Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, in 2017, I said on the Senate floor that we needed to come together to help rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in the Houston area and that our work was not complete and more work needed to be done. That, unfortunately, still is true today.
It is true also for the damage caused by other natural disasters during the same timeframe that was appropriated by Congress but has not yet found its way to the intended beneficiaries. Although we voted to send billions of dollars to help Texans still reeling from Hurricane Harvey, some of those funds are still needlessly caught up in bureaucratic redtape.
This is not just a phenomenon that affects my State. It affects all of our States. This is not acceptable to me, and it isn't acceptable to the people I represent--all 28 million of them--and it shouldn't be acceptable to Members of the Senate.
This storm ravaged the Texas coast and was the largest rain event in American history, with parts of Southeast Texas seeing 60 inches of rain over about a 5- or 6-day period. It destroyed people's homes, their businesses, and our communities.
In the wake of the storm, we all pulled together in Congress, in an unusually bipartisan manner, to provide billions of dollars in disaster aid. Like I said, it wasn't just for Texas. It was for Florida, Puerto Rico, for wildfires out in California, and other places that suffered from natural disasters.
The dollars we appropriated, and were signed into law by the President, have helped Texans get back to some sense of normalcy, and I am grateful to my colleagues for working together with us to make that happen. What has not been helpful, however, are the unnecessary delays on the part of the Office of Management and Budget in getting the roughly $4 billion in mitigation funds into the hands of State and local communities that desperately need them.
I have searched in vain in the Constitution for where the Office of Management and Budget has the power to veto appropriations bills passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. I can't find it. Yet they are still the impediment to the execution of Congress's intent to get the money to the people who need it.
The intent of Congress was crystal clear in the February 2018 disaster supplemental, when we appropriated about $12 billion of community development block grants for disaster recovery.
As I said, the undue delay is unacceptable, and I am filing an amendment to the disaster relief that is on the floor of the Senate this week to ensure that these funds and other like funds are properly disbursed.
Last month, Governor Abbott, Senator Cruz, and I wrote a letter to the OMB to stop stalling, but so far all we have heard is crickets.
The amendment we will file will start a timer on when the Federal Government must release funds appropriated by Congress. It will give the government bureaucracy up to 90 days to get the money untangled from all the redtape and to get it to the communities that desperately need it. This 90-day rule wouldn't just apply to this particular block of funding; it would apply to any funds that are now being withheld by the Office of Management and Budget that Congress appropriates to these States.
As I said, last time I checked, Congress had the power of the purse, not the Office of Management and Budget. I don't know about the rest of my colleagues, but I am not OK with letting OMB dictate when and how duly appropriated funds are released to the intended beneficiaries.
The disregard of those who are still struggling to rebuild and prepare for future storms by the bureaucrats is appalling. They know the kinds of hardships my constituents are facing, and they know that Hurricane Harvey will not be the last hurricane to hit Texas. It is time to do what is right by our State and local communities who have seen their livelihoods rot in a fleet of floodwater.
It has now been more than a year since President Trump signed a bill that would have sent roughly $4 billion to Texas. Imagine what could have been accomplished with that money in the meantime. They could have repaired wastewater treatment facilities that haven't been fully restored. It could have led to important economic revitalization projects in decimated areas. They could have even relocated or elevated damaged facilities to prepare for the next storm. But, no--those projects are still on hold because the OMB has refused to release the funding.
The 2019 hurricane season is fast approaching, and it is critical we get work done on long-term projects to protect my State and the Texas coast against future storms.
It is difficult to plan for the future with the resources we need being caught up in bureaucratic limbo. We have been waiting to get to the place where before Harvey and after Harvey isn't such a stark difference.
With the inclusion of my amendment, the clock will start ticking on the Office of Management and Budget to do its job and ultimately release these hurricane recovery funds. Texas communities have waited long enough. Border Security
Mr. President, I want to draw attention to another group of people who need our help, and those are the officers and agents of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Yesterday, Commissioner McAleenan announced that Customs and Border Protection is facing an ``unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border,'' and he provided some alarming statistics.
Yesterday morning, CBP had more than 13,000 migrants under their care. Under normal circumstances, a high number is 4,000. They consider 6,000 to be a crisis, and now they have more than double that. Yesterday, the Commissioner said that we are at a ``breaking point'' along the border.
Frankly, because the American people aren't acquainted with some of the details, they may think that CBP can easily handle 13,000 people in their custody on a given day, but, unfortunately, that is not the case.
CBP's detention facilities are relatively small, built for the short- term detention of single adults. The current immigrant surge from Central America is primarily of children and family units and has put these small facilities at overcapacity levels. Processing times have slowed due to the large number of people being processed and the lack of Border Patrol personnel to process them.
