Humanitarian Crisis

Floor Speech

Mr. COSTA. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on the importance of comprehensive immigration reform and the growing humanitarian crisis we are facing at our southern border.

It is the job of the Congress to face and resolve challenging issues like our broken immigration system. We ought to pass the bipartisan Senate bill that would provide commonsense solutions to address not only reforming our immigration system, but to deal with this immediate humanitarian crisis at our border.

Instead, the Republican House leadership refuses to allow a vote on comprehensive reform and has come up, instead, with a plan that would change the law passed in 2008 to combat human trafficking. In addition, this partisan bill will provide limited funding for this fiscal year.

Again, House leadership plans to pass a short-term fix, so that they can go back to their districts next month and say: well, we tried to fix this crisis that we are facing.

This is not how we should be solving our Nation's problems. Each day that our immigration system remains broken, jobs are lost, and our economy suffers. It is time to set politics aside and focus on fixing our current immigration system. In fact, failure to address reform is making it more difficult to deal with the thousands of unaccompanied children arriving at our southern border in hopes of finding safety.

The humanitarian crisis that we are facing is in part a result of the increasing turmoil in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where drug trafficking, human trafficking, and violence is rampant. Families have been tortured and killed, and today, there are people who are literally running for their lives.

Atrocities are being committed in those countries, and they must bear the responsibility of addressing and resolving their issues. Mexico also has a role to play.

We in the United States must now face the humanitarian crisis this violence is causing at our southern border. In a joint statement, President Obama, along with Presidents from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, pledged to reduce criminal activity in Central American countries by promoting greater social and economic opportunity.

It is my hope that these leaders stay true to their word and demonstrate leadership by addressing the humanitarian crisis taking place within their own countries.

These young unaccompanied children must be treated in a humane and dignified way. Ultimately, these children's fate rests in the hands of our immigration judges, and those children who are not granted asylum must return to their countries. Playing politics with this grave crisis, as some are doing, is not productive.

It is the height of hypocrisy that Republicans want more border security, but have refused to allow a vote on a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would in fact provide more funding to secure our borders. That makes no sense. We have spent billions of dollars on border security, but clearly, our border is not yet secure.

The comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in a bipartisan fashion requires that a long-term plan be developed and executed with an initial $8.3 billion in funding to focus on securing the borders today and an additional $6.5 billion in funding to be spent over the next 6 years to in fact secure our border.

What we need now, more than ever, is an open and honest discussion on the House floor about the relationship between immigration reform and this humanitarian crisis. Therefore, I urge my Republican colleagues to join together, in a bipartisan fashion, like they did in the Senate, to find an effective and humane short- and long-term solution to this crisis, which is directly related, in my opinion, to fixing our broken immigration system.

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