Between 2021 and 2024, the federal government processed more than 470,000 unaccompanied migrant children. Roughly 300,000 of them were lost or placed with unvetted sponsors. Eleven thousand were handed to adults who never received a fingerprint check or background check — a direct violation of federal law. Sixty-five thousand reports warning about children in danger went unread.
A federal task force has since knocked on 82,000 doors and found 22,638 of those children. Twenty-seven were found dead. Children were discovered in forced labor, debt bondage, and sexual slavery. Teenage girls had been impregnated by their sponsors. Florida ranks third in the nation for human trafficking cases — and an estimated 200,000 people were sex-trafficked in Florida in 2024 alone. Half of them were minors.
The system that was supposed to protect these children delivered them to their abusers. Chris Gleason will fight to make sure it never happens again.
Sources: DHS OIG · HHS ORR · Senate Judiciary Committee · USF Study 2024Fentanyl is the leading cause of drug overdose death in Florida. In 2023, it killed 4,593 Floridians — a son at a college party who thought he was taking a Percocet, a mother who filled what looked like a prescription, a teenager who never came home. Two milligrams is enough to kill. Border agents seized more than 27,000 pounds of it in a single year, and that is only what they caught.
The border wall is one-third built. Border Patrol is 3,000 agents short. Eighty-eight percent of stations are understaffed. The cartels know every gap, every shift change, every mile of unpatrolled desert. Progress has been made — fentanyl deaths in Florida fell 35% in 2024 — but the wall is not finished, the agents are burning out, and the cartels adapt faster than the bureaucracy.
Chris Gleason will fight to finish the wall, fund the agents, and designate the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
Sources: CDC WONDER · CBP · DEA · FL Medical Examiners CommissionIllegal immigration costs American taxpayers $150.7 billion every year — net of the taxes paid by illegal aliens. That is more than the entire GDP of Mississippi. Illegal alien households received $13.4 billion in child tax credits in a single year. Medicaid-funded emergency services cost $16.2 billion — a 124% increase. Fifty-nine percent of illegal immigrant households use at least one federal welfare program.
While those billions flow outward, the Americans who played by the rules are told to wait. Over one million veterans sit in the disability claims backlog. Roughly 33,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. Social Security faces insolvency by 2035. Florida seniors on fixed incomes watch their purchasing power shrink every year. Open borders mean open checkbooks — and the people who earned those benefits are paying the tab.
Chris Gleason will fight to close the loopholes, verify immigration status before any benefit is paid, and redirect every dollar saved to veterans, seniors, and the citizens who earned it. Americans first. No exceptions.
Sources: FAIR 2023 · AEI · House Budget Committee · Manhattan Institute · VAAmerican families are burying children because politicians won't finish the wall. Chris has the plan to end this.
“My daughter was 19. She was a sophomore at UCF. Someone gave her a pill at a party and told her it was Percocet. It was fentanyl. She died on a Friday night and we did not find out until Saturday morning. I keep her bedroom exactly the way she left it. Every politician who voted against finishing the wall should have to sit in that room and explain themselves.”Laura M. · Orlando, FL · Mother of a Fentanyl Victim
The border crisis is not an abstraction. It is the fentanyl in Florida's medicine cabinets. It is the children delivered to traffickers by the government that was supposed to protect them. It is the $150 billion invoice mailed to the same taxpayers whose veterans are sleeping on the streets.
Chris Gleason is running for the United States Senate because Florida's families deserve a Senator who will treat this as the emergency it is — not a talking point to be recycled every election cycle and forgotten the day after.
Help Chris bring real border security to the Senate. Not talking points. Not empty promises. Action.
Every dollar you contribute funds the fight to finish the wall, stop fentanyl, end the trafficking pipeline, put Americans first, and hold Washington accountable.
Read the Full Plan — Data, Evidence, and Six Policy PlanksEvery dollar fuels the fight. Every volunteer multiplies our reach. Florida deserves a Senator who answers to the people.