Immigration
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, we know that President Trump during the course of his campaign made immigration a major issue. Almost from the beginning, he made it clear that he would take a different approach to immigration than previous Presidents of either political party. We can remember when he referred to those coming to the United States from Mexico as murderers and rapists. We can remember when he called for the construction of a 2,000-mile wall between the United States and Mexico, and quickly added: And Mexico will pay for it.
We can remember all of the statements that were made during the course of the campaign about immigration and terrorism. We knew we were in for a change in policy with this administration. Some of the things that have occurred have been stunning, and some of them have been horrible. One of those things was the subject of a hearing this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I serve on. It was about the zero tolerance policy. Some may remember that last year President Trump decided to eliminate and abolish the DACA Program. That was a program for those young people brought to the United States as children-- infants, toddlers, and children--who grew up in the United States and believed they were part of this country and future. They learned, probably about the time they became teenagers, that this wasn't true. They didn't have legal status. They weren't documented in the United States.
They have lived their whole lives here. They have gone through our schools, and some of them have been amazing students. They had planned to go on with their education and their lives, and they learned they had an obstacle in their path.
President Obama created an opportunity for them to continue to live in the United States without fear of deportation and to be able to work here. So 790,000 of them stepped up and paid a $500 filing fee, went through a criminal background check, and were given, on a temporary renewable basis, this protection under President Obama's Executive action.
President Trump eliminated that order. In doing so, he eliminated the protection they had to stay here. Their fate and their future were in doubt because of the President's unilateral action. He challenged Congress to pass a law to save them.
We tried. At the last minute, a bipartisan bill, agreed to here in the Senate by a majority of the Members, was rejected by President Trump. It also included massive construction of his wall, but he rejected it nevertheless.
Today, the only thing protecting those young people--the 790,000--are court orders, which can change any day or any week. The President's effort on immigration and children didn't end with his elimination of the DACA Program. Just a few months ago, they announced something called zero tolerance. Here is how it would work. At our border, any person who presented themselves between ports of entry and wasn't a legal resident of the United States could be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor--a criminal misdemeanor--of trying to come into this country without legal documentation.
People can come in without legal documentation between ports of entry and claim asylum and refugee status, but no distinctions were made. If a person presented themselves and didn't have legal status, they face this misdemeanor criminal charge.
What flowed from that has created a humanitarian disaster. Because of that charge, the Trump administration then ordered the agencies to forcibly remove all the children who were with their parents who came to the border. That meant that almost 3,000 children were forcibly removed from their parents at the border under the zero tolerance policy.
That was the law of the land for some period of time, or at least that was the President's order for some period of time, until public reaction from both Republicans and Democrats was so strong that on June 20, President Trump did something very rare in his administration. He almost admitted he made a mistake. He decided to eliminate the family separation policy.
The elimination of that policy did not solve the problem for 2,700 children who were in the custody of the U.S. Government. These are children under the age of 18 who were basically spread across the United States, and are being held by government agencies and government contractor facilities.
The case went before a judge in the Southern District of California, Judge Sabraw, as to what to do with these children. A number of organizations, like the ACLU, came forward and said: These children should be reunited with their parents. Our government separated them. They should be reunited.
He set a time table and schedule for that to occur. A lot was done, but not nearly enough. We had a hearing this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which went on for several hours with representatives from five different agencies of the Trump administration trying to explain how we created this policy and what we have done ever since to reunify these parents with their children.
All of us know it is not healthy to take kids away from their parents. The pediatric physicians in America--the American Academy of Pediatrics--came forward and called it institutional child abuse. If that sounds like an exaggeration, imagine if it were your child who was being taken away by our government, or your grandchild, for that matter. I know how I would feel as a parent and a grandparent, and I am sure most people realize it would be a traumatic experience for any parent--or for grandparent, for that matter--to go through. Then, from the side of the children, we know that kind of separation can cause real psychological problems for these kids.
I met some of these kids--they were 5 and 6 years old--in Chicago. They had been transported 2,000 miles from the border to Chicago and were being held by our government in a contractual facility--5 and 6 years old. These little kids couldn't figure out what had happened to them in their lives.
I will never forget the scene of being in a room with 10 of them and watching 2 little girls walk into the room who were hanging on to one another for dear life. I thought they were twins. They weren't. They weren't even sisters. One of them said: ``No, amigas.'' They had really latched on to one another because they were so uncertain about where they were and what their future would be. Doctors tell us that isn't healthy for children. Yet it continues for too many of these kids.
