Congressional Hispanic Caucus
Floor Speech
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Mr. SOTO. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas, Congressman Castro, for putting together this Special Order hour. And it is timely, to say the least.
There are many borders that our Nation has. We have a lot of focus on the southwestern borders, such as in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. But there are also borders like what we have in Florida, with the Caribbean surrounding us, and a short, either plane ride or longer sea voyage to our peninsula.
We have immigrants from Venezuela coming in, fleeing tyranny. We had for generations Cuban-Americans escaping the issues down there. We have folks of Mexican descent who are farm workers in Polk County, and in other areas, that are now second and third generation.
And, yes, we have many refugees, particularly children, who have left the Triangle in Central America and are part of this great humanitarian crisis at the border.
I got the opportunity to be able to visit the Homestead facility, a facility that had blocked several of us from several requests of touring it. And I saw over 900 children, between the ages of 12 and 17, that were in a facility not made for over 500. And I suspect those numbers have grown since then.
There are a few of us who did speak Spanish, like myself, and were able to talk briefly to the children, even though they told us not to; but you know our responsibility that we have.
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Mr. SOTO. Sure. No speaking to the kids there; no photos. And then we were given kind of a song and dance about how well everybody was treated.
These young people hailed from Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, countries that we hear over and over because of the strife from drug cartels down there that are warring.
I saw six to eight beds per room, sometimes more, in rooms that couldn't be any bigger than 10 to 15 by 15, with shared showers between two of those rooms. And then I saw classrooms and recreation facilities in giant makeshift tents, these big, kind of puffy ones that were clearly not permanent facilities.
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Mr. SOTO. There is no question; those tents would be at great risk if a 3, 4, or Level 5 hurricane hit South Florida. And they are at the very end of it in Homestead, which is even south of Miami.
I want to talk a little bit about the root causes of it. We go back to the Triangle and what is happening. You know, these families are fleeing as an act of love because if their kids stay, they could be brought into these cartel drug wars and may not even survive to be 18 years of age, let alone go on to live productive lives.
So one of the root causes of this is that the funding, the foreign aid funding down in the Triangle hasn't been where it was under the Obama administration.
And of course, then, this idea that we have to detain all of these kids, which has really helped manufacture this border crisis. It could be easily resolved by getting them to families in the United States. I have been briefed that many of them are here to visit families, and we could have ways to track everybody; everything as tough as an ankle bracelet to having a case worker and having something less draconian.
But they chose not to do that. They chose to hold these kids back because they don't want them to go out into the general population of the United States.
So, if we just did things the way the last two t three Presidents did, Obama, Bush and Clinton, we wouldn't be in this situation right now, this deliberate holding of kids, as well as asylum seekers, in general, at the border that doesn't need to happen here in the United States.
And with asylum seekers, it violates many treaties that we are a part of.
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Mr. SOTO. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership as our chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and that is why we are here tonight, for those injustices.
I am proud to be joined by my good friend, Congressman Jimmy Gomez, of Southern California, of L.A., who has been a champion of issues related to immigrants and related to Hispanics across the Nation.
Jimmy, thanks for being here.
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Mr. SOTO. And as we go into the budget, the protections that we couldn't get in recent bills, we will double down on to make sure we have them going into the appropriations process.
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