National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020--Motion to
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. today the Senate vote on the confirmation of the Baranwal nomination, with all other provisions under the previous order remaining in effect.
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, yesterday I had a chance to sit down with a group of my constituents visiting DC from the Rio Grande Valley. For those who have never been to the Rio Grande Valley, I highly recommend a visit. It is a beautiful region, a unique part of our country, rich in culture and history and full of hard-working people and businesses that fuel our State's and the Nation's thriving economy. As record numbers of people continue to mass migrate across our southern border, it has become one of the most heavily impacted areas in our country, and it is working hard to manage the growing humanitarian crisis.
Last month alone, 144,000 people were detained coming across our border. It was the largest monthly total since 2006. It only begins to paint the picture of how challenging this mass migration has become. The vast majority of the people who crossed last month were either unaccompanied children or families, putting a strain on resources across the border, particularly when it comes to detention facilities.
It is no mistake that the human smugglers, whom we call coyotes back home, have figured out that if you can smuggle an unaccompanied child or family across the border, you vastly improve the chances of successfully placing them in the United States. That is because they understand our laws better than many Members of Congress do, and they know how to exploit them for their financial gain.
The detention facilities I referred to a moment ago have been around a long time--long before the current surge of families and children began arriving at our borders. They were built as short-term detention facilities for single adults. As trends have changed, the men and women of Customs and Border Protection have done everything in their power to make these facilities workable on an increasingly thin and inadequate budget.
I want to pause for a moment to say thank you to the men and women in uniform who are providing around-the-clock enforcement of our laws and providing quality and compassionate care to the migrants in their custody. It is a tough job. When you train to be a Customs and Border Patrol agent, you are not trained in child care, but that is what many of them find themselves doing--handing out juice boxes and diapers and providing assistance to those families as they seek to have their claims for asylum adjudicated.
This is a tough job, and it is getting tougher every day, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley and along the border. Of the 144,000 crossings last month, nearly 50,000 were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley, making it the most heavily impacted of the entire border.
In fact, it should come as no surprise that Texas is impacted more than any other State because, of course, we share a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico. Two-thirds of the apprehensions so far this fiscal year have occurred in the Rio Grande Valley, El Paso, or Del Rio sectors. As Federal resources have rapidly depleted, Customs and Border Protection officers and agents have struggled to manage the processing, care, and transportation of these migrants, and local communities, it should be no surprise, have stepped in.
The Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen is one of several locations working to care for the migrants and has had its doors open for 5 years now. In the summer of 2014, we saw then-unprecedented numbers of Central Americans, particularly children, arriving at the border. This was back when President Obama called this a ``humanitarian and security crisis.'' The scenes were heartbreaking and spurred many folks to action to try to offer their help.
Sister Norma Pimentel is the executive director of Catholic Charities in the Rio Grande Valley and led the creation of this respite center. Migrants who are released by CBP or ICE and are awaiting a court date are often dropped off at the center by officers or agents themselves. There they can get food, a hot shower, a good night's sleep, and travel to wherever they are going to await their court date.
There is certainly a need for this type of assistance under the circumstances, and it has been in existence only 5 years. The respite center has helped more than 150,000 people and continues its work as more people cross the border each day.
The number of unaccompanied children who illegally entered the United States last month is higher than in any other month since the 2014 surge that I mentioned a moment ago. The weight felt by those trying to provide assistance is getting heavier and heavier. As Federal resources dwindle, local communities in the Rio Grande Valley and along the entire Texas-Mexico border have been filling the gaps, despite the fact that, obviously, immigration and the sovereignty of our borders are Federal responsibilities. In the absence of Federal response, it is the State and local communities that have had to step up to help.
Like the respite center in McAllen, these communities regularly provide care, transportation, food, and shelter for migrants in need. I believe this generosity shows the true Texas spirit and helps illustrate how serious the problem has become and how desperately additional Federal resources are needed.
