[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]






                                 ______


 
                    THE BIDEN	HARRIS BORDER CRISIS:
                         WISCONSIN PERSPECTIVES

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                       COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

                     U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                       THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2024

                               __________

                           Serial No. 118-101

                               __________

         Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
         
         
        GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT 
        
        
        
        
         


               Available via: http://judiciary.house.gov
               
               
               
                       ______

             U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE 
 57-175            WASHINGTON : 2024 
 
               
               
               
               
               
                       COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

                        JIM JORDAN, Ohio, Chair

DARRELL ISSA, California             JERROLD NADLER, New York, Ranking 
MATT GAETZ, Florida                      Member
ANDY BIGGS, Arizona                  ZOE LOFGREN, California
TOM McCLINTOCK, California           STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
TOM TIFFANY, Wisconsin               HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr., 
THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky                  Georgia
CHIP ROY, Texas                      ADAM SCHIFF, California
DAN BISHOP, North Carolina           ERIC SWALWELL, California
VICTORIA SPARTZ, Indiana             TED LIEU, California
SCOTT FITZGERALD, Wisconsin          PRAMILA JAYAPAL, Washington
CLIFF BENTZ, Oregon                  J. LUIS CORREA, California
BEN CLINE, Virginia                  MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania
KELLY ARMSTRONG, North Dakota        JOE NEGUSE, Colorado
LANCE GOODEN, Texas                  LUCY McBATH, Georgia
JEFF VAN DREW, New Jersey            MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania
TROY NEHLS, Texas                    VERONICA ESCOBAR, Texas
BARRY MOORE, Alabama                 DEBORAH ROSS, North Carolina
KEVIN KILEY, California              CORI BUSH, Missouri
HARRIET HAGEMAN, Wyoming             GLENN IVEY, Maryland
NATHANIEL MORAN, Texas               BECCA BALINT, Vermont
LAUREL LEE, Florida                  JESUS G. ``CHUY'' GARCIA, Illinois
WESLEY HUNT, Texas
RUSSELL FRY, South Carolina
MICHAEL RULLI, Ohio

               CHRISTOPHER HIXON, Majority Staff Director
         AARON HILLER, Minority Staff Director & Chief of Staff
                                 ------                                
                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                       Thursday, October 24, 2024

                           OPENING STATEMENTS

                                                                   Page
The Honorable Tom Tiffany, a Member of the Committee on the 
  Judiciary from the State of Wisconsin..........................     1

                               WITNESSES
                               Panel One

The Hon. Ron Johnson, Senator, Ranking Member of the Permanent 
  Subcommittee on Investigations, a Member of the Budget and 
  Finance Committee from the State of Wisconsin
  Oral Testimony.................................................     3

                               Panel Two

Sheriff Dale J. Schmidt, Dodge County, President, Badger State 
  Sheriffs' Association
  Oral Testimony.................................................    18
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    22
Jacob J. Curtis, General Counsel, Director, Center for 
  Investigative Oversight, Institute for Reforming Government
  Oral Testimony.................................................    28
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    31
Rick Rachwal, Cofounder, Vice President, Board of the Love, Logan 
  Foundation
  Oral Testimony.................................................    36
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    39
Henri Kinson, Resident, Whitewater, Wisconsin
  Oral Testimony.................................................    44
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    46
Eric J. Toney, District Attorney, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin
  Oral Testimony.................................................    48
  Prepared Testimony.............................................    51
  Supplemental Materials.........................................    54

          LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC. SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING

All materials submitted for the record by the Committee on the 
  Judiciary are listed below.....................................    89



                   THE BIDEN-HARRIS BORDER CRISIS:



                         WISCONSIN PERSPECTIVES

                              ----------                              


                       Thursday, October 24, 2024

                        House of Representatives

                       Committee on the Judiciary

                             Washington, DC

    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m., in 
the Milwaukee Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, Room 190, 
517 E. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, WI, the Hon. Thomas P. 
Tiffany [Chair of the Committee] presiding.
    Present: Tiffany, Gaetz, McClintock, Fitzgerald, and Bentz.
    Also present: Van Orden, Steil, and Grothman.
    Mr. Tiffany. The Committee will come to order.
    Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a 
recess at any time. We welcome everyone to today's hearing on 
Wisconsin perspectives on the Biden-Harris border crisis.
    Without objection, Representatives Steil, Van Orden, and 
Grothman will be permitted to participate in today's hearing 
for the purpose of questioning the witnesses and will receive 
five minutes to do so.
    Without objection, I will now recognize myself for an 
opening statement.
    Well, good morning. I want to thank my colleagues for 
making the trip from all parts of the country and my fellow 
Wisconsinites for hosting us here today.
    The Committee is conducting a series of these hearings to 
hear from Americans across the U.S. about how the Biden-Harris 
Administration's open border policies, which impede immigration 
enforcement and encourage illegal immigration, are affecting 
their communities and we have been having these hearings this 
entire session of Congress from McAllen, Texas, Yuma, Arizona, 
San Diego, and now we are here in Milwaukee as every State is a 
border State.
    Since taking office on January 20, 2021, the Biden-Harris 
Administration has allowed at least 7.6 million illegal aliens 
into the United States, more than the entire population of 
Wisconsin and 36 other States.
    President Biden and borders czar Vice President Kamala 
Harris created this crisis by systematically dismantling 
effective border measures and their refusal to enforce our 
immigration laws in the interior of the United States.
    They have released millions of illegal aliens stopped at 
the border into our country and abused our laws to fly millions 
more directly into American communities, making every State a 
border State.
    The results have been tragic with foreign migrants flooding 
into American communities from coast to coast, straining social 
services and leaving a trail of innocent victims in their wake.
    The price tag alone is staggering, reaching into the 
hundreds of billions. Even worse, most of these costs are borne 
by State and local governments, many of which now face 
catastrophic strains on their hospitals, schools, and social 
safety net programs, which are supposed to take care of 
Americans, not a never-ending tidal wave of illegal aliens.
    In Arizona, I learned that a border hospital spent $26 
million in a single year on uncompensated care for the illegal 
aliens pouring in. In New York City, they expect to spend $12 
billion over the next three years on housing, food, healthcare, 
and other services for illegal aliens.
    Wisconsin is not immune as we have seen in Whitewater where 
local resources have been strained by an influx of migrants 
after the Biden-Harris Administration flooded the town with 
nearly a thousand migrants.
    It is about more than just dollars and cents. It is also 
about the human cost. Over the past three years Americans have 
been confronted with countless reports of brutal rapes, 
kidnappings, and murders of women and girls by illegal aliens 
in States far from the Southern border, Maryland, Missouri, New 
York, Georgia, Florida, and Wisconsin. No one is immune.
    In Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a Venezuelan illegal alien 
released by Biden and Harris sexually assaulted a woman and 
abused a child after sanctuary jurisdictions like Minneapolis 
failed to report his crimes to ICE for deportation.
    In Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, an illegal alien from Nicaragua 
who was released by Biden-Harris Administration tried to 
sexually assault a 12-year-old girl.
    In Abbotsford, Wisconsin, my district, an illegal alien 
stabbed three people over 15 times, killing two children.
    In Rusk County, Wisconsin--that is near Ladysmith for those 
of you who are familiar with Rusk County--an illegal alien 
whose license had already been revoked for a previous Operating 
While Intoxicated (OWI) conviction, but was not deported 
tragically killed a father of three.
    Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris fentanyl deaths in 
Wisconsin have also reached an all-time high, claiming 
thousands of lives. In Green Bay an illegal alien was busted 
after selling fentanyl-laced pills near a middle school and at 
a Boys and Girls Club--a Boys and Girls Club.
    While these are just a few tragic stories resulting from 
borders czar Kamala Harris' open border it is clear that these 
dangerous individuals should not be here. While the Biden-
Harris Administration misleadingly claims that its policies are 
working, the administration has made America less safe and less 
secure.
    The fact of the matter is the President has the authority 
to stop this. Trump did, Biden did not, and Harris will not.
    Today, we will hear from officials and residents in 
Wisconsin who have had firsthand experience with the chaos 
being inflicted on their communities because of President Biden 
and borders czar Kamala Harris' open border.
    We will take a brief recess. We are having some AV issues. 
We will stand in recess for a moment.
    [Recess.]
    Mr. Tiffany. The Committee will come to order. We are now 
going to introduce today's first panel.
    The Hon. Ron Johnson, the Senior Senator from Wisconsin, 
was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010. Prior to that for 30 
years he ran a successful manufacturing business in Oshkosh.
    He serves on the Senate Budget Committee, Finance 
Committee, and formerly on Homeland Security and Governmental 
Affairs Committee, which he chaired from 2015-2021.
    Senator, we welcome you to this hearing this morning and 
you may begin your testimony.

               STATEMENT OF THE HON. RON JOHNSON

    Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chair, Members of 
Committee, and Members of Congress.
    I really want to thank the Judiciary Committee for agreeing 
to hold this field hearing here in Wisconsin where we can 
highlight the tragedies that are occurring as a result of the 
Biden-Harris open border policy right here in our State of 
Wisconsin.
    It is often said that every State is a border State and 
that is absolutely true, and you are going to be hearing some 
powerful testimony from local sheriffs, from Rick and Erin 
Rachwal who tragically lost their son to a fentanyl overdose.
    So, rather than concentrate on those tragic stories, 
because that is going to be well covered in your second panel, 
what I thought I would do is, basically, utilize my time as 
Chair--the former Chair of Homeland Security.
    Over six years we held something like three dozen hearings 
on some aspect of our illegal immigration when it was far less 
worse than it is today.
    So, what I would like to do is use basically three charts 
that tell the story of how we ended up in this place right now 
and we will start with the first chart I began preparing as 
Chair of Homeland Security had to do with the unaccompanied 
children.
    You can see by this chart 2009, 2010, and 2011, and we had 
a kind of a normal number of unaccompanied children coming to 
this country, somewhere under 4,000.
    Then, what is the spark to all these crises ever since was 
the improper misuse of prosecutor discretion, the Deferred 
Action on Childhood Arrivals.
    The former President Obama issued those memorandums in 2012 
and you can see how all of a sudden the number of unaccompanied 
children coming to this country spiked--went up to 10,000 and 
the following year 20,000. In 2014, it hit a high for that 
point in time. Over 51,000 unaccompanied children came to this 
country.
    What was happening over those couple years is people in 
Central America and elsewhere around the world realized that 
something had changed in America's immigration policy. I 
remember Senator Cornyn coming to Senate lunches talking about 
how he is hearing that in Central America they are being told 
that you are going to get a white piece of paper called a 
permiso to come to this country. It was not a permission; it 
was a notice to appear. That is how they basically took this 
change because of DACA and sparked a crisis.
    The next thing that happened is, in addition to 
unaccompanied children, people got wise and they started coming 
into the country with their children or somebody else's child.
    So, we had a huge spike in family units. In 2014, over 
68,000 family units exploited our asylum laws. So, the former 
President Obama noticed that, and he took action. He started 
detaining families and it worked because the next year in 2015 
family units declined almost in half to 39,800.
    Then, the immigration groups took the Obama Administration 
to court because they did not like anybody being detained. They 
are all in for catch and release, and you had a 
reinterpretation of the 1997 Flores settlement agreement which 
stated that the DHS had to also consider accompanied children 
as part of that Flores agreement.
    In other words, they had to release into the custody of HHS 
children even if they are accompanied by their parents within 
20 days. So, the Obama Administration had a decision to make. 
Were they going to--and by the way, the court would allow them 
to release the child to the custody of HHS and detain the 
parents or release the entire family. The Obama Administration 
decided to release the family and the result sparked the crisis 
that we are still living today.
    If we can go on to my next chart. By the way, one of the 
things that we were supposed to do in terms of the whole family 
unit was we were supposed to do DNA testing to make sure that 
those actually were their children.
    The DHS has never fully implemented DNA testing. I would 
say they are actually violating laws on the books to force them 
to do that and we are not doing it. We actually held a hearing 
in June 2019.
    Vice President Harris was on my Committee at that point in 
time. We heard testimony of a child being sold for $84 to 
create a fake family unit to exploit our asylum laws. So, the 
Biden Administration knows what they are causing.
    This is a chart that I have been developing and updating on 
a monthly basis, the one I gave to President Trump in April 
2024, that he has been using at his rallies. What I have always 
liked about this chart is it shows the cause and effect and so 
I would like to just walk through it.
    Again, you can see 2012 DACA was announced. In 2014, the 
height of that crisis, former President Obama declared a 
humanitarian crisis when they were dealing with 2,000 illegal 
immigrants coming across the border a day being encountered--
2,000.
    I remember DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson at that point in time 
said, ``a thousand a day was a really bad day.'' He was going 
to be in a really bad mood. In 2015, you had the Flores 
interpretation, and when Trump took office after campaigning to 
close the border people in Central America took that seriously 
and so you saw a pretty dramatic dip in people trying to come 
to this country illegally.
    Unfortunately, the laws did not change and Congress would 
do nothing to change the laws. They would not do anything to 
strengthen the President's authority to secure the border, and 
so President Trump had deal with his own surge.
    He dealt with it. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the 
President has--it exudes deference. Current law exudes 
deference to the President to deal with the border, and he did 
so.
    So, he initiated the Migrant Protection Program, otherwise 
known as Remain in Mexico. Initiated and did agreements in 
Central America, the safe third countries. Threatened tariffs 
against the president of Mexico to make sure that he got 
cooperation in Mexico and you will see the dramatic results.
    In 12 months President Trump went from his high of about 
4,500 people per day--again, all sparked because of DACA, but 
4,500 people a day to less than 600 a day.
    In addition to that, and here is the updated chart now--let 
us take this one. Yes.
    In addition, President Trump, because of COVID, initiated 
returns under Title 42, and one of the reasons I modified the 
chart here is because I have seen how Democrats have been 
claiming that President Biden now has gotten numbers down to 
where it was under Trump.
    Well, it is true the encounters are down about the same 
level. By the way, the reason the encounters went up from a low 
point of April 2020, is on the Presidential campaign trail 
every Democrat candidate for President said they were going to 
end deportations, offer free healthcare, and you saw single 
adults starting to creep back into this country because they 
thought it was going to be an open border, which they thought 
right.
    Because President Trump instituted Title 42 you can see the 
very small number. It is that little gap there of people being 
led to the borders. Matter of fact, it was so low in December 
2020, even though it went from 17,000 in the month of April to 
74,000 in December, only 580 people were released that month 
under parole--0.8 percent, 19 people a day.
    So, again, Trump had the border under control and then 
President Biden used the exact same Executive authority that 
President Trump used to close the border to open it up even 
though he denied it for 3\1/2\ years until the media started 
reporting on this crisis at the border because Mayor Adams and 
Mayor Johnson started saying it was going to destroy the 
country--destroy their cities. The media could no longer ignore 
it.
    All of a sudden now President Biden was forced to 
acknowledge this problem. He kept saying, well, Congress has to 
do something. Well, obviously Congress has not, because under 
political pressure he started using the same Executive 
authority and he has brought the numbers down a little bit, but 
he is releasing we do not know exactly how many, about 80 
percent.
    In addition to that, what I have also added to this chart 
is he has also legalized pathways under the CBP One App he has 
released 800 and--I am trying to find it. Well, I do not know 
where it went on my numbers here, but under the CBP One App I 
think it is 800,000 some. Under the CHNV, Cuba, Haiti, 
Nicaragua, and Venezuela, it is about 500,000-30,000 a month 
for 18 months.
    So, that is just the new legalized way so they can claim 
that oh, this is not illegal immigration. They have just 
legalized a separate pathway. That is what Vice President 
candidate J.D. Vance was talking about when he was fact checked 
by the debate moderators.
    Anyway, this is a huge problem. The open border it is 
facilitating a multibillion-dollar business model of some of 
the most evil people on the planet. Let us face it, the human 
trafficking, the sex trafficking, and the drug trafficking--
again, you are going to hear about the rapes, the murders, and 
the vehicular homicides but we have also have terrorists 
entering this country.
    Are they just as sleeper cells? What is it with tens of 
thousands of military-aged Chinese men, transnational criminal 
organizations, again, the drug traffickers?
    If you go to Central America and you talk to law 
enforcement there who are under the sway of the drug cartels, 
if you are a new police officer there you are going to be 
bribed, but you are also going to get a little DVD that shows 
your children and your wife going to church or going to school.
    So, you can either accept the bribe and do the cartels' 
bidding and leave them alone or they are going to threaten your 
family. If you are a taxi driver, the extortion, the 
kidnappings--if you are a taxi driver you either pay the 
extortion or they put a bullet in your head and they put your--
they light your car on fire.
    So, the fact that now we are seeing Venezuela gangs taking 
over apartment buildings and it is unbelievable that a CBS--I 
think a CBS commentator on Sunday morning would talk about only 
a few, just a handful of apartment buildings being taken over 
by Venezuelan gangs like that is acceptable.
    We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of these 
gangs, these cartels, infiltrating smaller communities, 
intimidating police officers, and probably not many, but 
probably bribing some under threat of killing their children or 
themselves.
    You can see where this is going. The gang activity, by the 
way, those unaccompanied children, when I was the Chair, 70 
percent were over the age of 15 and male, perfect age for gang 
members, right?
    So, again, this is an unmitigated disaster. We have only 
seen the tip of the iceberg of the mayhem, of the depredations 
that we are going to see long term.
    We are going to be dealing with this for years and decades. 
My suggestion is we do turn the page on this and we actually 
elect a President who is serious about using that Executive 
authority to secure the border.
    We are happy to strengthen that authority. We can somewhat 
by the Florida settlement reinterpretation. We are happy to 
strengthen that. We just do not have partners on the other side 
that are willing to do it.
    Again, I truly appreciate you holding this field hearing 
and definitely looking forward to hearing from the other 
witnesses. I am happy to take any questions you might have.
    Mr. Tiffany. Yes, thank you very much Senator Johnson. I 
suspect there will be a few questions. I want to ask a couple 
to kick this off.
    So, you go to the very right side of that chart there and 
you see some of those numbers that are dropping and you alluded 
to that.
    Could this be tied at all--we are hearing reporting now 
that there are tens of thousands of people staging in Southern 
Mexico that are--some beginning their movement to the Northern 
border of Mexico as with us getting toward election day we 
suspect.
    Are you familiar with the reporting that is out there that 
there are tens of thousands of people that are staging down in 
Southern Mexico?
    Senator Johnson. Well, I know you have done good work going 
down to the Darien Gap and seeing the camps of Chinese 
military-age men. I do not know exactly what is happening, and 
that is part of the problem is we do not have a transparent 
government.
    The DHS--these numbers we are using is as good estimates as 
we can have. We have 12 million people coming in this country 
illegally, 10 million, 5.7 released. Nobody really knows. Two 
million got-aways.
    So, exactly what is happening I wish we had an 
administration that was transparent and honest with the 
American public, but we do not have that and we certainly do 
not have a news media that is inquisitive and do investigative 
reporting as well.
    Mr. Tiffany. The other question I have is we are hearing 
from some that--what was referred to as the Lankford bill was 
an answer to securing the border.
    We passed H.R. 2 through the House of Representatives, came 
out of this Committee and would have the Lankford bill would 
have been better at securing the border?
    Senator Johnson. The House bill by far, and I appreciate 
you asking me about that because there have been so many lies 
told about what happened there.
    That bill tanked itself. For whatever reason, Leader 
McConnell decided to seek negotiations utilizing James Lankford 
as the negotiator. Would not be forthright in terms of what 
they are negotiating with the conference. I finally requested a 
conference meeting to finally get the information. What are you 
negotiating?
    That was a week before they introduced the bill. Our jaws 
dropped when we heard about the threshold--the 4,000 a day 
threshold--to give the President discretion to stop processing 
asylum claims. Then, the 5,000 threshold where it would make it 
mandatory for him to start doing that.
    That got leaked over that week. When they finally 
introduced that bill by Sunday that bill was dead on arrival. I 
do not know of any Republican Senator that President Trump 
called up to tell him to vote against that bill because on 
Monday morning Mitch McConnell came in and said he is going to 
advise--even though this is the bill he negotiated, probably 
got Border Patrol to sponsor--``because they were looking for 
any port in a storm.''
    That Monday following the introduction of this thing on 
Sunday, McConnell comes into a conference meeting and said, 
``well, politics have changed. We got a Presidential candidate. 
I am going to recommend voting against--voting no on cloture.''
    Again, it kind of surprised all of us because that was his 
negotiated bill. He knew it had no chance. It was such an awful 
bill and, again, they established those thresholds, basically 
codified an awful lot of--half of President Biden's open border 
policy.
    By the way, during the Biden Administration the average 
encounters is over 7,700 a day. You tack on got-aways it is 
over 9,000 people a day coming into this country or attempting 
to come in. Nine thousand people a day.
    The former President Obama called 2,000 a day a 
humanitarian crisis. So, that would have codified 4,000-5,000 a 
day. Plus, by Congress saying that the President does not have 
discretion to stop processing asylum claims until he reaches 
4,000, you actually would have weakened what authority the 
President already had.
    So, on both fronts--codifying what President Biden has done 
to this country, this clear and present danger, and weakening 
Presidential authority that bill was a disaster. It was dead on 
arrival and, quite honestly, President Trump, I know he spoke 
out against it but he had nothing to do with tanking that bill, 
from my standpoint.
    Mr. Tiffany. Yes, that was my question. Senator Johnson, 
did President Trump expressing displeasure with the bill make 
up your mind as far as whether you were to support or oppose?
    Senator Johnson. None whatsoever, and I do not think that 
however many of us voted against it--there are only a couple 
that did--I do not think that had any influence whatsoever. 
President Trump was absolutely right coming out against the 
bill, but we were already against it.
    Mr. Tiffany. Members who have any other questions?
    Representative Gaetz?
    Mr. Gaetz. Thank you for that excellent presentation and 
for your expertise in this matter, Senator Johnson.
    I only take exception with one part, when you described the 
law enforcement dilemma in Central America to take the bribe or 
endure the threat, and I am grateful that in El Salvador there 
has been a third way.
    Through strong leadership and the State of exception 
President Bukele has actually created security there where now 
if you are a Salvadorian killer it is a more permissive 
environment in the United States of America than it is in El 
Salvador, and we see President Mulino in Panama endeavoring on 
an improvement there as well.
    I want to get to know what is going on with some of your 
constituents. What is happening in Whitewater, Wisconsin?
    Senator Johnson. Well, you are going to hear an awful lot 
of testimony so I will let them testify. It is a small 
community. About a thousand migrants all of a sudden showed up 
and law enforcement is being overwhelmed by it. Their schools 
are being overwhelmed by it.
    Congressman Steil and I went there a number of months ago 
to hear the tale of woe and it is but, again, that is just one 
little community. This is being replicated across the country 
in large cities and small communities where we primarily 
recognize the harm of the open border is more in drug 
trafficking, though.
    We do not have a huge migrant population from what I can 
discern traveling around talking to local law enforcement and 
Whitewater is somewhat of an outlier from that standpoint. We 
used to have meth labs not that many years ago. That was a big 
problem for law enforcement.
    We do not have meth labs anymore because you can get meth a 
lot cheaper and of higher quality coming across the Southwest 
border now. We used to have a central drug trafficking hub in 
Chicago. Now, we have multiple hubs in Wisconsin.
    So, you are going to hear again the tragic story from the 
Rachwals in terms of the loss of their son from, again, thought 
it was a pain pill and it was fentanyl laced and died by 
himself in his room. This is just tragic.
    Mr. Gaetz. What I observed was that even in circumstances 
where local law enforcement was able to seize substantial 
cartel funds they could not interest ICE in cooperation to go 
after the cartels that were establishing a presence in your 
State.
    There has been a lot of question and discussion about how 
to
effectuate the largest deportation in American history, which 
is
needed.
    Would not some of those experiences that you have observed 
as a Senator in Wisconsin provide a pathway to do that where 
when folks are doing the right thing from an investigative 
standpoint?
    A community did not choose to be a sanctuary city. There is 
this theory that, well, the only places being overrun are the 
places that have chosen the sanctuary status. I think in your 
State you have observed that it is more broad.
    Senator Johnson. Again, I think the Biden Administration 
has pretty well dismantled the ability of ICE to really detain 
and cooperate effectively with local law enforcement. Again, 
that is going to require a new President. That is going to 
require new leadership at ICE within DHS that actually want to 
enforce laws.
    By the way, the law enforcement officers within ICE and 
within CBP they will welcome that. They want to enforce the 
law. They want to protect U.S. citizens. They are really beside 
themselves.
    That is part of the problem. We are seeing a high level of 
retirements. We cannot hire--we cannot recruit law enforcement, 
whether it is local law enforcement after the defund law 
enforcement movement, but certainly CBP and ICE. It is just so 
dispiriting to sign up to protect the public and then basically 
be prevented from doing the job by this administration.
    Mr. Gaetz. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield back.
    Mr. Tiffany. Members--Representative McClintock?
    Mr. McClintock. Thank you.
    Senator Johnson, first, thank you so much for your 
leadership on this issue. You have been sounding the alarm on 
crisis since the day it began.
    You mentioned the Flores settlement and the dangers that 
confront these hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors. 
The H.R. 2, which passed the House last year, would have fixed 
the Flores settlement. It would have required the safe return 
of unaccompanied children back to their own homes and their own 
families.
    Why has the Senate not taken that bill up?
    Senator Johnson. Because the Senate is right now under the 
majority rule of Democrats and the last thing they want to do 
is fix this problem.
    People need to understand Democrats, Biden-Harris, they 
want an open border. They caused this problem. By the way, I do 
appreciate you bringing back up the UACs and trying to be 
somewhat succinct.
    I completely left out some of the field hearings we have 
had with Senator Grassley with the HHS whistleblowers. The New 
York Times article--85,000 UACs turned over to HHS completely 
unaccounted for, and that is a low number.
    We had an HHS whistleblower that said, again, this was a 
detailee into HHS. They were trying to handle this and they 
were so frustrated in terms of the sponsors that they could not 
find or that seemed completely unqualified.
    Sponsors with the addresses of storage units or a sponsor 
sponsoring thousands of children. She went to her supervisor 
and the supervisor said,

        I think you need to understand we only get sued if we keep kids 
        in our care too long. We do not get sued by traffickers. Are 
        you clear? We do not get sued by traffickers.

    The fact of the matter is HHS is taking these kids. They 
have to get rid of them within 20 days, and they are turning 
them over to sponsors that they know are operated by 
transnational criminal organizations that are sex trafficking, 
human trafficking, and they know what is going to happen and 
they are doing it, and they are turning a blinds eye toward it.
    Of course, the media except for The New York Times--I give 
them credit--a blind's eye toward it as well.
    Mr. McClintock. This is completely incomprehensible to me. 
If a little waif showed up on your doorstep the first thing you 
are going to do is get that little child back to its family and 
its home.
    You are not going to take that child three doors down to a 
crack house and drop them off there, and yet that is exactly 
what our government is doing, is it not?
    Senator Johnson. Yes, and it is shameful.
    Mr. McClintock. When we abandoned Afghanistan we released 
5,000 of the most dangerous terrorists on the planet that were 
being held at Parwan Detention Facility. We know where one of 
those terrorists went. Ten days later they went to the Abbey 
Gate at Kabul airport and detonated a bomb that killed 13 U.S. 
service members. We do not know where the other 5,000 are, do 
we?
    Senator Johnson. Not to my knowledge, and what is even more 
egregious about that is they did not have identification and we 
just created identities for these people.
    Mr. McClintock. Is it conceivable that some of those 5,000 
terrorists are among the 1.9 million known got-aways that we 
watched cross the border, but could not intercept because the 
Border Patrol was completely overwhelmed taking names and 
changing diapers at the border?
    Senator Johnson. Yes. It is almost certainly that is the 
case, and understand we have apprehended--we have encountered 
people on the terrorist watch list. Those are the ones we have 
apprehended.
    The real bad people I am sure take advantage of these 
surges of thousands of people at one border crossing so you 
have no nobody on the line, and they are going to be part of 
that known and unknown got-away population. There is just no 
doubt that there are terrorists who we have let into this 
country, members of transna-
tional criminal organizations. Again, it is just a ticking time 
bomb.
    Mr. McClintock. When we were at the Yuma border a year ago 
we talked to a group of rank and file Border Patrol agents and 
one thing I said is, look, we are the Congress. We cannot 
enforce the laws. We write laws so what laws do you need us to 
write?
    Unanimously, they responded we do not need new laws. We 
need to enforce the laws that we have. The Chief of the Border 
Patrol told us at Eagle Pass that he says,

        I am standing in front of an open fire hydrant with a bucket. I 
        do not need more buckets. I need somebody to shut off the fire 
        hydrant.

