Border Security
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, tomorrow evening, across the Capitol, President Biden will deliver his first State of the Union Address. As we continue to make headway in our fight against COVID-19, I expect the President to reflect on the tremendous progress we have made and encourage Americans to get vaccinated. So far so good.
But I also believe he will try to frame the nearly $2 trillion partisan bill that was rammed through Congress earlier this year as the driving force behind that progress, even though less than 10 percent of the bill was related to COVID-19.
I expect the President will call on Congress to pass his so-called infrastructure bill, which is similar to the COVID-19 relief bill in that it is a partisan bill having very little to do with the title of the bill itself. Only about 5 percent, in fact, goes toward roads and bridges, something we would all define as infrastructure.
I am hopeful that the President will finally announce a plan to address the crisis at our southern border because, so far, the administration has been largely silent. The crisis at the southern border is real; it is big; and it is growing. We are breaking all the wrong kinds of records, including the numbers of unaccompanied children, total monthly border crossings, and the capacity levels at our care facilities.
In March, we saw the highest number of border crossings on record, more than 172,000 individuals. That was a dramatic increase from the already eye-popping 100,000 in February--February, 100,000; March, 172,000; and, trust me, it is going to get nothing but worse.
Nearly 19,000 of these individuals were unaccompanied children, the highest numbers we have ever seen in a single month. Sometimes people will say: That child came to America all by himself or herself. I want to disabuse my colleagues of any notion that a child--small child-- would make that trip to the United States ``by themselves.'' These children are being turned over to criminal organizations that are paid by the head to transport them from their country of origin into the United States and, unfortunately, these human smugglers, known in my part of the country as ``coyotes,'' care nothing for the welfare of those children. It is only the money that they could produce by transporting them to the United States that they care about.
It is true we know that a spike in migration is not an entirely new phenomena and, sadly, neither is the dramatic increase in the number of children, but the current surge is unlike any we have experienced in at least the last 20 years, according to Director Mayorkas.
These eye-popping numbers are compounded by a deadly pandemic. We have never seen that before. The pandemic, of course, has made once routine tasks like transporting and caring for migrants incredibly dangerous to the men and women who are performing those duties.
In an effort to downplay the seriousness of the border crisis or to defer attention from it altogether, the administration has spent literally no time talking about it, especially when compared to the time and energy that it has dedicated to things like climate change.
In fact, the Biden administration has spent the first several weeks of the surge denying that there is anything wrong at the border. Then they came up with some creative euphemisms to describe what has happened. They called it a challenge. They called it a situation. They called it a mess. Well, as long as you didn't call it a crisis, they didn't seem too bothered by it.
A month ago, the President tapped the Vice President to lead efforts to address this crisis, which I thought was a positive sign, until I realized Vice President Harris acted as though the President had handed her a hand grenade and had pulled the pin because she couldn't get away from it fast enough, saying the next day that, well, her job is purely diplomatic in nature. She hasn't made a single trip to the border and, apparently, does not plan to do so at all.
The President has given lip service to encouraging migrants not to come, but those statements mean absolutely nothing when all of the other signals being sent by this administration are: There is a green light and a welcome mat out for migrants to come to the United States.
The situation is such that we are reaching a breaking point, and the Vice President and President could recognize that if they took the time to look and to learn from the very same people I have learned from, the experts who do these terribly difficult jobs along the border.
As you can imagine, I have spent a lot of time listening to those folks because I represent them. They are my constituents. I visited border communities and heard from the Border Patrol officers, mayors, county judges, and NGOs, nongovernmental organizations, that are doing the best they can dealing with overwhelming numbers.
I had the opportunity to actually talk to some of the migrants themselves about their journeys to our border and what brought them here. In the Rio Grande Valley, I spoke with three young mothers holding their crying infants less than a mile from the river they crossed into the United States. They had just undergone preliminary health screenings and were waiting for a bus to take them to a processing center.
And, please, our colleagues should understand these migrants are not trying to get away from the Border Patrol. They are literally walking up to the Border Patrol and turning themselves in because they realize that is the next step to their being placed into the interior of the United States and completing their journey.
Of course, as you can imagine, each of these mothers was hopeful. They made it to the United States and knew that as a family unit with young children they would be cared for by our government and then released into the interior of the United States. One of the mothers paid $3,600, she said, to get here. Another paid $6,000. This is big business for the smugglers and the criminal organizations that charge thousands of dollars to bring migrants to the U.S. border.
