What you might have missed when the mayor testified in Congress.
Denver six years ago in twenty nineteen, they didn't even make the top fifty most Dangerous States excuse me, dangerous Cities in the country list this year. In twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five, US News and World Report ranks Denver as the tenth most dangerous city in the country. Denver has twice the homicide rate as San Francisco. We've lost more than seven thousand Colorados to illegal drug overdose deaths since twenty twenty, with a significant percentage of that
coming from illegal drugs like fentanyl. And we know from criminal intelligence that in the Denver, Colorado area, almost all of that fentanyl is being trafficked by illegal transnational criminal organizations, the Hosco Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. We've seen a massive increase, this is just a recent headline. We've seen an increase in tucy, which is the drug of choice
of trendy Aragua in the Denver metro area. And we've seen headlines that show that overdose deaths in the den For metro area remained stubbornly flat despite falling in pretty much everywhere around the country. In terms of violent crimes,
Denver's had over sixty four hundred violent crimes. So that's including things like six hundred and eighty nine sexual assaults, over twelve hundred robberies, over forty four hundred aggravated assaults, and again, depending on which database you look at, anywhere from sixty five to seventy one homicides, again double the homicide rate of San Francisco.
So the first question to.
You is, for those homicides, do you know how many of those were committed by people illegally present in the country.
Now I'm stopping it there to welcome Representative Gabe Evans, who you just heard asking a question of Mayor Mike Johnston when he testified this week on Capitol Hill. First of all, well done on your first congressional grilling there, Representative Evans. You did a really good job.
Yeah, I appreciate it, Thanks so much, and thanks for having me on.
I will tell you that when I played that on my show, because we were trying to air stuff as quickly as it happened, we aired it on my show. And when you said we have a murder rate bigger than San Francisco's Both Grant, who was producing the show, and I looked at each other and our mouths dropped open. That was shocking, really shocking to see it put that way. Have you gotten feedback from people who felt like, yeah, I had no idea until he said that, kind of like we did.
That's pretty much the response I get everywhere. Unfortunately, Colorado's crime problem is it hasn't really gotten out there as much as I think it should given how bad it is. And that's very, very tragic, honestly, because these are the stories, these are the lives, these are the tragedies that aren't being told in this space. And as long as we're not telling those stories, that continues to give the Democrats a cover for all of their failed policies.
Well, you know, it has been really interesting to see Mayor Mike Johnson and even Governor Pola simply try to redefine what a sanctuary city is, like they want to argue about the definition of sanctuary city, when in reality, it was really apparent under questioning that when forced to answer questions about did in your case did the police fill out the nationality and immigration status on the FBI fingerprint card, that would very much make us seem to
be a sanctuary city that it's blank. Is it frustrating that they seem to be arguing about a definition and you're talking about actually what's happening.
It's been frustrating since I was a cop. You know my background. I spent twelve years in the US Army and the Colorado Army National Guard, another ten years in law enforcement in the Denver metro area. That's why I stepped away from law enforcement was because of all of this gas lighting from leftist leaders that were claiming that they wanted to protect public safety, but literally at every turn they were handcuffing law enforcement, empowering criminals, just empowering
our own, local, homegrown criminals. They were opening up Colorado to international criminal organizations with their sanctuary state policies, and we see it even now. The governor and the mayor
continue to say till they're blue in the face. Of course, we want to work with federal authorities to be able to get people who commit crimes in our community out of the community, which was why I chose that specific line of questioning to highlight how are you going to get somebody who is illegally present in the state or
in the city. How are you going to get that person out of the community if you don't even ask them as is required by the FBI fingerprint card, If you don't even ask them their nationality when they are arrested for a crime, and when the mayor couldn't answer that, it highlighted just the absolute gas lighting and the two faced nature of what they say versus the actual policies that they put in place which protect criminals who are
committing crimes in our community from deportation, because even when they're in custody, the cops aren't a lot to determine nationality. What would you like to see?
I mean, you're in Congress now, so you're kind of an arms length in a way from state law in Colorado. What would you like to see happen here? And do you believe that sanctuary states or sanctuary cities should have things happen to them like the SBA being pulled should they lose federal funding?
So in this space, the question that comes up a lot is what's the lawful role of the federal government. Well, fortunately, we have a constitution that tells us what the lawful role of the federal government is You go look at the preamble and there's six things listed. The second one is established Justice, and the fourth one is provided for the Common Defense. Bentanall is the number one killer of
Americans ages eighteen to forty five. Every month. We lose more Americans to fentanyl in the entire death toll of the September eleventh terrorist attacks by quite a bit actually. And we know where fentanyl comes from. It comes from China, it's traffic through Mexico, and it comes into the United States.
And so when we have a new administration that has quite reasonably declared these cartels to be terrorist organizations, that is clearly within the purview of the federal government under the established Justice and to provide for the common defense clauses in the preamble. And so I argue, this is absolutely a place where the federal government has the lawful authority and responsibility to weigh in and make sure that we are protecting Americans from what are quite literally declared
terrorist organization. To help with that, I introduced, as promised last year, I introduced my first bill in Congress, the Uplift Act, which uplifts public safety by unhandcuffing police to
locate and interdict foreign transgressors. There's a lot of things in the bill, but one of the specific things that it does is it basically holds harmless and indemnifies any state or local law enforcement officers who choose to do things like completely fill out the FBI fingerprint card and be able to work with their federal counterparts to be able to get violent criminals out of their communities.
Well, I just got a question on the text line, and I think it's a good one, although I'm going to massage it a little before I ask you now to the point about the FBI cards. If it's federal law to complete the FBI fingerprint cards in a certain way, why have we put Denver police officers or have we put them in a position where they're going to be breaking state law or they're going to be breaking federal law.
