The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ISSUES OF THE DAY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the in the House section section on pages H229-H230 on Jan. 12.
The Department is one of the oldest in the US, focused primarily on law enforcement and the federal prison system. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, detailed wasteful expenses such as $16 muffins at conferences and board meetings.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ISSUES OF THE DAY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) for 30 minutes.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, first of all, I would like to start out with some housekeeping.
A lot has been said over the last few days about the huge number of IRS employees that are intended to be added by the Biden administration, and I just want to clarify some numbers.
There are new employees who are going to replace retired employees, but there are still 25,000 new employees who are going to be added to the Internal Revenue Service.
I should point out that, over time, you would expect--and this apparently surprises some people--you would expect the number of IRS employees to drop.
I used to do taxes. I haven't done those for over 25 years now. Even at that time, as things became more computerized, if you got interest income or dividend income or capital gain income, the IRS would match up those numbers with what appeared on your tax return.
If you got from U.S. Bank $1,000, and you didn't put it on your return, you could expect a letter in the mail: Where is the $1,000? Please give us another $300 in taxes.
You do not need more employees to do that sort of thing. Again, when you talk about 25,000 more employees than the past, for a State the size of Wisconsin, that is really a small army of 500 new employees.
Sometimes, it is easier to bring down to the State level because we deal with such big numbers. Whether you are talking about Massachusetts, Maryland, Missouri, or Washington State, they all can expect about 500 new employees. While there may be some people cheating, an increase of that size is just inappropriate.
Immigration
Mr. GROTHMAN. Let's look one more time at the new numbers that were released over Christmas break as far as the immigration situation in this country.
We have a new all-time record for the number of people coming here in November, over 200,000, 210,000 people. These numbers were released, by the way, late on a Friday, Friday as always, so the mainstream press, which already does a bad job of covering this issue, does not bring them up.
A lot of the focus has been on title 42. While that didn't go into effect, it didn't stop there from becoming an all-time high.
When I talk about 210,000 in November 2022, a year before that, we were at 131,000 for November. The year before that, before President Biden took office, we were around 20,000. We have gone from 20,000 to 210,000.
I am somebody who believes in intact families. Just as scary is the callousness of the Biden administration to the degree to which the open border situation tears apart families. In November, there were over 9,000 unaccompanied minors released to sponsors apart from their parents. A year ago, instead of 9,000 people being broken away from their parents, we had about 10,000, again, the Biden administration. A year before that, the final year of another administration was 1,200. There were months in which we had under 200 unaccompanied minors enter the country. We are now over 9,000.
Please, I wish we remembered that when we have our open borders policy, we are causing so many children to be raised apart from their parents.
I also want to point out the number of got-aways, which is a particularly dangerous subgroup of people coming here illegally.
So that you folks understand, there are two big groups of people coming here illegally.
There are people who ask for asylum. They don't deserve it, but they ask for asylum and turn themselves in to the Border Patrol. At least we get to do a little medical checkup on them. We are allowed to get a little bit of information on them. If we have the right name, which we may or may not, we can do a little bit of criminal background check on whether they have committed crimes in the United States or Canada.
There is another group of people called got-aways that race across the border and take advantage of the fact that, right now, so many Border Patrol agents are just doing paperwork. We have, as far as I can see, the all-time high, 73,000 got-aways in November 2022.
So that you understand, if you are somebody who is sneaking fentanyl across the border, if you are somebody who has a criminal record, how would you come here? Would you turn yourself in to the Border Patrol? Not likely. You would rather sneak across the border.
The fact that that subset is increasing even greater than the people who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol should scare every American to death.
It is time for President Biden to do a little bit more than a perfunctory stop at the border. He has to look at 2 years ago, in November 2020, when that 210,000 figure was under 20,000. It can be done once; it can be done again.
The American people and the press corps in America ought to hold him accountable and ask him to explain why we used to--as a matter of fact, earlier in 2020, we were under 10,000 people a month--why we used to be able to hold these numbers under 10,000 a month and now we are over 200,000, and why we used to be able to keep the unaccompanied minors under 1,000 and now they are over 9,000.
When I talk about unaccompanied minors, I am not including minors that were rented by other people because they felt it would be easier to get here with a family. The Border Patrol knows that is happening, as well. Maybe you rent little Johnny to somebody who says we want to be a family. That is another thing that is not even showing in these numbers. We don't know how often it happens. We just know that it happens.
I realize that Black Lives Matter has been hostile to the traditional nuclear family. I realize that is an important group for a lot of Members on the other side of the aisle, but I will tell you, I don't like it at all when I see over 9,000 unaccompanied minors coming into this country.
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I want to point out another number that doesn't appear on here, and I wish we would keep track of it, and that is the degree to which we separate the family. Maybe one parent comes here with the kids but not two parents.
In America, our family court system--if people get divorced, we try to keep both parents around the area for the children. It breaks the heart of Border Patrol that they see no effort being done at the border.
In other words, if one parent shows up with the kids, maybe dad, maybe mom is left home in Guatemala, El Salvador, or wherever, we don't care. It really bothers the Border Patrol because, of course, when it comes to American children, we love them enough that we try to keep both parents involved. But when it comes to the policy at the border, we don't care.
I am also told, by the way, that this policy bothers governments of the countries that these people came from because they themselves have family courts and they would like to keep both parents involved in their children's lives. They don't like the callousness of the United States, how they don't care whether the family is apart or not.
