Anne Milgram: Congressman, I was about to introduce you and say a little more --
Will Hurd: Hey, Anne. How are you?
AM: Hi, how are you doing? Thank you so much for joining us tonight. We're so lucky to have you here with us. I've already explained that you're actually in Washington because you're working. And I was about to tell folks that you represent the 23rd district of Texas. But maybe you could tell us a little bit about your district and describe it for us.
WH: Sure, my district in Southwest Texas is 29 counties, two time zones, 820 miles of border from Eagle Pass, Texas all the way to El Paso. It takes 10 and a half hours to drive across my district at 80 miles an hour, which is the speed limit in most of the district. And I found out a couple of weekends ago, it's not the speed limit in all the district.
(Laughter)
It's a 71-percent Latino district, and it's the district that I've been representing for now my third term in Congress. And when you think about the issue of the border, I have more border than any other member of Congress. I spent nine and a half years as an undercover officer in the CIA, chasing bad people all across the country. So when it comes to securing our border, it's something I know a little bit about.
AM: One of the things I learned recently which I hadn't known before is that your district is actually the size, I think, of the state of Georgia?
WH: That's right. It's larger than 26 states, roughly the size of the state of Georgia. So it's pretty big.
AM: So as an expert in national security and as a member of Congress, you've been called upon to think about issues related to immigration, and in recent years, particularly about the border wall. What is your reaction to President Trump's statement that we need a big, beautiful wall that would stretch across our border, and at 18 to 30 feet high?
WH: I've been saying this since I first ran for Congress back in 2009, this is not a new topic, that building a 30-foot-high concrete structure from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. There are parts of the border where Border Patrol's response time to a threat is measured in hours to days. If your response time is measured in hours to days, then a wall is not a physical barrier. We should be having technology along the border, we should have operation control of our border, which means we know everything that's going back and forth across it. We can do a lot of that with technology. We also need more folks within our border patrol. But in addition to doing all this, one of the things we should be able to do is streamline legal immigration. If you're going to be a productive member of our society, let's get you here as quickly as possible, but let's do it legally. And if we're able to streamline that, then you're going to see some of the pressures relieved along our border and allow men and women in Border Patrol to focus on human trafficking and drug-trafficking organizations as well.
AM: Congressman, there's also been a conversation nationally about using emergency funds to build the border wall and taking those funds from the United States military. What has your position been on that issue?
WH: I'm one of the few Republicans up here that has opposed that effort. We are just now rebuilding our military, and taking funds away from making sure that our brothers and sisters, our wives and our husbands have the training and equipment they need in order to take care of us in far-flung places -- taking money away from them is not an efficient use of our resources, especially if it's going to build a ... you know, I always say it's a fourth-century solution to a 21st-century problem. And the reality is, what we should be focusing on is some of the other root causes of this problem, and many of your speakers today have talked about that. Some of those key root problems are violence, lack of economic opportunity and extreme poverty, specifically, in the Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. We should be working --
AM: I was going to ask what you would recommend United States government does to address the underlying, what we call push factors, or root causes in those three countries in Central America?
WH: One of the things I learned as an undercover officer in the CIA is be nice with nice guys and tough with tough guys. And one of the principles of being nice with nice guys is to strengthen our alliances. We have a number of programs currently in these three countries that USAID and the State Department is doing to address this violence issue. And we know, in El Salvador, one of the problems was that the police were corrupt. And so we've worked with the Salvadorians to purge the police, rehire new folks, use community policing tactics. These are tactics the men and women in the United States of America and police forces use every single day. And when we did this in certain communities, guess what happened? We saw a decrease in the violence that was happening in those communities. And then we also saw a decrease in the number of people that were leaving those areas to try to come to the United States illegally. So it's a fraction of the cost to solve a problem there, before it ultimately reaches our border. And one of the reasons that you have violence and crime is political corruption and the lack of central governments to protect its citizens. And so this is something we should be continuing to work on. We shouldn't be decreasing the amount of money that we have that we're sending to these countries. I actually think we should be increasing it. I believe the first thing -- we should have done this months ago -- is select a special representative for the Northern Triangle. That's a senior diplomat that's going to work to make sure we're using all of our levers of power to help these three countries, and then that we're doing it in a coordinated effort. This is not just a problem for the United States and Mexico, this is a problem for the entire western hemisphere. So, where is the Organization of American States? Where is the International Development Bank? We should be having a collective plan to address these root causes.
And when you talk about violence, a lot of times, we talk about these terrible gangs like MS-13. But it's also violence like women being beaten by their husbands. And they have nobody else to go to, and they are unable to deal with this current problem. So these are the types of issues that we should be increasing our diplomacy, increasing our economic development aid.
AM: Please, I want to take you now from thinking about the root causes in Central America to thinking about the separation of children and families in the United States. Starting in April 2018, the Trump administration began a no-tolerance policy for immigrants, people seeking refugee status, asylum in the United States. And that led to the separation of 2,700 children in the first year that that program was run. Now, I want to address this with you, and I want to separate it up front into two different conversations. One of the things that the administration did was file legal court papers, saying that one of the primary purposes of the separations was to act as a deterrent against people coming to the United States. And I want to talk for a moment about that from a moral perspective and to get your views.
WH: We shouldn't be doing it, period. It's real simple. And guess what, it wasn't a deterrent. You only saw an increase in the amount of illegal immigration. And when you're sitting, debating a strategy, if somebody comes up with the idea of snatching a child out of their mother's arms, you need to go back to the drawing board. This is not what the United States of America stands for, this is not a Republican or a Democrat or independent thing. This is a human decency thing. And so, using that strategy, it didn't achieve the ultimate purpose. And ultimately, the amount of research that is done and the impact that the detention of children has -- especially if it's over 21 days -- has on their development and their future is disastrous. So we shouldn't be trying to detain children for any more than 21 days, and we should be getting children, if they're in our custody, we should be taking care of them humanely, and making sure they're with people that can provide them a safe and loving environment.
