Nomination of Peter Joseph Kadzik to Be an Assistant Attorney General

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, just a few minutes ago the Senator from Texas, my friend John Cornyn, came to the floor and spoke about immigration and the situation on our border. It was a very moving statement that he has made before and needs to make again. He did it today and identified a serious issue we are facing--not just one but several serious issues. They are dramatized by the fact that we are seeing hundreds of children who are being turned loose on America's border with Mexico crossing the border, being apprehended, and being placed in a humane situation in America--children, some as young as 5, 6, and 7 years of age, not accompanied by adults. You think to yourself, what is going on here?

Senator Cornyn, of course, representing the State of Texas, knows this better than most because they are watching these children.

Eighty percent of these children come from three countries: Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In these countries there is a state of lawlessness at this point that is so desperate--so desperate--that a family would turn over a child to someone who says: I will get them across the American border.

Some of these kids show up--I do not know how many; I cannot tell you--with little slips of paper with a name and a telephone number of a relative in the United States. Think about that for a second. How desperate would a family have to be to turn over a 5-year-old, a 6-or 7-year-old child to someone and say: Take them hundreds of miles and enter illegally into the United States of America with my little girl or my little boy. I cannot even imagine the desperation that people are facing that they would do such a thing.

That represents a major problem for the United States at several levels.

First, we are a humane and caring nation. We will not see a child abandoned at the border and turn our backs. What we are doing is taking these children into protective custody, trying to find a way to link them with some member of their family for their own good. Imagine the trauma these kids have gone through at that point and now what they might face. That is why we are stepping forward.

Senator Cornyn came to the floor, and he rightfully said that many of these children do not make these journeys unharmed. Terrible things happen to them. Awful things happen to them--assaults, rapes, beatings, and God only knows. You think to yourself, what impact will that trauma have on that child for such a long period of time?

The lawlessness in these three countries is leading to this outmigration for safety, this desperation by many families and parents.

The second aspect is one that we cannot ignore either. Many children come into the United States, and some of them come in the most extreme situations for a very basic human reason--children who were raised in other countries and their parents are in the United States. They have not seen them sometimes for years. They have received cash to keep them going under the care of another relative, gifts at Christmas, gifts for their birthday. But some of these kids--these little kids--will jump on these freight trains and go through Central America toward the United States in the hope of finding a parent. I cannot tell you the exact numbers.

There is a book that won the Pulitzer Prize called ``Enrique's Journey.'' A woman named Nazario who writes for the L.A. Times went down to Central America, got on one of these trains with these kids, who sit on top of these freight cars as they go through these countries trying to get to the United States. Many of them--she believes the majority of them--are simply trying to be reunited with their parents.

Listen to the tragedy in what I have just described. Think about the desperation of families and the desperation of these children and where it puts us in the world today, and reflect for a moment on a political reality that did not come up in the earlier statement. The political reality is that it has been more than 1 year since the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill with 68 votes, 14 Republicans joining the Democrats in a bipartisan effort.

I know a little bit about this bill because I joined the group who wrote it, four Democrats, four Republicans, sitting across the table--on our side, Chuck Schumer of New York, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Mike Bennet of Colorado; on the Republican side, John McCain of Arizona, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida. We sat in this room--many rooms, I should say--over a period of months and hammered out a comprehensive bill that deals with many of the issues that are behind the tragedy I just described. That is something we ought to acknowledge is part of our challenge today, that 1 year has gone by and the House of Representatives has refused to even call this bill for consideration.

I am pretty proud of what we did and what we wrote. I do not think there are many pieces of legislation that bipartisan that have the support of business and labor and religious groups of every denomination. They all support our bill. I am proud of that fact.

I served in the House. I know they have some pride of authorship. They may want to do their version of the bill. That is OK. But doing nothing is not OK. It is not acceptable. We have a broken immigration system. Senator Cornyn of Texas said as much himself.

If we are going to deal with the problem at the border with these children, if we are going to deal with the problem of 11 million or more undocumented people in America--many of whom have been here for long periods of time, may live in a household where everyone else in the house is an American citizen, and I know of these cases in Chicago; I have met them--people who are willing to come forward at this point in their lives, register with the government, tell the government where they live, where they work, have a background check so that if they have serious criminal issues they are gone, stay in this country, pay their taxes, pay a fine for being undocumented, learn English, and wait 13 years at the earliest before they can become citizens, and they go to the absolute back of the line--that is what our bill says. That, to me, is a movement toward a solution of what we are facing today.

