Congressional Hispanic Caucus

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOMEZ. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for inviting me to participate today.

I actually serve on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and today we had a hearing about the conditions of the camps at the border, the conditions that the children are kept in.

We have lost six kids at the border, and I want to just highlight their names, because we need to recognize that there is a human face to the tragedy that we see; it is not just numbers.

We have Carlos Hernandez Vasquez; he was age 16. Wilmer Josue Ramirez Vasquez, age 2; Juan de Leon Gutierrez, age 16; Felipe Gomez Alonzo, age 8; and Jakelin Caal Maquin, age 7, and Mariee Juarez, age 1.

Mariee's mother actually testified in front of the committee to tell her story of what she was trying to accomplish by coming to this country and about the fear that she had as she crossed and as she was detained.

I want to remind people; a lot of people think that it is a crisis that is being created on its own. It is not. It is something that is a result of this administration's zero tolerance policy.

I want to remind people that the zero tolerance policy started because this President, as he was running for office, said that he was going to be tough on this issue, and that he would be the only one that could solve it. So what we ended up seeing is that we saw the zero tolerance policy.

And what is it? The zero tolerance policy states that anybody that crosses in between ports of entry will no longer be held civilly and administratively responsible; that they will be convicted criminally.

Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General when this policy was started to be implemented said: Zero tolerance policy shall supersede any existing policies.

And what this did is it caused people, when they are criminally convicted or being held for breach of criminal law, the parents are being separated from the kids.

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Mr. GOMEZ. Correct. And that is where we want to make sure people understand that this crisis, the separating of the children, was a direct result of this policy. It doesn't say, yeah, they will be separated. But it is that they would be--zero tolerance led to the separation. One triggered the other.

People then also try to make the argument that this happened under the Obama administration, but the Obama administration didn't do that. They were dealing with unaccompanied minors that were flowing into the country, and they had to deal with that humanitarian crisis at that moment.

So this administration has really taken a zero tolerance policy, which has had a ripple effect on capacity to handle influx, the metering issue, the Remain in Mexico issue, the separating of the kids and not keeping appropriate track of those children to make sure that they are actually returned to their parents.

And this administration, time and time again, now says that they never had a child separation policy.

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Mr. GOMEZ. And it wasn't only Secretary Nielsen. It was Kelly Anne Conway. It is a fabrication and a lie that has been repeated by the administration; and that is something that we want to call out, to make sure people understand that what is going on now is a direct result of the zero tolerance policy.

Additionally, we want to make sure that people understand that a lot of the decisions were made based on, I believe, on politics. My own personal belief was this, they wanted to seem tough, so they implemented policies without really understanding how they implement it on the ground.

I have taken tours not only of Otay Mesa, Adelanto, I went out to Victorville; I went to Tornillo, Texas, so I have been to the border quite a bit of times, a number of times.

And when you start talking to the people who are responsible for implementing these policies, the men and women who are in Customs and Border Protection, some of them are trying to do a good job. They are saying that they are being put in an impossible situation by this administration by often determining policy at a whim. And the problem is, when you are making policy not on rational decisions but on politics, then you end up with this situation, which is a big mess on the border.

I actually spent a night at the border with one of my colleagues.

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Mr. GOMEZ. Yes, at Otay Mesa. We spent the night at the Mexican side of the border, literally on the line, and we were there just to observe migrants to present themselves for asylum. They were on U.S. soil. They presented themselves. They were told that it was full. Congresswoman Barragan and I asked to see the facility. They refused to show us.

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Mr. GOMEZ. Yes, correct. Customs and Border Protection refused to let us in to see it. So the migrants sat down. We sat down with them. We got there around 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and we didn't leave until the next day, around 7 a.m. So we spent the night. It was cold. We slept on the ground.

The migrants couldn't leave the U.S. soil or the Mexican authorities would have grabbed them. So we actually got corralled, using bike racks, into kind of a cage to keep us in a certain area. Every so often, Customs and Border Patrol would wake us up to ask us who is here, how many kids, how old, but these were questions that we answered three or four times.

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Mr. GOMEZ. Correct. And what we were trying to remind them is that, by international law, by U.S. law, these migrants had a right to present themselves for asylum and then ask so that they can be processed. They ended up getting in. It was the woman who was tear- gassed at the border in that famous----

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Mr. GOMEZ. With her kids. She was one of the folks, and she asked for a credible fear asylum hearing, and she went through the process. That is why we have this process, so that we don't end up with just a backlog at the border that is more dangerous for the kids and the migrants, and it is unnecessary under what we believe under our rule of law.

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Mr. GOMEZ. And if I can interject.

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Mr. GOMEZ. I mentioned this article in the Oversight hearing. It is actually a ProPublica article, entitled: ``Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke about Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes.''

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Mr. GOMEZ. I think you make some excellent points.

One point I want to kind of talk about, this culture that is permeating Customs and Border Protection, I think that it is also based because of the leadership of this administration. The attitude of zero tolerance, as in, like: Nope, it doesn't matter what conditions you are leaving, it doesn't matter if you are fleeing violence, it doesn't matter if you are a victim of domestic abuse, you can no longer use that as a rationale for seeking asylum. That zero tolerance mentality is what is also helping drive this rotting of the culture within Customs and Border Protection.

