Congressman Johnson holds town hall meeting in Turkey Creek

Congressman Mike Johnson (Louisiana representative, 4th district) conducted a town hall meeting in Turkey Creek Monday. Johnson serves on several caucuses and committees which include the Republican Study Committee, the Natural Resources Committee, and he is the head Republican on the subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. He updated his constituents about several pertinent issues happening on the federal level.
Johnson said there is not enough bipartisan effort in Congress, calling it the “bitter, partisan debacle that has become the swamp of D.C.” He added, “We’re not enemies. We’re all Americans. Even though we’re in different parties and have different philosophies, principles, ideas and approaches to the big issues, we still have to be able to get together. There are members of Congress who literally will not cross the isle and talk to people on the other side of the isle. The system kind of breaks down when you get to that point, because if you can’t have people willing to sit down and work out their problems together then our form of government just simply doesn’t work, and it leads, ultimately, back to tyranny.”
Johnson said of the Republican Study Committee he chairs, “There are 199 Republicans in the House, 145 of them are in the group I’m responsible for. The RSC is the intellectual arsenal of conservatives in the House. This is the policy shop, where our philosophy makes its way onto the paper, and we devise the playbook and the legislative initiatives that push for the conservative side.” He said they are working on healthcare reform and they have the American Worker Taskforce to take the U.S. economy into the next decade.
The congressman commended President Donald Trump on a good economy. He said consumer confidence and small business confidence are at an all-time high.
One issue Johnson said he gets asked the most about is immigration and the border between Mexico and the U.S. He presented statistics, saying he served on the judiciary committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration policy. He said he was a co-author of the immigration reform bill. They failed to get it passed through the House.
According to Johnson’s statistics, in the past two years, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers have arrested 266,000 aliens with criminal records, including those convicted with nearly 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 400,000 homicides. “In Texas alone, 276,000 criminal aliens were booked in local jails between 2011 and 2018,” he said. “Last year, ICE officers removed more than 10,000 known or suspected gang members already in our country illegally.”
Johnson said of the drug issue in the country, “Every single week, approximately 300 Americans have died from heroine overdoses, and 90% of that stuff comes over our southern border. In February this year, they’ve had the largest fentanyl bust in history. They found 254 pounds of it strapped underneath an 18-wheeler that was coming across the southern border. The scary thing about it is, if you do the math, that’s enough fentanyl that would have killed 115 million Americans. This is pretty serious stuff.”
Johnson also brought up the subject of human trafficking. “Sex trafficking is a big problem. One in three women are sexually assaulted on the journey to the border. In 2018 alone, ICE made more than 1,500 human trafficking arrests, 97% of them for sex trafficking, and 20,000 children are illegally smuggled into the U.S. That was just in the month of December alone.” He said these statistics are the reason the president is talking about the wall every day.
Johnson said this year they were able to get some money for the wall, but it is not enough. He said the Department of Defense has dedicated about a billion dollars so far from the general fund. “Anybody who says that we do not have a humanitarian and national security crisis at the southern border is not looking at the facts. It’s a catastrophe now. I’d say it’s more than a crisis. That’s just the reality, and it shouldn’t matter what party you’re in. If you care about national sovereignty and security, then you have to make this a top priority.”