Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2014

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, later on today I expect we would be voting on the emergency supplemental appropriation that the President had requested to deal with the humanitarian crisis on the Texas border. Over the past few weeks I have spoken about
this and made several trips down to the valley. I will be leaving tonight along with colleagues. There is a bipartisan congressional delegation going down again to the valley and to Lackland Air Force Base where about 1200 children are currently being housed by the Department of Health and Human Services pending their placement with their relatives in the country.

As part of this discussion we have been having in the search for solutions to this unexpected flood of humanity in the form of unaccompanied children coming across the southwestern border, many of us are trying to figure out exactly what the cause of this flood is. In fact, I think it is probably more than one cause. I think perhaps it is the President's statements that he is going to defer action or refuse to enforce our current immigration laws against a certain class of immigrants that is known as the President's deferred executive action order of 2012.

But there is also another cause that has been recognized on a bipartisan basis, and this is a 2008 human trafficking law that passed essentially unanimously in 2008, because we were focused on one problem; that is, human trafficking, but the unexpected consequences or unintended consequences of that created a business model that is being exploited by the transnational criminal organizations, or cartels, as they traffic in human beings coming from Central America through Mexico up to the Texas border.

Together with my colleague in the House, Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, we have introduced a bipartisan, bicameral reform, something we call the HUMANE Act, and it has been cosponsored by people who have supported the so-called Gang of 8 bill in the Senate and people who opposed the Gang of 8 bill.

I raise that point to note that this isn't about comprehensive immigration reform. We have a lot of work to be done. But this is actually intended to solve this immediate problem right in front of our eyes and to stop this hemorrhaging on our southwestern border. My hope is once we address that problem, we can come together in a bipartisan way and address the larger defects in our immigration system, of which there are many. This is, simply put, an attempt to tackle a national emergency.

Let me briefly recapitulate what I am talking about. Since October of last year 57,000 unaccompanied children have been detained on the southwestern border. Under current law--this 2008 law I mentioned--these children are processed by the Border Patrol and they are placed with the Department of Health and Human Services, as it turns out an average of 35 days, and then placed with a family member in the United States or, if not a family member, some sponsor.

Part of the problem is that they are given a notice to appear at a future court hearing and very few of them appear. Thus, they are successful in making their way from Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala up through Mexico into the United States, and end up successfully immigrating to the United States illegally, outside of our broken immigration system.

What we need to do in order to fix that gap in the law, that loophole which was unintended by those of us who voted to pass the 2008 law, is to require that these children be held in protective custody and given a speedy hearing in front of an immigration judge for those who want to make the claim for asylum or some other relief. But the truth is the vast majority of these children, like the adults, will not have a claim to stay under existing law and our bill doesn't change that existing law. But for those who do, they have a speedy opportunity to appear in front of a judge and make that claim. Those who do not have a valid claim will simply be returned to their home country, to their family.

This morning I was invited, along with Members of the House and the Senate, to visit with the President about national security matters. He talked about Ukraine, he talked about Syria, he talked about Gaza, and all of the hot spots around the world. I used the opportunity to ask the President what he proposed that we do when this emergency supplemental bill goes down this afternoon.

The reason this bill will fail is because the majority leader simply is asking us to appropriate money and do nothing to fix the problem we have attempted to address in the HUMANE Act with Congressman Cuellar that I mentioned a moment ago.

In essence, the President asked for a blank check, when he himself acknowledged this morning in my presence and the presence of a bipartisan group of Senators and Congressmen that he knows we need to address this problem or it will just get worse if we don't address it.

It is quite remarkable to me that the President of the United States acknowledges we have a problem we need to address. When the Secretary of Homeland Security, who is trying to use the tools available to him to solve this crisis but knows he needs more tools and more authority, at the same time the President makes that acknowledgment, and at the same time his Secretary of Homeland Security identifies the need for additional authority in order to address the problem, the President has reported he wants to actually expand this deferred action Executive order he issued in 2012 and say to the people who are coming to our country outside of our immigration laws: It is OK. You can stay here. There are no consequences associated with that.

The problem with that is the message that is being sent to the cartels who traffic in human beings and make a lot of money off of it--like I said a moment ago, this is part of their business model--by exploiting this loophole in the law.

What sort of message does this send to the families who would send their children on this horrific journey from Central America through Mexico on the back of a train called The Beast? They are willing to send their children on this journey even though they could be injured, sexually assaulted, kidnapped or held for ransom. We don't know how many of them start the journey but don't make it because of the horrific conditions by the criminal organizations, not to mention the exposure to the hot weather and difficult environmental circumstances.

By failing to address the root cause of the problem, what we are saying is: That is OK. Keep coming. Indeed, that is why it is projected that of the 57,000 unaccompanied children who have made it here so far and have been detained--by the way, they are not trying to evade detection by Border Patrol. They are turning themselves in because they realize they will be processed and placed with Health and Human Services, and essentially, by and large, they will be able to stay. That is what we need to address.

Unfortunately, the House tried to work together today to pass a bill that would, I believe, have provided more money, as the President requested--not as much as he requested, but an emergency appropriation, together with the reforms to that 2008 law which would have addressed this problem.

Unfortunately, because the House of Representatives could not get any Democratic support, that bill failed and so the Speaker of the House pulled the bill from the floor. As a result, they will not be able to pass any legislation to send over to the Senate. That should not cause any of our colleagues here in the Senate much joy because the fact of the matter is the House has its independent duty to act and we have our own duty to act, and we can and should do that this afternoon.

We should do what the House attempted to do, which is to pass a slimmed-down appropriations bill on an emergency basis to help surge resources to the border but at the same time find a way to come together and plug the hole in this 2008 law, which is necessary to stop the problem--at least on this surgical basis.

What is so confusing is to listen to the President talk in his conference room at the White House about this and acknowledge the nature of the problem, and then to see that the White House threatened to veto the legislation that the House was considering. There are a lot of mixed messages, to say the least, with regard to the President's commitment to actually enforce the law. We know that in too many instances he has simply refused to enforce the law, and our immigration law is just one of those. But to hear such mixed messages out of the White House and the administration that yes, we need to act--we should not

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