in office, he took 94 executive actions, including removing Title 42 and Remain in Mexico, halting border wall construction, and reinstating Catch-and-Release, in an attempt to make it easier for immigrants to illegally enter and stay in our nation.
These calculated actions have resulted in a raging illegal immigration disaster. Massive surges of illegal migrants have swarmed our border, creating a serious national security crisis.
In fact, since President Biden assumed office, there have been over 8.5 million illegal crossings nationwide — including hundreds of individuals whose names appear on the terrorist watch list and thousands of “special interest aliens” from countries including Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, and over 1.8 million known “gotaways” who have evaded U.S. Border Patrol.
Additionally, this administration’s radical open-border policies have given the cartels free reign to push deadly fentanyl into every community throughout the United States, driving an unprecedented opioid epidemic that is killing far too many Americans. Oklahomans know the fentanyl crisis firsthand. According to the Oklahoma State Department of Health, fentanyl overdose deaths in Oklahoma have increased significantly, from 50 deaths in 2019 to 609 in 2022.
The evidence is clear — this is the worst border crisis in our nation’s history. I will not stand by and watch as these open-border policies put our homeland in danger. This is exactly why I supported articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last week. He abandoned his fundamental vow to keep the homeland safe and failed his constitutional duty, but I will not.
I am committed to bringing this border crisis to an end. It is time to reverse the Biden administration’s harmful immigration policies and send a strong message to the world: the United States of America’s border is strong and secure.