But I hear many times criticism of this President. I will tell you, this President has been fully supportive of this effort for comprehensive immigration reform. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent with him and so many others trying to work toward this goal. I know, because he used to be my junior Senator from Illinois and we are pretty close. I know that when he was going through the transition to become President, he invited Senators McCain and Graham to meet with him in Chicago before he was sworn in. They talked about immigration. That is how important it is to this President. So those who would blame him or dismiss him for the current situation, it is not fair. He supports comprehensive immigration reform.

He said to the House of Representatives and the Republican leadership that he will step back in terms of doing anything on an executive level and give them the opportunity to do what they are supposed to do--call this matter for a vote. We are praying they do it before the end of July because we are running out of time. In just a few months there will be an election and then a lameduck session between the election and the new Congress. Not much can get done in that period of time.

The President has said to Speaker Boehner and the Republicans: Move the bill. So when I hear the criticism of some of the terrible injustices in our current immigration system, I think we ought to be very honest. We have passed a bill--a bipartisan bill, a comprehensive bill--in the Senate, and it has been sitting in the House for more than a year. More than a year.

I came to this issue, like most, with a family story. I have told my family story on the floor many times, but I am proud of it, so I am going to repeat it.

My mother was an immigrant to this country. She came to America, brought here at the age of 2. She was brought from Lithuania. My grandmother packed her up with my aunt and uncle and brought them over in a ship. They landed in Baltimore and somehow got on a train to St. Louis. They were headed for their great opportunity in America, their land of opportunity, the town I was born in, East St. Louis, IL. That is where I came from. That is where they landed because the Lithuanians were there working in the packing houses and the steel mills and all of the jobs that immigrants take.

That is my story. That is my family's story. But that is also America's story. Those immigrants who come here and take the dirtiest, hardest jobs, work night and day trying to make sure their kids have another chance, create time and again generations of renewal in America.

There is something in our DNA, my friends--all of us who are proud to say we are Americans--there is something in our DNA about that immigrant spirit, to think that my family and millions of others said: We are leaving Jurbarkas, Lithuania, and we are going to America, where we do not even speak the language.

What an adventure. What courage. What Americanism. That is what creates us. That is in our national DNA. Thank goodness it is.

There is something else I would like to note. It has been 2 years since President Obama issued an Executive order. It was known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, DACA.

Here is the history. Thirteen years ago I got a call in my Chicago office from a Korean mother who said she had a problem. She had brought her daughter to the United States at the age of 2 on a visitor's visa. Her daughter was now grown up, 18 years of age. She had never filed any papers for her. Technically mom, who was here legally as a citizen, had an undocumented child in her house.

The problem was that this undocumented girl had turned out to be a spectacular pianist and had won an opportunity for scholarships to the Juilliard School of Music and the New York Conservatory of Music. She was that good. When she went to fill out the application, they asked her for her citizenship. She turned to her mom and said: What am I?

Her mom said: I don't know.

The girl said: What are you going to do?

Mom said: Let's call Durbin.

So they called my office. We checked the law. The law was very clear. That little girl who had been in the United States for 16 or 17 years at that point in her life was undocumented and under the law had to leave the United States for 10 years and apply to come back in. That is how the law was written.

I thought to myself: That is not fair. That little girl did not have any say in her parents moving here. She had nothing to say when they failed to file the necessary papers. Now she was the victim of our legal system and her parents' failure to file the papers so she could be here legally.

So I introduced the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act I introduced 13 years ago said: If you are in that kind of a circumstance--brought here as a child by your parents, have lived in the United States, finished high school, no serious criminal record--we will give you a chance. Either enlist in our military or go to college for at least 2 years, and we will put you on the path to citizenship.

That is the DREAM Act. Well, that bill has been around a long time--13 years.

It has passed in the Senate as part of a comprehensive bill, and it has passed in the House individually. But it has never passed in both places, which, as we know, is what is necessary to become a law.

So I wrote to President Obama, with 22 of my colleagues--that at one point included Senator Lugar of Indiana, my Republican colleague then--and asked the President: Create an Executive order so these young people eligible for the DREAM Act will not be deported while we debate. Give them a chance to be here in a legally recognized status because they would qualify under this bill that continues to pass--the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. That, of course, was enacted by the President in Executive order 2 years ago.

