Nomination of Peter Joseph Kadzik to Be an Assistant Attorney General

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I am returning to the Senate floor to talk once again about the wave of migrant children who are coming across the U.S.-Mexican border unaccompanied by adults. So far this year, since October, 47,000 unaccompanied minors have been detained at the border, most of them coming not from Mexico, which obviously is closer to the United States, but from as far away as Central America and beyond.

To put this in some context, from Guatemala City, Guatemala, to McAllen, TX, is roughly a trip of 1200 miles. I have spoken many times and I will continue to speak to anyone who will listen about the horrific and dangerous conditions these children and other migrants travel just to get to the United States. Thousands of migrant children, almost all of whom come from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico are currently being held in U.S. military facilities such as Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, TX. While Federal, State, and local officials try to figure out, No. 1, who they are--find out what their identity is, because many of them show up without any identification--they try to figure out, well, do they have any relatives here in the United States or possible legal guardians? Then they have to decide what to do with them while their cases are being processed. Obviously since the majority of them come from countries other than Mexico, they cannot just be turned back, particularly in the case of minor children, some of whom have been reported to be as young as 5 years old. The average age is roughly 14 years old, but still when I describe, as I will today and will continue to do, the horrific conditions under which these migrant children travel from Mexico and up from Central America, no one in their right mind would want to have their child subjected to that sort of potential and reality of abuse and mistreatment.

I am glad the President has asked Vice President Joe Biden to travel to Central America, but I worry that so far I haven't heard any plan whatsoever that would stop the flow of these unaccompanied children from Central America and Mexico.

As you can imagine, this is a bureaucratic nightmare, trying to figure out how to deal with this mass of humanity coming across the border. In fact, the Border Patrol is spending so much time trying to take care of the humanitarian crisis that they are neglecting some of their principal responsibilities, which are to stem the flow of illegal immigration and drugs across the border. So this is diverting law enforcement from its assigned role just to deal with the temporary crisis. At least I hope it is temporary.

The authorities in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley do not have the resources or the manpower to handle such a massive influx of unaccompanied children. In terms of the children who have been released from U.S. custody, we still don't know how many of their ``temporary guardians'' are themselves illegal immigrants. We don't know because I assume there is not a background check conducted on them. I hope I am wrong. But I hope we don't find out that some of these unaccompanied minors are being turned over to relatives who are themselves perhaps criminals or sex offenders. In other words, we have no idea, because the President has not spoken out, what kind of plan there is to make sure of the conditions these children are living in or what sort of potential abuse they might suffer. It is an awful situation any way you look at it.

What makes it even more outrageous is it is directly the result of the impression that President Obama is uninterested in enforcing our immigration laws, specifically his refusal to enforce and his granting of so-called deferred action programs he announced in the Rose Garden 2 years ago.

To be fair to the President and the Senators who voted for the Senate immigration bill, it would have, if signed into law, granted a deferred action for a certain class of minors, so-called DREAM Act kids. But none of these children entering the country currently qualify or would qualify for either the President's deferred action order that he issued unilaterally or the Senate-passed DREAM Act provisions. So we know they are entering in violation of American law, but there are no negative consequences associated with it as long as they are basically accommodated in the United States.

As a result, the number of children entering the country, together with the number of adults, is simply skyrocketing. As I said previously, to start with, it was estimated that 47,000 have been detained so far this year, and that this entire calendar year there will be as many as 60,000. Next year the numbers are expected to double to 120,000 children.

The fact is this is not just affecting States such as Texas, a border State, or even Arizona or California. This is affecting States such as Virginia, Maryland, Oklahoma, and other places where the Federal Government is simply looking for a place to warehouse these children while it figures out what to do with them.

Of course, the ensuing crisis has prompted a fresh debate over security conditions at the U.S.-Mexican border. As the debate goes forward, it is worth considering exactly what we mean when we talk about border security, because I fear it is a term that is often misunderstood.

Border security is not just about catching people along the Rio Grande or checkpoints in places such as Falfurrias or Sarita, it is also about deterring potential illegal immigrants from starting out from their home country on such a dangerous journey in the first place. My friend Congressman Henry Cuellar from Laredo said, for example, when you play football you don't just defend at the goal line; you start 20 yards from the goal line, you start at midfield and on the other team's turf. So we need to make sure we have a comprehensive approach and a plan to deal with illegal immigration into the country, as I said, hopefully with the goal in large part of deterring parents from turning their children over to the hands of the drug cartels and other transnational criminal gangs and sending them on this perilous and horrific journey north to the United States.