Changing the leadership makes a difference, but as long as there is a change in the civilian leadership.

Oversight is crucial. A lot of people ask: What is the difference between Democrats and Republicans? What is the difference between you guys being in charge versus Republicans being in charge?

One of the things that I noticed when I was on Oversight in the minority from my first year, year and a half in Congress is that we couldn't call in Customs and Border Protection and ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to have a public hearing on these issues. The only hearing we had regarding the zero-tolerance policy was behind closed doors, no cameras present. I don't even believe staff was allowed in the room.

So we had to sit there and ask, and we asked enough questions to get more information about how the zero-tolerance policy worked, how it was the nitty-gritty. But if people don't hear it, the public doesn't hear their testimony, then it lacks the credibility because some people think we are making it up.

So we need not only the right kind of leadership to reform the culture, we also need to make sure that there is direct oversight by Congress, and that is our job.

I voted against the emergency supplemental because I didn't feel that there were enough constraints on the money that was going to be sent to the agencies, that they were going to actually use it to improve the humanitarian crisis that was going on on the ground at the border region.

So we need to continue pushing that oversight, and that is what I plan on doing. I know that, under your leadership, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is doing so.

At the same time, I want to highlight another issue. People act like ICE has been around forever. We have to remind people that our system was restructured after 9/11 to make sure that we do have appropriate security at the border, at the ports of entry, through the airports, right, that we had major flaws. So reorganizing and changing and holding a bureaucracy accountable, that is the job of Congress. That is the job of everybody who gets elected.

So the idea of what should be done, I think that first we need to make sure that we are more specific on our money, make sure there is better leadership and, at the same time, never run away from our values that this country is based on immigrants and built by immigrants.

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Mr. GOMEZ. Madam Speaker, Mr. Castro makes a good point regarding the guardrails, the funding.

One of the things that I would like to point out is if this administration, this President, as he claimed, was the only one who could solve this problem, then why hasn't it been solved?

It is a bigger mess and a bigger disaster than we have ever seen, and that is resulting in these conditions on the border where people are mistreated. This culture that is becoming rotten to the core is starting to just fester. We have seen an uncounted number of children who have died.

According to Newsweek, there were no migrant children who died while in CBP custody during the final 6 years of the Obama administration. Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen previously admitted that it had been more than a decade since a child had died in CBP detention until December of last year when the 8-year-old Guatemalan national passed away on Christmas Eve. Since then, at least four other children have died while detained.

We are seeing this crisis get worse and worse, and my fear is that we haven't hit the bottom yet. Until Congress steps in and puts those guardrails in place, until we flex our constitutional muscle, we are going to see things deteriorating further.

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Mr. GOMEZ. Madam Speaker, I want to stress a few points.

Mr. Castro mentioned that this administration hasn't invested in aid to the Northern Triangle countries. One of the things that we need to recognize is that the zero-tolerance policy isn't working. It might feel good for hardliners to say: ``It is zero tolerance. We are not going to take it anymore. We are going to push back,'' but it is not solving the problem.

For example, the statistics show that net migration from Mexico to the United States is zero. In some instances, it has declined, where more Mexican nationals are returning to Mexico than ever before.

Why is that? Mexico still has issues regarding security, but its economy has built up more and more.

I have family members who are in Mexico, and they have no desire to move to the United States because they believe that their opportunity there is just as good as it is here.

So imagine if we want to be serious about tackling the issue of undocumented immigration to the United States, especially from Latin American countries. The way you do it is first by, of course, creating a comprehensive immigration reform here in this country but, at the same time, investing the resources and the policies that build up the economies of Latin America, thereby creating a situation where people feel that, instead of risking their lives to get here, they would rather stay at home.

That is one thing that this administration doesn't understand, but we also need to highlight for the American people. The zero-tolerance policy, the tough on undocumented immigration hasn't worked.

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Mr. GOMEZ. And they know about the conditions on the border, they know about the risk that they are taking, but they are leaving some desperate situations. So the way you make it so that they don't want to leave is that you make things better for them at home.

Some folks will say, well, that is not our responsibility; that is the responsibility of their home countries. But if you want to be a political realist about how we solve it, you have to have international aid, almost a Marshall Plan, for Latin America in order to build up their countries, their economies, their infrastructure, their training, and then make sure that we have a system here that has enough legal immigration in order for people to not try to come into this country illegally.

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Mr. GOMEZ. And we know, because of that, you have a situation where people are getting sick in these facilities, and then putting the kids and the people whose immune systems are compromised into more vulnerable positions.

We definitely have a lot of work to do, but in order to do that, we need to make sure that the American people know what is going on, to tell the story and to not let people forget about the kids who have passed away: Wilmer, Carlos, Juan, Jakelin, Felipe, and Mariee. Because if we forget, we turn away, only more kids will perish and more people will die at the border

It is our moral obligation. It doesn't matter if they are not U.S. citizens. It is our moral obligation to ensure that doesn't happen.

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