| WASHINGTON – Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, joined C-SPAN’s Newsmakers to discuss the humanitarian crisis at the border, Iran, border security and more. C-SPAN’s Susan Swain moderated the discussion with The Hill’s Scott Wong and the Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli.
Highlights below:
On the cause of the border crisis:
“It is a humanitarian crisis and it is not manufactured – it is real and getting worse. The fact is that over the last three months, we have had over 100,000 migrants coming across our border…We are dealing with a huge volume of migrants and there is a different set of migrants. In the recent past, we have dealt with single males, typically from Mexico. Now we have many women and children and we are not set up to handle them.”
On current conditions at the border and the need for Congressional action:
“These women and children and men need to have housing and health care while we try to determine who is appropriate for allowing in to our country or who needs to be sent back. They come across from Central America to Mexico, and by the time they get here, most of them are in very poor health. I am hopeful that soon the Democrats will allow my authorization bill to appropriate $4.5 billion in supplemental funding to help deal with this.
When President Trump was talking about wanting to get money for the border barrier, the Democrat party kept saying, well, we don’t need barriers, they don’t work. What we need is money for health care, transportation, housing. Well, that’s all this appropriations bill is, $4.5 billion to provide that kind of assistance to the border.”
On the need for retaliation against Iran:
“There absolutely has to be some response to that provocative, unprovoked act. But it does need to be measured. I think that’s what the president is trying to decide, whether it needs to be a kinetic strike, like was being planned, or something in the way of other diplomatic approaches to put pressure on them.”
On executive authority to take immediate action against Iran:
“When you have a country like Iran shoot down an American drone in international airspace, I don’t think we need to have three months of argument in Congress to decide what needs to be done. We have a commander-in-chief to make decisions like this, and it does not matter if it is a Democrat or a Republican. I thought the same way about Barrack Obama when he was president.
If we are going to get into a long-term war, that’s is a different story, but [Trump] needs to take action in a quick manner, whether it is sanctions or kinetic attacks…There has to be a response. Otherwise, China and Russia will be much more provocative in their actions toward us because they know we are paralyzed and unable to respond.”
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