House GOP Leadership Press Briefing on Border Issues… #TopNews

Following a meeting between Vice-President Mike Pence, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and acting WH chief-of-staff Mick Mulvaney, the House leadership team (Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney) deliver remarks to the capitol press:

White House – We are no longer in a status quo situation at the Southern Border but in a crisis situation. Status quo funding is not enough.

In fiscal year (FY) 2018, 17,000 adults at the border with existing criminal records were arrested by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and border agents.
In FY2017 and FY2018, ICE officers arrested approximately 235,000 aliens on various criminal charges or convictions within the interior of the United States—including roughly 100,000 for assault, 30,000 for sex crimes, and 4,000 for homicides.
We are now averaging 60,000 illegal and inadmissible aliens a month on our Southern Border.

Last month alone, more than 20,000 minors were smuggled into the United States.
The immigration court backlog is nearly 800,000 cases.
There has been a 2,000 percent increase in asylum claims over the last five years, with the largest growth coming from Central America—while around 9 in 10 claims from Central American migrants are ultimately rejected by the immigration courts, the applicant has long since been released into the interior of the United States.
In FY2017, roughly 135,000 illegal and inadmissible family units arrived from Central America. Of those, less than 2 percent have been successfully removed from the country due to a shortage of resources and glaring loopholes in our federal laws.
So far in FY2019, we have seen a 280 percent increase in family units from FY2018.
300 Americans are killed every week from heroin—90 percent of which floods across our Southern Border.
Illegal immigration is a humanitarian crisis: 1 in 3 migrant women is sexually assaulted on the journey northward to the U.S. border; 50 illegal migrants a day are referred for emergency medical care; and CBP rescues 4,300 people a year who are in danger and distress.
(Link to Data)