Congresswoman Kat Cammack at Every Town is a Border Town event: “The mission is to secure the dang border.”

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Yesterday, Congresswoman Kat Cammack brought Brandon Judd, President of the National Border Patrol Council, to speak at Big Daddy Unlimited about the situation on the southwestern border. In her introduction, Cammack said polling shows that the border is one of the top three important issues to residents of her district. Cammack added, “This isn’t just a Texas issue; it’s not just an Arizona, New Mexico, California issue; this is an everyday American issue… It’s absurd what is happening on our own border. We have every opportunity, every means to secure that border, and yet here we are: it’s more porous than it ever has been.”

Cammack sits on the Homeland Security Committee, which she says has “full jurisdiction over the border,” but Republicans are in the minority, and she said the Committee Chair, Bennie Thompson, won’t pick up any legislation on the border.

Crisis has public health, humanitarian, and national security implications

Cammack highlighted the public health aspect of the large numbers of people coming across the southern border, including COVID-19, record levels of tuberculosis, and fentanyl: “You have all of these drugs coming across the border, and no one on the left wants to talk about it. Yet they’re landing in our community. We’re going to talk a lot about the fentanyl landing here in Gainesville today. We know for a fact that it’s coming from the southwest border.” Cammack says that local law enforcement has seen cartel stamps on pills and bricks, “and we report it back up, and just kind of crickets.”

She also spoke about the humanitarian aspect of the border crisis, with women and children being trafficked and raped. She said her colleagues on the left also don’t want to talk about what’s happening to the children who are coming across the border. 

And third, she spoke about the national security aspect, “which is really one of the only fundamental roles of the federal government. But this administration has failed, majestically.” Cammack said that just this year, 66 individuals on the international terror watch list have been apprehended, and that doesn’t even include the “got-aways” that have been seen on drones or cameras but not apprehended. She added that “apprehension” just means “released into the United States. So when you hear about 3 million-plus apprehension, that’s not, ‘Ok, we caught you, and then we turned you around.’ No. That’s ‘We caught you and welcome to the United States.’”

Cammack also said she has documentation from FEMA that money set aside for homeless veterans and veterans at risk for homelessness was spent instead on buying bus tickets and plane tickets for illegal aliens: “This is a crisis of epic proportions, and I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat or independent. This is an issue that impacts every single one of us, it impacts our community, it impacts our nation, our community, and our kids’ future. That’s why we all have to be all-hands-on-deck. You all have a role to play in this because what’s happening at the southwest border is impacting us here.”

Cammack then introduced Brandon Judd, President of the National Border Patrol Council, who has served as a Border Patrol agent for 25 years. He said that what’s going on at the border is “not humane… It is not humane that we’ve had 700 deaths on the border to date, in this year.” Judd said the previous record was a little over 300 deaths; that record was broken last year with 500 deaths, and this year we’re already at 700. 

96% of dangerous drugs come across the southwest border

Judd continued, “We are allowing criminal cartels, organized crime, to dictate what the program, policies, and operations are on the border today. There are stretches of border that the criminal cartels literally own because they know that all they have to do is flood it with large numbers of illegal immigrants… [that] causes the Border Patrol to send resources to that area and take those individuals into custody, take them back to the station to process them… The cartels know that’s what they need to do, and when they control those areas of the border, that’s when they get their higher-value products across. That’s when the drugs come in – fentanyl, by the way, we set a record in 2021 with overdose deaths here in the United States—over 100,000 United States citizens died because of dangerous drugs. And the DEA will tell you that 96% of those drugs are coming from the southwest border.”

Judd said that at any given time, 90% of Border Patrol agents are performing administrative duties; only about 10% are patrolling. He said they’ve never seen large groups like the ones they’re seeing now; it used to be that a group of 100 was a “massive group,” but now they see groups of 500 people at a time crossing the border. 

