Will Hurd: Drugs Are Coming Through Ports of Entry and the Post Office, Not Across the Border

EXCERPT:

SCARBOROUGH: “Let’s follow up to what you just said there. Isn’t there a deal to be done between Republicans and Democrats, where you talk about the heroin, that's coming across the southern border and saying instead of building this -- this wall, just throwing it out there, focus more on ports of entry, where 90 percent of the drugs come in. Instead of erecting steel slats, as you said, a fourth century solution, build smart walls. I mean, our military is building smart walls on battlefields to confuse our enemy. So if they’re coming at you, the smart walls go up and they confuse some of the toughest fighters in the world. It certainly could work at the border, couldn’t it?"
HURD: "It is. And they’re already testing that technology, they're testing some of this technology in my district. They call it the innovative tower initiative, and where you are able to track someone that comes across the border, you’re able to follow them and able to deploy a drone or a border patrol to do that interdiction. All that data that is being used is on a smart phone that is on someone’s arm. But guess what? There are men and women on the border patrol that are doing this tough job, their smart phones, or their phones  don’t always work in all these different areas that should --" [crosstalk]
SCARBOROUGH: "Wow."
HURD: "There is a thing called carrizo cane in the Rio Grande, it’s an infectious weed, invasively -- excuse me, that's not from that area, that grows -- it looks like a bamboo patch. If you get rid of that, one, it improves the flow of the Rio Grande and helps agriculture but it gets rid of a barrier that some people that are trying to sneak across are doing. Now people have to remember, I have 820 miles of border, that's about of 2/3 Mexico-Texas border, a little bit less than a half of the border between the United States and Mexico. In some parts of the border, border patrol’s response time is measured in hours to days. If your response time  is measured in hours to day, a wall is not a physical barrier. And so we got to be having these -- these smart solutions. And the point on drugs, roughly, and this is a very conservative estimate, $66 billion of illegal drugs are being sold in the United States of America. And the most of that is coming through our ports of entry. And I think Senator Kaine mentioned this earlier, and a lot coming through our -- our -- our post offices. They need to have tools in order to address those things as well."