Forced Family Separation

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, many members of the Democratic caucus are coming down to the floor to speak to the abomination of a policy of separating children from their parents when people are seeking asylum in the United States of America. The Senator from Minnesota is going to speak first, followed by the Senator from Hawaii, then the Senator from Washington, followed by the Senator from Illinois.

I yield to my colleague.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I really appreciate the comments of my colleague from California. She brings her background as a prosecutor, as attorney general to bear, as well as the heart of an American who understands that it is not within the scope of America's history or of our traditions or of our culture to treat those who are fleeing persecution by then persecuting them when they arrive on our shores. It is quite the opposite. Thank you for your comments tonight.

Thank you to my colleagues who have spoken before, the 13 Members of the Senate who came and spoke this evening, sharing some very powerful stories. In several cases, they told powerful stories about their own family history, about their own parents or grandparents coming here to the United States of America, placing themselves in a situation. They spoke about how they might have suffered if President Trump had been in office when their families came to the shores of the United States and if they had been separated from their parents when they arrived.

It really helps sometimes to put yourself in the shoes of others, to recognize that outside of our Native Americans, virtually all of us have roots that involve families fleeing persecution, fleeing civil war, fleeing religious oppression, fleeing starvation, and coming here to the United States of America. When they came to the United States, they knew that the general principle of our country was to treat them with respect and dignity.

It has always been symbolized by Lady Liberty. Lady Liberty says: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'' That quote is the one we all know from Emma Lazarus. Her poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty has some other powerful lines, like this one: ``From her beacon-hand glows worldwide welcome.'' That has been the attitude of America. She says ``the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!''

Well, that golden door, Lady Liberty's torch lighting the path, has been desecrated by President Trump because he has a new inscription, a new message he wanted to send. That message is called a deterrent. If you are fleeing oppression abroad and you wash up here on the shores of the United States of America, we are going to put you in handcuffs, we are going to throw you in prison, and we are going to take away your children. That is hardly the powerful vision of respect and dignity that has been the hallmark of how we treated those fleeing oppression throughout our history.

Pregnant and fearing for her unborn baby's life, a woman fled a death threat from a drug cartel in Honduras. She made her way to America, delivering her baby girl, Andrea, along the way. On Sunday, a group of seven Members of Congress--myself included--met her and her baby. We had gone out on the bridge to see what was going on because we had heard that our American border guards were blocking those seeking asylum from coming across that bridge. They were demanding to see papers of people on the pedestrian bridge, saying: You have a visa, fine. You have a passport, fine. You have no papers and you are seeking asylum, you are not welcome. You may not enter.

I found it hard to believe that we would treat those fleeing persecution, seeking asylum, in that manner, but I heard from others that was the case, and there were articles in the newspaper. We went out there, and we saw it firsthand.

Here is this mother with her baby girl. We were able to talk to her because when we came off the bridge and went into the Hidalgo Port of Entry, through those doors, they had a variety of counseling rooms there. One room was holding 10 or so individuals.

I said: Have you let in anyone who is seeking asylum?

They said: Oh, yes.

I said: Can we meet that person?

They said: Yes.

They brought her out to us with her little girl. She sat down. I sat down beside her.

We asked her some questions.

Why are you fleeing from Central America?

She said: My family took a loan from a private bank. The private bank has a relationship with the drug cartel or criminal empire that runs that part of the city. We can't repay the loan. We had been told that I am targeted to be killed. I was safe as long as I was pregnant, but as soon as I delivered, I would be at high risk. With a month to go in my pregnancy, I fled. I fled to protect the life of my child and my life. I fled.

Unfortunately, her uncle was killed. She escaped, but her uncle was killed. I think we all have to conclude that her fear was very real. There she is, 8 months pregnant, taking the journey from Honduras north up through Guatemala, through Mexico, to get to the United States, stopping along the way to deliver her baby.

I think about the journey of Mary and Joseph with Mary pregnant, seeking shelter, a place to deliver her child, Baby Jesus. She was let in, given accommodation, taken care of, welcomed.

This woman was largely on her own, as far as I could make out. She continued north with her newborn, and she made it to our border finally, escaped the drug cartel, escaped the death threat, and delivered her baby. She made it through Guatemala and Mexico. She got to our shore--the shore so long symbolized by Lady Liberty and her beacon of hope and welcome. She got to the border, and she tried to cross the pedestrian bridge, and she was stopped. She was sent back. She said she tried multiple times to get across that pedestrian bridge, and she was rebuffed again and again.

