00:00Thank you, Senator.
00:02Senator Moreno.
00:04Secretary Noem, thank you for being here.
00:06Thank you for your work.
00:08I just want to reiterate for the record,
00:1093% drop in border encounters.
00:14Is that accurate?
00:15That is correct.
00:16And are you aware that during the Biden-Harris administration,
00:20we had 4,000 aliens that died along the journey to come to America?
00:27I wasn't aware of that specific number,
00:29but it doesn't surprise me.
00:31Because basically we had encouraged...
00:32The dangerous trip.
00:33It's a dangerous trip.
00:34The Darien Gap, which is right here where I was born in Colombia,
00:38went from being a supposedly uncrossable border
00:41to hundreds of thousands of people making that journey.
00:45Who benefited from our open borders policy under Biden?
00:50I would say Joe Biden certainly did.
00:52And the drug cartels that made tens of billions of dollars?
00:55Yep.
00:56And who was the victim?
00:59Certainly American citizens.
01:01American citizens, but those who chose to come to our country at that time,
01:04believing that they could come without any consequences.
01:08And obviously the drug cartels are drug cartels
01:11that became human traffickers at scale
01:14and use that human trafficking as a disguise
01:17to allow illegal fentanyl to come into our country.
01:21And what's been the ramifications of that?
01:23What have you seen firsthand when you go to the border?
01:25What do the agents tell you about the fentanyl that's coming across the border?
01:28Well, it's devastating.
01:31Luckily, we have the ability now to enforce our laws with this president.
01:35And fentanyl traffic has been down 54% since he's been in office because of that.
01:41Unfortunately, what's happening is these cartels,
01:44foreign terrorist organizations, are now moving to our maritime borders.
01:48They're moving and getting much more sophisticated.
01:50And so we need to adapt and have the resources to be able to interdict them
01:54before they come in and kill off our next generation of Americans.
01:56Yeah, so it's not hyperbole to say that tens of thousands of Americans
02:01have not been killed with fentanyl because of that problem.
02:04Correct, absolutely.
02:05And it's just important to just reflect, not for political reasons,
02:10but just for moral reasons,
02:12to say that what happened over the last four years is just despicable.
02:15We should never have allowed that to happen.
02:17There was no outcry about the situation,
02:22and yet it was allowed to happen.
02:23And now it's a lot easier to enter America than it is to be deported for America.
02:28Can you talk about that for a minute?
02:29Well, that is true.
02:30When you have a president in the White House
02:31that is openly saying our laws won't be enforced
02:34and in facilitating this invasion that happened over our southern border,
02:39we had millions of people come.
02:42And not just people looking for new opportunities in the American dream.
02:45You had people coming that were criminals, murderers, rapists, traffickers, terrorists.
02:51And now to remove them is much more complicated, difficult, and expensive.
02:56For us to deport someone, that we have to go out and find that individual,
03:01arrest and detain them and remove them from the country,
03:04it costs upwards to $17,000 if there isn't, you know, more delays than the normal process.
03:11That's why we're encouraging people to self-deport.
03:13If you are here illegally, we recognize that you may have been here for a period of time,
03:18but if you want to leave and have the chance to come back someday, leave on your own.
03:22We will facilitate that.
03:23We'll buy you a plane ticket.
03:24When you land, we will give you $1,000 that you can get started with
03:29and provide for your family, that cost of self-deportation is $4,500.
03:34So much, much cheaper for the American taxpayer
03:38in how we make sure that we really are following our laws
03:41and that the people here in this country, the American citizens,
03:45are treated with the respect that they're due
03:47by coming here through the legal process and being a part of our future.
03:51Yeah, and I think it's just important, and I hope my colleagues,
03:54especially on the other side of the aisle,
03:56I look at Senator Gallego, whose family came here from another country,
04:00his mom from Colombia, his dad from Mexico,
04:04that we honor and respect those of us, like myself, my five brothers,
04:09my sister, my mom and dad, that followed the legal process,
04:12which, by the way, is hard.
04:13It's a privilege to come to America.
04:15It's not easy.
04:17You have to go through a process.
04:19But over the last four years, what we did is we made it
04:22so that if you hired a drug cartel, brought you to the border,
04:26and then raised your hand when you got to the border patrol
04:28and said asylum or asilo, asilo,
04:31that that got you a free ticket into the country,
04:35free housing, free health care, free education,
04:37to the detriment of Americans.
04:39And I think that should be something we unite about.
04:40And Senator Fetterman talked about asylum seekers.
04:43Those are not asylum seekers.
04:45They're people who want a better life.
04:47They're economic migrants.
04:48We empathize for them, but we have to have a process
04:51that we honor the people who are following the rules.
04:56So, for example, the Afghanis that he's talking about,
04:59well, they have to wait in line behind millions of fake asylum claims.
05:03And I think we have to once and for all acknowledge that that's not the case.
05:06I was proud to introduce something called the Rules Act.
05:09Unfortunately, the Democrats blocked that very common sense bill,
05:13which would have said, hey, if you come across our border illegally
05:16and claim asylum, you can't claim asylum
05:19at an undesignated port of entry.
05:21You're immediately returned.
05:22That's something that's common sense.
05:24I want to ask you a few other just technical questions.
05:27Time.
05:28We're going to do another round in just a few minutes.
05:31Okay.
05:31Do you mind if I just ask one quick question?
05:33One quick question.
05:34Okay.
05:35I want to just encourage you to continue to do what you're doing,
05:39which is to enforce the law,
05:41which is that the agencies within DHS
05:43purchase products in the United States of America.
05:45So I applaud you for doing that.
05:47Yeah.
05:47Yes.
05:48Thank you for that.
05:49Senator Gallego.
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