Rep. Chip Roy: Fentanyl Death Border Crisis Numbers Are “Off the Charts”
Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX), representative for Texas’ 21st Congressional District, joined the Guy Benson Show to discuss the case for impeaching Secretary Mayorkas over failed border policy. They also discuss the recent inquiry into impeaching President Biden.
Watch the full interview below:
Listen to the full podcast below:
Full Transcript:
Chip Roy: I showed you before when you were here. The lost voices of Fentanyl. The hundreds, the thousands of Americans that continue to die. 90,000. Since you came into this committee and lied to us, saying we have operational control.
Guy Benson: Back here on the Guy Benson Show, guybensonshow.com, our website. Podcast is free when the show is over and on demand. That was a clip from yesterday, a House hearing. Congressman Chip Roy just going after HHS, excuse me, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the border crisis. And with us now is Chip Roy, congressman for the 21st Congressional District in Texas. And it’s good to have you back here.
Chip Roy: Good afternoon, Guy. And as always, hope you’re well.
Guy Benson: Got to be frustrating to have this man before the committee who at the very best. Spins like a top on the border crisis. I know you call it outright lying, and I think in some cases it’s hard to get around that. It’s also amazing to see when he goes, for example, to the Aspen Ideas Festival. I think it was he was just getting praise to the hilt about what a fabulous job he’s doing. And he just sits there with a little smirk on his face, like, you’re the weird, crazy one, I guess. You know, you’re sort of channeling the cathartic feelings that a lot of us have when we hear what this administration says about the border. But at some point it’s like, okay, now what? Because so far they’ve just gotten away with it. And to the extent that people are suffering and dying now, they just don’t seem to care.
Chip Roy: Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, look, we’re on the front lines, obviously, in Texas, Governor Abbott. Texas Department of Public Safety, the folks down there, local sheriffs, all the folks that are that are dealing with this on a daily basis, ranchers. You know, that’s the problem when I see someone like Secretary Mayorkas is basically smirking, not at me, he’s smirking at the American people, is smirking at the people of Texas. He’s smirking at the migrants who die while they say that it’s somehow compassionate to have these open borders. He’s smirking at, you know, all of the people, all the moms who have lost loved ones or children to fentanyl poisonings. You know, we’ve got terrorists coming across the border. This is all documented. They don’t they don’t deny it. They just shrug and say, well, we’re just doing everything we can. We’re doing the best we can and we’re down and it’s all a shell game. And when I posed the question in the hearing this week, what I went back to for those who watched and I think you saw it was when he came into the testimony 15 months ago, gave testimony in our hearing 15 months ago. He told me he had operational control now. That’s just a statement. But I put the statute up for him. At the time he read it, I repeated it. I repeated it again, and he said, I do have operational control. He said it emphatically. Now he’s trying to walk it back and say, well, no one has ever had operational control under that tight definition. Would you read the statute? And you said so because you were arrogant then, just as you’re arrogant now, now you’re just arrogant in trying a different approach. That’s the problem. It’s a shell game. They don’t care. They just want to have wide open borders.
Guy Benson: Well, and the other thing is you can quibble about the definition of operational control is like, well, under this extremely tight definition, no one’s ever had it. All right, fine. Let’s broaden out the definition. Let’s say, just broadly speaking to the average person, what does operational control look like? Do you have that? The answer is obviously no. 7 million illegal crossings in two and a half years. That is not operational control, loosely defined, strictly defined or anywhere in between.
Chip Roy: Well. And also, I’m a guy who tries to look at, you know, what’s the result? Like, all this stuff is noise. What’s the result? Well, the result are the dead Texans and the moms I have to talk to because they die from fentanyl. And then they say, well, yeah, but that’s a that’s a drug crisis. We have other issues. It was not a drug crisis when they were, you know, printing the stuff in Mexico, The cartels that they’ve been have laced something like Xanax and a kid dies from it because they take Xanax or Adderall. That’s something bigger than that. These numbers are extraordinary. These are off the charts, like 100,000 people, 200 a day. And this should be horrifying to the administration. I mean, Jay Johnson under Obama said a thousand a week was a crisis. We’re talking about thousands a day. And everybody sees it with their eyes. The administration wants to ignore it, sweep it aside. And the radical left, The New York Times, the elite New York, they all praise it. They’re all like, this is great. Look at what you’re doing.
Guy Benson: Well, I would the one thing that I would push back on is I’m not sure they’re completely ignoring it. They certainly do that as often as possible. But they spent some time this week paying some attention because they’re suing your state. Ah, to the extent that they’re doing anything, they are suing the state of Texas for those floating barriers in the river which are meant to prevent people from trying to cross. Many of them have drowned. Sadly, this is a deterrent. The administration doesn’t want that deterrent in place. So they’re suing. And we also heard the vice president out there saying that these enforcement and deterrence policies of the state of Texas are, quote, un-American. Your response?
