Energy and Water, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I understand there are two bills at the desk due for a second reading en bloc.
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I wish to first address the vote we held yesterday--one that unfortunately failed but I believe was important nonetheless. It would have set in motion a series of spending reductions--not on bills where we had appropriated money for programs and we knew where it was going to be used, but these were essentially surplus funds which were not being used for the intended purpose and which I believe should have been used to reduce our annual deficits and ultimately our national debt.
I want to express my gratitude to Senator Lee, the Senator from Utah, who spearheaded the effort to take up a bill that the House had already passed.
What we were attempting to do was rescind nearly $15 billion in previously appropriated money that has gone unspent, as I said a moment ago. This was just one small way to show the American people that we are serious--as the majority leader put it yesterday--about tightening our belts financially and taking small steps that hopefully would add up to big steps to live within our collective means.
I voted for the rescissions package because I believe strongly that the government should prioritize keeping its fiscal house in order, one that constantly works to improve and implement fiscal discipline.
I am concerned now that as interest rates are starting to rise, we are going to see more and more Federal spending go to pay debt service or interest payments on bonds that have been issued to secure our national debt.
So I hope we can come back to the table soon with new ideas, and I am disappointed in the outcome of that particular vote.
Keep Families Together and Enforce the Law Act
Madam President, I have also been speaking this week about the ongoing situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Of course, this is my backyard. I come from Texas, and Texas has a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico. We know, because we have all seen in the news and been moved by these scenes of people illegally crossing the border with children or individuals they claim to be their children and being separated as they have been processed, consistent with current law, including laws Congress had passed, signed by the President--not necessarily this President, in fact--consent decrees, and other court judgments that necessitated that children be treated differently than people who illegally enter the country as adults.
I will be traveling to the Rio Grande Valley tomorrow. Senator Cruz and I both will be in Brownsville and McAllen so we can learn from the people who are working on behalf of all of us to make sure everybody is treated with dignity and compassion. But we also enforce our laws against illegal immigration.
President Trump yesterday issued an Executive order, which I viewed as an emergency measure, that does not substitute for congressional action. In fact, I am confident that the Executive order will be the target of lawsuits. I think the only thing that could really settle the matter once and for all is legislation, which I know the Presiding Officer and I and others have cosponsored, to keep families together and to maintain enforcement of our laws.
Executive orders, of course, as I said, are always subject to legal challenge, and I think we ought to view this as more of a belt-and- suspenders. The President decided he wanted to do what he could on a temporary basis, but it is just a temporary basis, and we need to make sure, as I said, that this is finally settled so that no parent will be separated from their child even if they enter the country illegally. They will be treated both humanely and with compassion while they are presented to a judge who will make a decision on whether they qualify for a legal immigration benefit like asylum, for example.
The legislation I am referring to is led by the junior Senator from North Carolina and is called the Keep Families Together and Enforce the Law Act. As the title of the bill suggests, there are two parts: treating families with compassion while allowing them to remain together and enforcing the laws on the books. They don't have to be mutually exclusive, and our bill would ensure that they are not. It will allow children to stay with their families in a safe facility while they await their court proceedings.
It will also set mandatory standards of care for family residential centers where immigrant families are placed and keep children safe by requiring that they are removed from the care of any individual who poses a danger to them. Just as importantly, it will require more than 200 new immigration judges and require the Department of Homeland Security to expedite the court proceedings for these children and families.
Some have rightfully asked questions about the families who have already been separated: What happens now to the children who have already been separated from their parents?
I can tell you our bill requires the administration to take steps to reunify as many families as possible who remain in the custody of Immigration Customs Enforcement or Health and Human Services.
I have to tell you, this is an old movie in many respects. We have seen this movie before, particularly in 2014, when we saw a flood of unaccompanied children coming across the southwestern border. President Obama, at the time, called it a humanitarian crisis, and I agree. We simply weren't prepared for this flood of children from Central America coming to our border and seeking refuge or asylum. We worked hard to try to make sure they were treated compassionately and humanely, but the law, similar to the law in effect now before the President's Executive order and the law that would be modified by the new bill I mentioned a moment ago--the current law requires those children to be processed by the Border Patrol, to then be handed over to Health and Human Services, and ultimately placed with a sponsor in the United States pending their hearing on their immigration case. Because of the huge backlog of cases, it could be literally months or years before those cases are heard.
It shouldn't surprise anybody that the overwhelming majority of individuals don't show up for their court hearing. That is why it is important for us to move these cases to the head of the line, to maintain a humane detention while they are awaiting their court hearing--hopefully, in a matter of days or weeks, at most.
This is a huge problem that frankly was exposed, in part, by the New York Times. It recently reported that based on the tens of thousands of children who came across the border as unaccompanied minors who had been placed with sponsors, in a check of where those children are now, at least 1,500 of them are unaccounted for.
That should surprise no one because the sponsors were not required to be citizens. They weren't required to be relatives. They weren't even required to have a criminal background check. When the U.S. Government places these children with sponsors in the United States with such inadequate supervision and review, it should not surprise anyone that, unfortunately, some of them will be unaccounted for; hopefully not recruited into gangs, hopefully not trafficked for sex, hopefully still alive. This is a huge humanitarian crisis, and the latest episode having to do with separation of families is just the latest version of that story.