At the hearing we held, we talked about how many kids are still out there who haven't been reunited, who have been separated from their parents by our government agencies under this Trump zero tolerance policy. The numbers change almost by the day, but they estimate that over 700 children are currently separated, and in over 400 of those cases, their parents have been deported. So the parents come to the border, the kids are taken away, the parents are invited to leave the country, and the kids remain. Where are the parents? No record was kept as to where they were going. How will we reunite these kids with their parents? No one really knows. It was clear at this hearing that nobody had even thought in advance about what that meant.
When you listened to the testimony of the sworn government witnesses there, it was clear that no one from day one even envisioned what this policy was going to do. One of the people who testified before us--a man whose degree and expertise are in public health--said that he warned this administration. He told them that this was not a healthy thing to do to children, to separate them and put them in some institutional setting. Yet they went forward with this plan, and not a single one of them could point to any effort made to keep track of the kids and the parents so that someday they could be reunited.
In fact, what we found was that the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, on June 17, sent out the following tweet. It said: ``We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.'' The sworn testimony this week tells us that is not true, and it wasn't true from the beginning of the zero tolerance policy. There was a policy of separating children from parents. What this member of the Trump Cabinet said was just wrong, just plain wrong.
Listen to what the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security said on June 23. In a fact sheet that they sent out across the country, they said: ``The United States Government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families.'' Here we are, 6 weeks later, and they have fallen 700 children short of what they claim they already knew back in June.
These were two falsehoods that were promulgated on the American people to try to get them to believe this wasn't a serious problem. Well, we know better, because this Federal judge got serious about it, and he said: I am going to set a deadline for you to put these kids back with their families. Our government failed to meet the deadline.
Now read what this Federal judge had to say about it. This judge, incidentally, was appointed by a Republican President, lest you think this is some Democrat who is trying to make political hay. Here is what Judge Sabraw said: ``The practice of separating these families was implemented without any effective system or procedure for tracking the children after they were separated from their parents, enabling communication between the parents and their children after separation, and reuniting the parents and children.'' That is what the Federal judge said about the zero tolerance policy.
I can't remember a more heartbreaking and embarrassing chapter in American Government history in recent years--to think that our government set out with a policy to separate these kids from their parents, forcibly removing them and separating them without any plans to reunite them.
They argued afterward: We can't send these kids back to parents who might be dangerous.
No one argues with that.
We can't send them back to smugglers who are pretending to be parents.
Well, we can't argue with that either. But the United States accepted responsibility when we took custody of those children. We became what they call in law in loco parentis. In other words, we accepted a parental responsibility for these children. We have not met that responsibility.
I asked at some point, who is going to accept responsibility for this humanitarian disaster in this Trump administration? Absolutely no one has. I believe Secretary Nielsen should. I believe she should step down because this policy--this disastrous policy--has given a black eye to the United States.
What we have seen happen here is not consistent with our values as a nation. It is not consistent with the kind of treatment we have given to those who have come to our border over the years. Think about the refugees who presented themselves to become part of the United States and our history.
Think about the thousands of Cubans who came to this country saying: We want to escape communism. We want to come to the United States. Think about what a valuable contribution they have made. Did we punish them when they came into the United States? We accepted them. Have Cuban Americans been an important part of our country? Ask three U.S. Senators who are Cuban Americans. The answer is in the affirmative.
Think about the Soviet Jews, those of the Jewish religion who were living in the Soviet Union and facing all sorts of prejudice and discrimination. They asked for an opportunity to come to the United States, and we opened our arms.
Think about the Vietnamese who worked with us during the war trying to protect our soldiers, trying to be a part of the solution to their problems, risking their own lives in the process. We welcomed them to the United States too.
Time and again, this country has opened its arms to refugees who needed a helping hand and a place of safety. We did not put them in internment camps. We didn't take their children away to punish them. We said: We will hear you out, and if you have a legitimate claim, a fear of where you live, we will stand by you.
We know what is happening in Central America--in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. At this point, there are higher rates of murder, domestic violence, and rape than almost anywhere in our hemisphere, and these people are bringing their kids here for their safety.
I met in Chicago with one of the immigration lawyers who represent some of these immigrants, and she said to me: ``Senator, they believe their children will die if they leave them in these countries. They are willing to put their entire life savings on the line to get them to our border in the hope that they can be treated as refugees or people seeking asylum, and they are going to keep coming because the alternative is to accept rape and murder on their children.''
Think about if that were your choice in life, what you would do. Would you do everything in your power to protect these children? Well, they have done it, and they have come to the border, and we answered them by separating them from their children and deporting many of them back to these dangerous countries. This isn't consistent with what America is all about.
We should stand together, both political parties, and not only condemn zero tolerance but make a solemn commitment to return these children to their parents. These lost children sadly reflect on our Nation, and we need these children to be with their parents as quickly as possible. That needs to be our highest priority.
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