    Is this all--President Trump proved that using the existing 
law he could secure the border. The laws did not change on 
January 20, 2021. The Presidency changed. So, is that 
ultimately in the hands of the American people whether we are 
going to secure our border or not?
    Senator Johnson. Again, the Supreme Court ruled the 
President--the current law exudes deference to the President so 
he has got enormous power. Trump used it to secure the border. 
President Biden used it to open it up.
    I would say that it would be nice to address the Flores 
settlement reinterpretation. Secretary Jeh Johnson completely 
disagreed with that. It makes no sense. You cannot detain a 
child with their family. That makes no sense. That could be 
fixed.
    We absolutely have to increase the credible fear standard. 
The standard ought to be do you have a valid asylum claim or 
not.
    Mr. McClintock. H.R. 2 has--
    Senator Johnson. It ought to be just as--
    Mr. McClintock. H.R. 2 does that, too.
    Senator Johnson. So, there are things that we could 
certainly strengthen and we would be happy to do that. That is 
not what Democrats want to do. They basically want to codify 
this open border.
    Mr. McClintock. As you pointed out, the Lankford bill would 
have made it impossible, would have forbidden a president to 
take the actions that Trump did until illegal border crossings 
reached at least 4,000 a day.
    Senator Johnson. Four thousand. Yes. Now, again, that is 
incomprehensible.
    You mentioned the border in Texas. I remember going down--I 
think this is when--before I became Chair in 2014 during the 
Obama's humanitarian crisis and we were all singing the praises 
of CBP who created this facility in McAllen, Texas.
    Because, again, you have all these family units. You are 
really not sure. They were not sure. Is this really the father? 
So, they separated within that unit in a very humane way. They 
had chain link fences and stuff and we were all celebrating 
that. We were saying and singing the praise of CBP for going 
outside normal government rules and responding to this crisis.
    Of course, a year or two later under President Trump that 
exact same facility with the exact same chain link fences all 
of a sudden was kids in cages. Again, a grotesque double 
standard.
    Mr. Tiffany. Represent Fitzgerald?
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you.
    Mr. Tiffany. Representative Van Orden? OK. Representative 
Grothman, you are recognized.
    Mr. Grothman. Just a general--I want your opinion. I really 
appreciate the graphs you have up here and, obviously, as you 
just mentioned the unaccompanied minors coming here is 8,000-
9,000 a month.
    Why do you believe you have a situation that these minors 
are separated from their parents, probably are never going to 
see their parents again, and we had a short period of time in 
which kids were separated from their parents under the Trump 
Administration.
    Now, we have wildly more minors all going up here. Why does 
the press not consider this a scandal and why does the average 
American not know about it?
    Senator Johnson. Because the press, like our Democrat 
colleagues, they are supportive of an open border.
    Mr. Grothman. So, that is why the American public does not 
know all the unaccompanied minors who we have streaming across 
our border?
    Senator Johnson. Yes, and again, the media--I quit calling 
them mainstream media. The legacy of the corporate media they 
are cheerleaders for the Democrat Party. They are the comms 
department for Democrats. They wanted Biden president, so they 
did everything they could to get somebody who campaigned from 
his basement elected president. They were certainly 
cheerleading when Biden was replaced on the ticket with Kamala 
Harris. They put her on a pedestal and declared her the Second 
Coming.
    They are trying to do everything they can to get her 
elected as well. So, again, they are absolutely supportive of 
all these radical left policies, and one of those radical left 
policies is literally the clear and present danger of a wide-
open border.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you.
    Mr. Tiffany. Members, anyone with a question?
    Mr. Van Orden. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Tiffany. Representative Van Orden, you are recognized.
    Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    I would also like to thank Representatives Moore and Pocan 
for showing up here at this incredibly important hearing as 
immigration goes in between the top one and two issues for all 
Wisconsinites and American citizens.
    Our folks are literally being kidnapped, raped, and 
murdered here in the State of Wisconsin and around the country 
and we have two Members of Congress who could not bother 
showing up today. I think that that speaks volumes.
    The criminal illegal alien that Congressman Tiffany 
referred to earlier made his way across the border with 
Venezuelan gang tattoos, and those are not a ``Live to ride, 
ride to live'' tattoo.
    It is either you are a member of that gang and you have 
that tattoo or they will cut it off you while you are living. 
So, that should have been taken for what it is at the border. 
This person ever should have been allowed in the country.
    Made his way to Minneapolis, arrested for crimes after the 
Dane County sheriff had warrants out for strangulation, some 
other violent crimes. Did not bother following up with it 
because both of those places are sanctuary cities.
    Then, he came to a place a half mile away from where four 
of my grandchildren live and brutally raped a mother and 
assaulted a daughter over a period of days, and this could have 
been stopped at any point during this chain and solely because 
the Biden Administration is pushing this incredibly horrible 
political agenda is that going to keep happening over and over 
and over again.
    So, Senator Johnson, I just found this out this last week 
and I want to know if you are tracking this.
    We went to the Federal prison in Oxford--excuse me, Oxford. 
It is in my district, and half of the prisoners in this Federal 
prison--half--are illegal aliens. Are you tracking the volume 
of what is taking place with it?
    This is the second, third order effect of opening up these 
borders. When half of an institution is occupied by illegal 
aliens that is something that I am hoping we are going to be 
looking at here under a Trump Presidency. Are you tracking 
this, sir?
    Senator Johnson. I am not but it is not surprising. It is 
not just going to be Federal prisons, it is going to be local 
prisons and they are going to be bearing the brunt of the cost 
of this.
    I think the House Committee said that the cost of dealing 
with this crisis is about $150 billion per year across all 
governmental units. That is a massive cost imposed on us by the 
Biden-Harris Administration.
    You said that gang members never should have been let into 
this country. The vast majority of these people, as sympathetic 
as I am of people who want to come here for opportunity, they 
do not qualify for asylum.
    Asylum is a very tough standard. You have to be persecuted 
by your government or threatened with persecution under some 
very limited--I cannot remember all of them, but race, gender, 
part of a club, some kind of social group, or political group.
    Again, it is a very tough standard. Most people coming to 
this country, other than the criminals, are economic migrants 
and, again, we might welcome them in a legal system, which is 
one of the travesties, by the way of this open border. It has 
set back establishing a functioning legal immigration that is 
controlled, that brings people in to improve our economy.
    I am for a robust legal immigration system and we need one. 
We certainly need one here in Wisconsin, certainly in your 
district, with all the farmers. We need workers. We need 
laborers.
    Immigrant laborers do a great job. They come in here, they 
work their tail off. It has to be a legal system and cannot 
establish that until you secure the border. So, Biden has set 
back establishing that legal system I do not know how many 
years. It is a travesty.
    Mr. Van Orden. It is, and just for a couple stats out of 
the--at one point they had 17,000-20,000 some rotating through 
Afghan refugees at Fort McCoy, which I represent.
    We went back and looked at every single Afghan that came 
here that was eligible for a special immigrant visa. They 
worked with the U.S. Government during the war. Guess how many 
of those people qualified for SIVs?
    Senator Johnson. Probably not many.
    Mr. Van Orden. Zero.
    Senator Johnson. Not many.
    Mr. Van Orden. The answer is zero, Senator.
    Senator Johnson. I was right.
    Mr. Van Orden. That is less than not many. The last thing 
is we are looking at about 250,000 missing children, correct? 
The Biden Administration has lost--
    Senator Johnson. Yes, that is what the whistleblowers are 
talking about in our hearings. Yes, 85,000--as I said, that is 
a low number.
    Mr. Van Orden. Yes. Let us make sure that is in the record, 
that the Biden Administration under the Harris border czardom 
is solely responsible for losing almost a quarter of a million 
children into the United States that are most likely being 
trafficked--
    Senator Johnson. Knowing full well that they were releasing 
them to the hands of probably members of transnational criminal 
organizations, human sex traffickers, knowing full well that--
again, it was not a surprise to them.
    Mr. Van Orden. With that, I yield back, Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you. I now recognize Representative 
Steil.
    Mr. Steil. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
    Senator Johnson, thank you for being here with us today. 
Thanks for coming to Whitewater as we discuss the issue. We are 
going to get into that in the second panel.
    I just want to come back to your chart here. Both of us 
come--if we can keep the chart up, if you would. Can we keep 
that same chart?
    That chart has everything except one thing. What would that 
chart look like during the Biden-Harris Administration if you 
added got-aways?
    Senator Johnson. About a couple million more people.
    Mr. Steil. I think as we are stage setting here--
    Senator Johnson. These are encounters. So, yes--
    Mr. Steil. I am supportive of the chart.
    Senator Johnson. I would have a different scale.
    Mr. Steil. That is what I wanted to do in the stage setting 
of this because we are going to get into a great next panel. 
This only captures part of the problem. It is a huge problem. 
This captures part of the problem.
    In addition to that, you have millions of got-aways, and if 
we just think intuitively some individuals, as you have noted, 
turn themselves in to abuse our parole system, to abuse the 
catch and release policies of the Biden-Harris Administration.
    Other individuals are not interested in turning themselves 
in and allowing the abused system of the Biden-Harris 
Administration to give them paperwork to be released into the 
United States. If we think intuitively who might those 
individuals be that do not want to be caught in the first 
place?
    Senator Johnson. Those would be the bad hombres, I guess. 
You talked about abuse. I mentioned when it came to the UACs 
and the DACA that it was an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. 
What this administration has done with parole, it is a strange 
term, and what parole means for immigration is you are allowed 
in the country for a special purpose, like to get a medical 
treatment, or you have got a family member that died and you 
are coming in very short term for that medical treatment or to 
attend that funeral.
    They have granted that to well over a million people. 
Again, it is supposed to be case-by-case basis and they just 
expanded it. So, again, it is a lawless, like, the President--
like the Obama Administration these are lawless 
administrations. They are afraid for our democracy? They are 
the danger to our democracy.
    Mr. Steil. I totally agree. I think when we also think 
about the got-aways, when we think about those individuals who 
are crossing who have a criminal background, who have 
previously been deported, who may be trafficking drugs, those 
are the individuals likely to try to avoid the encounter, that 
are coming into the United States in large numbers.
    Then, when we think about the policies of sanctuary cities 
and we know Dane County operates as a sanctuary city because 
ICE makes it clear that Dane County does not coordinate with 
them, we know the danger that poses into our communities as was 
pointed out by Congressman Van Orden, the impact that is having 
in our State.
    There has been State legislation where we could have had an 
opportunity to ban sanctuary cities here in the United States 
and we have not been successful in doing that under Democratic 
leadership in this State.
    Senator Johnson. By the way, something you know the border 
with Mexico is 100 percent secure on the Mexican side. You do 
not cross that until you pay the trafficking fee.
    OK. So, the cartels they will funnel hundreds of thousands 
of people into one area so they can probably the higher value--
you probably get a higher trafficking fee for trafficking the 
bad hombres as known or unknown got-aways.
    Mr. Steil. I appreciate your testimony. I look forward to 
the second panel.
    Mr. Chair, I yield back.
    Mr. Tiffany. I now recognize Represent Bentz for 
questioning.
    Mr. Bentz. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Senator, thank you so much for being here. When I first saw 
your chart I thought it was something showing us inflation. 
That is what I thought that was.
    Here is the point. The point is the Biden Administration 
suggests that now that inflation has eased off a bit all the 
consequences somehow evaporated and they did not and that is--
the same is true for your chart on immigration, is it not?
    It is way down but what about all those 7-9 million people 
that now are here? So, there seems to be--we had the head of 
Homeland--former head of Homeland Security in front of us the 
other day, and he was talking about how there might be some 
means of removing people from the United States but then he 
admitted it would be extraordinarily expensive and extremely 
difficult.
    So, the challenge is it not--and that is why I am looking 
forward to the second panel--of how in the world do we now deal 
with these folks that are here and probably never going to 
leave?
    That, to me, is where our discussion is going to go. We can 
talk about who caused this--the Biden Administration, your 
chart shows. Now what?
    So, that is my question to you. Now what?
    Senator Johnson. Well, for those of you who have been to 
the border you also probably saw what I saw is so many young 
pregnant women in their eighth or ninth month. Of course, they 
come here and that child is a U.S. citizen which, personally, I 
believe we ought to do away with birthright citizenship. We are 
in the minority of countries that grant that and that is just 
another magnet to come here.
    I hope under a serious administration deporting criminals 
will be reasonably easy but past that point it is going to be 
very difficult. Because of birthright citizenship are you going 
to really separate a child from--an infant from their mother 
and father?
    So, no, this is something we are going to have to grapple 
with. I hope as Republicans we do it with a great deal of 
humanity. Take a look at how people--again, they were welcomed 
in. Yes, they came in illegally but they were welcomed in by 
the Biden Administration.
    So, I think we have to factor that in and figure out in 
some way, shape, or form how do we deal with these people with 
humanity, the ones who have behaved, that are working, they are 
not a burden on society.
    That is something we are going to have to grapple with. 
That would be a very serious issue and I hope it does not break 
down on party lines. I hope this is something we can work with 
on a bipartisan basis. We have got a real problem on our hands.
    Mr. Bentz. We do. The $150 billion a year into the 
indefinite future of cost and one in 10 being entitled to 
asylum, at least, that is what our hearing record shows one in 
10.
    The other nine they should not have come across even 
though, as you say, they indeed were welcomed in by the Biden 
Administration. Thank you, Senator, so much for being here 
today.
    Senator Johnson. Thank you.
    Mr. Tiffany. If there are no further questions, Senator 
Johnson, thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate 
it.
    Senator Johnson. Thank you so much.
    Mr. Tiffany. We are now going to move on to our--by the 
way, thank you for creating that chart and saving a person's 
life.
    We are now going to move on to our second panel, and as it 
is set up I am going to do the introductions of the people that 
are going to be on this next panel.
    First, we have the Hon. Eric Toney. He is in his 12th year 
as District Attorney for Fond du Lac County and is the former 
President of the Wisconsin District Attorneys Association, 
currently serving as past president. Prior to being elected 
district attorney, he was in private practice focused on mental 
health, juvenile criminal defense, and bankruptcy law.
    District Attorney Toney manages an office that files 
thousands of criminal cases each year and has personally 
prosecuted hundreds if not thousands of those cases including 
cold case homicide, sexual assault, drug conspiracies, gang 
crime, domestic violence, drunk driving, violent crime, 
racketeering, human trafficking, and election fraud.
    Jacob Curtis is a General Counsel and Director of the 
Center of the Investigative Oversight at the Institute for 
Reforming Government. He was appointed by Governor Walker to 
serve as Chief Legal Counsel at the Wisconsin Department of 
Natural Resources.
    He also previously served as Deputy Legal Counsel at the 
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Was a policy advisor 
to a State Senator and served as an elected County Supervisor. 
Mr. Curtis also serves in the Wisconsin Air National Guard.
    Rick Rachwal is the cofounder and Vice President of the 
Board of the Love, Logan Foundation. Mr. Rachwal and his wife 
Erin founded the organization in August 2022, following the 
fentanyl poisoning of their 19-year-old son Logan.
    The foundation educates and informs communities around the 
country about the impact of fentanyl and how education and 
awareness can save lives.
    Rick is also a lead engineer for the Eaton Corporation 
located in Waukesha, Wisconsin. We want to thank Erin for 
having appeared a 1\1/2\ years ago before our Committee to 
testify and we appreciate Rick is here today.
    Henri Kinson was born and raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, 
grew up attending Whitewater public schools, served on the 
Whitewater school board for seven years and has four sons, all 
of whom have attended Whitewater public schools.
    He holds a bachelor of Business Administration and a master 
of Business Administration. He is a certified Public Accountant 
and a certified Information Security Auditor.
    Sheriff Dale Schmidt has served in the Dodge County 
Sheriff's Office since 2004, first as a Patrol Deputy, then a 
Sergeant, finally taking over as Sheriff in 2015.
    Prior to 2004 he served as a police officer in multiple 
Wisconsin jurisdictions including the village of Winneconne and 
Horicon. He also currently serves as the President of the 
Badger State Sheriff's Association.
    Sheriff Schmidt holds an associate's degree in Police 
Science from Fox Valley Technical College and is a nationally 
certified drug recognition expert and a standardized field 
sobriety test master instructor.
    We welcome our witnesses and thank them for appearing today 
and we are going to begin by swearing all of you in. Would you 
please rise and raise your right hand?
    Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the 
testimony you are about to give is true and correct to the best 
of your knowledge, information, and belief so help you, God?
    [All witnesses answer in the affirmative.]
    Mr. Tiffany. I notice that each of the witnesses proclaimed 
in the affirmative. You may be seated.
    Please know that your written testimony will be entered 
into the record in its entirety. Accordingly, we ask that you 
summarize your testimony. We are going to have Sheriff Schmidt 
go first with his testimony. You have five minutes, sir.

