Speech #CREC-2017-03-02-pt1-PgS1548-3_t7

He went through Moscow, he said, and ended up in Central America, where he worked his way up with the help of human smugglers into the United States. I mention that only to point out that we have a vulnerability there where anybody determined enough or with enough money can find their way into the United States. We generally assume these people are economic migrants--in other words, looking for opportunity. We all understand that. Those same vulnerabilities create potential danger for our Nation and our local communities when people with unknown motives exploit those same vulnerabilities to come into the United States. The last point I will make, again, to emphasize the global nature of illegal immigration into the United States is this. We saw that the Border Patrol has several rescue beacons in Brooks County, TX. This is about 70 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. What happens is that the human smugglers will transport people into the United States and across the river. They will put them in stash houses, really in terrible conditions. As a matter of fact, we went to one of these stash houses. They found 18 migrants in the stash house waiting to be transported up the highway into the heartland of America. One of the checkpoints there is at Falfurrias, about 70 miles away from the border. What happens is that the smugglers will have people packed into a van or some vehicle, and before they get to the checkpoint, they will tell the immigrants to get out. If it is hot, they will give them a gallon jug--a milk jug--full of water and they will say: I will see you on the other side. They go around the checkpoint, out through the very difficult ranchland, and meet up on the north side, and then are transported off. In Brooks County, TX, we went by a cemetery where a number of unknown and unnamed migrants have been buried because they have died due to exposure. Some of these immigrants coming from Central America come up through Mexico. You can imagine the conditions they have been exposed to, and in the heat of the summer, they have been kicked out of a car and told ``meet us on the north side,'' with a gallon jug of water, and some of them don't make it. Of course the smugglers don't care about people.