I said to her: How did you get across the bridge?

We had been out there. We had seen the border guards stopping those without papers.

How did you get across?

For just a moment, an absolute smile lit up her face. She said that as she was sent back time and again, she would study the situation, and she saw that there were people out washing the windows on the car bridge.

She said: I had a plan.

She went out and she borrowed a squeegee from one of the car window washers who were washing car windows and asking for tips. She washed windows all across the bridge, making her way through the cars to the United States of America, and then she was able to open that door to the port of entry in Hidalgo.

That is how hard it was for one young woman with a 65-day-old child in her arms to get the opportunity to seek asylum in the United States of America.

It troubles me to reread the transcript of Secretary Nielsen, who proceeded to say that there is no reason for people to cross our borders; all they have to do is come to the port of entry. That is all they have to do. But she is in charge of this program of slow-walking those seeking asylum to only let in a few at a time and send them back time and time again.

There was an attorney who was doing pro bono legal work for immigrants. On my first trip down 2 weeks ago before last Sunday, she told me that when she got out to that bridge, there were some 40 families sleeping on the bridge, waiting to be allowed to come in.

When I went on Sunday with the congressional delegation, we said we wanted to go out on the bridge.

The officer said: Well, there is nobody on the bridge.

I asked: Why not? They were there 2 weeks ago.

He said: There is no one on the bridge. You can go out and see for yourself.

Well, here is why there was nobody on the bridge: There is nobody on the bridge because they are not being let past the American border guards to come to the American side of the bridge.

This pro bono immigrant advocate and attorney said that those folks are trapped in a terrible, no-win situation because if they return to the Mexico side, the gangs in that city know they are easy prey. She recounted how some had been kidnapped and then their families had been extorted to get the money to free them. It is almost better for somebody to be on the bridge waiting than to be sent back to the Mexican side.

Those who run out of patience and end up crossing the border by going across the nearby river--the bridge is actually over the Rio Grande River. If they do that, then the administration says: You have committed a crime. We are going to lock you up and take your children away.

Another young woman we met on this trip was hanging her head with hopelessness and resignation. She told us she had presented herself for asylum at an official port of entry because she heard the right thing to do was to ask for asylum. Despite doing it at a port of entry, she was charged with illegally crossing the border. Now she sits in an ICE detention center with no idea where her child is, no communication with her family, no legal representation. Will she ever see her toddler again? She doesn't know. I don't know. Do you know whether she will ever see her child again?

Another mother we talked with was panicked over her child's health. She said that her child had medical conditions. When the border guards took the child away, they didn't get any of the information from her about how he needed to be cared for. She is deeply disturbed. She was pleading with them to take the medical information. She still doesn't know where her child is. She doesn't know how he is going to be cared for. How is that mother going to find out about her son's health?

Here is what we know. This policy, which was run as a pilot project last summer, was officially sanctioned with a policy memo on April 6 and was officially announced on May 7. This policy of separating children from their parents is an extraordinarily egregious assault on the welfare of the parent, and it inflicts massive trauma on the child. The American Academy of Pediatrics describes it this way: ``irreparable harm.'' It is harm that cannot be fixed.

Our colleague from Hawaii shared the story of family separation when her mother was not able to bring all of her children with her when she escaped domestic violence and came to the United States to start a new life and the lifelong impact that this has had on her brother.

Well, here is a piece of the puzzle we should spend a lot of time thinking about. Attorney General Sessions just changed the policy of the United States about what qualifies for asylum. So my colleague from Hawaii, whose mother fled domestic violence, would no longer qualify for an opportunity for asylum in the United States of America. She would have been turned away and sent home, back to the horrific circumstances from which she escaped, and my colleague today would not be a U.S. Senator, sitting here helping us to understand this issue through her personal, powerful experience. That mother, the window washer who carried her baby, Andrea, 65 days old, she told us, in one arm and a squeegee in the other, washing windows to get across and finally bypass the American border guard so that she could present her case for asylum--she was fleeing a gang. A drug cartel is defined as a gang, so she is not eligible for asylum--a change that was just made by Jeff Sessions unilaterally. This was an established policy to serve thousands of families fleeing from oppression overseas, and they have just lost their legal standing to be able to present their cases.

I was distraught about this Executive order that came out. It is very vague. The President--was he ready to stand up and take responsibility for the policy he implemented? Was he ready to say: I thought it was right, and here is why. I hear the American people. I hear the Southern Baptists. I hear the evangelical leaders. I hear the United Methodists. I hear the citizens profoundly disturbed by the treatment of children from every corner of the United States, from every part--from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to Southern California, and across Hawaii. I hear them, and I am going to do better. I am going to change this. I am going to modify what we do.