              STATEMENT OF SHERIFF DALE J. SCHMIDT

    Mr. Schmidt. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and the thank you, the 
Members of the Committee, for having me here today.
    I really do appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak 
not only as the Dodge County Sheriff, but on behalf of many of 
the sheriffs. I understand I am the President of the Sheriffs 
Association. Some of the things--
    Mr. Tiffany. Would you pause for just second? I would ask 
the other Members on the panel please silence your mic and you 
will see with the light. It might eliminate some feedback. We 
will see what happens.
    Mr. Schmidt. Certainly.
    Mr. Tiffany. Sheriff Schmidt, continue.
    Mr. Schmidt. Thank you. I represent many opinions of the 
sheriffs of the Sheriffs Association, not all, so I am not 
speaking as the president here today, but I do have a number of 
incidents that I would like to share with everybody.
    As you know, being the sheriff is a very tasking job. There 
is a lot of work that I have to do. This morning I was out 
looking for a young lady who was missing. Found her, 
thankfully.
    Right now I am supposed to be back where--I have 17 
individuals doing a search warrant on a homicide investigation. 
There is a lot of things that we have to do. I thank you for 
taking your time to be here in your home State or come from 
across the country to be here.
    I do note, along with Mr. Van Orden, what he indicated 
earlier--I am disappointed that we do not have individuals here 
to hear what we have to say here today.
    We are your constituents and we have concerns, and I thank 
you for hearing them. I hope you can take them back to the 
other side and share them, but it is very important stuff for 
you to hear, and I really thank Senator Johnson for being here. 
Where is Senator Baldwin and the other Members of the other 
side?
    That is very concerning to me as a constituent. I elect you 
to be here just as Congressman Fitzgerald elects me to be his 
sheriff. I have a responsibility to him, you have a 
responsibility to me, and I appreciate you hearing what we have 
to say.
    With that being said, some of the sheriffs have shared some 
very serious things with me. If Trump does not win this 
election we are screwed. That is a quote from one of our 
sheriffs.
    Another sheriff--people do not understand how bad it is. If 
you would have asked me 10 years ago when I became sheriff if I 
would be sitting here in front of you talking about a border 
crisis I would have said no way. No way. We are not in a 
position where it is going to be this bad.
    I am here to tell you that is not the case. You, obviously, 
know that is not the case. In my 24 years of law enforcement I 
have never seen the type of criminal element from outside of 
our borders in our home State here of Wisconsin--our border 
State of Wisconsin--like we are seeing now.
    It did not take me long to reach out to our fellow sheriffs 
and say, hey, what have you got around the State, for them to 
come back to me with some incidents, and there is crimes of all 
kinds from around the country--around the State.
    I am going to start with a couple of them in my own county 
that happened here recently. The first one--really, the first 
arrest took place under President Trump at the very end of his 
first term.
    The DEA in collaboration with our agency made an arrest of 
an individual from the Sinaloa drug cartel in which they seized 
81 pounds of methamphetamine--81 pounds. That is a small human.
    Five and a half ounces of fentanyl. Five and a half ounces 
of fentanyl will kill 156,000 people. From one person, from a 
cartel member that lived in the city of Juneau, 3,000 people--
my county seat.
    I am here to tell you we have cartel members in every 
single one of the counties in Dodge County--I am sorry, in the 
State of Wisconsin. It is happening and we thought, OK, the DEA 
is here. The Federal Government is here to save us on this one.
    No prosecution. He was arrested--no prosecution. They were 
going to work him. To this day, I do not know that this 
individual has ever been prosecuted for any of those offenses.
    In November 2022, our drug task force came to me and said, 
``hey, we have got this guy again.'' I said, ``What do you mean 
we got this guy again?'' I thought--why is this guy not in 
prison?
    No, we have got this guy again, and they had some 
controlled buys into him, made an additional arrest and ended 
up with four pounds of methamphetamine--another four pounds--
2.1 pounds of marijuana and $51,000 in suspected drug money, 
which was all seized.
    My people did the right thing. I do not know what happened 
after that transition to power to the Biden Administration 
because under Trump's Administration they were doing a good 
thing and then all of a sudden it just fell off the table and 
nothing happened.
    Two years later into the Biden-Harris Administration we 
have to come back and arrest this guy and we have possession 
with intent to deliver more than 50 grams of meth, possession 
with intent to deliver marijuana, 200-1,000 grams, maintaining 
a drug trafficking place, possession of drug paraphernalia, 
three counts of manufacturing and delivery of methamphetamine.
    Blows me away. We have him in prison now. The State is now 
paying for him to be in prison. He should not have been here in 
the first place and the State is going to pay for him to be in 
prison for 18\1/2\ years and then have him on supervised 
release for 10 years when he should not be here in the first 
place or should be in Federal prison.
    That is a problem. That is a problem that is now on the 
Wisconsin taxpayers to take care of him.
    Another comment that was made earlier about law enforcement 
in other countries, we do not have them taking a hold on our 
State here in Wisconsin, yet. It is coming.
    We will have more cartel members coming into the State of 
Wisconsin. We will have more instances of individuals 
threatening our families. It is going to happen just like it 
happens in Mexico if this continues and if we do not stop this.
    I am fearful for my family. I am fearful for the family of 
those that serve with me that when we have cartel members, and 
if we are going to arrest individuals that they are going to 
turn around and say--they are going to hand us that DVD and 
say, what are you going to do, if we do not do something soon.
    Other incidents--we had a scammer from India. Tried to scam 
somebody out of $81,000 in Dodge County just last month. We 
were able to get in, intercept, and take this person into 
custody in the midst of a deal.
    We do not always get to do that. This was really cool. We 
got him in custody. He is now in our court system and we are 
hopefully working on some kind of deportation process, but we 
got a $100,000 cash bond.
    We will take care of it here at the State because the 
Federal Government is not doing it, but I sure wish the Federal 
Government would.
    Fond du Lac County incident. The individual on March 22, 
2024--the individual was stabbed. An illegal alien left the 
victim for dead. Just left her for dead.
    Fond du Lac County, in collaboration with two other 
counties, was able to take this individual into custody and on 
multiple charges--first degree intentional homicide, mayhem, 
first degree reckless injury, and aggravated battery. Those are 
all pending.
    Another Fond du Lac County. Just over the county border, 
12-year-old female had just shown up at somebody's door. She 
broke away from somebody who was sexually assaulting her. Had 
her bound, had her gagged, and had her blindfolded.
    He broke--she broke away. She had enough power to get away 
and get to somebody's home and seek help. Here just--and he 
paid for her. He paid for her from her mother. Unbelievable 
stories that we are hearing right here in Wisconsin.
    Oconto County--an individual who was found dead laying in a 
park in Green Bay Shore's State wildlife area. The Oconto 
County sheriff tells me that his staff worked really hard on 
this only to find out that this individual, the victim, was 
dealing and this individual owed the suspect money. The suspect 
is--it goes fine.
    Someone picks him up at his home, takes him out to the 
park, couple rounds, puts him down and here we have a homicide 
in Oconto--quiet Oconto County in Northeast Wisconsin.
    I could go on. Time after time there is all kinds of 
incidents. We have illegal driving--people not having licenses. 
We cannot identify them--incidents where we are stopping people 
on the side of the road and we cannot identify them. One 
incident on Highway 41 right in our county four individuals. 
None of them would identify themselves to us.
    One of them we figured out who it was. Three of them we 
took to the jail. One we find out has a U.S. Marshal Service 
warrant and you know the U.S. Marshal Service warrants are not 
cheap warrants. They are felony warrants. We did not know who 
that was. A 40-minute ride to jail before we figured out who it 
was.
    More and more of these individuals are coming into our 
county. Fentanyl is killing people. We have 1,500 people a year 
dying in Wisconsin because of fentanyl overdoses, and I would 
love to put up a border around Dodge County or around the State 
of Wisconsin. We need the Federal Government to do that at our 
Southern border.
    I appreciate your time. I have got so much more, but I know 
I am out of time and welcome any of your questions.
    [Prepared statement of Mr. Schmidt follows:]
    
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    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you, Sheriff Schmidt.
    Mr. Curtis, you may begin.

                  STATEMENT OF JACOB J. CURTIS

    Mr. Curtis. Good morning, Mr. Chair and the Members of the 
Committee.
    It happened fast and with little explanation or resources. 
In 2022, the city of Whitewater began to observe an increase in 
migrants from Central America. Whitewater Police Chief Daniel 
Meyer saw an increase in various law enforcement activity 
relating to issues not normally associated with local 
residents.
    He noted in an email to a Walworth County official that, 
quote,

          Within the last month or so our department has had contact 
        with an increasing number of Nicaraguan migrants who have 
        recently moved to our area.

          I do not have much of an estimate of how many people have 
        moved into the city at this point, but a number of the adults 
        have found jobs at larger businesses in our area.

          We recently have had a number of criminal investigations 
        involving some of these individuals and we have also had 
        children from some of these families within the school district 
        who have been reported truant.

          All told, from 2022-2023, the city estimates at least 1,000 
        migrants from Central America quietly established themselves in 
        the sleepy college town of 15,000, a population increase of, 
        roughly, seven percent.

          The city has struggled to deal with the increasing strain on 
        law enforcement resources, housing over capacity, and the 
        challenges associated with educating children with no formal 
        background in schooling and often lacking basic English skills.

    These increasing burdens culminated in the police chief 
offering a letter to the White House on December 28, 2023, 
highlighting the strain that had been placed on existing 
resources and describing the challenge as, quote, ``a critical 
humanitarian issue.'' A nearly identical letter had been sent 
the previous week to DHS Secretary of Homeland Security 
Alejandro Mayorkas.
    These letters resulted in additional communications from 
Wisconsin's congressional Delegation and the Wisconsin 
legislature as well as a significant number of State and 
national media requests.
    While many media outlets moved on to the next story the 
city of Whitewater has continued to struggle to meet the 
demands from the newcomers. To determine the full extent of the 
challenges on March 14, 2024, the IOG Center for Investigative 
Oversight submitted a series of public records requests to the 
police chief, who fully complied with the request and provided 
over 400 responsive records.
    The IOG's review of the records provided by the city 
uncovered numerous revelations which were detailed in a June 
report that is being provided to the Committee.
    The eight key takeaways include the following.

    (1) While numerous public officials have attempted to 
highlight the challenges, the Nation's broken immigration 
system and open borders continue to place an unmanageable 
burden on local units of government. Nationally touted funding 
programs are either unavailable or insufficient.
    (2) Unlike sanctuary cities, it does not appear the city of 
Whitewater sought the immigrants. Instead, the city's theory 
explaining the sudden influx revolves around a complex web of 
ample student housing following COVID, a need for farm and 
manufacturing labor, and the congregation of sponsor families 
in and around the city that were then identified by migrants at 
the border.
    (3) Despite the presence of notorious MS-13 gang members 
from Nicaragua and investigations that have led to the seizure 
of significant cartel funds, confusion remains as to the 
processing and potential deportation of violent criminals.
    Emails reflected uncertainty regarding the process for 
contacting ICE as migrants await immigration hearings in 
Chicago.
    This is particularly troubling considering the 
identification of known international crime syndicate members 
within the city.
    In December 2023, the police chief thanked ICE for, quote,

          The recent assistance in our city removing an individual who 
        had been identified as a wanted MS-13 gang member from 
        Nicaragua.

