Making Continuing Appropriations During a Government Shutdown

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I thank my friend from Indiana for his remarks about our military service men and women and our obligation to provide them the care they have earned for their service. I look forward to voting, along with everyone in this Chamber, on this bipartisan legislation this afternoon, which represents the first step--not the last step but the first step--toward the systemic failures that have been disclosed as a result of the comprehensive VA audit.

I come to the floor to speak again about a growing humanitarian crisis in South Texas, the State I represent, where authorities are struggling with waves of unaccompanied minors--children--coming through Mexico into the United States. The numbers are pretty staggering. So far 47,000 minors have been detained at the southwestern border since October. The Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol estimate that there could be as many as 60,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America. If we look at the map from Guatemala City to McAllen, TX, it is roughly 1,200 miles.

Unfortunately, this influx is a direct consequence of the perception that this administration will not enforce our immigration laws. Interviews with more than 200 of the migrants who comprise some of these individuals confirm their impression, which is reinforced by Central American news media outlets--primarily newspapers--that if children can get to the United States, they will have a free ticket and be able to stay.

We had a chance to question and discuss this humanitarian crisis with Secretary Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, this morning before the Judiciary Committee, and to his credit, he has taken an all-hands-on-deck attitude, but the truth is the Federal Government's resources are overwhelmed by this humanitarian crisis.

By creating a powerful incentive for people to come to the United States illegally, we have effectively encouraged children and their parents to make a treacherous and threatening journey from Central America, one of the most dangerous parts of the world today, through Mexico--large swaths of Mexico are controlled by drug cartels--and then all the way into Texas.

Secretary Johnson conceded this morning that somehow we are schizophrenic about this issue. When we look at the victims of human trafficking and other people, we all agree we need to do more on a bipartisan basis to deal with this scourge of human trafficking, but the fact is that the transnational criminal organizations--trafficking people for economic reasons, such as for sex, drugs, and weapons--will do anything for money. They are criminals, and that is what they do.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of innocent children who are now being swept up in this humanitarian crisis, as I said, committed by their parents to take this trek across Mexico into the United States. We have no idea how many children start that journey and how many simply drop off along the way because they have been kidnapped, injured, murdered or perhaps they just become ill as a result of exposure and die during this long trek.

It is a journey that often begins in cities, towns, and villages scattered throughout Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The first major checkpoint is the Mexican border with Guatemala. It is about 500 miles long. Before arriving there, many families and children pass through regions of northern Guatemala that are controlled by the Zetas cartel, one of the most violent criminal organizations in the world.

When they reach Mexico, many illegal immigrants jump onto a network of freight trains known by the ominous nickname ``The Beast.''

I encourage anyone who is listening to me to go online and Google or Bing or use some other search engine and type in ``The Beast'' and read some of the horrific stories about transportation from southern Mexico up to northern Mexico on The Beast. NPR, National Public Radio, repeatedly reported The Beast train is ``just as likely to spit them out as it is to shepherd them safely to the border.''

Indeed, people riding on The Beast are frequently robbed, raped or killed by the drug traffickers and gang members who control the smuggling corridors. This is organized criminal activity by transnational criminal organizations. As one former Beast passenger told CNN, ``almost everyone gets assaulted.''

If there is anybody who thinks illegal immigration and trafficking involves some sort of benign experience of traveling from a country where people don't have an opportunity to a country where people do have an opportunity, that part is true, but what they don't tell you is the horrific, life-threatening, and sometimes life-destroying experience of getting to the United States because people are committing themselves to the tender mercies of some of the most violent criminal organizations on the planet.

In recent years, Mexican authorities have discovered mass graves containing the bodies of Central American migrants--those who did not make it to our southern border. Among those who are not murdered by the cartels, many passengers on The Beast simply fall off the train. For example, they try to jump on it while it is moving. If they are lucky, they might just end up with a few broken bones, but if they are not lucky, they might end up losing a limb or being crushed to death underneath its wheels.

In short, no one should be traveling to the United States this way and least of all young children, some of whom, according to published newspaper reports, are as young as 3 and 5 years old. Can any parent comprehend the idea of a 3- or 5-year-old coming unaccompanied or perhaps en masse with drug cartels and criminal organizations transporting them from their home country to the United States?

The Border Patrol reported that 180 convicted sex offenders have been arrested since October while coming across the southwestern border. Can you imagine this trip with convicted sex offenders mixed into the mass of humanity coming across the border?

Some children who ride The Beast are kidnapped or forced to become drug mules or forced into sexual slavery. In fact, some who make it all the way to Texas and north remain prisoners of organized crime after crossing the U.S. border.

I remember talking to one young woman. About 1 year ago I had the chance to visit with her. She came from Central America. She was brought by a coyote, they called him--a human smuggler--into Houston, TX. She had family in New Jersey, but that didn't work out, so she came back to Houston where she was essentially held as an indentured servant and prostituted and forced to turn over the proceeds of that money to the coyote--the smuggler.

When people operate in the shadows of the law, they have no protection of the law, and the people who are the most likely to get hurt are the immigrants themselves or certainly the immigrant community. We need to keep that in mind. We have to remember that Mexico's biggest and most violent drug cartels are heavily involved in this trafficking, as I mentioned earlier.

