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Floor Speech
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Mr. CASSIDY. Mr. President, when President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, we had the lowest rate of illegal immigration in nearly 50 years. But instead of maintaining strong border policies inherited from President Trump, the Biden-Harris administration rushed to overturn them. They ended ``Remain in Mexico,'' reimposed so-called catch-and-release, and exempted unaccompanied children from title 42.
The result was predictable. The Biden-Harris open border policies encouraged the worst rates of illegal immigration ever, including over 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children. In fact, the month after migrant children were exempted from title 42, we saw the highest monthly total of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border in history.
The influx of migrant children under the Biden-Harris administration overwhelmed the Office of Refugee Resettlement, also abbreviated the ORR. This is the Agency responsible for unaccompanied children apprehended at the border and responsible for releasing them to thoroughly vetted sponsors.
ORR responded to this influx by sending children to hastily constructed emergency care facilities with untrained, unvetted staff and poor living conditions. The Agency also removed key sponsor-vetting requirements after senior Biden-Harris officials directed ORR to expedite the process of releasing migrant children to outside sponsors.
It is so easy to interpret this as a means to shield the White House from the political embarrassment of facilities overrun with unaccompanied children crossing the border that they had just opened.
In fact, as early as July 21, ORR staff warned superiors that ORR leadership had dismantled sponsor-vetting policies and that these changes weakened ORR's ability to protect children from risk such as trafficking and exploitation. Despite this, ORR left these policies in place for years while hundreds of thousands of children were released to poorly vetted sponsors.
You know, sometimes, it is easy to think this is partisan. Sometimes, it is easy to lose track as Republicans and Democrats talk about issues. But now, we are talking about kids--children that could be our children--who are being released to people who are not being vetted. It is easy to forget that. This is not partisan. This is something which should concern us all.
As a ranking member of the Senate HELP Committee, I am investigating the administration's failure to protect these migrant children from exploitation and abuse. I have learned that some of these children were forced into dangerous working conditions and exploited for illegal labor. At one such facility currently under investigation, a child was pulled into a meat processing machine.
By the way, again, we are not making this up. We have testimony from witnesses who speak to all of these facts. We have the whistleblowers who came to a roundtable. We have got the transcripts.
I have also learned that ORR's weakening of sponsor-vetting requirements directly led to children being put in harm's way. And in one instance, ORR neglected to verify whether the sponsor's claimed address was even a real home, and they sent this child to an address nothing more than open field. In another case, a 16-year-old was released to a sponsor who posted sexually explicit photos of the child on social media, including a photo with the sponsor touching the child inappropriately.
In addition to my investigation, I joined Senators Grassley and Johnson earlier this summer in hosting a Senate roundtable to examine ORR's failures and identify steps Congress could take to reform the Agency. We learned that due to failure at ORR, some unaccompanied children have been forced into drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and other criminal activity to pay off the cartels who brought them. All of this--according to whistleblowers--without followup or meaningful oversight from the Biden-Harris administration.
I repeat: This is not rhetoric, not fiction. This is what we are hearing from whistleblowers.
This exploitation also seemingly occurs while migrant children are still in ORR custody. In July, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Southwest Key Programs, the largest ORR contractor housing unaccompanied children, alleging that for nearly a decade, its employees have committed sexual abuse and harassment against unaccompanied children as young as 5 years old.
DOJ alleges that Southwest Key not only failed to take sufficient action to prevent sexual abuse but actively discouraged children from officially reporting these incidents.
Once more, this is not rhetoric. This is as a result of whistleblowers. This should not be partisan.
In August, I called on the HELP Committee chair to hold a hearing with Southwest Key and ORR officials to answer how these shocking allegations of sexual abuse went undetected for so long. So far, HELP Committee Democrats have not committed to a hearing or any effort to investigate.
And, by the way, Southwest Key still receives hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to operate shelters for migrant kids. If ORR will not take action in the wake of these allegations, Congress should. That is why I worked with Senator Grassley on legislation that would prohibit the use of Federal funds for Southwest Key or any other ORR grantee facing suspension and debarment procedures for allowing illegal sexual abuse or harassment of children in its care. I appreciate Senator Grassley's leadership.
The problems with ORR and the exploitation of children have been well-documented for years. Yet there has been no substantive effort by Biden or Harris to fix their open border policies--which caused these problems to begin with--or reform ORR to protect unaccompanied children from harm.
The exploitation of children should not be partisan. This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. When vulnerable children are harmed or die at the expense of bad policies or bad procedures or bad process, everyone should be outraged and everyone should be demanding change.
Unfortunately, it is clear that Republicans are taking this problem more seriously than Democrats.
It is not a messaging issue. It is an issue that challenges the humanity within us. It is something we should address whether or not it is an election year.
I wish that my Democratic colleagues would join Republicans tonight to pass this commonsense bill to hold ORR contractors accountable for the abuse and exploitation of children under their watch. We should protect these vulnerable children from harm as if they were our own.
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