    A Member of this Committee in a January's letter to the 
police chief made reference to the infiltration of Mexico's 
gulf cartel in Whitewater, and while unrelated to the situation 
in Whitewater and was already mentioned by Congressman Van 
Orden it was recently reported that a woman was sexually 
assaulted in Prairie du Chien by a suspected member of Tren de 
Aragua, the violent criminal organization born a decade ago in 
Venezuelan prisons.
    Simply put, while the exact scope and extent of these 
criminal operations in Wisconsin is not clear their very 
existence in the State should motivate every policymaker to 
secure the Nation's borders.
    (4) At various points city leadership sought assistance 
from the State including the Governor's office. While meetings 
took place there was an emphasis on the private nature of the 
meeting and a request to keep the meeting, quote, ``low profile 
to avoid the press.''
    (5) city officials were made aware of deplorable living 
conditions including children sleeping in sheds during subzero 
temperatures, children left at home unattended while parents 
worked, a 14-year-old being forced to work 30 hours per week by 
her father, and small apartment units where children were 
forced to cohabitate with 8-10 adults.
    The pairing of nonfamily members has resulted in 
allegations of sexual assault involving young females and other 
acts against victims including the discovery of a deceased 
child discarded in a ditch in a bag.
    At the time of the IOG report there were 10 open sexual 
offense cases involving migrants in the city.
    (6) As a result of increased costs to the city's police 
department and school district, both taxing entities are 
considering property tax referendums possibly as soon as Spring 
2025.
    (7) Because of the focus on the unique law enforcement 
challenges associated with the migrant population such as 
violations for driving without a license, the police department 
has identified a significant decrease in proactive policing.
    (8) In light of questions related to the legal status of 
migrants questions have been raised regarding how individuals 
should be identified. In particular, the city appears unsure 
how migrants can obtain identification cards. Some members of 
the community have suggested paths for migrants to obtain 
driver's licenses.

    Despite this lack of clarity, at least one record suggests 
certain migrants have been able to obtain temporary driver's 
licenses from the Wisconsin DMV.
    In conclusion, while numerous public officials have 
attempted to highlight the challenges, the Nation's broken 
immigration system continues to place an unmanageable burden on 
local units of government.
    Overall, many of the communications, particularly those 
from the police chief, make clear the city has attempted to 
balance maintaining an objective posture on a highly charged 
public policy debate, while recognizing the clear impact the 
influx of immigrants is having on the city's ability to protect 
its residents, ensure quality public education for the city's 
school children, and maintain fiscal solvency.
    Unless and until the Federal Government secures the border 
and repairs the Nation's utterly broken immigration 
infrastructure, local units of government like those in 
Whitewater, Wisconsin, will be left to respond to the Federal 
Government's continued failures.
    Thank you.
    [Prepared statement of Mr. Curtis follows:]
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    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you, Mr. Curtis.
    Mr. Rachwal, you may begin.

                   STATEMENT OF RICK RACHWAL

    Mr. Rachwal. Thank you, Chair, Members of Congress, and the 
Members of the House Judiciary Committee.
    My name is Rick Rachwal. I am a husband. My wife Erin is 
here with me today. Father of two boys, Caden and Logan, and 
cofounder of the Love, Logan Foundation.
    Today I share the heart wrenching story of my son Logan and 
the devastating impact that fentanyl has had on our family.
    On Valentine's Day in 2021, my family's life changed 
forever. Nothing could have prepared us for the heartbreaking 
pain from the loss of a son and a brother.
    Logan at just 19 years old died alone in his dorm room at 
the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He took what he thought 
was a 30 milligram Oxycodone but, tragically, it was a 
counterfeit pill containing a lethal dose of fentanyl.
    I will never get the image out of my head of our family 
walking into his dorm room and seeing his lifeless body on his 
bed. There was a stuffed animal next to him. He was just a 
child.
    If there is anything as painful as the loss of a child I 
cannot begin to imagine what that might be. Our hopes and 
dreams for Logan and our family were shattered and we now live 
with the ``what ifs'' and the ``what could have been.''
    We made it a priority to make our boys feel special, 
whether it was a birthday party, camping trip, family trip 
across the country, or cheering them on when they played their 
favorite sport, baseball. We were their biggest fans. Faith was 
also important to us and attending church together was a 
priority.
    Logan was full of life. He had an infectious smile and was 
very passionate, passionate about things like our cats, music, 
reading, and drawing. Logan was very kind hearted and often 
helped others who were struggling.
    Logan also had his share of struggles with anxiety, being 
bullied at school, and later depression. We sought out help for 
Logan at an early age and despite our best efforts Logan fell 
victim to fentanyl.
    Logan was a bright and wonderful young man who deserved a 
future. We will always remember his smile, his spirit, and the 
love that he brought into this world.
    As mentioned, the pill Logan took was laced with fentanyl, 
a substance so potent and addictive that as little as two 
milligrams, equivalent to just a few grains of salt, can be 
lethal. Fentanyl is the number-one killer in our country for 
ages 18-45 and has contributed to approximately 150,000 deaths 
between the years 2022-2023. This is over 200 deaths per day. 
Where is the urgent response from our elected officials?
    In 2022, we lost an average of 22 teenagers per week from 
drug overdoses and poisonings primarily driven by fentanyl. 
That is like losing one classroom each week for an entire year. 
Again, where is the response?
    Fentanyl overdoses and poisonings in Wisconsin from 2019-
2021, the year Logan died, increased by almost 100 percent. 
Fentanyl does not discriminate by race, gender, or financial 
status. Every parent and person in this room or any other room 
in America is at risk of being impacted by this epidemic.
    You are likely to hear these tragic experiences shared from 
a parent's perspective like mine, but let us not forget the 
often overlooked impact this is having on those who have lost 
siblings. They have an entire lifetime with that brother or 
sister taken from them. Families are being torn apart.
    There is also a battle against stigma associated with these 
deaths which I know hinders efforts to combat this poison. 
These are sons, daughters, grandchildren, brothers, and sisters 
we are losing.
    They deserve a chance to recover or like Logan deserved a 
chance to learn from their mistakes. With fentanyl they die 
before they even get a chance.
    This epidemic deserves more attention and a response as 
strong, bold, and determined as other issues have received in 
recent years. We secure our homes by locking doors and 
regulating who enters. Our government under the current 
administration is failing to do the same for our country.
    Record numbers of unvetted migrants are entering the United 
States, overwhelming resources and allowing fentanyl to pour 
in. Mexican cartels are operating just South of our border and 
they are the main organizations manufacturing and distributing 
illicit fentanyl.
    These cartels, driven by greed, have no regard for the 
lives lost from the poison they are pawning. These criminal 
organizations are in our own backyard, and yet our borders 
remain wide open.
    Increasing awareness and education about this crisis is 
crucial. This responsibility has, largely, fallen on the 
families of victims like mine who have taken up the cause 
through advocacy and nonprofits.
    In 2022, my wife Erin and I founded the Love, Logan 
Foundation to raise awareness and support other families 
impacted by fentanyl. We want to end these tragedies, tragedies 
like the young man who died just nine months after Logan in the 
same dorm building from the same type of pill. Again, the same 
school, same dorm, nine months later. Where was the awareness?
    Our government must also step up to educate and raise 
awareness to protect families from fentanyl. As I mentioned 
earlier, fentanyl is the number-one cause of death in our 
country for ages 18-45 with over 200 lives lost each day.
    Given those numbers and the drastic increases in fentanyl-
related deaths at even younger ages there is an urgent need for 
comprehensive strategies to combat this crisis.
    Our families deserve better and that starts with better 
border policies and a commitment from our leaders to prioritize 
the fight against fentanyl. We cannot continue to lose our 
children to this preventable tragedy.
    Erin and I learned the hard way that there is no level of 
involvement, number of vacations, Sunday school lessons, amount 
of money, or parental love that can eliminate the threat of 
fentanyl from our families.
    We need our leaders, the guardians of our Nation, to honor 
their oath of office by protecting our country and keeping our 
families safe. I lost my son Logan, a wonderful human being who 
deserved to learn from that tragic mistake that took his life.
    Please remember my son and every other American who has 
lost their life to fentanyl poisoning. They are more than 
numbers and data. Each number represents a life lost, a family 
torn apart, and a missed opportunity for the current 
administration to uphold their commitment to protect Americans.
    Thank you again for this opportunity.
    [Prepared statement of Mr. Rachwal follows:]
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    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you, Mr. Rachwal. Your son will not be 
forgotten.
    Mr. Kinson, you may begin.

                   STATEMENT OF HENRI KINSON

    Mr. Kinson. Good morning. My name is Henri Kinson. I grew 
up in Whitewater, went to Whitewater School District, and then 
to undergrad at UW Whitewater.
    I served on the Whitewater School Board for seven years and 
I am also the parent of four boys who have attended Whitewater 
public schools with one still a sophomore there.
    I was asked to come here to testify as to the educational 
situation in my hometown of Whitewater due to the large recent 
influx of non-English speakers.
    Put simply, educational outcomes by every metric are 
falling like a rock in Whitewater. When I attended Whitewater 
School years ago as a small university town our outcomes were 
great--certainly in the top third of the State, and always the 
best in the area.
    Over the last four years Whitewater has had the biggest 
drop in academic achievement in the State for larger districts. 
Today, we rank in the bottom fifth of all districts across the 
State and are still falling.
    The reasons for our falling test scores are no secret. All 
you have to do is go to Wisconsin's Department of Public 
Instruction website to see that the three drivers of academic 
achievement across the State are special needs kids, 
economically disadvantaged kids, and English learners, 
otherwise referred to as ESL. That is it.
    The more a school district has of any of these kids the 
lower the academic results will be and vice versa, and it is 
true everywhere. Any district's test scores are basically a 
math problem.
    So, what inputs have been changing at Whitewater? Our 
proportion of special needs kids, while high at about 20 
percent--the State average is 14--has not been growing. 
Similarly, our proportion of economically disadvantaged kids is 
also high, but hovers around 50 percent whereas the State 
average is 45.
    Which leaves English learners. As recently as 2021, the 
district had 236 English learners. Last year it was 352, an 
increase of 50 percent in just two years and growing. Migrant 
children are almost always both economically disadvantaged and 
ESL and sometimes special needs as well.
    I just spoke with a friend who is a paraprofessional in the 
district whose job it is to care for special needs kids and she 
told me of a family that just moved here who has two out of 
their three kids being high special needs like having to have 
their diapers changed as kindergarteners.
    This requires the district to transfer those kids to a 
special facility in Elkhorn, which costs the State even more 
money.
    At Lincoln Elementary more than a quarter of the kids are 
ESL. Such a large and growing proportion of kids who are not 
native speakers invariably drives academic achievement down for 
everyone and we are no exception.
    Last year, with 25 percent ESL kids in the school, Lincoln 
sent 80 percent of its fifth graders into middle school testing 
below grade level in English. This data is public. It is from 
Wisconsin's own DPI.
    To combat this the Whitewater school district spends 
hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get the migrant kids 
up to speed, but these expenditures necessarily come at the 
expense of other things such as lowering teacher to non-ESL 
student ratios so overall test scores drop.
    Another dynamic that many people do not think about is open 
enrollment. Here in Wisconsin we have public school choice so 
if you do not want your kid to go to your home district you can 
enroll them in another one.
    As Whitewater's academics have declined the number of 
parents placing their kids out of the district has increased, 
which further depresses test scores and decreases revenue as 
the most involved parents are the ones most likely to move 
their kids somewhere else.
    Hundreds of Whitewater parents do this every day with more 
than 200 kids going to schools outside the Whitewater district, 
more than 10 percent. This includes our own school board 
president who sends her kids to neighboring Elkhorn to attend 
school where they have less than five percent English learners 
and much higher test scores.
    There is a boy who lives in the district who got a perfect 
ACT test result this spring but he does not go to Whitewater 
schools.
    This movement of students outside the Whitewater district 
costs us almost $2 million a year in revenue and illustrates 
the negative feedback loop that can occur as a district faces a 
large influx of English learners like the ones we are 
experiencing real time.
    To see what we are heading for we do not need to look any 
further than our neighboring district of Delavan, which began 
facing an influx of English learners about 30 years ago.
    It now has the highest proportion of resident kids in the 
State enrolling out, almost 40 percent. Forty percent of the 
parents in Delavan send their kids outside of Delavan. It has 
perennial problems passing referenda and low test scores that 
are actually worse than Whitewater's, but Whitewater is not far 
behind.
    I am often asked what can be done to remedy the situation. 
At this point, I will ask anyone who will listen please just 
stop the bleeding. This is a problem not of our making and out 
of our control.
    It is frustrating hearing politicians imply that the 
residents who care about their kids' instructional quality are 
somehow racist or xenophobes as their own children attend 
classes at public and private schools with few to no English 
learners. Some of our classrooms are half English learners.
    Thank you, and I look forward to answering your questions.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Kinson follows:]
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    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you, Mr. Kinson.
    Now, finally, District Attorney Toney, you have five 
minutes.

