"This is a national crisis that deserves the attention beyond pushing a political football around."
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Texas Insider Report) — Congressman Tony Gonzales (TX-23) on Tuesday highlighted the border crisis in the House Appropriations first full committee markup for Fiscal Year 2022.
Congressman Gonzales spoke in support of Congressman Ken Calvert’s (CA-42) amendment requiring an emergency declaration from the President before deploying federal employees to the southern border.
Specifically, deploying civilian employees from the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) to help care for unaccompanied minors at the border.
- Watch Gonzales full remarks here.
“I rise in support of my colleague from California. My district is over 40% of the nation's Southern Border. While I appreciate all the volunteers from across the country, especially in our federal government, that have gone to the border to help with this crisis, we absolutely needed to designate it as a national emergency. We need to replace the volunteers with actual experts in their field. Volunteers cannot solve this problem. One party cannot solve this problem. It is going to be both of us that come together to solve this crisis because it goes beyond words.
Every day I’m on the border. Every day I see unaccompanied children by the 1,000s that are left alone. Regardless of their legal status, these are innocent children, and we cannot have volunteers taking care of these children.
"We have to have professionals. In El Paso, there is 1,600 unaccompanied children at Fort Bliss, 120 of which have been there for greater than two months.
"This is a national crisis that deserves the attention if we are going to solve this, beyond just pushing a political football around,” said Cong. Gonzales.
