This week, our southern border was invaded. It was invaded by a delegation of members of Congress.
Unlike President Joe Biden and his vice president, who have yet to visit the border, Congressman Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) joined a group of his colleagues who traveled to the U.S. border with Mexico.
What the GOP delegation found there was disturbing.
At New Mexico’s southern border, Garcia and his colleagues saw miles of makeshift and ineffectual temporary fencing put in place after Biden halted the building of the border wall on his first day in office. Nearby and unused lay giant piles of fencing construction materials from the abandoned Trump-era physical barrier system that was meant to fortify the border.
“You can actually get through any part of this old fencing that was here,” Garcia said pointing to the temporary fencing in a Facebook video. “While they halted the construction, they left all the material behind and as you can see this is as porous as the border has ever been.”
Even worse than what the delegation saw in New Mexico was what they didn’t see in El Paso, Texas. The twelve members of Congress were refused access to the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC). EPIC is a governmental agency that provides “tactical intelligence to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies on a national scale” with an emphasis on the southwestern border. In other words, EPIC collects and shares data with agencies such as the DEA, ICE, and local law enforcement entities in order to “deter threats and protect our nation.”
Congress members are representatives of the American taxpayer and as such they have a Constitutional duty to oversee border security facilities like EPIC. After repeated requests, however, the entire GOP delegation was denied any access to the facility.
Why would members of Congress be denied access?
The planned GOP visit wasn’t a spontaneous request. “We’ve been trying to get in there for a couple of weeks,” Garcia said. In fact, in an interview with Fox News, Garcia claimed this partisan denial of access “is coming from the top. It’s coming from the White House.”
Delegation host Representative Brian Babin (R-Texas) added, “I can only imagine what is it that they are wanting to hide and not show the very representatives of the American people [who] have oversight over this facility, [who] fund it, and [who] authorize it. Why don’t they want us to see it?”
To make matters even more egregious, many of the members of the GOP delegation also sit on the House Appropriations Committee. This is the very committee responsible for appropriating funding for most functions of the federal government. How on earth can Congress be expected to ensure that our taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely and that our border is secure when the Biden administration won’t permit them to provide oversight?
What exactly is Joe Biden hiding? Representative Garcia has a theory:
You can make conjecture about why it is they don’t want us in there, but my opinion is they have data that they’re gathering in this intelligence center which is clearly indicating that our open borders are actually a more serious problem than the average American understands right now.
In the early days of the Biden administration, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki pledged that Biden was committed to bringing “transparency and truth back to government — to share the truth, even when it’s hard to hear.”
Where is that transparency at the border, Joe Biden?
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