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deniseyallen · 7 years ago

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On Senate Floor: Portman Supports DHS Secretary Nominee Kirstjen Nielsen

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a speech on the Senate floor, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), a member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, outlined his support for Kirstjen Nielsen for the position of Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Specifically, Portman discussed his belief that Nielsen, who confirmed her support of the Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act in November, will work to prevent the flow of drugs into our country in order to combat drug addiction. The STOP Act is designed to help stop dangerous drugs such as heroin, fentanyl and carfentanil from being shipped through our borders to drug traffickers here in the United States. Portman introduced Nielsen at her HSGAC nomination hearing earlier this year.

Transcript of his remarks can be found below and a video can be found here.

“Today, we’ll have the first vote on Kirstjen Nielsen, the administration’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Homeland Security. I want to talk about why I believe she must be confirmed. I’ve had the privilege of introducing Kirstjen Nielsen during her nomination hearing at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. She received, in the committee, broad bipartisan support, and I hope the Senate can now come together in a bipartisan fashion to confirm her as secretary so she can get on with the critical work of leading the Department of Homeland Security.

“I’m delighted we’re having the cloture vote today—I wish it had been a few weeks ago—and I am looking forward to a vote to confirm her later this week. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to look closely at this nomination because we need her there and it would be great if we had a strong bipartisan vote to send her there.

“I think she is ready to hit the ground running on day one. I say this because she knows the department. She knows what the challenges are and she knows how to address them. She will be the first Department of Homeland Security nominee ever to have had any previous experience at the Department of Homeland Security. She was a policy director for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) during the George W. Bush administration. She took over that role shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and later served on President Bush’s White House Homeland Security Council as the senior director for prevention, preparedness, and response. I got to see her good work in that capacity. Most recently, she served as the department’s chief of staff for former Secretary John Kelly. She proved herself during the early stages of the administration transition and experienced firsthand the challenges of managing this diverse and sprawling agency.

“With her homeland security experience from those transformative years with the department, her industry and homeland security consulting experience, and her most recent efforts in this administration, I believe she will be a capable leader needed badly in this ever-evolving threat environment we find ourselves in. Throughout her career in government and in the private sector, Ms. Nielsen has developed an extensive experience in homeland security strategy, cybersecurity, transportation security, and emergency resilience, all critical areas for the next secretary to understand.

“As we have seen countless times from terror attacks, cyber-attacks, and natural disasters, tragedies persist despite our preparation and we need to remain resilient and responsive to overcome new challenges and combat these evolving threats. I believe she gets that. She understands it. I believe she’s well-qualified to lead the Department of Homeland Security as a result. From our conversations that we’ve had, both before and during her nomination hearing, I can say confidently that Ms. Nielsen is committed to addressing the most pressing issues facing our country, and she’s signaled that she has a full commitment to working with the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle to get this done.

“There’s so many issues this department faces. For a moment I would like to talk about one of those issues that is critically important to me and every member in this body that she has made a commitment to addressing and will be able, I think, to make a big difference. This is the scourge of deadly synthetic forms of heroin that are being shipped into our communities. Synthetic heroin, usually fentanyl, sometimes carfentanil, is one of the great new threats that we face in our communities. It is an example of one of the emerging threats that the Department of Homeland Security and its agency, the Customs and Border Protection, must address.

“Fentanyl is up to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Carfentanil is even stronger than that. These drugs are increasingly taking people’s lives in my home state of Ohio and around the country. Fentanyl is so deadly that as little as three milligrams can be lethal to an adult male. By initial estimates of 2016 statistics, fentanyl deaths in America have increased by 540 percent in the past three years. In 2016, more than 20,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses. Tragically, my home state of Ohio is at the center of this national epidemic. In 2015 fentanyl was involved in slightly more than 38 percent of the state’s overdose deaths. Last year that number increased to more than 58 percent. 58 percent of our drug overdose deaths in Ohio last year involved fentanyl. In the first two months of this year, 2017, fentanyl was involved in approximately 90 percent of drug overdoses. So this is an emerging threat to all of our communities.

“Fentanyl is a threat to every state represented in this chamber and every community. While overdose victims are most often the drug users themselves, it’s also become a great threat to law enforcement and to children who have been inadvertently exposed, tragically exposed, to this substance. An example would be Chris Green. He is a police officer in East Liverpool, Ohio. He was exposed to fentanyl while doing a routine car search this earlier year. He pulled a couple of guys over. When he pulled them over he noticed a white powdery substance in the car. And being alert to that, he put on his gloves, he put on a mask, and he proceeded to determine that it was fentanyl that they had spread around the car to try to hide the fact that they were moving drugs.

