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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, with what is happening in Iraq, what is happening with the claim of lost IRS emails from Lois Lerner, what is happening in the developments of the Benghazi investigation, what is happening in Ukraine, and what could happen in Afghanistan, it is easy--perhaps too easy--to overlook a crisis occurring right here in America on our southern border. That crisis is easily described as a wave of humanity coming across our southern border from Central America.

Tragically, tens of thousands of the people coming across our borders seeking refuge in the United States are children--unaccompanied minors--from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The question we should ask ourselves is, Why are we seeing this unprecedented increase in the number of unaccompanied minors coming across our southwestern border?

As we can see, in 2011 there were 6,560 detained. But that number has grown steadily, from 2012, 2013, and now 2014. So far 47,000 minors--unaccompanied children--have been detained coming across our border, primarily from Central America. It is estimated that this 60,000 number will likely double next year unless something is done.

These children--and their parents are enabling this--are crossing the border because of a widespread perception that they will be allowed to stay here. The reason for that perception is a series of events--a series of stated changes in policy--which have given the impression that President Obama does not have a commitment to enforce our immigration laws.

None of us denies that Central America's Northern Triangle is plagued by drug cartels, street gangs, rampant violence, and deeply entrenched poverty. There is no doubt about it. The fact is that the majority of people coming across the southwestern border these days are not from Mexico; they are from Central America. They are coming through a 500-mile strip of border between Guatemala and Mexico, making their way up the Mexican coast in areas largely controlled by the Zetas--a criminal organization, a drug cartel which has basically figured this is another way to make money. In other words, they not only traffic in drugs, they traffic in people, and now, quite honestly, they are trafficking in tens of thousands of children.

The massive spike in unaccompanied minors, of course, seemed to start to take off when President Obama announced in 2012 his so-called deferred action plan. To be clear and to be fair, this deferred action announcement where the President said he would not deport certain categories or classes of children would not apply to the children coming across the border today. So we might wonder, why in the world do they keep coming?

Well, that was not an isolated event in 2012. Just to remind my colleagues, this deferred action announcement came 2 years after John Morton, who was the Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, circulated a memo declaring that the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws against most illegal aliens was now a lower priority. That memo went out in June of 2010.

A few months later several colleagues and I sent a letter to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano expressing our concern that the administration's selective enforcement of our immigration statutes was jeopardizing public safety and breeding contempt for the rule of law. That letter read, in part:

Numerous criminal aliens are being released into society and are having proceedings terminated simply because ICE has decided that such cases do not fit within the Department's chosen enforcement priorities. It appears that ICE is enforcing the law based on criteria it arbitrarily chose with complete disregard for the enforcement laws created by Congress.

Then, in the second Morton memo the following June, then-Director Morton sent around another memo which further advised U.S. immigration authorities to systemically reconsider hundreds of thousands of immigration cases and to make them low priorities to enforce immigration laws against millions of people illegally present in the United States. That second Morton memo went even further than the first in looking at everyone--all the undocumented population here in the United States--and saying: We are going to reconsider our priorities in terms of repatriation of those individuals should they be detained by ICE. That June 2011 memo laid the groundwork for the deferred action program the President announced a year later, which was 2012, and these programs were extended earlier this month.

The average was about 6,500; then it doubled in 2012; and then it doubled again in 2013; and then it is scheduled to double again in 2014.

The administration has continued to treat the vast majority of illegal immigrants as low-priority offenders, thereby creating perverse incentives for people to cross the border. If people don't believe there is any consequence associated with entering the country in violation of our immigration laws, they are going to continue to do it. As the distinguished Presiding Officer knows, law enforcement has more than just what I would call a goal-line defense priority. In other words, deterrence is very important. Obviously, people are not being deterred.

Perversely, people are being encouraged by this series of events to show up at the border--and, of course, in huge numbers--overwhelming Border Patrol, which is now no longer looking uniformly at drug dealers and human smuggling operations. Now they are trying to take care of children and trying to get them to a safe place to live and to take care of them.

John Sandweg, who served as the ICE Director from 2013 to 2014, recently told the Los Angeles Times:

If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.

It is just unlikely to happen. That message has obviously gotten through to folks in Central America, who, admittedly, are living in a very tough neighborhood, and it has encouraged many of them to risk their lives and their children's lives on an extremely dangerous journey through this region of Mexico covered by the drug cartels.

Actually, it is part of the business model of the drug cartels to encourage this flow of illegal migration from Central America through Mexico because they effectively get paid a tax by the coyotes and human smugglers who smuggle people through this dangerous region. One of the ways they come is on the top of one of these trains.

This is a shot of a train they call The Beast. It has been well documented and written about by a Salvadoran journalist, Oscar Martinez, in a book he wrote in 2013 which is chilling, but it describes the journey from Central America through Mexico on the top of one of these trains and the risk of accident, the likelihood of sexual assault--6 to 8 out of 10 migrant women are sexually assaulted--people who are kidnapped for ransom, and people who are killed who don't comply with the dictates of the drug cartels.

Don't take just my word for it.

Last week the Washington Post confirmed that the influx of unaccompanied minors:

..... is being driven in large part by the perception that they will be allowed to stay under the Obama administration's immigration policies.

The New York Times recently told the story of a 13-year-old Honduran boy who was detained in Mexico while trying to reach the United States. Like so many others across Central America, the Times reported this boy

..... said his mother believed that the Obama administration had quietly changed its policy regarding unaccompanied minors and that if he made it across he would have a better shot at staying.

The distinguished Senator from Maryland is here.

