To watch Senator Capito’s remarks, click here or the image above.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Ranking Member of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, today joined a group of her colleagues to highlight the devastating consequences and costs of the ongoing crisis at the southwest border, and to urge President Joe Biden to finally act to secure the border.

In President Biden’s first year in office, there were roughly 2 million illegal crossings at the southwest border, an all-time record. December 2021 saw a 242% increase in illegal border crossings compared to December 2020.

HIGHLIGHTS:

A PLEA FOR ACTION (AGAIN): “So lastly, I would say, Mr. President, it's February of 2022. You've been in office now over a year. Your yearly statistics is more than any other year in the history of immigration. Over 2 million people. Do something. Not just act like you care, which he doesn't do a very good job of that, actually do something. Work with us to make this problem better…to make the numbers shrink, and to make this open border policy that you've moved forward on a thing of past.”

STAGGERING COST OF MANAGING FAILED IMMIGRATION POLICIES: “This is costing us, last year, about $1 billion. I'm going to outline these quickly: $335 million for housing, $160 million for medical care. This is just in Homeland Security. Health and Human Services has an even larger budget on health. $90 million on hotels and processing. $70 million for overtime for personnel at the border, and another $60 million for shuttling migrants from one facility to the next.”

WORSENING BORDER CRISIS = WORSENING OPIOID CRISIS: “The drug issue hits my state particularly hard. We have the largest percentage of overdose deaths from fentanyl in the entire country. And the fact that CBP has picked up over hundreds percentages of more fentanyl coming across the border… I talked to the head of the Border [Protection] yesterday, and I asked him, ‘Is this because we're getting better at detecting it? Or is it because they know our eyes off the ball and they're flooding it with more and more product coming into the country?’ His answer was, ‘both.’ That’s disappointing to me because we've been screaming about this devastating effect that these drugs are having on our families, our communities, our economies, and our health facilities at the same time. It's just terribly, terribly difficult to…see how they're ravaging our communities.”

ON BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ATTEMPTING TO BURY STATISTICS, CONCEAL PROBLEMS AT THE BORDER: “I'm the ranking member on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. That means we're looking at the dollars and the numbers very, very closely every single month. In December, nearly a month after the December statistics were complete, finally, the administration has released them. And we kept saying, ‘What's taking so long? Why? Why?’ Because the numbers have just gone up and up. This number of December of 179,000 is 242% higher than the previous year of December 2020. So these numbers are staggering and the lack of information about these numbers is very disappointing, and makes you know that they know the effect these numbers will have on American citizens, and they want to try to bury them within the news cycle how best they can.”

GROUNDHOG DAY FOR BIDEN’S BORDER CRISIS: “It is Groundhog Day. And we were here, I was here, in October with many of us when we had a press conference in the press room in the Capitol talking about this very issue. And…the bottom line was: do something. So here we are again. More press conferences, more statistics, more outrage at the situation at the southern border."

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