[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 143 (Thursday, November 20, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6180-S6182]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  Mr. INHOFE. Tonight there will be a speech. I think everyone is aware 
of that. I think we all know pretty much what the President of the 
United States is going to say.
  I would like to read the oath of office that any President of the 
United States has to take, and this President has taken this oath in an 
affirmative way for--I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning 
business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. INHOFE. Tonight we have the President's speech, and I would like 
to recite one more time what every President has to say and has to 
affirm before he becomes President.

       I do solemnly swear or affirm that I will faithfully 
     execute the Office of the President of the United States, and 
     will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend 
     the Constitution of the United States.

  I think people are overlooking this because they know what to expect 
tonight. They know what is going to happen. They know the President is 
going to do something that in the eyes of most people--and I have to 
say that most of the people I talk to are from my State of Oklahoma. 
They have a lot of common sense and ask the question: Is this illegal, 
what we are about to witness?
  The President is bound by the Constitution to ensure the laws on the 
books are being carried out in a manner that is true to the law that is 
written and passed by Congress. It is his duty, his obligation. That 
was envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

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  As any school-aged kid or any of my grandchildren would say, laws are 
made in Congress and signed into law by the President. Once bills 
become law, the President's constitutional duty is triggered at that 
point, no matter who holds the office or how that person feels about 
the particular law. If a President finds a law problematic, then this 
is how he has to address that problem: He has to work with Congress to 
change the law. He does not have the authority to unilaterally declare 
that law not to apply to millions of Americans, which is what I think 
we are going to witness tonight. That is exactly what the President is 
doing.
  He issued ultimatums to Congress: Pass what I want or else. We heard 
that. We heard those words. When Congress and the American people push 
back against him, he charges forward with Executive orders that are 
written and executed behind closed doors. Let's remember that at the 
time this President first took office, his big thing was transparency. 
He wants people to know what is going on and not have any surprises. 
Yet this is what is happening: These Executive orders are taking the 
place of those laws that are passed by Members who are elected to the 
House and to the Senate.

  He says the reason for this is he is tired of waiting on an 
immigration system that is broken. Those are his words. He has taken 
action because Congress won't. That is not the way it works. A Congress 
that has had--by the way, he had a Democratic majority the first 2 
years in the House and Senate and the White House. He can't say we are 
not doing it. He is certainly not referring to Republicans. These are 
the excuses for doing what he is doing.
  Some claim he is not doing anything different from what President 
Ronald Reagan or President George H.W. Bush did. I think it is very 
important, very briefly, to show you that is not true at all.
  In 1986 Congress passed and President Reagan signed into law the 
Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave amnesty to close to 3 
million illegal immigrants. Amnesty was granted by statute, not by 
Executive order. That was a law which was passed and which the 
President signed and agreed to.
  Soon after, the people realized the children of these immigrants--who 
were still eligible for deportation--were simply overlooked. The fact 
is, if there is a husband and a wife and they are able to go ahead and 
become naturalized citizens, their underaged children would have to be 
as well. Everyone agreed, no one disagreed, and so they went ahead and 
did it. That was working with Congress. Congress made that decision 
with the President of the United States.
  In 1990 President Bush expanded President Reagan's grant of deferred 
deportation to all minor children and to the spouses of those who were 
granted amnesty in the 1986 law, and Congress codified the policy later 
that year in the Immigration Act of 1990. So it wasn't George H.W. Bush 
who did this; it was the Congress of 1990 that did this. We are not 
talking about the same thing at all.
  In the case of both Reagan and Bush, they worked with Congress and 
interpreted a statute. That is not what is happening now. President 
Obama is creating a law on his own as to how he wishes the law would 
be. He has no authority to do it. We are going to see this tonight, and 
I think we need to have this in our background in what we are looking 
for.
  As we saw with his previous amnesty--that was 2012; we remember that, 
about 2\1/2\ years ago--this new Executive amnesty will encourage more 
people to come here and break the laws.
  This year, thanks to President Obama's Executive order--called the 
deferred action for childhood arrivals, DACA--Americans watched as 
unaccompanied alien children--that is, the UAC--poured over our 
southern border seeking the same amnesty others had been given. Who is 
to say the President won't give them that? It is reported that tonight 
he will be changing the qualifications of the DACA to include even 
more.
  What happened then is really worse than what is happening now and 
going to be announced tonight because at least tonight they are talking 
about 5 to 6 million people who are going to be granted amnesty, and 
what he did before in encouraging the young people to get here to the 
United States--we don't know where they are today or how many there 
are.
  In my State of Oklahoma--Fort Sill in Lawton, OK--we have a base that 
was given several hundred of these young children. They are under 18 
years of age. They were told they were to house these children until 
January. It worked out pretty well because we were in the middle of 
building some buildings down there, and so we had a place for them for 
a temporary period of time. They were supposed to be released in 
January. I went down there in October, and they were already gone. They 
didn't really know where they were, but they were gone. Even to this 
day, if you call up and talk to the commander down there, they will 
tell you they don't know for sure where they are.
  To go even further into this, I went to the Texas border, where I 
went to a center called Los Fresnos. There are 18 IES facilities on the 
southern border. It is not just in Texas but all--I think 13 of those 
are in Texas. I went down there to see the process they used. I talked 
to the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol told me they are instructed 
to--and they did--send the kids as they came to the various facilities, 
these 18 facilities. So I went to the one that I believe is the 
largest. It is called Los Fresnos. It is on the southern border on the 
eastern side of Texas. They weren't very happy about this. I went in 
and took a bunch of pictures to see what was going on there. I found 
out that they had a facility that had 200 beds. They had 200 beds. That 
is a very small number of people.
  I asked the question: How many kids are coming through here?
  They said: Thousands.
  I said: How many in the last 6 months?
  They said: Well, several thousand.
  Let's keep in mind they can only bed down 200 people. Thousands have 
come through.
  We came back to trace where these thousands actually ended up. We 
were not able to find out. You can find that they have a Web site 
saying how many States received how many kids. We have no way of 
verifying if that is true. For all we know, there are hundreds of 
thousands of kids out there, and we don't know where they are.
  Those people who are concerned about 5 to 6 million people tonight, 
keep in mind that it is really much more than that. On that number, the 
issue we have is we don't know where the children eventually end 
up, and the administration does not have to notify the local 
governments of their presence. There are counties that are published as 
to how many are in a county. We don't know their names.