Not only is this affecting States such as Texas, but these children, 1,000 of them, are being effectively warehoused in Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, TX, some are being shipped to Arizona and California, and some are being sent--or at least the plan is to send them--to Virginia and Maryland, because these 47,000 children who have been detained since October of last year are overwhelming the capacity of local communities and State and Federal authorities to deal with them. As I said, The Beast, which transports people 1,000 miles or so on a trip from southern Mexico up to the southern border of Texas, is a horrific way to transit that huge expanse.

Migrant women are preyed upon by drug cartels such as the Zetas. Officials from the mayor's office in Ciudad Hidalgo told Oscar Martinez, the author of the book ``The Beast,'' in Ciudad Hidalgo the Zetas control all trafficking, sending men to recruit women in Central America, and sometimes even kidnapping migrant women riding the buses. They sell the women to truckdrivers for a night, and then throw them away like unwanted scraps.

My point is, there is nothing humane about encouraging people to travel through cartel-dominated smuggling routes in the hopes of reaching the United States. Yet that has been the effect of the perception that the President and his administration are not committed to enforcing our immigration laws. I know that wasn't their intention but that has been the consequence. Even before the ongoing border crisis erupted, people were taking notice of the President's disregard for the rule of law.

Last December, for example, a Federal district court judge in Brownsville, TX, absolutely excoriated the Obama administration for making a mockery of enforcement, noting that the President's policies were incentivizing human traffickers and endangering the lives of children. Here is what Federal Judge Andrew Hanen said:

By fostering an atmosphere whereby illegal aliens are encouraged to pay human smugglers for further services, the government is not only allowing them to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so.

That is a Federal district judge in Brownsville, TX.

One final point. Some of my friends across the aisle have argued that if only Congress would pass President Obama's preferred immigration reforms, the current border crisis would never have happened. That ignores the fact that none of these children qualify for any of the deferred action policies either ordered in 2012 or any of the others I mentioned. But there is the perception caused by the first Morton memo, the second Morton memo, then the deferred action announcement, and now the widely publicized news that the President has instructed Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, to reconsider the entire repatriation and deportation policy, and it is clear this is related to the upcoming midterm election and the President's desire to try to make a point.

The problem is his point is backfiring. It is victimizing the very same people the President believes, I think, that he is trying to help. That is what happens when the rule of law is no longer your priority--unintended consequences. As I explained today, the President's actions have helped cause this humanitarian crisis.

I know the Finance Committee has in subcommittee appropriated I think roughly $2 billion to help the Federal authorities to deal with this humanitarian crisis. Unfortunately, unless we are able to process appropriations bills across the floor of the Senate, I don't know when that money is going to be available, and that is another problem.

But the most fundamental problem is the American people's confidence that the Federal Government will enforce the laws, until such time as those laws are changed, has been undermined. Passing new legislation will do nothing to fix that unless the President is willing to enforce laws that have already been passed by Congress. This isn't a problem of passing some more laws; this is a problem of the President and his administration effectively conveying the message that they are not going to enforce the laws they don't want to enforce. Unless we send a clear, unambiguous message that our border is secure and our immigration laws are being enforced, we can expect more and more Central American migrants to embark on the harrowing journey from Central America up through Mexico, which means more of them will be robbed, kidnapped, raped, and killed. We don't know how many start out on this journey. All we know is how many show up on the border. We ought to be concerned about that.

To be clear, I remain personally committed to fixing all aspects of our broken immigration system, but I cannot and will not support any policy that effectively empowers human traffickers and endangers the lives of these children.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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Mr. CORNYN. I appreciate the Senator's leadership and big heart. This is not a political issue. The first and most important thing we need to do is to pursue the best interests of these children, but we cannot simply deal with our immigration problem, illegal immigration problem, at the border. It has to start back in Central America. That is one reason I am glad Vice President Joe Biden is traveling to Guatemala, as I know Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security has, to try to see what they can do.

We then need to try to persuade our friends in Mexico to commit more resources. Perhaps we can persuade them to deal with the 500-mile southern border that is basically controlled by the cartels. But the cartels are making money. So this is a governance issue in Central America and Mexico as well.

I might point out that perhaps with the same reservations the distinguished Senator from Maryland made about not agreeing with everything I said, but much of what I said, what I have said has I think pretty much been echoed by my friend Representative Henry Cuellar from Laredo, TX, who obviously by virtue of where he lives and was raised is very knowledgeable about the border around Laredo and Mexico and Central America.

I saw an interview with our former First Lady Hillary Clinton, that unless we send a very clear and loud message to people in Central America that you should not come, you should not risk your children making this long, harrowing journey because they will not be able to stay, then they are going to keep coming, because right now when these children come here, as the Senator knows, our capacity to deal with them is overwhelmed at the local level, at the State level, and at the Federal level, and they are essentially being treated like refugees and warehoused in places such as Lackland Air Force Base and other places around the country.

You can imagine the impact in the long run not only on the health care system, on education, and other services that would be required to take care of these children until they can be repatriated. But I would align myself with what former Senator Clinton, the former Secretary of State, said: The President and the administration need to send a very clear and loud message that anyone who comes to the United States will be returned to their country of origin once a safe family member can be identified to repatriate these children. But right now the system is so overwhelmed that we don't even know who these children are being placed with in America. They may be some claimed family member, but I am not sure whether there are background checks being done for criminal history or perhaps sex offense.

This is overwhelming the whole system. I am sure working together we can come up with an improvement over where we are now, and I would point out this is not a partisan issue, but it is a very harsh reality and my concern is it is being overwhelmed by the news out of the Middle East and other concerns here in Washington when it is very much front and center back home in Texas.

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