Who benefits from status quo when we fail to correct our laws to make sure that both individuals coming across the border are treated humanely and that we enforce our immigration laws? Who benefits the most? It is the transnational criminal organizations, the cartels, which make money off the status quo. As one person called it the other day, when they were referring to the situation, these organizations are commodity agnostic. As long as they can make money, they will traffic in people, drugs, weapons, and other contraband. They don't really care as long as they make money.
Until Congress acts, as we must, these cartels, these criminal organizations, will continue to exploit these gaps in American law, and the people who will be hurt the most are these children and immigrants who do have a case to make before the immigration courts.
I hope we will act. Frankly, our track record is not good when it comes to fixing our broken immigration system, but I know Mrs. Feinstein, the Senator from California, and Senator Tillis have been talking, and a lot of us have been putting our heads together to figure out how we can come up with a narrow bill that will keep families together and allow us to enforce the laws of the land. I hope we keep trying until we get it done and get it done right.
Other proposals have been made, including one by our friend the senior Senator from California. She and I have worked together on many issues, but on this one, I think her bill has a lot of problems. In fact, there is a huge question about what sort of enforcement, if any, would ever be permitted under her bill. In effect, her bill would make it impossible to enforce the law against an adult illegally crossing the border unless the child is able to go to jail with that adult. I don't want a child to have to go to jail and be exposed to hard and potentially violent criminals. This is a big problem with our friend's bill, Senator Feinstein.
By the way, every single Democrat on that side of the aisle has signed on to that bill. Did they intend this result? No, I don't think they intended it, but it is a big problem with their bill. Children should not go to a jail run by the Bureau of Prisons. No one, I would think, would think that is a good idea. So that is essentially what the bill results in.
Again, I am not saying this was their intention, but the result is to reinstate this catch-and-release program, which has been a failure of our immigration system for a long time. When there is nowhere for the families to be detained and when they can't go to Department of Justice facilities, basically, the authorities simply have to let them go and say: Come on back in a few months, maybe a couple of years, when your case comes up on the immigration court docket.
That is the result. As I said earlier, in the vast majority of cases, people do not reappear because they understand, if they made it that far, they are basically off scot-free. The cartels and the transnational criminal organizations that traffic in people and facilitate this sort of illegal immigration are the ones cashing in on these vulnerabilities and on these gaps in American law. We need to fix it.
Let me correct one other misconception from all of the emotional news we have seen recently. Sometimes the facts get lost. If an immigrant family crosses the border outside of a designated port of entry, they have broken the law, unless they are authorized. If you release these individuals without any consequences, you send a clear message that it is acceptable to cross our borders illegally. Once you have sent the message to the criminal organizations--to people in Central America and elsewhere--that it is OK to break the law and you will be released without any consequence, it should come as no surprise that a huge percentage of illegal immigrants fail to show up at immigration court hearings and that it is a magnet attracting more illegal immigration if there are no consequences associated with it.
With all due respect to my friend, the senior Senator from California, her bill has these unintended effects, and I think simply will not do. I want to be clear, we want to work together to try to address what she wants to accomplish and what we want to accomplish. Let's keep families together, but let's not inadvertently or unintentionally reinstate the broken catch-and-release policies, which simply serve as a magnet for more illegal immigration.
Some commentators have pointed out the problem I have identified. It is not just me. They have said Senator Feinstein's bill would present law enforcement with a terrible choice of either keeping children with parents or criminals in the middle of being prosecuted or not prosecuting those violations of the law at all. That is not really a choice. We know what the decision would be. Those cases would not be prosecuted. There would not be enforcement. Then, again, the transnational criminal organizations, the people who try to take advantage of our laws, will have won.
With these and other shortcomings, I think the much better option would be the bill introduced by Senator Tillis, which I, the Presiding Officer, and others have cosponsored. It would achieve two important goals: continued enforcement of our immigration laws and the unification of families. Some of our friends on the left seem to want one but not the other. They want to unify families, but they don't want to enforce our immigration laws. They say they want to see zero tolerance ended--zero tolerance for violating immigration laws, and, of course, they cast a lot of aspersions on the President and the Attorney General for implementing this policy, along with the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Let's think about their criticism for a second. What does that really mean? If you aren't happy with zero tolerance of violating our immigration laws, that means you are happy with tolerating exemptions for lawbreakers. You tolerate not enforcing immigration laws under some, perhaps many, circumstances. We can all see where that leads us. It encourages illegal immigration by sending a message by saying we will not enforce our laws. We should not stand for that and neither should the American people. It would be a big mistake.
Tomorrow Senator Cruz, my colleague from Texas, and I will be traveling to Brownsville and Weslaco, once again, so we can get eyes on the situation there and learn from the people who are charged with making sure our policies are carried out.
As I mentioned, Texas has 1,200 miles of common border with Mexico, and we are ground zero when it comes to the border security challenge. I look forward to talking with our Federal and local officials about the situation, along with faith-based organizations and other groups who are trying to help out. We need their help and welcome their help.
Ultimately, I urge colleagues on both sides of the aisle to continue talking urgently and to support the bill Senator Tillis and others have introduced. We can come together, we can fix this problem swiftly, and ensure these children are kept together with their families.
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Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Corker) and the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
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Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Tennessee (Mr. Corker) and the Senator from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
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