Thankfully, yesterday the Appropriations Committee took action. The committee announced an agreement on a border supplemental package that will include humanitarian assistance needed at the border. The nearly $4.6 billion includes funding to support the missions of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is providing care for the record number of unaccompanied children who are arriving in the United States. It also provides funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is working to enforce our laws and properly care for the adults and families in their custody, as well as the Departments of Justice and Defense. The hard-working men and women in these Departments are working tirelessly to care for the migrants in their custody, and I want to thank each of them for working day in and day out to enforce our laws. But, as I mentioned, these are not the only folks trying to provide support with minimal support from the U.S. Government.
Earlier this month I sent a letter to the chairman and ranking member of both the Appropriations Committee and the Homeland Security Subcommittee, requesting that the funding package include reimbursement for local communities that helped carry the weight of the humanitarian crisis. NGOs, nongovernmental organizations, like the respite center in McAllen are trying to do more and more with less and less. Cities and counties are diverting hard-to-come-by taxpayer dollars from their intended purposes, such as public safety, power, and clean drinking water, to do the job that is the responsibility of the Federal Government. It is unfair for these folks to pay for a humanitarian crisis that is not of their making. I am glad to see the Appropriations Committee taking some action to right this wrong.
The funding agreement yesterday includes $30 million available nationwide for direct reimbursement for local governments, States, and NGOs that have spent millions of dollars to respond to this crisis. Communities, both along the border and throughout the State of Texas, will be able to request reimbursement directly through local and national boards of the Emergency Food and Shelter Program at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help lessen the financial burden they have incurred over the past few months.
I want to thank the chairman and ranking member and all of our colleagues on the Appropriations Committee for supporting this effort to help alleviate this strain on Texas communities. The funding bill received broad bipartisan support in the committee and passed by a vote of 30 to 1. I hope we will soon have the opportunity to pass this important funding bill here in the Senate. I encourage our friends in the House to put politics aside and do the same.
As happy as I am that the appropriations committee has come up with this additional money, this is still a matter of treating the symptoms and not the underlying cause. President Trump, in his frustrations with congressional inaction, threatened to impose additional tariffs on the nation of Mexico. Fortunately, the negotiations that ensued came up with a plan for Mexico to work with the United States to begin to slow down or stop the flow of people from Central America across Mexico into the United States.
I have never seen anything quite like that before in terms of our relationship with Mexico. They have historically tended to view immigration as our problem, not theirs, as well as the drug problem, because the demand in America is our problem and not theirs. This really represents a change of attitude on behalf of President Lopez Obrador's administration, and I want to congratulate President Lopez Obrador and his administration for working with the United States to address a joint problem. This is not just Mexico's problem. This is not just the problem of the United States. This is our shared challenge. Working together, I am confident we can begin to address it.
Finally, I want to say that Congress has largely been AWOL when it comes to dealing with this humanitarian crisis up to this point. A couple of months ago, my colleague from the House of Representatives, Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, TX, and I introduced a bill we called the HUMANE Act, which would fix some of the gaps in our laws that are being exploited by the human smugglers and are causing this humanitarian crisis in this huge flood of humanity coming into the United States.
If Congress would accept its responsibility and do its job, it would never have been necessary for the President to threaten additional tariffs on Mexico, forcing this diplomatic negotiation. I am glad it resulted in a good and positive outcome, that negotiation, but the fault ultimately lies with Congress for not taking up and debating and voting on bipartisan legislation like the HUMANE Act that has been introduced in the Senate and in the House.
I will say that Chairman Graham of the Judiciary Committee has been focused like a laser on this issue. We were scheduled to mark up a bill today in the Judiciary Committee that I believe would incorporate many provisions of the HUMANE Act as part of a bill which would, I believe, address this humanitarian pull factor because of exploitation of those gaps in our asylum laws. That now has been postponed, but I hope the discussions will continue because, ultimately, this is a matter of congressional responsibility. We can be glad that the Appropriations Committee stepped up and provided additional resources, including this $30 million in reimbursement for local communities. We can be glad that Mexico and the United States are finally now working together on this shared challenge, but ultimately, if we are going to address not just the symptoms but the causes of this humanitarian crisis, it is up to Congress. I believe the American people will ultimately hold us accountable, as they should.
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