Yeah, honestly, and anyways they have. That's why I have said for years now that state and local law enforcement in Colorado has been handcuffed by these just horrible laws at the state level and then these terrible ordinances at the local and the municipal level. Because when you have a cop that's not able to do what they're supposed to do as required by the FBI and the fingerprint database. Of course they're putting them in a very very difficult position.
And so again that's one of the many things that my Uplift Act is it exerts that federal primacy and says, look, if you're working to protect the public safety, you're working to fulfill the oath that you took by getting violent to legal criminals and drug dealers or the dealers out of the community, the federal government will indemnify you from any sort of punitive or retaliatory actions taken against you by the state or the local government.
I mean, that's incredibly significant. And I had a law enforcement officer reach out to me via email and he said that with the decrease in excuse me, the qualified immunity change in Colorado, there's a lot of fear among law enforcement officers that if they violate state law, something happens, they get sued under that qualified immunity, they're going to be found to be not following state law, and therefore they're going to be on the hook if a judgment.
I mean, it's like, you have to think about all this now. If you're a cop. You know, you can't just go out and do your job. You have to think about whether or not you're breaking state or federal law, and which of those is more likely to get you sued if anything happens while you're on the job. I mean, it's kind of a mess.
It's a total mess. And that's why Colorado has absolutely abitismal ratings when it comes to recruiting and retaining good police officers. Nobody wants to do the job in Colorado right now because of exactly what you said. The liability is so high, and in fact, again another just horrible decision by the ruling Democrats in Colorado, they actually put into state law that anything that is not captured by a police body camera, the courts are allowed to assume
misconduct on the part of the officer. So in state law, cops in Colorado are actually presumed guilty and it's up to them to prove their own innocence for anything that was not within the field of view or not captured by body cameras. Who wants to work with that kind of liability in an already very dangerous and stressful profession.
Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly. The mayor was on we have a sound from him earlier saying, hey, they moved the SBA, but we're not breaking any federal laws. How is that going to get decided? Representative Evans, who's going to be the decider on yes, even though you're playing word games because you're not directly going against the federal government. But they released a trendy Iragua member into the streets with a warning to him of how to
handle ICE if I showed up. I mean, come on, how is that not running right up against the supremacy of a federal law.
Well, I mean, I think there's a couple of answers to that. The biggest one was the American people spoke about that on November fifth, when they gave a very clear mandate to both President Trump and then also gave him conservative majorities in the US House and the US Senate to go to work with for the next two years. So I think your first answer is right there, that the American people are sick and tired of this and
they are ready for a change. And then the second answer to that is as Trump's nominees continued to be confirmed to the various different positions, and I think this is something that you'll probably ultimately see litigated between the states and the localities that continue to try to pretend like they're not sanctuary jurisdictions. And I think that you'll probably see some input on that from the DOJ, the FBI, and some of these other federal agencies under the new administration. I have a.
Question, could we pass a bill in Congress that clarifies exactly what sanctuary status or sanctuary cities are, because then you have a clear definition of which to proceed.
You could potentially pass something like that. The problem with the definition is you can't anticipate every single right to it, and so you have a bunch of folks in places like Denver that sit around and do nothing other than dream up ways to try to advance their incredibly liberal agenda and then say that they're not. I mean, look at some of the statements that the governor and the
mayor have said. They said, we of course work with with federal law enforcement when whenever there's an actual crime committed, and through my line of questioning about the fingerprint card, no, they very clearly don't. Through Representative Cranks line of questioning where he was talking about releasing a trend de aar Agua member in a parking lot. No, they clearly don't.
And so you know, that's just the first thing that pops to my mind if we if we define this is they're just going to tell you they're not doing it anyway.
Yeah, sad but true. I mean, I mean really sad but true. Okay, Representative Evans, you're about to go into your first like a threatened shut down on the budget. Are you ready for this?
Are you ready? Are you ready?
I got to tell you, there's a lot of people on my text line and me personally, I don't love these giant budget deals. I know you're a freshman, but what influence, if any, do you do you hope to have on going back to some kind of normal order for the budget.
Yeah. So there's two things that are happening in the budget space right now. The first is the continuing Resolution that was passed in the one hundred and eighteenth Congress. We're one hundred and nineteenth now. The one hundred and nineteenth took over on January third, when we're all sworn in. So the government is currently being funded by a resolution that was passed in the one hundred and eighteenth, and
that resolution expires on March fourteenth. Now, obviously, back in the one hundred and eighteenth you still have the Democrats controlling the Senate, you had Joe Biden in the White House, and so that Continuing Resolution was not perhaps as favorable to the conservative viewpoints just because we didn't control the Senate, we didn't control the presidency. And so where we're at
now is we're actually working twofold number one. We're working through You've heard President Trump talk about the one big, beautiful bill and budget reconciliation that is the long term budget to be able to really fix a lot of the problems that we're seeing in the United States. But
there's so much to fix. We're not going to get that package put together by March fourteenth, which is then where this cr the Continuing Resolution in and then that is a short term fix to be able to bias the time to be able to put together this long term reconciliation package that I think is going to be incredibly effective in terms of just cutting out basics term the government.
Well, I hope you're right. I am encouraged when the President said the other night during the speech that he wanted to go to a balanced budget. I got a little tingle, but we're one of those families. Deeds not words, Gabe, I mean, you know, deeds not words. So I'm ready for more, and i know a lot of my audiences as well. Thank you so much for your time today.
Of course, I'm always glad to be on with you.