This journey from Central America to southern Mexico to the U.S. border is one of the most dangerous journeys anywhere in the world. Indeed, every single corridor is controlled by transnational criminal drug organizations, including drug smugglers and cartels. They prey on the weakest and most vulnerable people they find. They will rob them, they will sexually assault them, they

will kill them if need be in order to suit their purposes. Not surprisingly, the ongoing surge of Central American migrants has been an absolute gift to the Mexican drug cartels and their gangland affiliates. As an Austin-based immigration lawyer told the L.A. Times recently: ``The smugglers are milking this situation for all it's worth.'' This is money in the bank for the drug cartels and the human smugglers, the people who prey on the most vulnerable people who are smuggled in from Central America and Mexico to the United States. That is how they make their money. That is their business model, so to speak.

President Obama has often defended his immigration policies as a humane response to a broken system. I would be among the first to acknowledge that America's immigration system is indeed broken, but there is nothing humane about incentivizing people who risk their lives and their children's lives by traveling through the most dangerous smuggling corridors in the Western Hemisphere. There is nothing humane about incentivizing people to pay human traffickers for transportation through Mexico.

Yet when the administration deliberately refuses to enforce our immigration laws and talks daily about its investigation into changing repatriation policies, it effectively tells people in Mexico and Central America that if they make it across to the U.S. border they will almost certainly be allowed to stay. When the administration does those things, it is effectively encouraging poor, vulnerable immigrants to embark on a treacherous and often deadly journey.

As I said, the journey is especially treacherous for young migrant women and children. The migrant women are frequently raped, kidnapped, and sold to sex traffickers. Some experts believe that 6 out of 10 of the migrant women who traverse this dangerous territory are sexually assaulted. It is truly appalling and without question one of the worst human rights nightmares anywhere in our hemisphere. For that matter, it is likely getting worse. A new Congressional Research Service memo indicates that girls and children below the age of 13 represent a growing number of unaccompanied minors who are being apprehended at the southern border. Needless to say, as more and more migrant children travel through Mexico, more will be forced into sex slavery and prostitution.

I think we all agree that the status quo is simply intolerable and unacceptable.

So what is the solution? Well, I spent the past couple of days urging the President to take a few basic steps that would help curtail the seemingly endless flow of unaccompanied minors up through this dangerous smuggling corridor. The steps I have outlined I think reflect common sense. For starters, the President of the United States must make it abundantly clear to everyone that his deferred action program on deportation does not apply to the children who are now streaming across our border in floodlike proportions. If the President himself were to make such an announcement, it would get noticed.

Right now Central American newspapers as well as the criminal cartels are actively spreading the word that if you turn yourselves over to us and pay our price to get smuggled into the United States, you can get free passage and stay, because they are saying you will not be repatriated.

If the President also worked with the Mexican Government to help secure its southern border with Guatemala--that border is about 500 miles long and it is currently the place the migrants come from Central America into Mexico to begin that long, perilous journey, many on a train system that has become known as The Beast or The Beast of Death, which has been written about a lot. If the President were to help provide Mexico, in consultation with our Mexican friends, a way to help secure that border, it would help stem more than half the flow of migrants including these unaccompanied children from Central America. And if the President sent the message, contrary to what he has done recently, that he is committed to enforcing all of our immigration laws until Congress and the President can engage in our constitutionally required process of amending those laws, then the tide of children flooding across South Texas might soon be reversed.

I wish I had confidence that President Obama would take the actions I have described. His record on immigration and border security, unfortunately, inspires no confidence that he will.

To reiterate, once again, solving this crisis isn't simply about securing America's southern border. It is not just about goal-line defense, in the words of Congressman Cuellar, it is about enforcing our immigration laws. It is about saving mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, from contact with some of the most brutal criminal organizations on the planet.

I hope the President is listening. I am encouraged that Vice President Biden is traveling to the region, but, of course, we know that Central America, the government there, has deteriorated to the point that it has become an increasingly dangerous place. That is another one of the arguments that is made, that people are simply fleeing from violence in those Central American countries. I certainly am sympathetic, but the fact is the United States cannot absorb people from every part of the globe who want to come to the United States without imperiling our way of life. So what we need to do is find a way to control immigration through legal channels, and we need to send the message to other countries that you cannot come here with impunity and simply overwhelm our ability in the United States to take care of legal immigrants.

The President can do a lot. Sending Vice President Biden to Central America is a start, but what we need is a plan along the lines I have outlined in order to stem this humanitarian crisis that is occurring not just in South Texas but is being spread to Virginia, Maryland, Oklahoma, Arizona, and California, because that is where these children are being sent in the custody of the Federal Government--basically in warehouses or it occurs to me that this is more like a refugee camp on American soil. This is not the way we would want our children to live, and this is not the way we should want other parents' children to live.

We will take care of them to the best of our ability while they are here, but what we need is an unequivocal message that says America does not have an open border and that parents should not turn their children over to these dangerous drug cartels and human smugglers in order to come to the United States.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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