National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, on Monday, in my office in Chicago, I met a woman and her daughter. The story they had to tell me was heartbreaking. This woman was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa.

Something had occurred at her home while she was gone, where a child of hers left an iron on. Another child came in, grabbed the wire of that iron, was electrocuted, and died. It was a horrible accident that claimed the life of a child.

That child who died was the nephew of a general in the Army of the Democratic Republic of Congo. When he heard about his nephew dying in this accident, he said he would take care of the situation and that family would pay a price for the life of his nephew.

This woman, a mother of three, went into a panic because her daughter was going to be killed by this general--such a panic that she fled the country. Her journey is almost indescribable: From Africa to South America, up through Central America, finally arriving on a bus at the border, the port of entry in Southern California. She came there and asked for asylum. She was in fear of not only her life but the life of her daughter.

What happened next is what I want to speak to, because what happened next is something that I didn't think would ever happen in America. What happened next was a decision by the Federal Government to take her 6-year-old daughter away from her in California. They said initially that her request for assistance was a valid enough request to go forward to a hearing. But even having said that, they snatched this girl from her mother's arms and removed her screaming to another room. Then, they deported her daughter from Southern California to the city of Chicago--our government.

Was this mother abusing this child? Of course not. Was there any evidence of trafficking involved here? Of course not. Was this woman a terrorist? Of course not.

Why did they do it?

When I heard about it, I called the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Nielsen, and said: Why would you remove that child from that mother's arms and transport her 2,000 miles away?

She said: Oh, I will look into that. That is not our policy. We don't do that.

Well, historically, our government didn't do it, but it turned out that Secretary Nielsen was wrong. It is our policy--a policy that has been announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He says it is basically going to be a hard approach to those who try to come to this country and ask for asylum, ask for refuge.

So in the first two weeks of the month of May, with this new policy of Jeff Sessions--Attorney General Sessions' policy--658 children were removed from their families and taken to separate places.

Can you imagine the trauma on that child, let alone the mother? The American Academy of Pediatrics tells us that you don't do that to children without leaving some scar, some problem, but we are doing it as official government policy--official government policy of this administration.

Well, I met with the mother and the child. What happened to the mother after the child was removed is just a succession of horror stories. The mother was called in for a hearing while the child was sitting in Chicago. The mother has no attorney. She was not represented. She speaks limited English. She went through a hearing where they denied her request for refuge and asylum. They then said she could appeal the ruling if she wished.

She said: How long would that take?

They said: 3 to 6 months.

She said: I could not stand to be separated from my daughter for 3 to 6 months. I waive all of my rights. I am finished. I am finished with this effort.

Well, she was released--the mother was--on another appeal, I might add, by the ACLU. She was reunited with her daughter, and I happened to see them both in my office in Chicago.

When I walked in the room, this woman, who had traveled this great distance to protect her little girl, clearly tensed up when she saw this White man in a suit and tie walk in, and then it was explained through her interpreter that I was not there to hurt her or separate her from her daughter. Her daughter was running around the office while we were talking but never lost sight of her mom the whole time.

This is not an isolated instance. This is not just a little accident that happened on the border near Southern California. This is now the policy of the United States of America, the policy of the Trump administration, the policy of Attorney General Jeff Sessions--to remove children from their mothers.

Of course, it is not cheap. Transporting a child 2,000 miles and putting them in some care facility--even a good one--is not cheap. When my colleague, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, recently went to Arizona to see the children who had been separated from their parents, he was denied access. They wouldn't let him see it. He has gone back, and others will go back too.

It is unthinkable that we are holding these children in some situation where we don't want anyone to see them once they have been taken away.

In the southwest part of the United States, reportedly some mothers have been told: Oh, we are going to give your child a bath, and then the child was snatched away.

That is the official government policy of Attorney General Sessions and the Trump administration.

It is hard to imagine that we have reached this point in the history of this country that this is acceptable conduct by our government. It is hard to believe that the rest of the world will look at this and say: Well, that is how Americans treat people who come asking for help. They take their kids away from them.

Family separation is now the policy of this administration, not family unity.

I am hoping--just hoping--that perhaps some of my Republican colleagues will think this is an outrage as well. Maybe they will step up and speak out. I hope they do. On a bipartisan basis, we should all be standing up for these children who are being separated from their parents.

They say: Well, it is a new approach, a hard approach for dealing with those who come to our border. We have used hard approaches in the past in the United States.