  Interestingly, when I was at Los Fresnos on the border, I talked to a 
lot of the kids who were being brought into this country. Those kids--
each one had a story, and you could tell it was a rehearsed story: I 
have parents who live in California. I have a dad who lives in New 
York. They all had a story down as if they are coming back.
  Keep in mind--these are kids who came not from Mexico but through 
Mexico. We heard only yesterday some of the atrocities, the things that 
had happened to some of these kids--the raping, the killing, all of 
that--as they were making the transition through Mexico.
  They publish online what States they end up in, but we don't know the 
numbers, whether these are verified numbers or if we are taking their 
word for it.
  Something is going on, and even I, as a Member of the Senate, have 
gone down there two separate times to Los Fresnos and still don't know 
the answer to the questions that I get from people in Oklahoma who are 
very much concerned about this. Who monitors to ensure that they remain 
and show up for court? If they evade the law long enough,--and they 
know now they can evade the law; if the President can do it, they can 
do it--then amnesty will eventually be received by them.
  We have immigration laws that are going to be ignored. What does this 
say to the immigrants who are coming into America and applying for 
citizenship in accordance with the law?
  I have been honored several times to go and be the speaker at 
naturalization ceremonies in my State of Oklahoma. I

[[Page S6182]]

will tell you, you cry when you look out there. You see a couple 
hundred people who have come to this country, gone through the system, 
studied the history--and I would suggest those people up for 
naturalization probably know the history much better than people who 
are born here in this country. They learn the language. They go through 
all these things, and finally they become citizens of the United 
States. That is the legal way to do it. What are their thoughts right 
now after all they have gone through and the doors are open for anyone 
to come through? Is that compassion for those people? I don't think so. 
Compassion is acknowledging and respecting the millions who adhere to 
our laws and achieve citizenship.
  But here is the thing. When you stop being a nation based on the rule 
of law, you are at the mercy of one man and his whims. It sounds 
exactly like something our Founding Fathers were looking to avoid and 
escape. I think that is the problem we have. I have people asking me: 
Why is the President breaking the law with regularity? Does he not have 
to obey the law the same as we do?
  Well, as you know, there is a lawsuit that is being processed over on 
the House side. But we also know this: Anyone who comes who has 2 years 
left in his term knows if something is starting the process to 
determine whether action is legal, it would be probably 5 or 6 years 
before that case would be decided. By that time he is long gone.
  I want to mention one thing that is specific. People say: Well, how 
can you say the President is breaking the law? He does break the law. 
He breaks it all the time. One of the things I have been concerned 
about for a long period of time is keeping the installation named 
Guantanamo Bay--called Gitmo--keeping it open. It is the only place 
that we can keep the type of terrorists we have down there. It is one, 
I think, that has worked out well. But somehow there is the obsession 
that this President has--he wants to close Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay.
  Knowing that, I put an amendment on the Defense authorization bill in 
2014. If anyone wants to look it up, it is section 1035(d) of the 2014 
National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA. It specifically states--
anticipating that the President would start releasing these people from 
Guantanamo Bay without authority, we put into law that the President 
shall notify Congress not later than 30 days before the transfer or 
release of any Guantanamo Bay detainee.
  What did we find out? The President, without notifying anyone, 
released probably the five--in fact, not probably, certainly the five 
very worst of the terrorists who were being kept down there. In fact, 
one of their names was Mohammad Fazl. One of the Taliban commanders, 
whose name is Mullah Salem Khan, made this statement--this is right 
after the President released the five terrorists. We do not know where 
they are, whether they are killing Americans, where they are right now.
  He said, ``Mohammad Fazl, his returning is like pouring 10,000 
Taliban fighters into the battle on the side of Jihad. Now the Taliban 
has the right lion to lead them in the final moment before victory in 
Afghanistan.''
  So that is another issue altogether. These people are released to 
come back and kill Americans. But the point is, that law was aimed 
specifically at the President that he cannot do that. He did it. So 
when I see these things happen, I think I have never seen this before.
  I am not a real student of history, but certainly I have read an 
abundant amount of the history of this institution as well as the 
President and what is going and what should go on in Washington and 
what our Founding Fathers envisioned. Our Founding Fathers never 
envisioned they would have a President who would blatantly break the 
law, specifically break the law.
  That is what is happening now. That example is just one of many I 
could give. So enjoy the speech tonight. I think you are going to see 
that another one of our laws looks as though it is going to be broken. 
That would be our immigration laws that are on the books now.
  I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Markey). The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader.
  Mr. McCONNELL. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Republican leader is recognized.

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