“When he got back to the police station after the search to book these individuals, Officer Green noticed that there was something on his shirt, and he did what any of us would do. He reached down to brush it off of his shirt. Unfortunately it was fentanyl, and the fentanyl became exposed to his fingers. Just that small amount absorbing through his skin caused him to have an overdose. This is a big guy, 6’2, 220 pounds, great shape. And he fell to the ground unconscious. Luckily he was able to get immediate medical assistance at the police station, but it took four doses of narcan to revive Officer Green. As his police chief said at the time, he would have died had he been alone. Think if he had gone home to his family and hugged one of his kids and his kids had been exposed to that fentanyl. This is a great danger obviously to our communities generally, to individuals, but also to our first responders who are unfortunately finding out that these dangerous poisons are more and more of a danger.

“Children are also being exposed. This fall, a 12-year-old Columbus boy died as a result of fentanyl exposure. He was at a sleepover at a birthday party when he came into contact with the deadly poison. Someone had left it lying around. He was unconscious by the time paramedics arrived. He died at the hospital two days later. These synthetic forms of heroin have created a new challenge for law enforcement as they increasingly account for more and more of our overdose deaths. Combatting this threat requires solutions from across the federal government with local, state, and private sector initiatives. We talked earlier about an organization in Ohio dealing with this threat that’s coming into our communities and the private sector and nonprofits have a huge role to play, but so does the federal government and so does the Department of Homeland Security. And again, Kirstjen Nielsen understands that need.

“The Department of Homeland Security plays a critical role in countering the significant threat because it comes through the U.S. mail system and it’s Customs and Border Protection officers who are meant to screen those packages that come in through the mail. Unlike heroin, which enters the U.S. over land, typically from Mexico, manufacturers mostly in China ship fentanyl through the U.S. mail directly into our communities. The federal government is responsible here. We’re supposed to combat the threat of illegal drugs coming through the mail system, but in the case of fentanyl coming from labs in China, the U.S. Postal Service is often used as a conduit without any check.

“Drugs should not be as easy to send as a postcard and the U.S. mail service should not be able to be exploited as a drug trafficking service. This is why we’ve introduced here in the Congress legislation called the STOP Act. It’s bipartisan. It’s sensible. If enacted, it would give Customs and Border Protection officers—along with their law enforcement partners—the tools they need to identify suspicious packages by requiring the U.S. Postal Service to provide advanced electronic data on all the packages and mail entering the United States. Already this information as to what’s in the package, where it’s from, where it’s going, the name of the sender, is required if you send it through one of the private carrier systems. UPS, FedEx, DHL and others. Unfortunately the Postal Service is not required to do that, and as a result traffickers do what you would think they would do. They choose our U.S. Postal Service to send this poison into our communities, to a post office box, maybe to an abandoned warehouse address. This fentanyl is then being spread throughout our communities.

“We need to hold the Postal Service to that same standard. At a recent Senate hearing on this issuing acting Customers and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan voiced his support for reforms like those in the STOP Act. He said advanced electronic data would enhance their detection and prevention efforts. I’ve seen this firsthand as I’ve visited the sites in Ohio where Customers and Border Protection is asked to screen this these packages. When they’re with these private carriers they can find packages, take them off-line and carefully—because it requires a lot of care given the poisonous nature of these packages—deal with it.

“President Trump’s opioid commission recently issued its recommendations. They endorsed the STOP Act and called for it to be enacted and implemented in the commission’s final report just a month ago. At her confirmation hearing last month, Ms. Nielsen voiced her support for the STOP Act. I was pleased to have her commitment to getting this bill into law and implemented by Customs and Border Protection so we can keep more of these deadly poisons off our streets. There is no one solution to the opioid epidemic but the STOP Act will give law enforcement the tools they need to help stop this synthetic form from entering our communities in the first place and also raise the cost of this synthetic heroin. The end result will be saving countless lives.

“Back to Ms. Nielsen, again, she is eminently qualified for this post and able to address so many of the tough issues we face as a country, the evolving threats like the fentanyl issue, the terrorism issues we’ve talked about today. We need her at the Department of Homeland Security. We need her now. She is the leader we need at this critical and sprawling department at a time when our homeland security posture has never been more critical, more important. I hope my colleagues will come together in a bipartisan basis and vote Ms. Nielsen out this week as the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.”

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from Rob Portman http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=0E51F3B9-E756-44F0-845A-AD51ED03F293

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