                   STATEMENT OF ERIC J. TONEY

    Mr. Toney. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and the Members of the 
Committee. I thank you for being here in Wisconsin today.
    I want to just begin my comments by, Rick, thanking you for 
sharing your story and condolences to you and Erin for the loss 
of your son Logan, and the work that you are doing I think is 
undoubtedly saving lives.
    I want to talk a little bit about Fond du Lac County. We 
are a county of about 100,000 people. We have numerous highways 
running through the community that makes us a corridor for drug 
trafficking.
    We have seen the seizure of drugs, the quantities soaring 
like we have never seen before. As was previously noted, we are 
not seeing methamphetamine labs. We are seeing larger 
quantities of meth coming across the border and into our 
community with fentanyl being the most destructive of those 
deaths, and we heard the Logan story and the impact that is 
having.
    Sadly, as a district attorney, I have sat across from too 
many parents that have buried their child and those 
conversations are never easy. When we are actually able to file 
a criminal case they have to come back to court day after day, 
month after month, sometimes year after year to relive that 
trauma, and these are all avoidable deaths if we just had 
control of the Southern border to prevent the flow of fentanyl 
coming into the United States.
    It is not just the drug overdose deaths but I think the 
numbers are staggering. In Fond du Lac County in 2019 we had 19 
overdose deaths. In 2020 it was 27; in 2021 it was 20; in 2022 
it was 23; then last year in 2023 it was 32; and these are all 
families that do not get to say I love you to somebody that 
they hold dear, whether it be at Thanksgiving, birthdays, 
holidays, or family events, and this is all a direct 
consequence of the Southern border crisis with drugs pouring 
into our country.
    The fentanyl crisis cannot be underscored enough. We need 
to make sure that we do not have more families that experience 
what Rick and Erin experienced and it is something that we can 
gain control of.
    We have seen the graphs and some of the efforts that have 
been done during Senator Johnson's presentation, and it is not 
just the drug overdose deaths that we are seeing. It is the 
attempted homicide, sexual assaults, and human trafficking. 
With the testimony that I submitted, I included the criminal 
complaints from the cases that we filed and ethical obligations 
have to make sure we know that those individuals are presumed 
innocent and lesser until proven guilty.
    We have four people charged in one drug overdose death in 
the city of Ripon where Vice President Harris recently visited, 
and a couple of them are juveniles that were charged in that 
homicide in relation to the delivery, and these are 
circumstances that a family can do everything right and they 
are not able to stop the scourge of fentanyl from taking a 
loved one.
    We have seen stories from across the country, whether Laken 
Riley to Prairie du Chien with these issues, and it is creating 
a tremendous stress on our criminal justice system with the 
work that law enforcement is doing on the front end of trying 
to identify individuals that are in the country illegally 
committing crimes.
    If they do not have a fingerprint identification system 
that can prevent challenges. In talking to Sheriff Schmidt 
earlier his agency recently purchased six of those which can 
help identify who those individuals are because they may not 
have identification and that can make a law enforcement job 
much more difficult.
    Then when we have some of these very serious crimes that 
result in a hospital stay, we know that some of our hospitals 
struggle with bed space and that can create various issues as 
well.
    There are issues that go beyond just the stories that we 
see in the news and it is happening day in and day out across 
Wisconsin and across the country. They are all avoidable.
    One of the things we have had to do in Fond du Lac County 
we have had enough cases come in where we need an interpreter 
time slot so we can handle those cases and that had to be 
expanded to a second time slot because we have so many of those 
cases. They can take 20 minutes for one case with the 
translation which sucks up the prosecutor time, public 
defenders, courts, clerks, and adds to the cost the taxpayers 
are having to fund.
    When we have more illegal immigrants that are being 
prosecuted for crime sometimes our jails operate at thin 
margins and counties are having to look at building new jails. 
Not solely because of that but that is part of the issue, and 
we are looking at that in Fond du Lac County and a county our 
size is looking at well over $100 million to consider building 
a jail, and those are real costs to taxpayers in our community.
    I want to just share a much more minor personal experience 
that I had that pale in comparison to the loss that Rick, Erin, 
and so many others have suffered from fentanyl.
    I was driving in the city of Fond du Lac last April and I 
was rear ended while driving, and then pulled over and I was 
rear ended again, and the person that hit me fled the scene.
    I appreciate that his license plate fell off his truck so 
that we were able to identify him, and it was a day where it 
was the first warm April day of the year and law enforcement 
was slammed. So, I was waiting over 4five minutes as our law 
enforcement was responding to more serious calls.
    I had to take my passenger to the hospital to be evaluated 
for a concussion and, thankfully, she was doing well. 
Ultimately, the guy actually came back to the scene as well 
because he thought we were gone. During the investigation we 
found out that he was in the country illegally and he did not 
have insurance and it ended up totaling my vehicle.
    As you might recall, trying to buy a vehicle around April 
2013, was quite expensive with inflation and limited inventory, 
and those are consequences that people suffer day in and day 
out across the country, which are much more minor but can have 
a significant impact on those that do not have significant 
financial means with those type of violations.
    So, we have individuals that are suffering from the 
consequences of crime committed by illegal immigrants, and I do 
want to just close by noting America is a Nation of immigrants 
that offers hope for a better life, a safer future, and we are 
that shining city on a hill and that is why people seek to come 
here.
    My family experienced that. My great grandfather came to 
America from Lebanon. My grandfather fought in World War II. My 
dad was a police officer. I have the honor of being a district 
attorney and we know immigrants have built our Nation and we 
support it.
    It has to be done legally to prevent the consequences and 
the crime that we are seeing and the fentanyl that is pouring 
across our borders, and we appreciate you taking the time to be 
here to listen and hear the concerns that we are experiencing.
    Thank you.
    [Prepared statement of Mr. Toney follows:]
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    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you all for your testimony. We are going 
to proceed under the five-minute rule. Sheriff Schmidt, I think 
you have a hard stop. Is that correct? At 11:30 a.m.?
    Mr. Schmidt. I built in a little bit of extra time.
    Mr. Tiffany. So, I would like to pose a question before you 
leave here. Some States have made compliance with ICE mandatory 
but Wisconsin is not one of them. Is that correct?
    Mr. Schmidt. That is correct.
    Mr. Tiffany. Would requiring counties to comply with ICE 
help prevent these repeat offenders? So you have, perhaps, 
heard the story up in Rusk County where you had a repeat 
offender drunk driver ran a truck driver off the road.
    He is now dead. Three daughters no longer have a father. By 
requiring compliance with ICE could some of those situations be 
cause to not occur?
    Mr. Schmidt. Absolutely. We struggle as sheriffs under the 
current law with even maintaining somebody just on an ICE 
detainer. Once their crimes have been resolved then we have no 
additional reason to hold them.
    The detainer as it is written today does not allow sheriffs 
to hold somebody for ICE so they can continue that process.
    In addition, there are many agencies that have told me they 
will not comply with ICE, period, and that tells me that 
individuals are breaking the law whether that be Federal or 
local law and they are getting away with it.
    What does that tell? When you are not holding somebody 
accountable for their crimes that enables them to commit 
additional crimes, and having that mandate that you must comply 
with ICE certainly would help be that carrot, and stick to make 
sure that we are holding individuals accountable when they 
break the law.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you.
    Mr. Rachwal, so in testimony that we received in 
Washington, DC, from Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas we 
also had Sheriff Mark Dannels from the border Cochise County, 
Arizona, there and they gave two diametrically opposed 
responses to the question in regard to fentanyl coming into the 
United States.
    Secretary Mayorkas said it is not tied to the open border. 
Sheriff Dannels, who is in Cochise County on the border with 
Mexico, said it has had a direct impact since January 20, 2021, 
when we have had these open borders with the amount of fentanyl 
coming into this country.
    Which one do you believe is correct?
    Mr. Rachwal. I believe that it has a direct effect. The 
fentanyl is flooding in. We talked about it earlier, the got-
aways that is coming through. It is so small, it is so potent, 
that it is easy to conceal.
    With the resources that it has taken to process all the 
immigrants coming into this country I do not know how they 
could do their job.
    Mr. Tiffany. As you have talked to law enforcement, perhaps 
other officials, since the day that you lost Logan have they 
alluded at all that the amount of fentanyl has increased 
exponentially over the last few years? Do any of them share 
that with you?
    Mr. Rachwal. We have not had much contact with law 
enforcement in regard to that area, but undoubtedly it is 
increasing exponentially.
    Mr. Tiffany. So, since you started your foundation I am 
assuming you have run into--that you have had much more contact 
with families that have suffered the same fate as your family. 
Is that correct?
    Mr. Rachwal. That is correct, yes. We come in contact with 
hundreds and then in networks, we have contact with thousands 
of people that are in the same situation that we are in.
    Mr. Tiffany. Do they have a consistent message of how this 
could have been prevented?
    Mr. Rachwal. Well, definitely it can be prevented by 
stopping the source. That is for sure. It is a multifaceted 
approach, but stopping the supply would definitely help.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you for coming here today. I just want 
to put a question to Mr. Curtis. So, if we have four more years 
of what has happened since January 20, 2021, is this situation 
going to get better or worse for the United States of America?
    Mr. Curtis. Sir, obviously our focus was on one small 
community, but I think that kind of answers the question that 
if you extrapolate this across the country, I think there has 
just been so much focus on large municipalities, whether it is 
Chicago, New York, Dallas, or Phoenix, and those are certainly 
concerning situations.
    If you just look at proportionally what is happening in 
some of these cities, a thousand immigrants may not be much in 
a place like Chicago but--and the police chief made clear that 
was a very conservative number based on the number of students 
in the district.
    Obviously, as we have talked about this morning, as Senator 
Johnson pointed out, there are a lot of individuals coming 
across the border that are single individuals with no children.
    So, the point being that estimate by the police chief he 
has noted himself is conservative. So, you have a municipality 
that has seen their population increase by 10 percent so 
extrapolate that across the country.
    This has devastating consequences. Certainly, we talked 
about the human toll, but one of the things we focused on our 
report is just really kind of the meat and potato of running a 
local government, right.
    This is why the city of Whitewater is looking to a 
referendum in the Spring 2025, for not only city operations, 
i.e., the police force, but also the school district. So, that 
is the taxpayers of Whitewater now facing two separate 
referenda in one spring election because they simply cannot 
meet the obligations.
    Mr. Tiffany. My time is up, but I want to ask one other 
really quick question. In your paper it alludes to discussions 
where the city of Whitewater wanted to have with the Governor's 
office and the Governor's office insisted on this being a 
private discussion. Why would that be?
    Put it this way. Were you ever told why they insisted that 
this be a private discussion and not a public meeting for what 
is a very public problem?
    Mr. Curtis. So, first, to be clear, we actually interviewed 
nobody for this report. We intentionally focused on the 400 
records that were provided by the city, because it was an 
objective review.
    When I say records I am using that in the legal sense where 
one record maybe an email with numerous attachments. So, it is 
fair to say we reviewed thousands of pages of records in this 
situation. So, we just want to see what the situation was in 
the words of city officials, private communications that are 
obviously ultimately public records. So, obviously, I would be 
guessing as to the kind of the motivation behind the Governor's 
office.
    It is fair to say I think there maybe was concern with 
respect to the eligibility that the city had for funding that 
was not available and, obviously, I think there was concern 
that despite all the issues happening, State funding and 
Federal funding, was simply unavailable to the city.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you very much.
    For those that may be interested, this is a very well 
researched document put out by the Institute for Reforming 
Government. It is worth a read.
    I now recognize the representative from Florida for his 
questioning.
    Mr. Gaetz. Mr. Kinson, did I understand the end of your 
testimony to be that in Whitewater there are classes now in the 
school district where half the kids do not speak English?
    Mr. Kinson. English learners. They are English learners.
    Mr. Gaetz. Yes, they are English as a second language.
    Mr. Kinson. Correct. Yes.
    Mr. Gaetz. So, how do the teachers deal with that?
    Mr. Kinson. Well, one of the ways is that we actually have 
a second teacher who translates.
    Mr. Gaetz. So, who bears the cost of that?
    Mr. Kinson. Well, the district.
    Mr. Gaetz. Is that one of the reasons why the local 
governments are having to pursue referendums, just the cost 
structure, or how does that get absorbed by the district if you 
are doubling your labor costs in some of those classrooms?
    Mr. Kinson. Well, the district's never going to tell you 
that, right? Instead, they will--money is fungible. So, they 
will say, well, we need it for the roofs, right? Well, they 
spent the money for the roofs somewhere else.
    Aside from the money it affects the educational outcomes. 
Honestly, that is what concerns me more than the money is that 
the educational outcomes for the other kids it affects them 
all.
    There is no cohort in Whitewater of kids--cohort is 
educational speak for any subgroup of kids--that is not testing 
below average. Boys, girls, native speakers, and ESL, they are 
all below average.
    Mr. Gaetz. That was not the case before this influx of 
migrants, right?
    Mr. Kinson. Right. It has been a steady decline.
    Mr. Gaetz. So, what do you say to those who say this is 
your obligation? We are the richest country in the world. We 
have all the benefits of being Americans and really it is the 
duty that we have to open our doors and invite migrants to come 
here and utilize our services?
    Mr. Kinson. Their kids do not go to Whitewater.
    Mr. Gaetz. Why do you say that?
    Mr. Kinson. Well, the people who are most likely to say 
that are sending their kids to a public school or, more likely, 
private school where they probably do not have one or two 
English learners in their classrooms.
    Mr. Gaetz. Really, so it is the public schools with the 
working class people that you are testifying bear the brunt of 
this, not the people who--
    Mr. Kinson. Absolutely.
    Mr. Gaetz. --have the money and the--maybe just even the 
time to be able to drive your kid outside the district to 
another school.
    Mr. Kinson. Well, take our representatives, for example. 
Tammy Baldwin does not have any kids in the Whitewater schools. 
She does not have kids, right?
    Governor Evers does not have any kids in the Whitewater 
schools, but Governor Evers came by to say Lincoln was a 
success story.
    Lincoln is not a success story. Eighty percent of the kids 
were testing below average--were not at grade level in fifth 
grade. That is not a success story.
    That is in spite of the efforts--that these teachers are 
taking on a Herculean task, right. So, this is no reflection on 
the teachers at all. I have a lot of friends who are teachers. 
They are fighting an uphill battle.
    Mr. Gaetz. Yes, and I wonder to what extent is this just 
the front end of the wave. Is every town going to be Whitewater 
soon? Here there was a unique circumstance where there was 
excess housing available. There was a need for work in 
agriculture. So, what substantial percentage, now, of the town 
are these migrants who have taken up there, right?
    Mr. Kinson. Well, I think what happens is that there is a 
critical mass, right. If you have one or two kids in a 
classroom that are not English speakers it is not going to set 
back the instruction.
    You get to a certain critical mass and then all of a sudden 
it affects everybody. What is that critical mass? I am sure 
there is some person smarter than me who could tell you that 
but we are at it.
    Mr. Gaetz. Yes, I wonder because I actually know a little 
bit about that. When there is a student who is not speaking 
with proficiency or learning at proficiency it is very 
different than when you got a third, half the class, that cause 
the teacher to have to not even teach to the middle of the 
class, but to teach to the bottom of the class, really, and 
then you do not get that achievement.
    I think that the people who want open borders are willing 
to accept that as, like, just an acceptable cost of open 
borders--that if students do not do as well, if our hospitals, 
if our schools are overrun and overburdened, that this OK so 
long as we are serving this broader goal that they have of open 
borders, and that just strikes me as cruel.
    It is cruel that you would subject students to diminished 
learning for this social experiment. Do you have any other 
reasonable explanation for it?
    Mr. Kinson. I do not and, in fact, you see that dynamic at 
Whitewater because it is a liberal town so a town that used to 
be really focused on education now all of a sudden are totally 
disinterested in test results.
    You just never see them talked about when I bring them up, 
I am the devil there--they totally do not want to talk about it 
and it is--well, like I said, our school board president sends 
her kids somewhere else.
    Mr. Gaetz. Well, I appreciate you being here. My time has 
expired, but I would think that rising student achievement 
would be something that could unite people even of different 
political persuasions, and the things that diminish that 
achievement should be dealt with and not just accepted as a 
cost of doing business.
    Thank you very much for your testimony. I yield back.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you. I now recognize the representative 
from California for five minutes.
    Mr. McClintock. Thank you. Sheriff Schmidt, a few weeks ago 
Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux testified before this 
Committee that the Sinaloa cartel has already sunk deep roots 
into his county in California.
    Their activities include the murder of cartel opponents, 
rampant extortion of small businesses, and criminal activities 
that include drug and human trafficking.
    He testified that the cartel was so well organized that 
they had actually divided the State into regions with their own 
regional units including assassination units. He is fighting 
the Sinaloa cartel in California and you are waging the same 
battle 1,500 miles away in Wisconsin.
    Tell us about the Sinaloa cartel that this administration 
has deliberately allowed into our communities.
    Mr. Schmidt. Well, I am hopeful that we do not get to the 
point of where California is. I think right now we have it to a 
point under control here in Wisconsin as far as there is only a 
few of them and they have not gotten to the point of what you 
are seeing in California.
    Obviously, if we do not take action when we make the 
initial arrest and we just let them go into the wind and 
continue their operations that is going to enable the leaders 
of the cartel to say, look, they are not doing anything to us 
in Wisconsin--what can we do now because they let us get away?
    Mr. McClintock. If we continue down this road another four 
years what do you anticipate?
    Mr. Schmidt. I anticipate we will have additional, just 
like we are seeing across the country with the Tren de Aragua. 
We are going to see this happen here as well with this cartel 
and--
    Mr. McClintock. What kind of crimes are they responsible 
for? These are not exactly Rotary Club recruits.
    Mr. Schmidt. Right. No, these are individuals--in our areas 
we are seeing drug--fentanyl overdose, fentanyl distribution, 
methamphetamine distribution, and pushing drugs. That is what 
we are seeing right now.
    Obviously, that grows as they become more prevalent in our 
communities. Right now, we are concerned because we do not want 
more families like you heard from here today and that is what 
we are going to see if that continues.
    Mr. McClintock. We are seeing some 300 a day, I am told, on 
average across the country. Sheriff Boudreaux estimated that 
fully half of the crime that he is now dealing with is due to 
illegal migrants.
    A few weeks before that NYPD officials estimated that about 
75 percent of the crime that they are now dealing with in 
Manhattan is due to illegal migrants.
    What percentage of the crimes would you estimate that you 
are dealing with are now due to illegal migrants in your 
county?
    Mr. Schmidt. I believe it is growing. It is a much lower 
rate. Yes, we still have hope here. I think we are probably in 
the 20 percent range--15-20 percent range--but it is growing.
    Mr. McClintock. How rapidly has this condition developed?
    Mr. Schmidt. Over the last four years is when it really has 
started to rear its ugly head. Before that we had slow, 
incremental growth. There has been that growth. Over the last 
four years it has really exploded and we are seeing it 
especially in the drug area.
    Mr. McClintock. Sheriff Boudreaux testified that according 
to his discussions with his counterparts across the country the 
problems that he was describing in his own county and that you 
have described in yours are becoming typical of communities 
throughout America.
    Have you discussed this with other sheriffs and what are 
they saying?
    Mr. Schmidt. As I said earlier, yes, we have talked about 
it. I asked the other sheriffs for examples and there was no 
shortage of supply of examples across our State of these 
various types of crimes, and in my neighboring county of 
Columbia County he gave me--he could not break it down into 
individuals.
    He just said there is a bunch of these, various types of 
sexual assaults. We are seeing a lot of sexual assault types 
crimes, things that you would never accept here. It is almost 
like part of their culture.
    So, we are seeing the sexual assaults and the drug 
offenses, homicides, scams, across the variety of all the 
different crimes that we see. They are pushing it here.
    Mr. McClintock. Mr. Curtis, what we seem to be seeing is 
that illegal migrants concentrate in very large numbers in very 
short periods of time in small towns and then completely 
overwhelm those local communities. So, a lot of communities 
have not faced this yet, but for those that do the effects are 
devastating.
    What would you say to those communities that have not yet 
seen this influx into their towns and neighborhoods?
    Mr. Curtis. Great question, sir.
    Unfortunately, a lot of this does come down to resources. 
As we have heard from a school district standpoint, you need to 
be prepared if you are going to see this influx of ESL 
students.
    Frankly, I would argue it even goes, unfortunately, beyond 
that, right. A lot of the school resource officers in 
Whitewater, according to emails that we reviewed, really spend 
a significant amount of their time simply doing home visits to 
identify why students are not attending.
    The truancy rates have significantly increased in the 
district. So, these are really basic issues almost operational 
issues that school districts have to be prepared for and, 
obviously, the sheriff and the district attorney have noted 
some of the law enforcement concerns.
    Mr. McClintock. So, if it has not come to your community it 
is going to if this continues, and if it is in your community 
it is going to grow if this continues. Is that essentially what 
the two of you are telling me?
    Mr. Curtis. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Kinson. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Tiffany. The gentleman yields.
    I will recognize the gentleman from Oregon for his 
questioning.
    Mr. Bentz. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I thank the panel for 
being here.
    Kamala Harris just a little over a month ago made a 
statement regarding violence against women and she was stating 
this on the anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act, and 
at the end of her statement she says,