As the Chief of the Border Patrol has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, this is intentional on behalf of the transnational criminal organizations that are responsible for transporting people from Central America to our borders. This is a moneymaking proposition. If you can charge $5,000 or more a head for every person you deliver to our border, that is a big, big deal. These people are not just involved in transporting immigrants. They are engaged in trafficking of human beings for sex or involuntary servitude, and they are also engaged in trafficking drugs.
I will remind all of us that last year, 70,000-plus Americans died from drug overdoses--70,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year--according to the Centers for Disease Control. A substantial portion of that was part of the opioid crisis, not just prescription drugs but also synthetic fentanyl as well as heroin. Ninety percent of the heroin that comes into the United States comes across the U.S.- Mexico border. As President Obama himself said in 2014, this is truly a humanitarian and security crisis, but it is on steroids today.
On Monday, CBP had the highest totals of apprehensions in more than a decade, and on Tuesday, they broke that record. Daily averages for border apprehensions are higher than we have seen at any time since 2006.
Last month, CBP apprehended 76,000 people in 1 month on our southern border--the highest monthly total in over a decade. Yesterday, Commissioner McAleenan, announced that, in March, they are on track to beat that record with 100,000 apprehensions along our southwest border. That is 76,000 apprehensions in February and an estimated 100,000 in March.
As a result of the surge, because the Border Patrol has to do something, 40 percent of the Border Patrol's manpower is now spent processing immigrants and providing care and transportation. In other words, they are not engaged in their primary mission, which is border security, because they are busy handing out juice boxes and diapers to children, as well as processing the immigrants who are providing other transportation.
The Border Patrol simply doesn't have the resources, nor should it be expected to have the resources, to handle this crisis and perform their primary duty, which is to protect our border. We know that detention centers are at or over capacity, and local charities and nongovernmental Agencies are strained, as well, and all of our border communities are being overrun by humanity.
Recently, Senator Cruz and I were down at the Sarita checkpoint to name that checkpoint after a heroic Border Patrol agent who was killed by two illegal aliens. We were approached by the chief of police from McAllen--somebody who is well respected in law enforcement circles in our State--who said that because the Border Patrol is simply unable to process all of these people, and they are being released into those communities or put on a bus and sent to places like San Antonio, they are increasingly worried about public safety. That is notwithstanding the fact that many of our border communities are extraordinarily safe, at least on our side of the border. If you go on the Mexican side of the border, they are some of the most dangerous cities in our hemisphere.
This is having a profound impact on our local communities, on the men and women of the Customs and Border Patrol. Frankly, it should be an embarrassment to us here in this country that we haven't dealt with this in a more timely and more effective way.
Because the cartels have figured this out, people crossing the border today are largely families and unaccompanied minors because of the special way they have to be processed and because of a consent decree called the Flores decision, which says you can't detain them for more than 20 days. That is not enough time to get them in front of an immigration judge in order to adjudicate their asylum claim, so they are released into the interior of the United States. Guess what. Overwhelmingly, they don't show up for their court hearings because they realize they have beat the system. The cartels know that because of the money they make. They are exploiting these vulnerabilities in our laws and in our infrastructure. The only people who can fix that are Congress and the President, working together in a bipartisan way.
I know we have had a big debate over border barriers--walls, fences, you name it--but, frankly, you could build all the barriers you want along our southwest border, and it will not stop this flow of unaccompanied minors and family units because, frankly, they are showing up at the border, and they are turning themselves in. So we need to act.
Two weeks ago, Ms. Nielsen, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said: ``The situation on our southern border has gone from a crisis, to a national emergency, to a near system-wide meltdown.''
Our Democratic colleagues have called this a fake emergency. They have opposed treating this crisis for what it is. It is even more than an emergency; it is a total system failure, and the only people who can fix it are Congress, working with the President. I am not sure how much longer our Democratic colleagues could be in denial when we see this flood of humanity coming across in higher and higher numbers every day.
The issue is staring us in the face. The numbers confirm what we have said all along: This is a border security and humanitarian crisis.
Secretary Nielsen made an important point that our communities, our members of law enforcement, and the immigrants themselves are paying the price for our inaction.
We have heard it from people at the border who know how to fix the problem, and we need to listen. They have told us time and again that it will take a combination of technology, physical infrastructure, and boots on the ground. It will also take legislative action to fill the gaps in our laws that we know exist and are being exploited by the cartels.
I want to commend the men and women of Customs and Border Patrol for working around the clock in a thankless job but in an important job. Frankly, I am embarrassed that they haven't seen more support by the people who represent them in Congress.
We have sent them out on a losing battle unless we can work together here in Congress to give them the resources and the legislative fixes they need.
I want to assure these dedicated men and women that we are trying, but we need their help to talk to their elected Representatives here in Congress. We need Ms. Pelosi to consider this the same humanitarian crisis that President Obama identified back in 2014, when he called it a humanitarian and security crisis. By any measure, it has gotten much, much worse. We need to give this crisis the serious attention that it deserves.
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