Judd: Solution is to hold people in custody, hire more temporary judges to process them

Judd said the crisis can largely be solved with policy: hire more immigration judges on a temporary basis, then hold people in custody pending their asylum or deportation proceedings, and people will stop coming. He said that “the moment you start holding people in custody, and this has been proven time and time and time again, they stop coming.” Judd said people don’t have the money to give to the cartels, so they have to enter into indentured servitude when they arrive here to pay back the cost of passage across the border. He said, “That’s not humane. What’s humane is the rule of law.”

Cammack passed around wristbands that she found on the border; she said they can be found in piles there. Each wristband signifies a different cartel, and each person crossing the border gets a numbered wristband from the cartel that is providing their passage. She said, “This is a reminder of the fact that the cartels do not think of people as people; they treat them like cattle.”

Q&A

Cammack and Judd then took questions that the audience had submitted on index cards before the event started. 

The first question was, “Do Democrats want to legitimize the illegals to give them the right to vote?”

Judd said that Democrats continually push “comprehensive immigration reform,” which would legalize the people who are already here and give them legal status after some waiting period. “Yes, the Democrats do continue to push for immigration reform or an amnesty pathway to citizenship for the millions of people who are here illegally.”

Cammack added that in the current Congress, one of the Democrats’ top priorities is a bill that lowers the voting age to 16, makes it illegal for states to enforce Voter ID, and publicly finances campaigns with a six-to-one match on small-dollar donations of $200 or less, meaning that whatever a candidate raises in that category, the federal government would give them six times that amount. She said the bill would also allow non-citizens to vote. She added, “I think there is something to be said about the fact that they have pushed for doing away with Voter ID and have done away with the notion that you have to be a citizen to vote in New York City.”

Cammack added, “And that’s all the more reason why we as conservatives have to take back the House to stop this nonsense. We can only do that if we’re united. That is the only way we can do it, is if we are one team, one mission, and the mission is to secure the dang border.”

The second question was, “As a Constitutional Conservative, at what point does the federal government failing to enforce the border violate Article IV, Section 4, ‘shall protect against invasion’?”

Cammack responded, “I think it’s already been violated… I think Article IV was abandoned quite a long time ago because we’ve seen states like Texas that are now having to build their own border wall to protect their citizens… and talk about what Arizona is dealing with at the state level.”

Judd said there’s a debate right now about whether the framers of the Constitution meant “an invading force” in that Article and what constitutes an invading force. Judd says he believes cartels are an invading force: “Every single person that crosses that border illegally, every single one of them that comes across is facilitated by the cartels.” He added that China is now involved in the drug trafficking because all the precursors for fentanyl come from China, then it’s manufactured in Mexico.

Cammack added that NORTHCOM has concluded that 40% of Mexican territory is under the control of the cartels.

Judd said the first step in fighting back against the cartels is to control illegal immigration: “Remember, this is not a legal immigration debate. This is about illegal immigration. We are the most compassionate country in the world. We take in more legal immigrants than any other country, on average, per year.”

Another question was, “Will Republicans eliminate the 87,000 new IRS positions?”

Cammack responded, “Hell, yeah, we’re gonna get rid of the 87,000 IRS agents. They have no business being around.”

The final question was, “Does Republican leadership have a plan for 2023? If not, will you support someone other than [Kevin] McCarthy to be Speaker?”

Cammack responded, “So yes, we have a plan, and actually there’s four major pillars to the plan, and actually everybody’s been rolling out talking about it. There is a plan to support the securing of the border… Regarding leadership, there is no one else running other than McCarthy. Jim Jordan is supporting Kevin McCarthy for Speaker. There are no alternatives. So there is really not much else to say on that.”

Cammack added that Republicans are naturally independent thinkers and don’t “hang together” like the Democrats. “They are tough as a unit. They are one team, one mission, and that’s why they’ve been successful in sliding and pulling this country to the left towards socialism.”

Cammack said that Republicans had an opportunity in 2017, but they had internal fighting, “and we fought amongst ourselves and we lost America. We need to learn our lessons, and we need one team, one mission… We have got to stop eating each other alive. We’ve got to stop fighting one another… If we agree on 85%, 90%, 95% of the big-ticket items, we can do some amazing things and take this country back.”