Border Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, last week, the DHS inspector general released a report detailing horrid conditions at border facilities. This is the President's own DHS inspector general saying how bad conditions were. Then we found reports of a secret Border Patrol workers' Facebook group that revealed a toxic culture at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Everything we had heard anecdotally, everything we feared about the mindset of CBP proved to be true in that Facebook group.

Over the weekend, the New York Times and then the El Paso Times released the latest account of conditions at the Border Patrol station in Clint, TX. A facility built for 100 adults has become a modern-day internment camp for up to 700 children at a time, many locked up for weeks on end. Some children go without beds to sleep on. There are food shortages and insufficient sanitation. For heaven's sake, we read reports of children suffering from outbreaks of scabies, lice, and even chicken pox. This is cruelty--cruelty--once again.

These awful conditions show that for too long, the CBP has operated as an agency out of control. It must be reined in immediately, beginning with its leadership. Internal investigations will not suffice because CBP leadership--particularly Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan-- is far too callous in their treatment of children and their families. Too many of the CBP leaders have had this attitude for too long, and it has infested itself down to too many who are the rank and file in that agency. We need untainted professionals to be brought in from outside the CBP structure immediately.

President Trump turns to his typical tactics of denial, distortion, and distraction. President Trump should be focused on fixing the problems that exist instead of blaming others. The truth, of course, is that we should never have been in this situation in the first place. The suffering imposed on migrant children is the result of the administration's own mishandling of family arrivals through Central America.

While Donald Trump says he is serious about fixing our immigration challenges, he has done just about everything to make matters worse.

President Trump, you want to fix the border? Then do what Democrats have been asking you to do for a long time--let the asylum seekers apply for asylum in their home countries, increase the number of judges to process the cases, and, for heaven's sake, restore aid to those Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to help them crack down on gang violence and cartels so people will not flee for fear of their lives from the gangs.

President Trump, stop finger-pointing at Democrats for this mess of your own making. You are the President. As this problem festers and gets worse, the American people realize you are the Chief Executive. It is your problem to solve.

We will join you, if you have anything reasonable to propose, but just finger-pointing at Democrats for this mess of your own making, President Trump, is like poking holes in your own umbrella and then blaming the clouds when you get wet.

I urge President Trump and Senate Republicans to seriously consider these measures because unless we make structural reforms to our immigration system, we have done nothing to reverse what is happening at the southern border.

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