Zero Tolerance Equals Zero Humanity

Floor Speech

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Mr. POCAN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to talk about a trip I did on Sunday to the United States southern border in Texas to visit the processing centers and detention facilities that we are using to enforce the zero-tolerance policy that the President has put forth, the zero-tolerance policy that apparently means zero humanity.

It is a policy that is cruel, inhumane, and un-American, and I want to share my firsthand observations with the American people about this.

First of all, it is a cruel policy. We are separating mothers and fathers, parents from their children, brothers from their sisters, across the border as people come into the United States.

I can tell you that when children are taken away from their parents, sometimes they are told a lie of why. Sometimes they are just taken away. There are no questions asked of the parents about the children: Do they have an allergy? Have they ever been abused? Do they have any diseases? The basic questions that you would ask, if you didn't have a cruel policy, aren't asked. So you are essentially separating the parents from their children without any information whatsoever.

I talked to mothers at the ICE detention facility, and we asked about the situations, if they knew where their children were. One woman pulled out a little slip of paper that said where her children were, as if she knows New York, as if the other mothers knew Florida. It is not like the children are held in the next room, in the next building, in the next city, but they are being held several States away.

One woman told us that she was told that her children would be put up for adoption. Another woman told us that she would be released and eventually her 9-year-old daughter held by herself in New York would be released.

The policy is inhumane. People are being held in cages. And anyone who wants to contest that, come to my backyard and I will show you the dog run in my backyard that is made of the same material and the same construction, only with shorter walls than the cages that we are holding people in, in the processing center.

There are no pillows. You have a mat. There are no toys for children. Then I visited the Walmart Supercenter where we have 1,500 10- to 17- year-old boys held in a Walmart Supercenter where the sleeping space is 6 by 10. Even though it is a little larger room with six or eight beds, it is a 6 by 10 allocation.

I have done work with supermax prisons when I was in the State legislature. A supermax prison cell is 8 by 12. That is 40 percent less than a supermax prison cell. You get outside 2 hours a day. In a supermax prison, you get out about an hour a day. This is wrong.

Parents don't often know the status of how their children are doing. When we were set up to interview one woman, she hadn't even seen her 13-year-old daughter in 2 days. This is un-American.

We are taking the points of entry that are legal points of entry, and we are making it impossible to get into the United States. So what happens is you either go back into Mexico where you can get kidnapped by a cartel and extorted for money from relatives in the U.S., or if you don't want to get kidnapped, you cross illegally across the river, and then you get detained under the zero-tolerance policy. And that is why we have this situation.

But the bottom line is, Donald Trump did not do anything, nor did this Congress, to actually fix the situation. Donald Trump finally caved to enormous public pressure, saying he will no longer separate children and parents, but he won't fix the 2,300 children who are currently separated at all. That is not in the executive order.

We don't have the facilities to deal with this. Again, because of this policy change, in 6 weeks, the population of the detention center at Walmart, which I refer to as the supermax prison, went from 500 to 1,500 in 6 weeks. You can't make that process work.

Everything I saw shows the President did this without any thought, and because no thought was put into it, people are treated thoughtlessly through the process.

Ultimately, the President did this for one reason: he wants to force Congress to put up an unneeded and unnecessary wall at the border, and he will do anything and use anyone to get what he wants.

This Congress today has a couple of bills up that will not deal with this issue. We need to act. This is a cruel, inhumane, un-American policy.

This is a Trump policy, and if we don't act, we are also complicit in the horrors that are happening.

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