Chip Roy: Well, the thing that is the most un-American that I maybe ever seen in my lifetime from the leadership of a country is to say that it is somehow compassionate to allow these individuals to be used as pawns of the cartels to be sold into sex trafficking, as we’ve seen in the sounds of freedom in the movie. But more than that, in judicial opinions like Judge Reed O’Connor up or departing from the sentencing guidelines because of the horrors he saw that an illegal dad who was here in Baltimore was being charged $23,000 by a cartel member because he had that guy’s family in a stash house in Fort Worth. And he said, we’re going to rape your daughter if you don’t give me $23,000, you tell me which is more un-American. A governor who’s trying to stop the flow to prevent this, prevent the empowerment of cartels, prevent the empowerment of China, prevent the deaths to Americans, prevent the rape and abuse of these people, and human trafficking, or an administration that gives lip service to it and says it’s un-American to say we need to secure the border. And by the way, Border Patrol are they want this help. They are beside themselves, the lying guys. They will tell you the Border Patrol union, they will tell you they’re delighted that Texas is trying to help. And the Texas DPS guys and the head of DPS who I talked to pretty much every week will tell you that, you know what? What they try to do with these barriers is push people down to better parts of the river to cross so they don’t die drowning in the, you know, flooding waters or in the higher in the deeper waters. So this is all about trying to manage the big crisis that the feds have created and do it in a way that helps Texans and helps migrants. And this administration, you’re right. It’s not that they don’t care. They’re doing it purposefully. And now they want to stop us from trying to do our job to secure the border.
Guy Benson: You have made the case for impeaching the DHS secretary. Let me ask you about another impeachment push that we’re hearing about. There’s a growing chorus among House Republicans pushing for the opening of an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden, the president of United States. And I’m really of two minds on this, Congressman, because on one hand, I think impeachment shouldn’t be thrown around lightly. And I know people would say, well, look at what they did twice to Donald Trump. And that point is well taken, especially on the first one, in my view. But it’s easy to dismiss something as partizan when one side is saying, oh, we’re going to move forward on this impeachment process, at least against the president of the party that we don’t like. I think the media, the Dems will just feed relentlessly a narrative. This is just a witch hunt by the Republicans. It’s totally partisan. And I think it’s a tool that should be used very sparingly when there’s strong, strong evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. On the other hand. The way that you identify high crimes and misdemeanors is through the investigative process, which hasn’t happened to Hunter Biden and the Biden family. In fact, we just saw testimony under oath last week from the IRS whistleblowers that they were not allowed they were forbidden from the higher ups to actually do the investigating, to present and gather the evidence that might then inform a decision about what to do on impeachment. If Joe Biden is implicated and there’s proof of, for example, the bribery scheme from this FBI informant, etc.. So some of your colleagues are saying we need to have this inquiry so we have more power to do more investigating because the normal channels of investigating were shut down to protect the Biden family. I agree with that. But I also see the political risk in that word. Where do you come down on this?
Chip Roy: Well, it’s a great question. It’s a long question, and I’ll try to give the answer. I can. No, no, no, no. It’s just. But with the let me just start with one thing about Mayorkas. Yes. I’ve made the case for impeaching Mayorkas and not likely to take your point very seriously. We should make the case. I’ve been doing it for two years now that he is fully, I think, clearly lied under oath and indeed rightly said. Well, it depends how you look at the definition. I don’t think so. I put it in front of him. He saw the statute. He knew what he was saying and doing. I think he lied to us something. It was intentional because the policy, you know, his answer changed quickly right after when he realized, oh, I stepped in it. So, look, I think it’s impeachable. 100%. He’s ignoring his duty to the Constitution to enforce the law and ignoring the laws and endangering Americans. So so we should go down that road. Importantly, we should we should not fund the Department of Homeland Security without getting changes in the appropriations process. I’m not going to vote for a C.R. appropriations unless we get changes and secure the border. But to your point about the president, I agree with you that we should take this all very seriously. I do not believe we should open an inquiry unless unless we truly believe we’ve got a path that we need to pursue and we’re going to pursue it all the way to the end. And you’re going to do it. You’re going to go make the case and, you know, pursue the truth wherever it may lead. If you end up short of evidence, then you don’t do it. But if you if you’re going to open this inquiry, you better damn well know that you’ve got you know, you think you’ve got the goods. Look, I’m former prosecutor. I didn’t go indict if I didn’t think I had the case. So, you know. Yep. Open the inquiry. Go look into it if you want. But you better do it. You better not do that unless you really, truly believe you’re going to. It’s going to bear fruit and pursue the truth wherever it leads. And in this case, my eyes tell me that when you look at a President United States, he’s been a public servant for the better part of my entire life. I’m 50. That guy is living in a massive mansion in Delaware. And I’m sitting in back and I’m going, How do you do that?
Guy Benson: You know what? Yeah. And he’s and he’s been protected. When you ask that question in an investigative way, you’re told actually you can’t ask that question. That’s a huge part of the problem here. Chip Roy, thank you, sir.
