Forced Family Separation

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues who are here tonight and Senator Merkley for organizing this evening.

The President has taken a step back from a crisis he provoked, a crisis he caused, and it seems like it is a rare recognition on his part that when a President speaks and a President acts, he speaks and he acts on behalf of the American people, not on his own behalf. The American people could not stand the idea that this country would do what it did to these kids in their name. They could not stand the idea that the whole world would see the separation of children from their parents on the southern border of the United States of America-- perpetrated by our own government.

Finally, probably for the first time ever, this President relented to the values the American people share whether they are conservatives or whether they are liberals or something in between that. That is a reason to say I am glad we are moving in that direction.

Maybe another good thing will come out of this, which is that the people who stood up who work for this administration and defended this terrible, inhumane policy in the name of the law and in the name of religion--the Bible--might think harder the next time they do that at a moment of conscience like this one.

As my colleagues have said, it is not clear tonight what is in the policy. I quote a New York Times article that is on the front page of the paper tonight.

It reads:

And a Health and Human Services official said that more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under the President's ``zero tolerance'' policy will not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings.

``There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,'' said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Wolfe said the decision about the children was made by the White House, but he added, ``I can tell you definitively that is going to be policy.''

So what are they saying--that current kids aren't going to be grandfathered, that the current kids who have been on the TV this week and the week before are not going to have the benefit of this Executive order?

Shear, Abby Goodnough and Maggie Haberman)

Washington.--President Trump caved to enormous political pressure on Wednesday and signed an executive order meant to end the separation of families at the border by detaining parents and children together for an indefinite period.

``We're going to have strong--very strong--borders, but we are going to keep the families together,'' Mr. Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office. ``I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.''

But Justice Department officials said it was not clear whether the practice of separating families could resume after 20 days if a federal judge refuses to give the government the authority it wants to hold families together for a longer period.

And a Health and Human Services official said that more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under the president's ``zero tolerance'' policy will not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings.

``There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,'' said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Wolfe said the decision about the children was made by the White House, but he added, ``I can tell you definitively that is going to be policy.''

The president signed the executive order days after he said that the only way to end the division of families was through congressional action because ``you can't do it through an executive order.'' But he changed his mind after a barrage of criticism from Democrats, activists, members of his own party and even his wife and eldest daughter, who privately told him it was wrong.

Stories of children being taken from their parents, audio of wailing toddlers and images of teenagers in cagelike detention facilities had exploded into a full-blown political crisis for Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans, who were desperate for a response to those who have called the practice ``inhumane,'' ``cruel'' and ``evil.''

The president's four-page order says that officials will continue to criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the border illegally, but will seek to find or build facilities that can hold families--parents and children together-- instead of separating them while their legal cases are considered by the courts.

But the action raised new questions that White House officials did not immediately answer. The order does not say where the families would be detained. And it does not say whether children will continue to be separated from their parents while the facilities to hold them are located or built.

Officials on a White House conference call said they could not answer those questions.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, the headline of the article reads: ``Trump Retreats on Separating Families, but Thousands Will Remain Apart.''

We need to know, and that, obviously, isn't going to be acceptable to the American people if that is what it is.

The last point I want to make tonight, because I know I have other colleagues here, is that it does not help matters when the President is completely allergic to the truth on any dimension but especially on this one.

Today, at the White House, in front of all of the cameras and in front of the Republicans he invited there--he didn't invite any Democrats--this is what he said in lamenting the fact that he couldn't do a deal with Democrats.

This is the President:

We're having a lot of problem with Democrats.

They don't care about lack of security, they would like to have open borders, where anybody in the world can just flow, including from the Middle East--from anybody anywhere they can just flow into our country. Tremendous problems with that. Tremendous crime caused by that. We are just not going to do it.

That is what he said is our position.

As the Presiding Officer knows, I was on the Gang of 8 in 2013 that negotiated what was called the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Enforcement Act of 2013. The first two words in that title are ``border security.'' It got 68 votes on this floor. Every single Democrat voted for it. I want the American people to know what is in it because they will never hear from the President as to what was in it:

There is $46 billion dollars for border enforcement; $30 billion to hire and deploy nearly 20,000 new Border Patrol agents, doubling the total number, a doubling of the number of Border Patrol agents; $8 billion for a fence along the southern border at least 700 miles long; $4.5 billion for new surveillance technologies, including air and marine surveillance so we could see every inch of the border, so we would know what was happening there; $2 billion to enact recommendations of a newly established southern border security commission; $750 million to expand the E-Verify; the remaining $1.5 billion dollars for administrative costs to the Departments of State, Labor, Agriculture, and Justice.

That was the border security bill we passed in 2013, and that is the border security bill we should pass today. The only reason it is not the law of the land today is that the House would not let it come to a vote. Had they let it come to a vote, had the Speaker allowed it to come to a vote, it would have passed.

I think, collectively, we should go back to that work and see if we can't actually solve the problem rather than just play politics with it or, in the case of what we have just seen, rather than play politics with the lives of the children on the southern border.

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