There is another side to this story, as far as what is going on on the southern border as well, and that is the number of deportations. You know, people say, Oh, we all have such wonderful people crossing the border, blah, blah, blah. Well, they are all not that wonderful. They are people that commit crimes, people that we catch doing wrong things.
And while our immigration system is relatively weak, our deportation is weak compared to what it should be, at least some people historically have been turned back south of the border. If you look, that number was usually over 200,000 under President Trump, 250,000, 260,000. It slipped to 185,000 in President Trump's final year, in part because of the COVID. We recently got the numbers for fiscal year 2022, where it is 72,000.
The COVID crisis is not exclusively but largely over, so here we are in a situation in which we have under a third of the number of deportations which we used to have. So not only are we letting everybody come here and not only are we encouraging the breakdown of the families by having so many unaccompanied minors coming here, we are not deporting people like we have in the past.
I have talked to a Federal attorney, and it disappointed him because he knows the rules they could have operated under in which you are able to now commit more crimes, do more bad things, and apparently the U.S. Government doesn't care.
Of course, eventually, as we let more people commit crimes in this country, there is going to be an increase in the crime rate. It is going to be a less civil America.
I wish and I beg the Biden administration to find some of the officials left over from the past administration and have them show them how it is done so we don't continue to have so many people who have criminal records wind up in the United States.
Now, speaking of things that have happened since the new year, we finally have the murders in Milwaukee--the city which I was born in. I love Milwaukee so much. When I was a child, Milwaukee had the lowest murder rate of the 25 biggest cities in the country, depending on the year, it was either them or San Diego.
This year, we exploded to a new record. We went up from 197 to 224 in 1 year. That is 27 more than the previous all-time high. I can remember when Milwaukee had a much smaller population, but that number was under 40.
Well, what happened?
Part of it, of course, is the police hatred that goes on in our society. I think that really began around Ferguson, Missouri, where it was called the Ferguson effect, and police began to become afraid to enforce the law. No matter how much they were in the right--and, of course, the Justice Department did investigations in Ferguson, and they found out the policeman was in the right in that tragic death--they still were attacked by opportunistic politicians and opportunistic clergy.
We had a situation in Ferguson, they called the policemen racists. The Justice Department, even under Barack Obama, felt nothing had been done wrong. The opportunistic and offensive Al Sharpton showed up and attacked--or verbally attacked--the police in that area, rather than becoming persona non grata. Rather than being pushed aside, we see politicians still trying to ingratiate themselves to Al Sharpton, and still trying to promote his divisive world view.
So it is not surprising, as the police back off, despite the population falling, the number of murders continue to go up.
I beg the Members of this body to reject the Al Sharpton divisiveness. Stop standing up on the dais with him. Stop attending joint meetings with him and promoting that lying clergyman. It is an embarrassment to Christianity. It is an embarrassment to America. I can't believe there are Members of this body who think he is somebody to promote his view to the world.
Then we have what I think is the root cause. We have a continued break-down of the family in America. We know that Black Lives Matter, that played such a big role in the 2020 elections, hates the nuclear family. But I wish our social scientists would do a little more investigation on the role of the break-down of the family and the anger, particularly of the young men, the fact that so many men don't have a family to take care of because the government takes care of all the families. And we work our way back to what the murder rate was in the 1960s before you had the huge war on the family initiated by Lyndon Johnson.
I ask the social scientists and I ask the journalists to demand information on the background of the murderers that are caught--not enough are caught--who are committing the murders in Milwaukee, and also the family backgrounds of those unfortunate souls who have died because of the Ferguson effect and the police hatred that is fomented by Members of this body.
My final comment here is with regard to another year gone, another year we will wind up--we will get the numbers shortly--with over 100,000 people dying of illegal drug overdoses.
We all know two things that politicians should do immediately, because almost all these drugs come across the border, we should shut down that border and prevent any more Americans from dying.
Big numbers are kind of easy to gloss over, and it is important to remember when we are talking about 107,000 or 108,000--I am old enough to remember the Vietnam war--we are having twice as many people die of illegal drug overdoses in this country than has died in the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war went on for 12 years, there were protests, there was so much commentary on the number of people who died, and they were all heroes and we should talk about it.
But we have twice as many people dying in 1 year in this country as died in 12 years in Vietnam.
Do you think any increased effort is made to close the border?
No. Politicians don't care about that 108,000.
Remember, they all had parents, some had children, some had siblings, some had friends, but we are so callous, we don't care, another 107,000. What difference does it make?
The other thing you should do--because it is up to the police to find these drug dealers--we, one more time, should have a little more respect for the police.
I will shortly be introducing a bill to allow the Border Patrol to hire more drug-sniffing dogs. Anybody who takes the tour down there--I am sure Joe Biden didn't hang around long enough to find this out--
would find out how tremendous those dogs are. They are not cheap.
When I think of all the people who died because of the drug overdoses, I really hope in the upcoming budget we maybe find more money by getting rid of all the new lawyers we are hiring to represent the people coming here illegally. Instead of hiring more lawyers, we hire more drug-sniffing dogs. Maybe we can reduce the numbers of Americans who are dying of drug overdoses as people come across the border.
So those are a few things for the American people to digest, some more things the mainstream media ought to be taking up. A little more headlines, even if the administration releases the immigration numbers on a Friday, publicize, you know, the huge numbers of people who are coming across the border.
Do not get anesthetized and stop caring about the huge numbers of ever-increasing Americans who are dying of illegal drug overdoses. Please, take action.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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