After it was enacted, Congressman Luis Gutiérrez and I--in Chicago--said: We want to give all of those eligible to apply for this deferred action protection under the Executive order a chance to sign up.

So Luis and I said: We are going to reserve Navy Pier--if you have ever been to Chicago, there is a huge ballroom at the end of Navy Pier, one of the most popular sites in downtown--and we are going to invite any young person who wants to sign up for DACA so they won't be deported to come in and sign up.

I said initially: I hope we get 200 people to come because we have a big room here.

In the end over 10,000 showed up. It overwhelmed us. We had volunteer lawyers there, lots of friends there, and people helping. Parents got in line at midnight the night before, standing with their kids and waiting for a chance to give these kids a chance to be legally in the United States and not deported; that is how much it meant to them.

Some of these parents, sadly, didn't have the same protection, but they wanted to do everything they could for their kids. Well, the time has passed, and in the course of time we have seen 560,000 children across America who signed up for this protection under DACA--560,000.

I have come to the floor and told about 50 or 60 stories about these DREAMers. We call them DREAMers--these young kids. Each time I tell the story, I get responses from people saying: I can't believe that we still haven't resolved this problem.

I want to tell you one of these stories today. I want to update you about one of the DREAMers I have spoken about on the floor.

This is Erika Andiola and her mother Guadalupe Arreola. Guadalupe's husband--Erika's father--abused her for 15 years. In order to escape this abuse and protect her kids, she fled to the United States.

Free from threats of violence, Guadalupe and her children made life in this country. Her daughter Erika graduated with honors from Arizona State University with a bachelor's degree in psychology. She is the founder and president of the Arizona DREAM Act Coalition, a group advocating for immigration reform.

After receiving DACA, her protection under the President's Executive order, Erika became the first DREAMer to work for the Congress. She could legally do it under the President's order. She served as district outreach director for Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. I might add that Congressman Gutiérrez also hired one of the earliest DREAMers under DACA on his staff as well.

The same week that Erika was hired to work for a Member of Congress, they received notice that her mother was being placed in deportation proceedings. Why were we trying to deport Erika's mother, Guadalupe? Because she was pulled over for a traffic violation and she had a deportation order that was 15 years old.

Erika made a difficult decision. She gave up her job with the Congresswoman and started focusing on helping her mom. Her mother wrote me a letter and said:

I have always taught my children that there is nothing more important than the love for our families. ..... I ask Congress and the President to realize that I am a human being who was just looking to protect my children from a life full of violence.

There are 11 million undocumented immigrants like Guadalupe in the United States. They are hard-working men and women with courage who leave everything behind they know to build a better life. They have strong family values, and they make a real contribution to our country and our economy. They serve our food in restaurants. They clean off the tables when we are finished eating. They take care of our small children in daycare, and they watch our parents in nursing homes. That is who the undocumented are in America.

They raise children like Erika and make contributions to our country. They want to be Americans. But under current law, there is no way for them to get in line and legalized.

Last week the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, was kind enough to come to Chicago. I invited him. I wanted him to see the Broadview processing facility, where those who are about to face deportation are held. It is a grim reminder of families that are being broken up right before our eyes. I wanted him also to meet with people in the Muslim community, in the Syrian community, in the Hispanic communities, and talk about immigration in America today. He was kind enough to do that.

Along with my colleagues, Congressmen Luis Gutiérrez and Bill Foster, we visited the center. We met in the detention cells a 51-year-old man who came to the United States at the age of 6. He has three kids who are U.S. citizens. One now serves in the U.S. Army and another is a police officer. In the visitation area outside, we met his mother, who is 80 years old. She was hoping to get a glimpse of her son before he was deported.

This is the human impact of immigration laws and policies. The House of Representatives has a chance to fix this and many other problems. We can move together to stop this horrible humanitarian crisis at the border with children. We can move together to deal with the undocumented among us who will step forward, pay their taxes and their fines, learn English, go to the back of the line and wait their turns. We will be a better country if we do.

I hope the House Republicans will take up this responsibility. If they have a better idea, bring it to the floor and vote on it but, if not, call up our bipartisan Senate bill. Let's fix this broken immigration system. Let's move this country forward.

I yield the floor.

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