Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Authorization Act - Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. CRUZ. I thank my friend the senior Senator from Texas. I am honored to stand here with the senior Senator from Texas and the Senators from Arizona as we speak out together against the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding on our border.
President Obama today is down in the State of Texas. But, sadly, he is not visiting the border. He is not visiting the children who are suffering as a result of the failures of the Obama policies. Instead, he is doing fundraisers. He is visiting Democratic fat cats to collect checks. Apparently, there is no time to look at the disaster, at the devastation that is being caused by his policies.
Just a couple of weeks ago, as the Senator from Texas observed, I was down at Lackland Air Force Base where there are roughly 1,200 children being housed. There is one thing President Obama had said about what is happening that is absolutely correct. This is a humanitarian disaster. But it is a disaster of the President's own making. It is a disaster that is a direct consequence of President Obama's lawlessness. A quick review of the facts makes that abundantly apparent.
In 2011, just 3 years ago, there were roughly 6,000 unaccompanied children apprehended trying to cross illegally into this country. Then in 2012, in the summer of 2012, right before the election, President Obama illegally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people who were here illegally who had entered the country as children.
The direct, predictable, foreseeable consequence of granting that amnesty is the number of children--unaccompanied children--immediately began to skyrocket. This year, the estimates are that 90,000 unaccompanied children will enter this country illegally. That is up from 6,000 just 3 years ago--6,000 to 90,000. Next year the estimate is 145,000.
This explosion is the direct consequence of the President's lawlessness. It is worth underscoring. The people who are being hurt the most are these kids. The coyotes who are bringing them in are not well-meaning social workers trying to help out some kids. These are violent, hardened transnational criminal cartels. These mothers and fathers, sadly, are handing over their children to violent criminals who are physically abusing and who are sexually abusing small children.
When I was down at Lackland Air Force Base, a senior official there described to me how those cartels--with some of these children after they have taken them and after they have begun coming to this
country to take them here illegally--would hold these children captive, hold them hostage to extract additional money from the families.
If the families did not send them additional money, as horrifying as it is, these drug cartels would begin severing body parts of these children. I listened to the senior official at Lackland describe how the cartels would put a gun to the back of the head of a little boy or little girl and force that child to cut off the fingers or the ears of another little boy or little girl. If they do not do so, they will shoot them and move to the next one.
So on our end, we are having children come to this country whom we are having to deal with who are maimed. They have been maimed by the brutality of these criminal cartels. Others of them have deep, deep psychological trauma from a child forced to do something so horrific. This is a tragedy that is playing out. It is happening in real time.
Now, the administration has suggested the cause of this is violence in Central America. I would suggest to my friends, the senior Senator from Texas and the Senators from Arizona, that argument is a complete red herring. With violence in one country, you would expect to see the number of immigrants from that country to go up. But there is no reason unaccompanied children would go up. That is something unique and distinct.
There have always been countries across the world, sadly, that have been plagued by violence. When that happens, we have always seen an influx in immigrants, both legal and illegal, from those countries. What we are seeing here is particular, though. It is particularized towards children. The reason it is particularized towards children is because the President granted amnesty in a way that was particularized towards children.
If you want to understand just how false the administration's talking point is for the cause of what is happening, you need to look no further than a report which was prepared by our border security that Senator Cornyn and Senator Flake and I all saw in the Senate Judiciary Committee. A couple of weeks ago we had a hearing on this humanitarian crisis, and a whistleblower at the Border Patrol handed over this confidential document to a number of Senators on the Judiciary Committee.
It described how the Border Patrol interviewed over 200 people who have come here illegally--adults and children--and asked them a simple question: Why did you come? Ninety five percent said: We came because we believe if we get here we will get amnesty. We believe we will get a permiso is what they said; that once they get here, once a child gets here, that little boy, that little girl is scot-free. I would suggest to my friend, this is what amnesty looks like.
I would suggest to my friends this is what amnesty looks like. Amnesty looks like dangerous drug cartels entering this country wantonly. Amnesty looks like thousands of young children being housed in military bases. Amnesty looks like hundreds of immigrants who came here illegally being transported to cities and towns amid opposition from the citizens who lived there. Amnesty looks like a complete and utter disregard of our rule of law. Amnesty is unfolding before our very eyes.