Time magazine reported last year: ``Cartels control most of Mexico's smuggling networks through which victims are moved, while they also take money from pimps and brothels operating in their territories.''

The cartels, gangs, and sex traffickers are only too happy to prey on the poor, vulnerable migrants, including children, transiting through their terrain. Experts believe the Mexican drug cartels may earn as much as $10 billion a year from sex trafficking and sex slavery alone. These are not nice people.

According to Amnesty International: ``Some human rights organizations and academics estimate that as many as six in 10 women and girl''--and one-quarter of these unaccompanied minors are girls--``migrants experience sexual violence during the journey'' through Mexico--6 out of 10.

A new CRS--Congressional Research Service--memo reports that based on apprehension data provided by Customs and Border Protection, ``there has been an increase in the number of [accompanied alien children] who are girls and the number of [unaccompanied alien children] who under the age of 13.''

They are not exactly able to defend themselves against the monstrosities they encounter along the way.

I hope it is clear to everyone listening and to the President and every other person of good will, that we should be doing everything possible to discourage people from risking their lives in the first place, and especially their children's lives, on such a dangerous journey.

Before I came to the Senate, I happened to be the Attorney General of Texas, and before that I had a career in law and the judiciary. It is standard criminal jurisprudence that not only should law enforcement enforce the laws in order to maintain the law, but the law serves another important function; that is, deterrence.

In other words, it stops people from doing things they know they should not do in the first place rather than just catching them after they do it. This is one of the elements that is missing and unfortunately was encouraged by the impression that you got a free ticket if all you had to do was get on the train and show up in South Texas. As I have said, this is very dangerous stuff, and it has backfired in unexpected ways.

Yesterday, I listed five simple suggestions to the President that he could take to start fixing the problem. I was glad to hear Secretary Johnson talk about some of the ad hoc measures he has begun to implement, but the truth is they are struggling to catch up.

I urged the President, No. 1, to publicly declare that his 2012 deferred action program will not apply to children currently arriving at the border. Let me stop there to say that this morning some of my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee could not resist the temptation to take a partisan shot. They said if the House had just passed immigration reform, this never would have happened.

My point is the President's deferred action program doesn't even apply to these children, so it is still against the law for them to enter. But they realize, as a practical matter, although the resources and capacity of the Federal Government are overwhelmed, there is no way we can turn them back, and they will have to be handled compassionately and in a humane sort of way.

It would help if, No. 1, the President would make clear he has not issued a free ticket to anyone who wants to enter the country illegally.

No. 2, I encouraged him to publicly discourage people from attempting the journey through Mexico, and it would help if our Mexican counterparts would do a better job--maybe with our help and assistance--securing their southern border, since that would stop a lot of people from coming from Central America through Mexico on this dangerous journey which I have tried to describe.

I also encouraged the President to enforce all of our immigration laws regardless of political needs or any frustration he might feel or anyone else might feel on the current stalemate in which we find ourselves. Sometimes these things take a little time.

My hope is, if not before, then by next year, Congress--the Senate and the House--can begin to move a series of smaller pieces of legislation that are more transparent, consensus based, and begin to repair the broken immigration system.

I don't think anybody believes on the right or the left that the status quo is acceptable, and indeed it is dangerous to the people I have described.

So I mentioned the fourth item, which is to work with the Mexican Government to improve security at the border with Guatemala. I was recently in Juarez, Mexico, right across the river from El Paso, which used to be one of the most dangerous places on the planet because of all of the conflict between the drug cartels. Things are getting better. It is still pretty rough, but things are getting better thanks to strong leaders, such as the mayor, whom I met with there, and thanks to the assistance the U.S. Government is providing through the Merida Initiative to help train law enforcement and to provide equipment and the like. So we could step up our work with the Mexican Government to help them secure their own southern border, which would eliminate more than half of this migration from Central America.

Finally, I urge the President to take the step of making sure that Texas and other U.S. border States and communities have the resources they need to address the ongoing crisis.

Today I reiterate those calls, and I also call on the President to please act as soon as possible. Make no mistake. The actions we take and sometimes the actions we don't take have unintended consequences. But in the days and weeks ahead, there will be life-or-death consequences to an untold number of vulnerable children, perhaps in the misperception that they can come to the United States if they can just get here, without understanding the treacherous journey that will befall them. We are doing no one a service by allowing that.

Because the impression created by the President has resulted in this problem, at least in substantial part, I believe he has the unique authority and power to begin to fix it. But first he will have to send the message that I mentioned a moment ago, which is that there is no free ticket into the United States. We have to deal with the humanitarian crisis of these children and make sure they are safe, but then we need to get about the business of enforcing our laws and not just giving the impression that anybody and everybody who wants to come to the United States can come here.

Perhaps in a perfect world everybody could live in America. But the fact is that we need to have our immigration laws for our protection and for the protection of legal immigrants. We need to do everything we can to send a message that we are a caring country, but we are also a country that believes in the rule of law. We need to restore order out of this chaos, while dealing with the immediate humanitarian crisis of this wave of children that is overwhelming the capability of the Federal Government to deal with it. We need to do everything we can together to address all of these issues.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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