Did he take responsibility? No.

He titled it ``Affording Congress An Opportunity To Address Family Separation,'' and then he proceeded to say nothing about actually uniting the families he has already separated. There is not a thing in here about actually remedying the harrowing plight that he has now put several thousand families into--and counting. The last count I heard was 2,300, and that was days ago. Where are we now? There are 2,500 families separated, children separated from their parents.

What do we know about this situation in which the existing children are going to be united or not united? We have an article from the New York Times that my colleague from Colorado referred to this evening. It answers the question very plainly. I have heard various analyses saying that this Executive order fails to address what is going to happen to the current children, those children who were sent far away from their parents and their parents are incarcerated. The parents are in prison far away. Where are the children? Far away. What is going to happen to them? This doesn't say.

It does say that it is the policy of this administration to maintain family unity, as if it has always been the policy of the administration to maintain family unity. It doesn't announce that they are reversing the previous policy. It doesn't announce a new policy. It says that it is the policy to maintain family unity.

If it is the policy to maintain family unity, then why do I have this in my hand, this article from the New York Times, quoting Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families?

Realize this: When the Department of Homeland Security takes children away from their parents, it then ships them out to a different agency, the Administration for Children and Families, which is a part of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Human Services. So the children are torn away by Homeland Security, and then they are put in a different department over here, a subsection called the Administration for Children and Families. So here is the spokesman, and he says: ``There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases.'' ``Cases''--what a word to describe children ripped away from their parents. They are cases; no ``grandfathering of existing cases,'' he said.

He goes on to say: ``I can tell you definitively that is going to be [the] policy.'' Well, I can tell you definitively, I am going to fight that policy. I am going to fight that policy of failing to reunite these families after the administration says that it is policy to keep families together and then says: But not all the children we have already harmed.

This is pretty disturbing, but it is only the half of it. What is the other half? The other half is that the administration has not given up on its strategy of deterrence based on injuring children. It is a strategy laid out by Jeff Sessions, supported by Chief of Staff John Kelly, with Steve Miller chiming in to say: This will work. They want to deter people from seeking asylum here in the United States of America by mistreating those who arrive and try to seek asylum. They use the word ``deterrence'' to send a message of what will happen to you if you try to come here.

There is no moral code in the United States of America or in the world that would support hurting children to send a message to families still overseas. There is no religious tradition on this planet that supports injuring children to send a message overseas. But here we have Mr. Wolfe speaking definitively that nothing is going to be done for those children, those more than 2,000 children who have been separated from their parents.

Moreover, the other half of the policy is that for those now coming in, it will be the official strategy of the United States of America to incarcerate the children along with the parents. That is the plan. We have already gone down that path in the past. Experts have already weighed in, saying that incarcerating children with their families--they may not be separated, but they are incarcerated. They can't go to school. They can't play on the playground. To continue this policy of deterrence, that is another strategy of injuring children. That is deeply, deeply disturbing, and it is profoundly unacceptable.

We have done this before. We have put families together in prison camps. We did it in World War II. We took our Japanese-Americans, and we put them into prison camps. It was a profoundly disturbing chapter in our history. Now the President says that is his new plan--to put families together in prison camps.

So, no, I am not happy that the President has ended the policy of family separation because he hasn't ended the strategy of harming children. The fight must continue. The pressure must continue. The weighing in by religious group after religious group needs to continue. The legal challenges need to continue. The debate here on the floor of the Senate needs to continue. We cannot accept family prison camps here in the United States of America.

I was struck by the fact that we had a program that was working pretty well. That program is called the Family Case Management Program. Here in my hand is the report from the Office of the Inspector General of Homeland Security. This is the inspector general's analysis of the Family Case Management Program to keep families together and out of prison and to make sure they show up for their hearings, their asylum hearings. This report is from just a few months ago, November 30, 2017.

For those who want to look it up online, just look up OIG--for Office of the Inspector General---18-22. That is OIG-18-22, and you will immediately see a copy of the inspector general's report. It takes a look at this program, the Family Case Management Program, which addresses this challenge in a whole different way.

Here is what it says, in summary:

As of March 30, 2017, ICE reported that it expended $17.5 million in program costs to enroll 781 active participants in FCMP--

the Family Case Management Program-- across all five locations. According to ICE, overall program compliance for all five regions is an average of 99 percent for ICE check-ins and appointments, as well as 100 percent attendance at court hearings.