I would suggest that the only response that will stop this humanitarian disaster is for President Obama to start enforcing the law, to stop promising amnesty, to stop refusing to enforce Federal immigration law, and, finally, to secure the borders. Indeed, I would call upon our colleagues in this body in both parties to come together and secure the border once and for all and to stop holding border security hostage for amnesty.
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Mr. CRUZ. The senior Senator from Texas is exactly right that the President has effectively admitted he has no intention of stopping this problem. The supplemental request he has submitted, $3.7 billion, the majority of that goes to HHS's social services, providing care to these kids, rather than stopping and solving the problem.
The Senator and I have both spent a lot of time down on the border of Texas and all four of us have spent time down on the border of Texas or Arizona. The consistent answer from local leaders, from local law enforcement, from local elected officials about what is effective securing the border--the most consistent answer is boots on the ground; that if you want to effectively secure the border--boots on the ground, particularly combined with technology.
It is striking, out of $3.7 billion, a tiny percentage of that is directed toward boots on the ground. This is an HHS social services bill, and it is unfortunately a pattern we have seen with the Obama administration of bait-and-switch. They are calling this a border security bill. It is reminiscent of the 2009 stimulus, which we will all recall was sold to the American people. The 2009 stimulus was about building roads, infrastructure, and shovel-ready projects, all of which are good ideas. Then when over $800 billion was spent by the Obama administration, very little of it actually went to roads, infrastructure, or shovel-ready projects. Instead, it paid off liberal interest groups such as, in this case, the administration calls the $3.7 billion border security and yet almost none of the money goes to border security.
Indeed, I would note for all of the Democrats who are seeing this humanitarian crisis unfold, who are discovering suddenly the need for border security--and I would note my friend the senior Senator from New York stood on this floor as we were debating immigration last year and said: The border is secure today.
President Obama stood in El Paso in 2010 and said: The border is secure today.
I would note, for everyone who says now they are focused on border security that when the Senate Judiciary Committee was considering immigration reform, I introduced an amendment--the senior Senator from Texas supported it--that would have tripled our Border Patrol, that would have increased fourfold the fixed-wing assets, the technology that would have provided the tools to finally solve this problem, and every single Senate Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted against it. So we shouldn't be surprised the President's proposal that is labeled border security doesn't actually secure the border, doesn't do anything about the lawlessness or the amnesty, which means the Obama administration is effectively admitting they expect these children to continue coming--hundreds of thousands of them in years to come, hundreds of thousands of little boys and little girls being subjected to horrific physical abuse, sexual abuse, and they intend to do nothing to fix the problem, to stop it, to secure the borders, to uphold the law. That is heartbreaking, and that is not the responsibility of a Commander in Chief.
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Mr. CRUZ. I would note that the confirmation and message of amnesty received by the parents entrusting their children to these drug dealers is the Border Patrol report, which said that 95 percent of those coming believe they would get a permiso. They believe they would be allowed to go scot-free. That is the message being heard. It is why these children are being subjected to violence.
A Lackland Air Force Base senior official described a young Hispanic child who is a quadriplegic, who is paralyzed from the neck down, and the drug cartels abandoned him on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. They found him lying by the river, on the other side of the river. That is the sort of care and consideration they are providing for these children. What is happening to these children is horrific.
We are a compassionate nation. We have always been a compassionate nation. But any policy that continues children being abused by violent drug cartels is the opposite of compassion.
So I ask two questions to my friend the senior Senator from Arizona.
This afternoon I had lunch with the attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbott, who described that the attorney general of Texas and the U.S. Attorney's Office have recently arrested an alleged terrorist in Texas with ties to ISIS--with ties to the radical Islamic terrorists who are right now wreaking havoc across Iraq and Syria.
The first question I would ask the senior Senator from Arizona is, how significant does he see the threat of terrorists crossing our porous border and targeting the homeland?
Then, of the $3.7 billion President Obama has requested in the supplemental bill, just $160 million is directed to Border Patrol agents and immigration judges--both. So less than 5 percent of the total actually goes to boots on the ground.
The second question I would ask of the senior Senator from Arizona is, in his judgment, is devoting less than 5 percent of the resources from this bill to boots on the ground a serious effort at securing the border and solving the problem?
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