Amid an ongoing and worsening migrant crisis, Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins delivered remarks Tuesday calling for bipartisan solutions to address border security at both the southern and northern borders.
“In the State of Maine, encounters have increased over 450 percent since fiscal year 2021,” Sen. Collins said in her floor remarks. “Just recently, the U.S. Border Patrol encountered a group of 20 Romanians illegally crossing into the United States near Houlton, Maine.”
“Two of these individuals were flagged as Transnational Criminal Organized Crime matches and detained for expedited removal proceedings,” Collins said. “The remaining 18 were released into the local community.”
[RELATED: Border Patrol Apprehends 20 Romanian Nationals Who Illegally Crossed US-Canada Border into Hodgdon…]
Collins noted that on Monday there were a record 12,281 encounters with foreign nationals entering the U.S. along the southwest border without authorization.
“So far this fiscal year, we are averaging nearly 8,500 encounters per day, and this month, the average is nearly 10,000 per day,” Collins explained. “At the current rate, we are on pace for more than three million encounters in fiscal year 2024, which would shatter the previous high set last fiscal year.”
“To put this in perspective, that is more than twice as many encounters at the southwest border as there are people in the entire State of Maine,” she added.
Collins went on to address the impact the migrant crisis is having on Maine — especially in Portland, where more than 1,600 asylum seekers have arrived since January.
[RELATED: King, Collins, Pingree Request DHS Rule Change to Help Fund Shelter and Services for Migrants…]
Sanford –with a population of only 22,000 — has had approximately 400 migrants arrive since May, and has spend $1.3 million providing food, housing, and other services to the migrants and their families.
“Communities in Maine and throughout our country are struggling to absorb this influx of people who are being released into the interior,” Collins said. “The majority of migrants are released pending an adjudication of their claims, but that is a process that can take years.”
Collins also expressed her concern over the flow of fentanyl trafficked across the southern border.
“Mexican drug cartels are using the chaos at the southern border to facilitate their trafficking operations,” Collins said. “They are sending record amounts of fentanyl into this country – enough to kill every American many times over.”
According to the most recent data from the Maine Attorney General’s Office, Maine has seen more than 8,259 drug overdoses and 513 fatal overdoses in 2023 as of October.
About 80 percent of those fatal overdoses were attributable to fentanyl.
“Maine, like so many states, has seen record increases in recent years in the number of overdose deaths, nearly 80 percent of which were fentanyl related,” Collins said. “We lost 513 Mainers in the first 10 months of 2023 to fatal overdoses – 373 of these deaths were fentanyl-related.”
“It is unfortunate that the Administration has been so late to these negotiations,” said Collins.
“But I still have hope that we can put together a package that will address all of these crises: the border crisis in our own country, the border crisis in Ukraine, the border crisis in Israel – with the terrorists attacks from Hamas – and the coming border crisis that we’re going to see, I fear, with China’s increasingly threatening Taiwan,” she said.
All of those issues need to be addressed in the supplemental. Let’s get the job done.
Watch Sen. Collins’ full remarks on the Senate floor below:
