Hageman hears from home
From border security to public land use to government agency overreach, U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman’s recent Fremont County town hall spanned issues important to Wyoming and provided some insight into the work she’s done during her first term.
As part of her campaign pledge to visit every county every year while serving in Congress, Hageman held a town hall in Dubois at the National Museum of Military Vehicles Wednesday, when she heard from residents both concerned about the direction of the federal government and grateful for her leadership.
Town halls – and hearing from voters – is an important part of the work she does, Hageman explained in a Wednesday interview. “I open it up to questions so that I can have a dialogue with the folks there,” she said of the feedback she gathers to take back to Washington. “I don’t really know how to represent the people unless I come back and talk to them.”
One of the biggest issues on Hageman’s plate and the thing she’s heard the most about from Wyoming residents continues to be border security, something she said is central to the nation’s security and identity. “It shouldn’t be this difficult. It shouldn’t be a fight,” she said of the battle with Democrats over securing the border. “That’s the bizarre part. If you don’t have a border, then you don’t have a country.”
The congresswoman recounted her three trips to the southern border and what she observed there, from a hole in the border wall where work was halted under President Biden, where an officer told her more than 200 bodies had been discovered after cartel murders, to crucial food production areas overrun by immigrants contaminating fields. During one such trip, Hageman said, she learned that the Department of Homeland Security has lost track of over 85,000 immigrant children into the interior of the U.S. “They are being trafficked, enslaved in factories … That is why I refer to this as one of the most inhumane things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Hageman explained.
While the House passed HR 2, which Hageman described as the nation’s strongest border security bill ever passed, the Senate has dropped the ball. The Senate version of the bill actually doesn’t address border security at all, rather just a piece of immigrant processing legislation, she said. “I do think that there is enough focus on this issue. I’m hoping that [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro] Mayorkas would attempt to do his job,” Hageman said.
Instead, Hageman said Mayorkas has committed high crimes and misdemeanors in failing to follow the law on border security, and has instead instituted a “catch and release” system where mass groups of illegal immigrants are paroled into the country. That is why the House passed articles of impeachment against him, which were delivered to and then immediately dismissed by the Senate. It’s the first time in U.S. history that the Senate has failed to hold an impeachment trial. “That just demonstrates the level of cover up that we’re dealing with,” Hageman said.
Proud moments
Hageman pointed to several bills that are hallmarks of her first term, including a bill that just passed the house that would unlock restrictions on tribal leases, and the “Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale” Act, which restricts federal law enforcement agencies from purchasing electronic data without a warrant. She’s also introduced the POSTAL Act, which would prevent the USPS from closing processing and distribution centers if doing so would negatively impact mail delivery or close the only such center in the state.
While the House has been relatively hamstrung during Hageman’s term, she said much has been done to expose federal corruption, from Hunter Biden’s laptop to the Twitter files, to working with the Selects Committee studying the January 6 Committee. “There are many things that have been exposed through this Congress,” she explained to the Dubois crowd on Wednesday.
She expanded on that thought during an interview. “We’ve had some really important wins this year with our leadership moving forward with the investigations that we’ve done. While there have been some fits and starts on the legislative front, we have been able to expose some things for the American people that wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed,” she said. “I have been able to be involved in many of those investigations and I have learned a lot from that. It’s helping us to formulate ideas so that we can rein in this federal government, and return to that idea where the individual is central, and not the government. I’m proud of that.”