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This morning, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (TX-16) questioned DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin during an oversight hearing of the Homeland Security subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. Present at the hearing was DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar. She discussed the planned detention warehouses in Socorro, the GSA decision on BOTA, the building of the border barriers at Mt. Cristo Rey and Big Bend National Park, and more.

Video of her remarks can be found here and a transcript can be found below:

Congresswoman Escobar: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, Mr. Deputy Secretary, welcome. I am going to begin with the positive. First and foremost, thank you so much for the time you made for me and my team recently. It was a really great meeting and I so appreciated your openness to hearing me out and hearing out the concerns that I brought to you. I also want to thank you because ICE Acting Director David Venturella, came to El Paso and he exhibited the same openness. This is quite a turnaround from your predecessor and his predecessor, who I could not secure a meeting with, could not get an audience with, and it was incredibly frustrating. So I want to thank you for that. 

I also want to thank you. GSA just announced this week that the top three bidders for the Bridge of the Americas Modernization Project have been selected. And as you know, my community has gone through a multi-year process around the modernization efforts. The vast majority of El Pasoans who participated in the process said, "let's remove commercial traffic from the center of our city, and let's move it to our other ports of entry that have capacity.” And you've upheld that decision that that had heavy input from CBP and the community, so it's great to see the progress, and I want to thank you for your support of that as well.

There's a couple of issues I do want to raise with you here during my time, local issues. The first and I had extensive conversations with Mr. Venturella about Camp East Montana. And many of the concerns that I had expressed to the private contractor have emerged in a GAO report and it has been a very frustrating several months. I know we have a new contractor for which I'm delighted, but so much of what I had sounded the alarm about really fell on deaf ears. And when I sound the alarm about issues that I'm seeing in my oversight visits, it's not to play gotcha. It's not to one up anyone. It's to uphold the standards that I know we all agree should be upheld. And so I think it's really important that especially members who are sounding the alarm when there's a private contractor, that that private contractor be held accountable by all of us. 

I'll give you a very quick example, because I don't want to use too much of my time, but the medical, as an example and that medical contractor is still on site, by the way at Camp East Montana. Just one glaring example. I spoke with a detainee and I've spoken with dozens and dozens of detainees, but he expressed to me - he had been a Camp East Montana for weeks, and he expressed to me the pain that he had been living with, with his arm. And I asked him what happened. Well, his arm had been broken during an arrest in Minneapolis, and he had been complaining for weeks to the medical about the arm. He had a brace. He took off the brace. I could see like a letter S. His bone was so broken and medical had only given him aspirin. And so these are the things that I'm sounding the alarm about that I will continue to share with you, because I know we want to hold these contractors to federal standards. So I wanted to share that with you. 

When Acting ICE Director Venturella was in El Paso, we had a roundtable to talk about the three warehouses that were purchased by your predecessor in Socorro, Texas, which is in my district. Whoever preceded you that chose those three warehouses chose the worst possible location. Mr. Venturella heard from the mayor and from the water district and from the Emergency Services District. Socorro is actually a very small municipality, and they struggle with water, wastewater, pump stations. Their Emergency Services District only budgets for the their population and Mr. Venturella heard from our folks. The Emergency Services District chief told him, “I'm going to have to double my staffing if you all proceed to put human beings instead of pecans,” because those warehouses were slated for pecan storage. “I'm going to have to double my personnel. I'm going to struggle with that. I'm going to have to buy another fire truck.”

The water district shared with Mr. Venturella a just how challenging it has been to get water and wastewater to existing residents. And I'm not going to go into excruciating detail, but I want to flag for you. Whoever made the decision to buy those warehouses, which I know is before your time, picked the worst possible place with the least amount of infrastructure, and it truly is not feasible to turn convert those warehouses into spaces that will hold human beings, whether for training or staffing or detention. So you know, I feel very obligated to share with you to sound this alarm that it would take years to prepare those facilities, but it would also take probably multiple millions of dollars on top of the overpayment to purchase those warehouses. So, you know, I'd ask for you to please take a closer look. Now that Mr. Venturella has been there, hopefully he has a more kind of on the ground perspective about that. 

Secretary Mullin: We are evaluating all 11 that was purchased. There's some that just quite frankly, probably won't work. I believe there's at least one in that area that probably just won't work. We - you know - we do have issues with detention centers, just not enough bed space. So there are some that some that we're trying to make work, but there was some due diligence that maybe wasn't actually checked off.

And so ma'am, what you're saying is not wrong. We're going through and reevaluating every one of them to be the best possible outcome for our mission inside of DHS. 

Congresswoman Escobar:Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Something else I wanted to flag for you, and this was in the GAO report about the use of WEXMAC, the procurement tool for DoD that has been used for some of the private companies that have been hired for the private detention. Wex Mack was used - 

Secretary Mullin: We're not using anymore. 

Congresswoman Escobar: Oh great. Okay. That's fantastic. Thank you. That is fantastic news. Okay, let me move on to a couple of other points before I run out of time. The Ranking Member mentioned sensitive spots along the border where we previously thought the wall would not be constructed. And I want to flag for you two that are of particular importance to my district.

One is Mt. Cristo Rey, which is actually in my neighboring colleague’s district, Representative Gabe Vasquez, property owned by the Catholic Church. The decision to take the Diocese to court, to acquire some of that land has really caused incredible distress in the community, so I wanted to flag that for you, maybe for a future conversation. The other area, and this is way outside of my district, but a place near and dear to my heart and to my constituents’ heart: Big Bend. And Big Bend, we have seen really a coalition of law enforcement, private property owners, ranchers, nature lovers come together to want to preserve and protect Big Bend.

Secretary Mullin: Big Bend - we're only gonna have like two miles now that we're going to put a physical barrier in. The rest of it will be will be smart fence. So there won't be a constant barrier across there. We're having to do it in the high traffic areas. We do study the high traffic areas. And so we've got that problem resolved. 

As far as the site which are discussing, we have already worked on this. We have a gate that's going to be available for those that are trying to come in from Mexico's side to build and make the pillage to the site. The site itself will not be disrupted where the wall is going to be at. It's - I forget how far off it is quite a ways off from where the wall is actually being constructed. I don't have the exact footage, but it's not close. I mean, it's you're going to be able to see it, but it's not going to be close. But we're working with that sensitive area the best we can, but we can't leave it open because it is a high traffic area. It is a visited site, so we do have to control the flow coming in and out so there's not there's not criminal activity taking place at the same time. But we have we've worked closely with the senators in the area. We have been out there to visit the site. And it was one of the first areas that we had to work through other than Big Bend, to come up with a second solution for it.

Congresswoman Escobar: Thank you. Can - 

Secretary Mullin: It's not perfect, but it is manageable. 

Congresswoman Escobar: I would like to connect with your team just to get more specifics -

Secretary Mullin: Absolutely. 

Congresswoman Escobar: - if you don't mind? 

Secretary Mullin: Absolutely. Reach out to us.

Congresswoman Escobar: And I know I’m way over time. I have other questions, but we will follow up. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.