A border congressman’s legislation headed to the House floor would impose harsher consequences on anyone who leads law enforcement on a vehicular high-speed chase near the border, particularly if the pursuit ends in a deadly accident.
Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ), who represents the southeastern part of the state, said addressing the high-speed chases coming through communities in his region was the “No. 1 thing [community leaders] asked for” after he took office in 2023, Ciscomani told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
“They’re a huge deal,” Ciscomani said in a phone call. “The president is doing a good job on delivering executive orders, but we have to codify things in law.”
Ciscomani’s bill, the Agent Raul Gonzalez Officer Safety Act, is up for a House vote this week. It was named after Raul H. Gonzalez, Jr., a Border Patrol agent in McAllen, Texas, who was killed in the line of duty on Dec. 7, 2022, while pursuing illegal immigrants on his all-terrain vehicle.
The bill has had a long road to get where it is today. Ciscomani first learned of the issue of high-speed chases while a congressional candidate in 2022, while on the campaign trail with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
After being sworn in in 2023, he met with Cochise County, Arizona leaders in his congressional district to discuss the most important matters that they wanted him to take on in Washington.
“They unanimously said high-speed chases,” said Ciscomani. “These drivers are going 100 miles per hour, endangering law enforcement, but also all the innocent bystanders. … There have been incidents where innocent bystanders have been struck and killed, not to mention Raul Gonzalez.”
The legislation passed the House last year with bipartisan support but died in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
If passed again this week, the legislation would be sent to the now-GOP-led Senate and then to President Donald Trump’s desk. Under the bill, any U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or illegal immigrant who leads federal, state, or local police on a vehicle chase within 100 miles of the U.S. border would face up to two years in prison and a fine or both.
A chase that results in serious bodily injury to the officer, bystander, or people being smuggled would face between five and 20 years in prison, as well as a possible fine.
Chases that result in the death of any person involved, such as Gonzalez’s case, would face between 10 years to life in prison, plus a fine.
In addition, any person involved in a chase would be ineligible to seek asylum in the United States and deemed “deportable.”
The bill would require the attorney general and Department of Homeland Security secretary to provide an annual report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees listing the number of people who committed one of the three mentioned offenses, any instances in which the fleeing driver was not prosecuted, and a list of cases prosecuted against such drivers.
Ciscomani is optimistic about the bill’s success because, he said, it is a “commonsense” piece of legislation that will likely prompt “broad bipartisan support.”
The Border Patrol union issued a strong endorsement of the bill.
“The National Border Patrol Council fully supports any effort by Congress to establish laws that provide real consequences to those who flee from our Border Patrol agents, oftentimes, with a complete disregard for the safety of the public,” National Border Patrol Council President Paul Perez told the Washington Examiner.
“For far too long, the criminal cartels have operated with impunity by smuggling and trafficking persons and narcotics, to include the deadly drug fentanyl,” Perez continued. “With the consequence of prosecution and mandatory minimum prison terms for offenses resulting in death or serious bodily injury (which happens a lot), we hope to see a decrease in these types of incidents.”
High-speed chases are a daily occurrence up and down the 1,950-mile southern border as human smugglers try to move illegal immigrants or drugs into the country and seek to evade getting pulled over by police.
For example, Gov. Greg Abbott‘s (R-TX) decision to surge state troopers to the Texas border with Mexico in 2021 has resulted in thousands of human smuggling attempts thwarted and a revelation of how many people have slipped past Border Patrol.
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Texas Highway Patrol officers, known as troopers, made 8,721 traffic stops that involved a vehicle suspected of transporting illegal immigrants from the border deeper into the U.S. between Jan. 1, 2021, and Dec. 31, 2022, according to data shared with the Washington Examiner through a 2022 public information request of Texas Department of Public Safety records.
During the traffic stops, the state troopers discovered an additional 39,100 illegal immigrants smugglers had attempted to transport from stash houses and fields near the border to cities including Houston and San Antonio.