Let me explain two examples. There was a hard approach that was used in this Chamber, in the Senate, in the 1940s, during World War II. Senator Bob Wagner of New York came to the floor and said: I want to give permission for 10,000 Jewish children who are currently in England--safe and away from Nazism and Hitler in Europe--to come to the United States. He called for a vote in this Chamber and he lost. It was defeated--the notion of allowing 10,000 Jewish children to come here for safety was defeated on the floor of this Senate.

The same thing happened during that period of time when the ship the MS St. Louis came over from Germany with 900 Jewish people who had heard about the Holocaust, feared it, and wanted refuge in the United States, and they were turned away--turned away and forced to return to Europe, where several hundred died in the Holocaust.

Those are specific examples of things that happened here, in this town, by this government, in one of the most embarrassing chapters in our Nation's history. That was the time when we were also taking Japanese Americans--Japanese Americans--and interning them in camps despite no evidence of sabotage, treason, or wrongdoing.

After that war, America reflected on those incidents I have just described and said: We are going to be a different nation from this point forward. After World War II, the United States said: We are going to set the example where we are a caring, compassionate nation that is there to help when people are in desperate circumstances. We did it over and over again.

Look at the Cuban-American population in the United States. Look at three of my Senate colleagues who are Cuban Americans and tell me that accepting refugees from Cuba was a bad idea for the United States. Of course it was not a bad idea. It was the right thing to do for those who wanted to escape the early days of the Castro regime.

Take a look at those who came over after the Vietnam war, many of whom had risked their lives to fight on our side of that war, asked for refuge in the United States, and we gave it to them. Tell me that was a mistake. We know it wasn't.

Tell me our decision to open the United States of America to Jews living in the Soviet Union who faced oppression was a mistake. I don't think so. I think it was the right thing to do.

The things I have just described--the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Soviet Jews--define who we are. This Nation--this caring, wonderful, great Nation--defines itself by its policies.

Now look at this policy of family separation. Look at this policy of removing children from the arms of a mother, with no suspicion of any wrongdoing whatsoever, and tell me that is consistent with who we are in America. That is what we face with this family separation policy.

I am joining with Senator Feinstein and several other of my colleagues to prohibit this new policy. We don't have a single Republican cosponsor yet. I hope we do. I hope there is one Republican Senator who will step up and say: This is wrong.

We can enforce our laws, but let's not do it by tearing children out of the arms of their parents and mothers, because that is sad, and that is what is happening now. The family separation policy of this administration, sadly, is not only not right, it is not American. Opioid Epidemic

Mr. President, I have had roundtable discussions across the State of Illinois. I have gone from Chicago to downstate, to small towns, to suburban towns, to, of course, the big city of Chicago. What I have found is this: No matter where you go, no matter how rich the suburb, no matter how small the town, you will find the opioid crisis facing America.

This drug epidemic may be the worst in our history. Every day, we are losing 115 American lives to opioid overdose. In the past 3 years, there has been a 53-percent increase in drug overdose deaths in my State. More than 2,400 of my neighbors and the people I represented in Illinois have died because of this crisis.

When we look back at the history, it is hard to understand how we reached this point. We know--when we go far enough back--that the pharmaceutical companies that produced these opioid pills misrepresented, lied to doctors, nurses, dentists, and the American people about the addictive nature of opioids. We know that happened. We also know that it became a big cash cow industry for pharmaceutical companies when more and more Americans became addicted to opioid pills.

Think of this: Two years ago, pharma produced 14 billion opioid tablets in the United States--enough for every adult in America to have a 3-week prescription of opioid pills. That was the reality. They were churning out these pills as fast as they could make them because they knew there was money to be made.

What we learned is that when the pills got too expensive on the black market, those who were addicted moved to heroin--another form of narcotic--which was cheaper and also addictive and, when laced with fentanyl or taken in overdose, killed the person who was using it.

Fourteen billion pills.

I have introduced legislation to address several aspects of this crisis. There is a lack of access to treatment. Once a family or a person identifies someone in need of treatment, sadly, there aren't many opportunities for good, affordable treatment to stop this addiction and to save their lives. I also want to respond to the childhood trauma that can drive people to opioid use. We see that. I want to improve the oversight of the volume and types of opioids being approved by our government for sale in this country.

We need to do more to prevent addiction and to address this crisis. What are we finally going to do to get serious about this?

First, we have to have the pharmaceutical industry stop making profit--their motive in the production of opioids.

Next, we have to be realistic about where these opioid pills are going.

Downstate in my State of Illinois, in Hardin County, which is a small, rural county, fewer than 10 doctors can prescribe controlled substances--10 doctors in this county. There is a total population of 4,300 people in Hardin County, and there are 10 doctors with the legal authority to prescribe. It is the smallest county in my State.