It doesn't get much better than 100 percent of people showing up for their court hearings. This didn't require a family prison camp. This got 100 percent by treating people with respect and having a case manager who actually spoke their language check in with them, making sure they had their cell number and their home number and knew where they were living, and making sure they knew the date and understood the importance of showing up both for their check-ins and appointments and their court hearings.

They didn't have 80 percent show up for their court hearings; they didn't get 60 or 40 percent. They got 100 percent.

So there is no argument--no argument--that you have to incarcerate people to have them show up for a hearing, and there is no morality in continuing to injure children in order to send a message of deterrence to people overseas.

Then we have the plan, through all of this incarceration, to build prison camp after prison camp. We have a picture of the tents.

There are children in this new prison camp that is near El Paso, TX. They ran out of room. They ran out of room at Casa Padre. Casa Padre is a big former Walmart that was serving as a detention center for children--children who were unaccompanied minors and children who were separated from their parents. They said earlier this year that they had 300 children there, and in April they had 500 children there.

When I went down there 2 weeks ago and stood outside that Walmart, trying to gain entry after having been denied a waiver to visit it with less than 2 weeks' notice, I said that I had heard from refugee advocates that there were hundreds of kids behind those doors in Walmart--hundreds--and there might even be as many as 1,000 children behind those doors. Even as I said those words, I thought: That is not possible. It is not possible that 1,000 children are locked up in that Walmart.

What did we find out 2 weeks later? A congressional delegation going down and getting a waiver to be able to visit--there weren't 1,000 children there. There weren't 1,100 children there, not 1,200, not 1,300, not 1,400. They had gotten a special adjustment to their permit to allow 1,500 children to be in that Walmart. There were 1,500 children sleeping, living, spending the day, apparently trying to go to class--1,500 in this one building. They said they actually were at capacity. They said: We do have a few slots. But it was something like 1,467 kids. So maybe they had one busload that they could add.

That is why the government is building this tent city--for all the children they are detaining, for all the children they are ripping away from parents.

Now the administration says: We will take these same tent cities, these same prison camps, only we will put whole families in there. By the way, for those children we see in this picture--the almost 1,500 boys I saw at Casa Padre--they don't get to be united with their families because Kenneth Wolfe, the head of the Administration for Children and Families, says that there will not be a grandfathering, meaning those kids are out of luck. For as long as their parents are incarcerated, they are out of luck.

Now, a lot of parents were told: You are only going to go through a court proceeding. It will just take a day or two, and you will be united with your children. That, in many cases, is a lie. If they were asserting asylum, the administration has decided to keep the parents incarcerated until their asylum hearing which, at this point, could be many months into the future, sometimes over 1 year into the future.

There is one woman who said that she came here expecting to be able to assert her asylum claim. She didn't know if it would be judged to breach the standard for asylum in the United States, if she would have enough evidence to demonstrate legitimate fear of return and that she had been persecuted before she came. She didn't know if she would meet those standards, but she said: What I have learned is that my child has been shipped off. She actually said ``children.'' She had several children. She said: It may be that I will be in prison for a year. So I have two choices. One is to give up my asylum claim and be shipped home; the other is to be in prison for a year. She said: For my children's sake, I will ask my sister to adopt my children. She was trying to find some decent way, with asylum blocked and threatened with a year in jail, just to get an asylum hearing.

For those Members of the Senate who have family histories with people who have come from abroad--and I would say it does include every single Member of this Senate; I don't think a single Member of this Senate is 100 percent Native American; so every Member here has a family history with all of these branches going out for generations--imagine your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandmother, and what would have happened if they had arrived in the United States and they told them: You must leave your children aside and be in prison for a year, knowing what harm it will do to your children, and knowing that at the end of the year you might not be granted asylum anyway when you got that hearing.

So let's wrap this up. I believe that we must return to the vision of the Statue of Liberty. I believe that our Nation is a Nation that deeply resonates with the understanding that when those individuals flee persecution--they flee persecution--they should be treated with respect and dignity when they arrive on the shores of the United States.

We absolutely must not go to a family policy of incarceration. That is handcuffs for all, and it is completely unacceptable. We had, under family separation, handcuffs for the parents, and now the administration proposes handcuffs for all of the people and to put them in prison.

This must not stand. We must resist it with every particle of our being and return to treating those who flee persecution with graciousness and fairness and dignity.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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