U.S. Representative August Pfluger, who represents 20 counties including Brown in District 11, was the guest speaker at the Kiwanis Club of Brownwood luncheon Thursday at the Brownwood Country Club.

Most of Pfluger’s comments to those in attendance centered around the current political climate and tensions currently, particularly in the state of Minnesota.

The following are excerpts from Pfluger’s speech:

On the recent ICE protests and tragedies in Minnesota

What we went through this weekend with literally millions of Americans locked in their houses because of the freezing weather, and to wake up at 9 or 10 a.m. Saturday morning and seeing the news, that’s a snapshot in time. It’s absolutely tragic, any loss of life is absolutely tragic, and that’s no different for Alex Pretti or Renee Good or any of those folks.

I believe in my heart of hearts the passions are real. You can’t fault someone for being passionate about a subject. All of these passions are real, but about four weeks ago the biggest problem that I had with where we are is I think real leaders, instead of eliciting more anger and more passions and more inciting of what could be misconstrued as potential violence, real leaders come up with solutions and ideas. I know that our common ground is very minimal on this particular issue, but let’s at least start on that common ground and see if we can go from there. Let’s see if we can expand that common ground through some negotiations and compromise.

What I really had a problem with was two individuals, a governor and a mayor, basically inciting a lot of, what I think was a right to step beyond the First Amendment protected speech and peacefully assembling, into non-peaceful protests by using explicit language about ICE, saying get your phones out and go into your community and make sure you document and you have the database of the illegal ways ICE is acting or the border patrol is acting. My assumption is that law enforcement is not only action according to the law but enforcing the laws. That’s my assumption. When that doesn’t happen, they need to go through an investigation and figure that out. And if you ask me should we investigate this, 100 percent, everything about this. Feb. 10 there will be a hearing in my committee to get DHS up to D.C. to ask questions. But those comments, I believe, really lit the fuse on the situation in Minneapolis.

How the Minnesota tensions reached this point

I want to set the environment up for you to remind us what has happened over the past six or seven years. We had cities across the nation that voted locally on their city council, sometimes endorsed by their state elected officials, to become what you call sanctuary cities. Now that right there set up the collision course that happened Saturday morning. That set the conditions for the passions and the anger and all the things we’re thinking and feeling to happen.

Basically what you’re saying when you say you’re a sanctuary city is that we don’t care about federal law. In fact, it’s not that we don’t care about it, we’re not going to follow it, when that federal law preempts everything that the states are doing. The states can take a more conservative approach, i.e. a more restrictive approach if they want, but they don’t have the option to take a less restrictive approach.

My question to (former Secretary of Homeland Security) Alejandro Mayorkas was this: this is what the law says, and it appears to me you’re not enforcing the law through the Department of Homeland Security, through the customs and border protection and ICE agents. We had millions of people came into this country, and what the law says and I’ll quote it to you ‘Those people shall be detained.’ It’s very clear except for some very, very narrow exclusions.

Sanctuary cities start and you have a four-year period where basically there’s 100 percent complete disregarding the rule of law. If we don’t like the law, then change it.

You get into the first year of the Trump administration and you know, because he campaigned on it, he’s very serious about the border and deportation.

In that year, there were hard images to see. I see these images and they elicit emotions from me and that is hard. We all know people in our community who have been affected by deportations. I just got off the phone today with some folks in Midland where there are two Venezuelan children, one is a 3-year-old born in Venezuela and one that is 1-year-old born here and an American citizen and the mother was a Venezuelan here illegally and deported and the kids are still here. That’s a problem.

How to deescalate or resolve the hostilities

Where we sit right now, to me, is in a position where we have a choice to make. Are those elected officials in Minnesota and other places that have taken their stance on sanctuary cities, which I don’t believe in and feel is unconstitutional, are they going to turn down the rhetoric? And people like me are already asking our own administration to turn down the rhetoric. Let’s find a solution. We can still enforce the law, we can still do the things that are necessary, and we can prevent these kinds of things from happening again. I think that is the only acceptable path forward.

I want to enforce the law and I believe the folks that are coming in from other countries, most of them, want the rule of law to occur. They wouldn’t necessarily be coming here if this wasn’t a country that respected the institutions and the rule of law and the things that are so important to this flag.

When you ask me, how do we get out of this mess, I don’t think our country can heal with radicalism on either side. I don’t think it can heal with radicalism on the left, and we better be looking at it on the right as a Republican. I can’t control what happens over there, but I can control to some extent what we do in our party.

You’re never going to read it in the news, but I meet with my Democratic colleagues all the time. I’ve passed more bills than any other Congressmen, 434 of those in the last year, and every single one of those bills has been bi-partisan. One of the reasons we’ve been successful in that is because we’ve said no to a radical approach. We are trying everything we can to reorder the structure from a sound byte structure to let’s have a conversation, and that’s probably not going to be in the news media and that’s OK because what it means is we’re actually working on those solutions and looking for that common ground. Instead of looking for self, we’re trying for the betterment of our team, and the team is our country.