National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Madam President, I rise in advance of the discussion that will be taking place in a very few minutes on the National Defense Authorization Act. I want to compliment and acknowledge the leadership of Senator Reed of Rhode Island and Senator Inhofe and, of course, Senator McCain, for whom this bill is named. They have provided amazing leadership, as the Presiding Officer knows from her membership on the committee, by bringing this bill to the floor. I look forward to supporting it later this afternoon.

Family Separation Policy

Madam President, I do want to take a few moments to discuss a different subject, which is what is going on at our southern border.

Secure borders and limits on immigration are necessary and justified in any country, and that is why there were major border security provisions in the comprehensive immigration reform act that passed this body by two-thirds--67 votes--in 2013. If that bill had even been taken up in the House, I believe it would have passed, it would have been signed, and a lot of the problems we are having today around the issue of immigration would already be solved.

I believe in border security. I believe in necessary limits. This is a difficult issue--I understand that. It is difficult in part because of the proximity of our country to some of the most violent countries in the world, with the highest murder rates, countries from which people are literally fleeing for their lives. But difficult issues are amenable to humane and decent solutions--solutions that take into account our values, that take into account the underlying principles upon which this country is based. And this is one that could be resolved without this drastic policy of separating children from their parents.

I was asked on the way in whether we will do legislation to solve this problem. This problem could be resolved by a phone call from the President of the United States to the Attorney General. This is not the law; this is a policy of enforcement which was adopted by this administration in April, implemented in May, and which has brought us to the place where 2,000 children have been forcibly separated from their parents.

There are just a few points I want to make.

No. 1--and I think this is important; this is lost in the discussion--asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants. They are coming to this country under the law. They are allowed to come to the country and then prove their case, and they should have an opportunity to prove their case. They are not illegal immigrants. They are being lumped in with illegal immigrants. These are almost entirely people who are seeking asylum here because they are fleeing violence in their own country.

This country was based on asylum seekers. The Pilgrims were asylum seekers. The Catholics who came to Maryland were asylum seekers. The Irish who came here as a result of a famine were asylum seekers. The Jews who came here in the thirties and forties, during the period of the Holocaust, were asylum seekers. I should say that one of the darkest periods of this country's history was the turning away of the USS St. Louis in the late thirties, where a third of its population of Jewish people went back to Europe and died in the Holocaust.

This country is based upon some basic principles, some of which are stated very unequivocally on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

That has been the promise of America from the very beginning. We are not a country like most other countries in the world--based upon one race, one ethnicity, one population that has lived in the same place for 1,000 years, one language. In fact, our secret is the people who have come here from other places, with their ideas and their energy.

I sit in the U.S. Senate seat following four of my illustrious predecessors, all of whom are children of immigrants, every single one: Edmund Muskie, the son of an immigrant polish tailor, one of the great Senators of the 21st century; George Mitchell, majority leader, the son of immigrants; and Olympia Snowe, the daughter of a Greek immigrant. This is who we are as a country, and we are talking about arresting people and locking up their children in cages.

I have heard various justifications for this:

We are just following the law.

No, the law does not require separating children from their parents. This is a policy that was adopted by this administration in April and implemented in May. This is not required by the law. This is a policy decision, and it can be rescinded by a phone call from the President. It can be solved this afternoon by a phone call from the President.

Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor.

So is jaywalking. Are we going to have a policy that says we are going to separate children from their parents because of jaywalking? It doesn't have to be this way.

Children and their parents can be kept together while we go through the legal process of determining whether their asylum claim is valid. That is a process that we have, and, yes, it takes too long. That is on us because we haven't adequately funded the judicial system to have enough judges to hear those claims.

The next justification I have heard is that it is a deterrent, that it will be a deterrent.

It is only a deterrent if the people who are coming from these countries--by the way, very few of them are coming from Mexico. They are coming from Central American countries, some of which, as I have mentioned, have the highest murder rates in the world. And we are going to say: Well, we are going to rip your children away. That word will get back, and then you will not come.

We could do a lot worse. Can you justify anything as a deterrent? Can you justify any inhumane treatment? We will torture you if you come across the border--that would be a deterrent, but that doesn't make it right.

The next one that I heard is that it is a bargaining chip for negotiations. We will bring the Democrats to the table, and that is when we will talk about immigration. But we are not going to change this policy until then because it is a bargaining chip.

We do not take children hostage in legislative negotiations, and that is what this is. Let's call it what it is. It is literally taking children hostage to be a bargaining chip in a legislative negotiation on the broad panoply of issues involved in immigration. That is wrong. It is a basic principle of everything we hold dear that we don't negotiate with hostage-takers. Yet that has been explicitly stated as a motivation for this policy.

The final justification I heard, and frankly the reason I am here today because it just tore it for me, is the Bible; that somehow this is justified by the Christian Bible, by Romans 13, which says you should obey the law. Yes, that is what it says, but it also says the law should be based upon love.

I would add that very provision, Romans 13, was used 150 years ago to justify slavery. Would that provision apply in Germany in 1938, where the law was exclusively directed at punishing the Jewish people? It was legal under the German law. Would that provision say this is OK; we don't have to object to it because it is part of what is in the Bible? No; of course, not.

To say that this is somehow justified by Scripture is just ignoring the whole message of the Bible and certainly the message of the New Testament.

For me, as a Christian, it all comes down to Matthew 25. The King said:

Come, you who are blessed . . . take your inheritance. . . . For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Then, the righteous said:

Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?

They went through the whole list and said: We never did any of those things. And Jesus said:

Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire. . . . For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. . . . Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, my brothers, you did not do for me.

I was a stranger, and you took me in. That is what the Gospel talks about. That is what we are talking about here, is talking about strangers and trying to take them in.

Of course, it goes without saying that Jesus and Mary escaped from the Promised Land because of the threat of violence from King Herod into Egypt. What if Egypt had said: No, we are not going to take you in. We will send you back to Herod. That is the law. Herod's law is the law; we are going to send you back.

They were asylum seekers, and Egypt took them in, and our Lord and Savior was born.

So don't come to me and tell me this is somehow justified by Scripture; it just isn't, under any stretch of the imagination, and it can be remedied by a phone call.

We don't have to negotiate a complicated bill here. We don't have to work on something for 3 weeks. A phone call this afternoon from the President of the United States to the Attorney General can end this obscene practice. Then we can talk about asylum seekers and what the rules should be and what the standards should be and how long the policy should be and how many judges we need and how long you should be able to wait until you get your case adjudicated and all of the other complicated issues involved in immigration, but we should not be talking about it in the context of children being held hostage.

So I hope the President will make that phone call, solve this problem this afternoon, and then we can get about solving some of the larger problems that he and I and everyone else in this body are concerned about, but let's not do it with children in cages anywhere in America.

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