Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I come here in fulfillment of a promise that I made a couple of months ago to bring to the attention of the American people an injustice that is occurring in Turkey.

I am here to talk about an American pastor, Andrew Brunson. He is from a church. He is from western North Carolina. He spent 20 years in Turkey as a missionary. He started out just doing missionary work without a church. Then he built a very small church that maybe can house 100 people, in Izmir.

After the coup in 2016, Pastor Brunson was apprehended, and he has been in prison ever since. He was imprisoned for almost 19 months without any charges. For the vast majority of that time, he was in a cell designed for 8 people that had 21 in it, without charges. Earlier this year there were charges levied against him that are just absolutely absurd. I know from firsthand experience.

After the indictment was issued, I heard through channels and through his wife Norine that Pastor Brunson was afraid that the American people were going to read this indictment, believe it, and turn their backs on him. So it was important for me to go to Turkey and let him know that is the last thing we are going to do and that I was going to bring this to the American people's attention until he was released.

I went back about a month later. I sat through a court proceeding in a Turkish courtroom for about 12 hours, and I heard some of the most absurd claims you can possibly imagine. They were charges that would not keep an American citizen or a foreign national in an American jail for the afternoon. Yet they have kept him in prison for 642 days.

This afternoon I am going to be traveling to Brussels to be a part of the NATO meeting that we have. I am going to seek to speak once again with the Turkish officials to tell them that justice needs to be served. Pastor Brunson needs to come home.

Pastor Brunson has a court date next week. It could be the last hearing, and he could be subject to a 35-year sentence. He is a little over 50 years old. So that is effectively a life sentence.

The charges are basically this. He has been a missionary. He has been providing humanitarian relief to Syrian refugees, to the Turkish people, and actually just offering and preaching the Word to those who want to hear it.

So I ask President Erdogan and the Turkish officials to please let justice be served. Let Andrew Brunson come home.

The last thing we are working on--and I hope it no longer has to be a provision in the NDAA--is that if he doesn't get released, we have to rethink our relationship with this NATO ally that has been in the NATO alliance since 1952. We have to ask ourselves about ramifications if a NATO ally will hold people illegally, imprison them, sweep them up--in a legitimate effort to tamp down an illegal coup--and hold this man hostage.

I hope I come to the floor in a couple of weeks thanking the Turkish Government, the Turkish people, and the Turkish judiciary for having justice served. The only way I believe justice will be served is when Andrew Brunson comes home. Until he does, I will come back here every week to continue to bring attention to this issue. It should be important to every American.

If any American is traveling to Turkey, right now I am not sure I would because you could have a meal, you could have a light on for a couple of hours in your hotel room. These are the types of charges that have been used as a basis for saying that this man was conspiring to plot a coup and was conspiring to support terrorist organizations-- eating a meal that looks like a meal that certain terrorist organizations like, which, incidentally, is a very popular meal in the Middle East; having a light on upstairs, in a room, incidentally, that doesn't have windows that some secret witness said could only be on because they were plotting some nefarious activity.

I thank the Members of this body--some 70 Members--who signed on to a letter expressing their concern with his illegal detention. I promise Pastor Brunson and I promise any American citizen and some of those Turkish citizens who work with the State Department that as long as I am a Senator, I will be bringing attention to this injustice until justice is served.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Mr. President, I wish to very quickly bring attention to something about which I think people need to speak up on the other side of the issue; that is, this movement now called End ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

We have a gubernatorial candidate in New York who said ICE is a terrorist organization--not ISIS, which is a terrorist organization, but ICE. These men and women in uniform go out every day and put their lives on the line to protect the American people.

Let me tell my colleagues what people who are part of the End ICE movement are for. This chart represents what they are for if they are for ending ICE. These are 2017 numbers. They are for ending the arrest of some 143,000 people who have broken our laws. They are for ending the seizure of tons of fentanyl.

I will give you an idea of what that means in terms of potential risk of human life. You are talking about gangs--some 5,000 gang members who were arrested last year because they were clearly related to gang activity, with MS-13 being one of the first among them. They are for ending all of our protections and having all of these activities go unchallenged on American soil.

If you are for ending ICE, you are for ending almost 7,000 pounds of heroin seized, and that is only a fraction of what these criminal elements are bringing to this country.

If Members come to this floor and talk about fighting the opioid epidemic, I can't imagine anyone who is sincere about fighting the opioid epidemic saying that they want more poison on the streets. You can't have it both ways. You are either for solving the problem of the opioid epidemic, which means that we have to have law enforcement to specialize in seizing it, or you are against it. You are for poisoning our youth. You are for poisoning people who are addicted to opioids. You can't have it both ways. If you want to end ICE, you are for this.

If you want to end ICE, you are for people who have tattoos that clearly indicate that they are part of a gang on the streets. We have gangs that, actually, as a part of getting initiated, want you to kill or harm somebody to prove that you will when you are asked to. If you want to end ICE, you are for more of these folks on the streets--some 4,800 of them.

Again, if you want to end ICE, then you want to end the careers of people who have such a dangerous job that, oftentimes, when they do drug seizures, they have to wear HAZMAT suits because if they touch the fentanyl, they could die or go into an overdose. If you want to end ICE, you want that poison to be in the hands of a child or someone else who, if they touch it, is going to die or have a profound overdose.

That is what ending ICE means. Just to sum up, if you want to end ICE, you want that seizure of a ton of fentanyl coming across our border, mainly from Mexico, that has enough potency to kill 500 million people.

Now, I honestly believe that nobody in this body really means that they want to end ICE, that they want to cause human traffickers, gun traffickers, drug traffickers--more of them. But you can't have it both ways. If you want to go on the stump and say you want to end ICE, then add this to your stump speech. Add this to the logical consequence of what happens when you insult the men and women in uniform in ICE and you say you want to end what they are doing, because if you do, the negative consequences are clear. All you have to do is look at what ICE has done over the last year, and what they would not do this year, if you really believe what they say about ending ICE.

So I think they need to ice the ``end ICE'' narrative and start getting smart about making sure that we maybe make changes that we need to in any organization. But for people to go to such an extreme, to say that they want to end one of the most important law enforcement agencies combating illegal immigration and illegal trafficking across our border, you had better be honest on the stump. You had better let them know what you mean because that is what they mean.

I think it is important for our Members to step up and let people know the consequences of this ridiculous rhetoric and to show the men and women in uniform--police officers, ICE agents, and everybody else-- that people like me care about them. People like me respect them for what they do.

We know that their assaults were up by three times last year. It is a dangerous job. Many of them don't even know if they are going to come home when they leave in the morning.

It is an insult for anybody in this body to come into this Chamber and say that they need to be ended. They need to be thanked. They need to be revered. Agencies always need to be improved, but if you believe we should end ICE, you had better own the consequences.

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