In the year 2010, pharma sent 6 million hydrocodone opioid pills and 1 million OxyContin pills to Hardin, IL. Seven million pills to a county with a population of 4,300 people were enough opioids for every resident of that tiny, rural county to have a 3-month prescription for opioids. Last year in Madison County, IL, which has a larger population, 17 million opioid pills were sent.

Maybe you have heard of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. I encourage my colleagues to pick up Foreign Affairs magazine or the New York Times or the L.A. Times or the New Yorker. There, you will read about the family who owned this pharmaceutical company and made a fortune off these opioid pills and addiction, the Sackler family. If the name sounds familiar, it is because they have donated millions of dollars to art galleries and universities across the country--and also helped to fuel our Nation's opioid epidemic. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma and is responsible for a lion's share of the opioid crisis we face today.

For years, under the Sackler family leadership, Purdue waged a comprehensive campaign to addict America to OxyContin. They wildly mischaracterized the risks of the drug, falsely claimed that it was less addictive and harmful, and just two pills a day were all you needed for full-time relief. They went on to say that OxyContin should be prescribed for common aches and pains, even when they had internal information proving that these pills were dangerous.

The family promoted the liberalization of direct-to-consumer drug advertising. Ever turn on the television lately and see the drug ads? How do we keep up with these? They are coming at us from every direction. Well, they went on direct consumer advertising with opioids at this point. They enlisted an army of sales reps to swarm doctors' offices with payments, false medical journals, and false promises. As my colleague, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, has documented, they showered the so-called patient advocacy groups with millions in funding to fabricate a patient perspective demanding more opioids.

In 2007, this company, Purdue, pled guilty to criminal misbranding of OxyContin. So what did they pay as a result? Listen to this. What did this company have to pay for creating the opioid crisis in 2007? Six hundred million dollars. Does it sound like a lot of money? It shouldn't because their sales revenues were $35 billion. So $600 million was the cost of doing their deadly business. No jail time for any member of the Sackler family, no Sackler family responsibility, but hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to be killed because of their crisis. As our former colleague, Senator Arlen Specter, once said, it is ``an expensive license for criminal misconduct.''

Purdue, the Sackler family, and other opioid manufacturers, such as Janssen, Abbott, Endo, and Insys, systematically orchestrated a complex web to deceive the American public, promote their opioids, and avoid liability. This is shameful, it is unjust, and it is well past time for Congress to do something about it. I will soon be introducing legislation to crack down on this corporate misconduct by properly penalizing and preventing the misrepresentation of opioids and requiring drug corporations to provide more information to the Food and Drug Administration on the risk of abuse and long-term effects. I am also examining the influence the pharmaceutical industry is exerting over our regulatory agencies and the medical community by hiring former officials with incentive payments.

In the meantime, here is what we need to do:

First, Purdue Pharma and other opioid manufacturers must testify before the Senate to explain their role in this epidemic. We did this with the tobacco companies and put them under oath years ago. We need to do the same to these pharmaceutical companies.

Second, we must fix the 2016 law that weakened the Drug Enforcement Administration's strongest enforcement tool against this outrageous distribution practice. I support efforts by my colleagues, Senators McCaskill and Manchin, to restore the DEA authority.

Finally, opioid manufacturers have profited off of flooding the market with painkillers and addicting Americans, and they should pay for the need for treatment their products have created. I have introduced legislation to impose a penny-per-milligram tax on the production of opioids. Big Pharma has to be financially liable for the mess and epidemic they have created.

While we sit on our hands, sadly, in the United States and watch this opioid epidemic grow, an arm of the Purdue company, Mundipharma International, is shamefully exporting its deceptive marketing campaign overseas. Mundipharma, an arm of the Purdue company, is targeting doctors and the public with misinformation they were found guilty of using in the United States.

Meanwhile, the wave of addiction created by the drug industry has ignited a new and deadlier crisis with the highly potent synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is being shipped through the mail in staggering quantities from China to the United States. This rippling effect is causing further deaths in America, straining our resources and exposing major gaps.

I am glad the Senate Judiciary Committee is considering this issue and moving one of my pieces of legislation forward, but we must do more. Our communities across the country are facing the suffering caused by this crisis. We need to do more to hold pharma responsible for this deadly, irresponsible, and many times criminal conduct. Let's start by bringing them to testify under oath before the Senate.

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Mr. DURBIN. Duckworth) is necessarily absent.

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Mr. DURBIN. Duckworth) is necessarily absent.

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