AM: I would challenge you even on the 21-day number, but for the purposes of this conversation, I want to follow up on something you just said, which is both that it's wrong to detain children, and that it's not effective. So the question, then, is why does the administration continue to do it, when we've seen 900 additional children separated from their parents since the summer of 2018? Why is this happening?
WH: Well, that's something that you'd have to ultimately ask the administration. These are questions that I've been asking. The Tornillo facility is in my district. These are buildings that are not designed to hold anybody for multiple days, let alone children. We should be making sure that if they are in our custody -- a lot of times for the uncompanied children, we don't have a ... we don't know of a patron or a family member in the United States, and we should make sure that they're in facilities where they're able to go to school and have proper food and health care. And if we're able to find a sponsor or family member, let's get them into that custody, while they're waiting for their immigration court case. That's the other issue here. When you have a backlog of cases -- I think it's now 900,000 cases that are backlogged -- we should be able to do an immigration hearing within nine months. I think most of the legal community thinks that is enough time to do something like this, so that we can facilitate whether someone, an individual, is able to stay in the United States or they're going to have to be returned back to their home country, rather than being in this limbo for five years.
AM: If we think about the asylum system today, where people are coming and saying that they have a credible threat, that they will be persecuted back home, and we think about the fact that on average, it's about two years for someone to get an asylum hearing, that many people are not represented as they go through that process, it makes me think about something that they say in the health care space all the time, which is that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And so as you think about this and think about how we would redesign this system to not do what we're doing, which is years and years of detention and separations and hardship for people seeking -- and again, asylum being a lawful United States government process -- for people seeking to enter our country lawfully. What should we do?
WH: I tried to increase by four billion dollars the amount of resources that HHS has in order to specifically deal, ultimately, with children. I think we need more immigration judges in order to process these cases, and I think we need to ensure that folks can get representation. I've been able to work with a number of lawyers up and down the border to make sure they are being able to get access to the folks that are having these problems. And so this is something that we should be able to design. And ultimately, when it comes to children, we should be doing everything we can when they're in our custody, in order to take care of them.
AM: So I have two more questions for you before I'm going to let you go back to work. The first is about our focus in the United States on the questions of immigration. Because if you look at some of the statistics, you see that of people who are undocumented in the United States, the majority of people have overstayed on visas, they haven't come through the border. If you look at the people who try to enter the country who are on the terrorist watch list, they enter overwhelmingly through the airports and not through the border. If we look at drugs coming into the United States, which has been a huge part of this conversation, the vast majority of those drugs come through our ports and through other points of entry, not through backpacks on people crossing the border. So the thing I always ask and I always worry about with government, is that we focus so much on one thing, and my question for you is whether we are focused in this conversation nationally about the border, every day and every minute of every day, whether we're looking completely in the wrong direction.
WH: I would agree with your premise. When you have -- let's start with the economic benefits. When you have 3.6 percent unemployment, what does that mean? That means you need folks in every industry, whether it's agriculture or artificial intelligence. So why aren't we streamlining legal immigration? We should be able to make this market based in order to have folks come in and be productive members of our society. When it comes to the drug issue you're talking about, yes, it's in our ports of entry, but it's also coming in to our shores. Coast Guard is only able to action 25 percent of the known intelligence they have on drugs coming into our country. The metric that we should be measuring [is] are we seeing a decrease of deaths from overdose from drugs overseas, are we seeing a decrease in illegal immigration? It's not how many miles of fencing that we have ultimately built. And so we have benefited from the brain drain of every other country for the last couple of decades. I want to see that continue, and I want to see that continue with the hardworking drain. And I can sell you this: at last Congress, Pete Aguilar, a Democrat from California, and I had a piece of legislation called the USA Act: strong border security, streamline legal immigration, fix DACA -- 1.2 million kids who have only known the United States of America as their home -- these kids, or I should say young men and women, they are already Americans, let's not have them go through any more uncertainty and make that ultimately happen. We had 245 people that were willing to sign this bill into law, it wasn't allowed to come forward under a Republican speaker, and also the current Democratic speaker hasn't brought this bill through in something that we would be able to pass.
AM: So I want to close, and you are, perhaps, most famous -- I don't know if that's fair -- but you took a road trip with Beto O'Rourke from your district to Washington, DC, and you've become known for reaching across the aisle and engaging in these bipartisan conversations. And one of the things I've seen you say repeatedly is to talk about how we are all united. And I think, when we think about the language of immigration and we start hearing words about enemies and militarization, I think the real question is: How do we convince all Americans to understand what you say that more unites us than divides us?
WH: Crisscrossing a district like mine that's truly 50-50 -- 50 percent Democrat, 50 percent Republican, it's been very clear to me that way more unites us than divides us. And if we focus on those things that we agree on, we'll all be better off. And I'm not going to get a perfect attendance award for going to church, but I do remember when Jesus was in the Second Temple and the Pharisees asked him what's the most important commandment, and he said to "Love thy Lord God with all your heart, mind and soul." But people forget he also said, "Equally as important, is to love thy neighbor like thyself." And if we remember that and realize what it would mean, and what you would have to be going through to be living in a situation that you may send your child on a 3,000-mile perilous journey, because that's what you think the only thing for their future, the only thing that you can do to make sure their future is bright, if we all remember that situation, and think what we would do in that situation, I think we'd also be better off.
AM: Thank you, Congressman. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
(Applause)