        As we reflect on the life-changing progress we have made over 
        the past 30 years we recommit to the critical work ahead. 
        Together, alongside survivors, advocates, allies, President 
        Biden and I will continue to do everything in our power to 
        ensure that every woman throughout America has freedom to live 
        safe from violence and hate.

    She said that and, yet, at the same time the Biden 
Administration has allowed one-third of the folks that came 
across the border are from Central America. Let me read this.
    Gender-based violence in Latin America has the highest 
rate. Latin America has the highest rate of gender-based 
violence in the world, according to the Wilson Center. One-
third of the folks that came in the six million--two million 
are from Central America.
    So, we hear President Trump State that folks from South of 
the border are rapists he was speaking in, obviously, 
generalities. The specific point was made the other day in 
front of our Judiciary Committee by April Aguirre, who came in 
and talked--a crime victim advocate saying how the attitude 
toward women in Central America is horrible.
    The question to you, Sheriff, is how in the world, when we 
have people that come in where women are second class citizens 
in many respects, and you can look it up--Google it--in these 
countries.
    How in the world are we going to do something about it now 
that we have all these folks from those areas here, and this is 
real and this was brought home to us in graphic detail by Ms. 
Aguirre in front of our committee just two months ago, and she 
was disdainful of the assertion that somehow we could fix this.
    She was pointing at the culture in Central America, and I 
hate to be saying that everybody from that country is that way. 
I am sure they are not. Definitely, there is that attitude and 
you can look it up. Gender inequality is rampant there.
    I do not know why the Biden Administration is busy saying 
it is doing everything for women when it is allowing this kind 
of thing to happen. Well, here we are, and as I asked the 
Senator what are we going to do about it?
    Sheriff, I do not expect you to have all the answers, and I 
went back and forth on whether to ask the school board member 
what to do about it, because it seems like a training thing but 
in your opinion what do you think?
    Mr. Schmidt. I can say I do not have the resources. I do 
not have the resources to do what we need to do about it.
    You take a look at the issues that we have. How about that 
12-year-old girl that was almost sexually assaulted--in the 
process of being sexually assaulted just North of our county 
line that I talked about earlier?
    You talk about the sexual assaults that we hear about all 
the time. You hear about the human trafficking. Whether it be 
sex trafficking or labor trafficking, these are very real 
issues.
    I do not have the resources. I have seven detectives for my 
county of 900 square miles and I do not have the resources to 
do that. It is going to take a lot of money. It is going to 
take a lot of resources. It is going to take the community to 
come together to be able to do this. I do not have the answer.
    Mr. Bentz. You are speaking at how are we going to protect 
people now that we are in this situation. In that regard, we 
had a situation in Southern Oregon where a cartel member was 
raising huge quantities of marijuana.
    Southern Oregon is a wonderful place to grow it and many, 
many people are there doing it illegally and the water master 
went down to try to shut off the water that they were stealing 
for their marijuana grow and the head of the cartel running 
that particular grow came up to him with an AK-47 and said, 
``you cannot do anything to me because I am invisible. I am 
invisible.''
    So, my question to you is, was he right? Was that cartel 
member right? Because when they do a raid people scatter into 
the woods. There is no way to find them.
    So, my question to you is, are you encountering that same 
thing, and is the response you need more help? What is the 
response?
    Mr. Schmidt. I think you are dead on. They do become 
invisible. We do not know who they are. We cannot track them 
down. I think you are spot on--I think it is a very--becomes 
more and more difficult for us to--even if you have a picture 
of somebody I cannot put a name with them because we do not 
have a proper identification for them, and I think you are spot 
on and we need a lot more resources. We need to know who these 
people are and what they represent and what their background 
is.
    Mr. Bentz. Thank you. I am struck by what, again, the 
Senator was pointing out is this huge problem that we now have 
and how in the world do we deal with it, and it looks as if one 
of the ways is going to be to encourage and support law 
enforcement more.
    With that, Mr. Chair, I yield back.
    Mr. Tiffany. The gentleman yields. I now recognize the 
gentleman from--one of the gentlemen from Wisconsin, Mr. 
Fitzgerald.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Thank you, Chair.
    Mr. Rachwal--Rick and Erin--thank you for being here today. 
Because of the networks you described earlier that you have 
been able to develop and the conversations you have had with 
other parents that, unfortunately, have suffered what you have 
gone through, and you talked about the kind of the elected 
officials and maybe getting more involved or doing specific 
things. What are some of those things that you could relay to 
the Full Committee today that you see would be clearly things 
that need to be done and done as quickly as possible?
    Mr. Rachwal. Sure. Again, our main focus is the education 
awareness so one of the things would be making sure that these 
young children in our country are educated at an earlier age, 
or educated at all and not leaving it up to the families of the 
victims to do that work.
    Having some mandated education on--I mean, this--as a 
foundation, we are not going to--Erin and I and our members are 
not going to stop the flow of fentanyl. We can only do as much 
as we can with education awareness. So, that is one of the big 
things that would help us.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Have a relationship--I am sure you do--with 
law enforcement and are there things that maybe happened on 
campus and that were repeated that you think could be avoided? 
Maybe more awareness or what are some of the strategies you 
think that could work?
    Mr. Rachwal. Sure, definitely, and one of the big things 
that I mentioned too is the stigma. So we get a lot of 
resistance when we talk to schools or talk to the university. 
When we first started talking to the university after Logan 
passed away we did not start--we did not realize that there was 
this big need for this awareness until nine months later when 
another young man, Cade, passed away from the same pill and we 
asked the university was anything done. They did not even--
there was no awareness made to any of the kids.
    So, there needs to be. They get alerts when there is a 
storm coming. These kids need to know that these dangers are 
out there and you hear about bad batches and stuff, but there 
is no bad batches anymore. Fentanyl is just bad altogether.
    They just need this awareness and so one of the things that 
happened with us talking to the school is they are now more 
receptive. They have gotten Narcan installed, which I am not 
going to get into that, but through our efforts and other 
nonprofits we have gotten Narcan installed in primarily all the 
UW campuses in Wisconsin.
    That is a great thing, just knowing the signs, getting that 
education. Now at UWM, they are having education in their 
orientation, so they are actually talking about it when the 
kids first come into school.
    Those are the things we need. It is just that awareness. I 
know it is not going to 100 percent get rid of the issue but 
that would help.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. Very good. Thank you. Yes.
    Mr. Rachwal. I do apologize, too. Congressman Tiffany asked 
me the question about talking to law enforcement earlier and 
the--my nerves just got to me.
    I did want to--we do work with the DEA in Washington, and 
the question was brought to me about the flow of fentanyl, and 
I did want to bring this up because I felt bad because I kind 
of froze up.
    If I am correct with my numbers, just in 2023 the DEA 
confiscated almost 80 million fentanyl pills and almost 30,000 
pounds of fentanyl powder. That is almost 15 tons. If you 
equate that back to the two milligrams that is considered a 
lethal dose that is 6.5 billion--billion--doses that could 
kill. A million lethal doses. So, 6.5 billion doses.
    Mr. Fitzgerald. OK. So, I am going to ask the DA kind of 
the more technical aspect of this. Right now we have had a bill 
the last two Congresses to actually label fentanyl as a 
Schedule I narcotic. That bill has not passed, which is just 
simply unbelievable to me at this point, and if you talk to 
people, the Members of Congress, they are amazed by this too 
why we cannot get this done.
    From a DA's perspective how do you view crimes or certainly 
anything related to a Schedule I narcotic, and do you think it 
would make a difference when it comes to prosecuting some of 
these crimes related to fentanyl?
    Mr. Toney. I think it definitely has the opportunity to 
help. We know the danger that fentanyl is and just how potent 
it is and it is taken very seriously.
    Once you start putting drugs into that Schedule I category 
that certainly gives us more tools and we will take any tools 
that you are able to give us that can help us prosecute these 
cases.
    Mr. Tiffany. The gentleman yields.
    I now recognize Mr. Van Orden for his questioning.
    Mr. Van Orden. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Hey, Sheriff, thanks for coming out. Thank you for your 
work. I appreciate it greatly. I think across the board we 
recognize the fact that this is an abject failure on the 
Federal Government's part like no other directly relating to 
Vice President Harris' border czardom. I think we can just 
agree with that. Again, I want to thank Mr. Pocan and Ms. Moore 
for coming to this incredibly vital hearing that has affected 
tens of thousands of Wisconsinites on a daily basis.
    So, actually I just think that is pathetic that they could 
not bother to find time in their day to come here to talk about 
this issue that is killing our citizens.
    Sheriff, have you been given any guidance from the Evers 
State House about how you should be dealing with this illegal 
alien issue that we are having here for reporting or money or 
anything at all?
    Mr. Schmidt. The Evers Administration has not communicated 
with me much at all. I have attempted several times both as the 
sheriff and as the President of Badger Sheriffs to have open 
communications but my attempts have gone to interns and it has 
taken weeks and months before I even get a return call from 
anybody. There is zero communication between me and the Evers 
Administration.
    Mr. Van Orden. All right. So, put it into context for folks 
that are from Wisconsin. You are the head of the Badger 
Sheriffs Association. You are one of 72 sheriffs, the most 
senior constitutionally elected law enforcement official in 
your county, correct?
    Mr. Schmidt. That is correct.
    Mr. Van Orden. The Governor of the State of Wisconsin has 
not contacted you about an issue that has been killing hundreds 
if not thousands of Wisconsinites for years now?
    Mr. Schmidt. He has not contacted me and he has been very 
scarce to most sheriffs in the State.
    Mr. Van Orden. OK.
    District Attorney Toney, have you been given any guidance 
by the mighty Josh Kaul about how you should be handling this 
issue with Wisconsinites being brutally kidnapped, raped, 
murdered, and poisoned?
    Mr. Toney. We as district attorneys are independent from 
the Department of Justice as far as how we prosecute cases.
    One of the challenges that we face in cases when we are 
trying to get evidence tested is limits on what we can now send 
to the crime labs run by the Department of Justice and slower 
turnaround times in some of those categories that--there was 
recently a study by the Legislative Audit Bureau where of the 
judges that responded, I think the number was North of 60 or 70 
percent that were having to reschedule cases because they did 
not have test results. That was slowing down cases that we are 
having in court which bottles things up, delays justice, and 
makes it more difficult for prosecutors in the courtrooms.
    Mr. Van Orden. So, Mr. District Attorney, could you say 
that district attorney Josh Kaul has an understanding that 
there is a fentanyl issue in the State of Wisconsin?
    Mr. Toney. I would have to believe that he has an 
understanding of that. There may be some stark differences in 
how some of us would look to combat that compared to his 
approach.
    Mr. Van Orden. We can reasonably be assumed that the 
sitting attorney general for the State of Wisconsin is aware 
that there is a fentanyl crisis with the citizens in the State 
of Wisconsin.
    We can also reasonably assume that he has some contact with 
law enforcement and if law enforcement on both sides, wearing 
the suit and wearing the badge, are saying exactly the same 
thing to you, but Governor Evers and Josh Kaul refuse to do 
anything about this fentanyl crisis what does that say about 
Governor Evers and Josh Kaul?
    Mr. Toney. Well, it is disappointing when we do not see 
some of those resources that we need. The types of cases that 
are coming through are getting more complicated, that are 
taking more and more time just to review it for charging to 
make sure that we are getting justice for families, because not 
every family is even going to have a case make it to the 
courtroom if they lost a loved one to offend all over again.
    Mr. Van Orden. Right. So, Sheriff, when someone calls into 
911 is the first question that your 911 operator asks someone 
what their political party affiliation is?
    Mr. Schmidt. It is a question that is never asked.
    Mr. Van Orden. It is never asked. So, Mr. District 
Attorney, when you are thinking about prosecuting a case do you 
ask people what their political party affiliation is?
    Mr. Toney. No.
    Mr. Van Orden. OK, you do not. If the cops are not asking 
what the political party affiliation is and the person that is 
going to prosecute somebody is not asking what the political 
party affiliation is, do you not think that Governor Evers and 
President Biden and Vice President Harris should stop asking 
those questions?
    There is no way--it is statistically impossible that they 
magically removed the 91-plus Executive actions from President 
Trump just happenstance, oops, they all had to deal with the 