I think it is important to note that this is not just a Mexico- Central American phenomena. A couple of months ago, when I was down at the Del Rio sector of the Border Patrol, the Border Patrol Chief showed us a slide with the names of 54 different countries represented by the people who were detained coming across the Del Rio sector just so far this year--54 different countries.
As I said, many of these ``customers'' are children traveling with no parents. We know the journey is not a safe or easy one. In fact, it is dangerous, and it is hard, and many children arrive in critical health, having endured days, weeks, and months on the road. And the tragic fact is, some of these children don't make it. They die en route.
I have heard horrific stories of physical and sexual abuse that occurs at the hands of the criminals, cartels, and human smugglers, and others traveling in a large caravan of immigrants. At the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, which is now serving as a shelter for migrant boys, I talked to one young man who endured a 3- month-long trek on foot from Central America to the United States. He told us he slept in the jungles along the way and that food was scarce. As you can imagine, he was happy now to be in a shelter receiving three square meals a day with a roof over his head.
These stories are not unique. Many of us have seen the heartbreaking video of a young boy abandoned by smugglers in the Rio Grande Valley, dropped from the top of the wall into the interior of the United States. And we have read the story about a young girl who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande River. And we have seen where the smugglers who care so little for the welfare of the people they are smuggling into the United States--and in one instance they threw a 6- month-old child into the river, knowing the Border Patrol would be diverted in order to save the child, which thankfully they did, while they skedaddled into the United States.
I think it is heartbreaking that these children are enduring this sort of trauma, and it is infuriating that cartels and criminal organizations are getting richer in the process.
So make no mistake, there is a crisis at the border and the policies of the Biden administration helped make it worse. Despite warnings from folks on both sides of the aisle, the administration revoked policies of the previous administration without any alternative plan in its place. Making matters worse, they entirely failed to prepare for the obvious consequences. Now the question is, What are they going to do to address it?
I believe the American people deserve to hear from President Biden his outline of a plan to address the border crisis and to manage this surge of humanity in a fair and humane way. If the President is still working on that portion of the speech, I would like to make a friendly suggestion.
There is a grassroots plan out there that was built from bottom up by the Senators and Congressmen most familiar with the crisis. It includes input from the men and women who dealt with migration surges in the past and who are working around-the-clock to manage the consequences of uncontrolled movement of migrants across the border now. It is called the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act.
Senator Sinema from Arizona, who also represents a border State, and I have introduced this legislation here in the Senate. We are proud to work with two Texans, one Republican and one Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Tony Gonzales, a Republican in the 23rd Congressional District. He represents, I believe, the largest single section of the U.S.-Mexico border of any Member in Congress. Our bill seeks to address the most urgent problems on the border today. There is more we can and should do, but at least this would address the most urgent problems.
First, it would establish four regional processing centers to streamline the processing of migrants. Right now, the smugglers know that if they flood the zone with children, the Border Patrol are going to have to go off the frontline in order to take care of the children, leaving it wide open for smuggling narcotics and other migrants-- narcotics which, by the way, contributed to roughly 88,000 drug overdoses in America alone in the last 12 months.
Our bill would provide protections for migrant children who come into the country without a parent or any relatives.
It would help reduce the immigration court backlog and remove a major pull factor for migrants who do not have a legitimate asylum claim. But it would, more importantly, speed up the process for the most vulnerable migrants who do have a valid asylum claim.
I think these are commonsense reforms that should earn the support of Members from both parties in both Chambers in Congress, as well as a number of respected outside organizations.
We would be glad to receive the support of the administration or at least a phone call so we can begin conversations. Ignoring this crisis will not make it go away. We have spent the last couple of months demonstrating that inaction will only make it worse.
As I said, we have seen surges in the past but never like this. The busiest months are usually April, May, and June, not February and March, which indicates, by historical trends, it is going to get worse and worse and worse. If our facilities and our personnel are overwhelmed today, which they are, and we haven't yet reached the normal busy season, how much worse are things going to get? How many more children will die in the hands of these criminals on their way to the United States before we decide to take action?
As the Presiding Officer and I have discussed before, there is nobody else to solve these problems except us. On something as important as this, it seems like a logical area for Republicans and Democrats to work together to try to take at least some modest steps to address this crisis. I hope the President will work with us and be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
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