Hageman's town hall meeting informs Worland on national issues

U.S. House of Representative Harriet Hageman (R-Wyoming) came to Worland for a town hall meeting on April 27 at the Worland Community Center Complex.

This meeting was part of a series of town hall meetings, where Hageman personally reports on her work in Washington, D.C. and engages with the people whom she represents.

"I'm your representative as you know, but I don't know how to represent you unless I'm able to have a conversation with you and talk about the issues that are important," she said to begin the meeting.

BILLS

Hageman began by informing her audience about the status of bills she had been involved with over the previous weeks.

"On March 22, the House passed the second omnibus bill, which funded the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and more. The bill was 1,102 pages long, it cost $1.2 trillion dollars, and I was given 32 hours to read it. I don't like governing that way and I voted against it," she said.

Hageman added that she introduced her first bill as the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs on April 8, and it passed the House.

"In my role, I have learned an awful lot about our 574 recognized tribes and the various challenges that they face. One of the things that I have found though, is that our federal government has tried in so many ways to be so overly paternalistic to our tribes, and as a result, they don't have the autonomy that I think they ought to have as American citizens."

The legislation that Hageman's committee brought forward would allow leasing of Native American lands for up to 99 years, up from a previous restriction of 25 years.

She said, "On April 12, the House passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, it is a bill that reauthorizes section 7-02 of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). Formerly, because it had a five-year sunset on it, we got to review the bill every five years. Now, we get to review it every two years. I'm very glad of that because we know that our intelligence agencies have gone rogue over the past couple of years and have been spying on American citizens."

Hageman spoke about her work on the Judicial Committee, saying, "We put together a really incredible reform package to reform FISA, to limit what our intelligence communities and law enforcement communities can do in terms of surveilling American citizens."

She continued, "However, because they were unwilling to include a fundamental clause that made it so surveillance requires a warrant, I voted no on the FISA Reform Act. It passed with Democrat support, but I was adamant that I was not going to take away civil rights. I don't have the authority to do that. I'm going to continue to push that we get a warrant requirement."

Hageman said she also supported the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which passed on April 17. She said, "Our law enforcement agencies cannot get personal data from a person without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment prohibits them from doing so. But, they have been circumventing this by obtaining data from brokers who purchase it themselves from companies such as Verizon. We passed this act that defends privacy by closing that loophole that the FBI has been using to surveil Americans without a warrant."

IMPEACHMENT

Hageman said she was happy to report that last week "I had the immense honor of delivering the articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate. I would have been one of 11 impeachment managers had they actually carried out their constitutional responsibilities and held a trial and allowed us to present our case as to how he has committed both high crimes and misdemeanors, why we impeached him, why he should have been convicted and why he should have been removed from office."

Mayorkas was impeached due to concerns over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border from the role of Secretary of Homeland Security, having served since 2021.

She continued, "Mayorkas has been before our committee before and I think we will get him back again soon. I don't think that I've ever met someone as insidious and as destructive as Mayorkas has been. What has been happening at the border is not by accident, it is an intentional invasion. It is an effort to weaken our country."

BORDER

She told the audience, "I've been to the border three times now. Last year in February I was in Yuma, [Arizona], and at the time I described it as a terrible crisis; it's not a crisis, it's a catastrophe that is fundamentally changing and transforming the United States of America."

She described speaking to a police officer during her visit to the border who told her that about 200 bodies had been discovered in the area. According to the officer, the bodies were those of people attempting to illegally immigrate to the U.S. without going through a Mexican cartel, murdered and left in the desert as examples to dissuade others who would try.

She spoke also about the issues she saw at the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, while on the visit. Hageman said, "When I went to Eagle Pass, Texas, over Christmas, the day before I was there, they had been processing 5,000 to 6,000 people a day at the border. While we were there, there were about 165 people being processed. We asked them what the difference between yesterday and today was, and they said, 'someone in the White House told the cartel you were coming, so they didn't send them over today.'"

Hageman claimed that in that one section of the border near Eagle Pass, Mexican cartels are making $35 million a week via human trafficking.

She said that she worked with the Natural Resource Committee two months ago in the area of Tucson, Arizona, to address environmental degradation. Hageman said, "Every illegal that comes over brings approximately eight pounds of trash with them, and we were trying to address some of that." She said a sheriff there told them that illegal immigrants per year in the area had jumped from 70,000 to 800,000.

"This is an issue that I get asked about everywhere, it's at the forefront of everyone's mind and with good reason. I wish I could tell you there was a way to fix this. Not right now there's not; not until we get rid of this administration."

More on the town hall meeting will be published in next week's Northern Wyoming News.