border, now we have this crisis.
    We have had 200,000-plus Americans die of fentanyl 
poisoning, right? It is actually about 300 a day. Imagine a 
jumbo jet crashing every single day--every single day. That 
would be dealt with.
    The Biden Administration under the Harris czardom and 
Governor Evers right down the road here and his buddy Josh Kaul 
have politicized this and our American citizens are dying 
because of it and it is pathetic.
    With that, I yield back.
    Mr. Tiffany. The gentleman yields.
    I now recognize Representative Steil for five minutes.
    Mr. Steil. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
    The Biden-Harris Administration's policies are having a 
real impact here in the State of Wisconsin. I think it is worth 
our time to reflect just on the case study of what has happened 
in Whitewater, Wisconsin, due to the policies of the Biden-
Harris Administration.
    I will start with you. You have done--Mr. Curtis, you have 
done great research into this. You have seen a significant 
influx of migrants into Whitewater as noted by the chief of 
police's letter that says he is estimating, roughly, a thousand 
migrants. Do you think the thousand number is accurate?
    Mr. Curtis. Well, certainly in the records we reviewed it 
is accurate, but I think I noted earlier the sheriff, or excuse 
me, the police chief himself has noted that this is likely a 
conservative number.
    There were some individuals that challenged that estimate 
and his response was, I think this is conservative--I am 
paraphrasing--because, again, that is based on the district 
population.
    Mr. Steil. I agree it is, roughly, and it is based on the 
school district numbers, right?
    Mr. Curtis. Correct.
    Mr. Steil. So, what are the school district numbers that 
give rise to the thousand estimates?
    Mr. Curtis. I think it is 200-300 in that range and, again, 
that fluctuates year to year.
    Mr. Steil. A rough, 200-300-person increase in a school 
district. I will go to you, Mr. Kinson. How many students are 
in the school district of Whitewater?
    Mr. Kinson. Twelve hundred.
    Mr. Steil. So, 1,200 and you have seen an increase in, 
roughly, 200 students over the past 2-3 years?
    Mr. Kinson. Two years, yes, it increased 50 percent.
    Mr. Steil. An increase of 50 percent of English second 
language students, but an increase in absolute--
    Mr. Kinson. It was 200-300, yes, roughly. Two hundred--
    Mr. Steil. Two hundred to three hundred students in a 
school district of--
    Mr. Kinson. Twelve hundred.
    Mr. Steil. Twelve hundred. That is a very significant 
percent increase in the school district. Then, in your 
testimony you walk us through the real-world impact that this 
has had in the school district and on children.
    As you correctly noted, you noted that special needs 
students has held reasonably steady, about 20 percent State 
average of 14. Students who are economically disadvantaged has 
held reasonably steady, about 50 percent--State average 45--but 
a significant increase in the needs of English as a second 
language in the school district and then at the same time you 
note the correlation of overall academic achievement. You have 
been a long-time resident in the city of Whitewater. You have 
students that are there.
    Could you walk through how the school achievement has 
fallen in the community of Whitewater as a result of this 
influx?
    Mr. Kinson. Well, the example I gave in my testimony was I 
think the perfect illustration of this is Lincoln, one of our--
the elementary school with the highest proportion of ESL kids. 
So, fifth grade last year they had--25 percent of that class 
was ESL. Eighty percent of that class was not reading at grade 
level in English.
    Mr. Steil. I think this is really important. Let us just 
dive into Lincoln Elementary in the school district of 
Whitewater. Twenty-five percent of the students are English as 
a second language but 80 percent of the fifth graders are not 
reading at a fifth grade level.
    Mr. Kinson. That is right.
    Mr. Steil. Does that mean that not only is there a 
challenge to those students who English is a second language, 
but really it is impacting all the students in the classroom. 
Is that your understanding?
    Mr. Kinson. Yes. There is no mystery to this, right? If you 
go to the Wisconsin DPI website there are three drivers, like I 
said. It is special needs kids, economically disadvantaged, and 
ESL. That is it.
    You can determine what a school's outcome is going to be 
based on that. As you raise one, right, the test scores are 
going to drop. It is invariable, and it is not just Wisconsin 
or Whitewater. It is across country.
    Mr. Steil. Every mom and dad who has a child in the 
Whitewater School District is being negatively impacted by the 
Biden-Harris Administration border policies, by the Biden-
Harris Administration catch and release policies.
    That is directly impacting every student in the Whitewater 
School District, and when we extrapolate that out and we look 
statewide and nationwide it is actually impacting almost 
everyone and it uniquely impacts hard-working families in 
school districts that are not uniquely affluent.
    Moms and dads who have unlimited cash-flow find ways to 
take care of their children. They drive to another school 
district. You noted in your testimony some people drive to 
Elkhorn School District. Some people move to school districts 
or send their children to private schools with their own 
resources.
    Mr. Kinson. Or better yet, they do not come to Whitewater, 
right. That is the other dynamic I did not talk about. If you 
are a parent and you care about your kids you are not moving to 
Whitewater.
    That is the sorry truth of it. It is a university town. 
When I grew up all the professors' kids went to Whitewater. 
Now, they do not.
    Mr. Steil. I grew up 20 minutes away. I know the city well, 
and the impact that the Biden-Harris Administration policies 
are having in Whitewater is really just an example of the 
horrific policy impact that this is having across our State and 
across our country.
    This is why securing the U.S.-Mexico border is absolutely 
essential not just for all the students in the community of 
Whitewater but for students across our State.
    Cognizant of my time, I would go on and dive into some of 
the drug trafficking issues that we have seen in Whitewater as 
well but, Mr. Chair, I will yield back.
    Mr. Tiffany. The gentleman yields and I will recognize 
Representative Grothman for his questioning.
    Mr. Grothman. Thanks.
    First, a little comment. I have been down on the border 
many times and one of the things you hear if you talk to Border 
Patrol or the people who have to analyze or interview the 
people coming across is all the sexual assaults going on at the 
Southern border.
    That is one of the prices that people have to pay for this 
open border policy. I again and again hear--and I talked to the 
woman last time I was down there who did examine everybody and 
she told me, yes, it is something we see all the time. That is 
one of the prices that has to be paid by the women of this 
current situation.
    You hear again and again they are putting even young girls 
on the pill because they expect they will be sexually 
assaulted, which is just almost beyond belief, there at the 
Southern border.
    Now, we do not have any Democrats here today, but if they 
were here what they say is, well, sure that there have been 
crimes committed by some people here illegally, but it is no 
large amount or it is no more than the native-born population.
    I have talked to many judges, other DAs, from my district 
prior to this hearing today and one of the things I hear is 
that nobody knows really--I do not know how anybody can make 
that statement because nobody knows how many crimes in this 
country are being committed by illegals.
    If I go to one of the State prisons of my district they 
have no idea how many people in that prison are here illegally. 
If I talk to somebody, how many people in your jail--county 
people--are here illegally they have no idea. If I say last 
year in the United States there were 15,000 murders, how many 
were committed by illegals, nobody knows.
    I would like to ask--I guess both Sheriff Schmidt and 
District Attorney Toney, does anybody keep track of how many 
crimes in this country are committed by illegals or is that 
just a number, despite the blizzard of paperwork that is 
required out of Washington, nobody knows?
    Mr. Schmidt. I think you are right on par with what you are 
saying. We really do not know. Mr. McClintock asked me a 
percentage. I had to guess because I do not know how many 
people are committing crimes in our areas.
    I am unique in my county because I have a holding facility 
for immigration so we have the ability to--once they are booked 
in we are able to identify if they are supposed to be here or 
not.
    I am one of the very, very few across the country that have 
that ability and most of the time, when they get booked in 
until a couple of days later, even I do not know that. There is 
no way for us to even know that.
    Mr. Grothman. District Attorney Toney, if we talk about the 
number of murders, fatality by drunk driving, whatever--does 
anybody in Fond du Lac County know? Tell us what percentage of 
serious crimes are committed by illegals?
    Mr. Toney. Most of the crimes that come in we do not know 
the immigration status of somebody. When we look at the border 
crisis we see crime that is related to people coming here 
illegally and crime related to the drugs that are being done by 
American citizens.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Here, in Fond du Lac County, for sure, 
nationwide--
    Mr. Toney. There is a reason every judge reads an 
immigration warning in State court when there is a conviction. 
It does not matter if they are a citizen or not. The court is 
supposed to read that because we simply do not always know the 
immigration status.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Do we have a special problem when it 
comes to people here--immigrants coming here--in that they 
are--the victims are reluctant to report crimes to law 
enforcement in part because there is kind of a solidarity in 
ethnic groups? Is that a problem?
    Mr. Toney. We see challenges with reporting crime. If 
somebody is afraid they could be deported or otherwise removed 
from the country where they may be not willing to--
    Mr. Grothman. Even if they are here legally there is some 
solidarity, right, Sheriff Schmidt?
    Mr. Schmidt. Yes.
    Mr. Grothman. There is solidarity in saying, no, we are not 
going to turn Jimmy in for the sexual assault.
    Mr. Schmidt. There are cultural issues as well, that 
sometimes they will not cooperate with law enforcement because 
of their culture or because of the potential crime that is 
being investigated.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Do we have another problem, which people 
mentioned, particularly from the Latin American culture in 
which people are giving different last names at different times 
depending on whether they are arrested? This is a special 
problem we maybe do not have with American but people who grew 
up in that culture, all of a sudden one day it is Morales 
Rodriguez, the next day it is Rodriguez Morales. Is that a 
problem?
    Mr. Schmidt. Different last names, different first names, 
different birth dates, different everything. Yes.
    Mr. Toney. We will run criminal histories and we will see a 
list of aliases at times where it becomes difficult to track 
and match some of those records.
    Mr. Grothman. Do we have another problem? District Attorney 
Toney, you mentioned this, that people, perhaps victims of 
human trafficking, may be threatened with we are going to turn 
you in and you might be deported, which is another challenge 
for law enforcement that you do not have with the native born. 
Is that true?
    Mr. Toney. We do have challenges with those that are in the 
country illegally. There is a U Visa system to try and help to 
make sure we can have those witnesses or victims here, but that 
gets slammed with people applying that should not even be 
applying, taking spaces away from those victims that we need 
here.
    Mr. Grothman. Is that true?
    Mr. Schmidt. Yes, absolutely. I think it is true.
    Mr. Grothman. Do we have another problem? There is a 
cultural difference between people coming here and the native 
born. Is it accurate to say that maybe in other cultures drunk 
driving is not to be taken as seriously as it is in this 
country?
    Mr. Toney. I do not think I can speak to that.
    Mr. Schmidt. I do not know what the particular culture is, 
but I am sure there is some aspect of that.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Same thing following up with regard to 
sex with a minor. Maybe it is accurate to say that in this 
country maybe we would be alarmed if a 14- or 15-year-old-girl 
was involved in sexual activity. Perhaps in other countries it 
is not considered quite as big a deal?
    Mr. Toney. Well, I just had an exchange with a social 
worker where we were dealing with underage sex and the social 
worker described it as a cultural difference, and one of the 
challenges that we see when people are coming here illegally is 
they are not looking at what our laws are before coming here. 
That is something that we routinely see that happens.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Same thing with regard to perhaps 
physical abuse in domestic relationships. Is there another 
maybe a little cultural difference there?
    Mr. Toney. Well, one of the cases that I referenced is a 
domestic violence case, a brutal stabbing that we have set for 
trial in November. I do not want to get into much of the 
details, but we do see those challenges.
    Mr. Grothman. OK.
    Mr. Schmidt. As do we.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. That was a lot of good questions to get 
in there. I guess I will have to give the rest of time back to 
you, Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you very much for those excellent 
questions. Appreciate it very much.
    If everyone's questions have been asked and answered that 
will conclude today's hearing. We thank all our witnesses for 
appearing before the Committee.
    Without objection, all Members will have five legislative 
days to submit additional written questions for the witnesses 
or additional materials for the record.
    Without objection, the hearing is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 12:19 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

    All materials submitted for the record by Members of the 
Committee on the Judiciary can be found at: https://
docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=117709.