[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 24 (Thursday, February 12, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S975-S976]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO FEDERAL EMPLOYEE


                           Ramiro Garza, Jr.

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, here in Congress, as the Presiding Officer 
knows, we do a lot of oversight. Oversight is focused on what is going 
right as well as what is going wrong in our government. There is a lot 
of each, actually. That oversight is critically important work. It is 
sometimes overlooked, but critically important.
  I think it is also important to stop and recognize where things are 
going right from time to time and the people who are doing the right 
thing. Following in the footsteps of one of our former colleagues 
here--I don't think the Presiding Officer ever had a chance to work 
with him, but Ted Kaufman was a Senator who served here for 2 years. He 
succeeded Joe Biden who went off to do some other job--Vice President, 
maybe that is what it is. And then, before Senator Chris Coons was 
elected 2 years later, Ted Kaufman was our Senator, a great guy. He 
used to be Senator Biden's chief of staff for 20 years or so.
  Ted used to come to the floor pretty regularly and talk about 
different Federal employees who are doing exemplary work; people who 
had gone above and beyond to achieve the mission of solving problems 
and giving the U.S. taxpayer something to be proud of.
  When somebody has a good idea, I like to steal it, and I think Ted 
Kaufman had a great idea. I have not really stolen it, but we have 
taken an idea and we have focused it a little bit, to focus on some of 
the people the Presiding Officer and I, along with Senator Ron Johnson, 
met with this last weekend on the U.S. border with Mexico. I have 
decided to take the Ted Kaufman idea and focus it, put a spotlight on a 
number of employees within the Department of Homeland Security.
  As many of us know, the Department of Homeland Security, which does 
important work--sometimes heroic work, dangerous work--they suffer from 
low morale, but it is filled with men and women who, frankly, deserve, 
I think, in many cases, a lot more credit than they receive.

[[Page S976]]

  Today I wish to speak for the next several minutes about one of the 
people we met, a fellow whose name I think the Presiding Officer will 
probably remember. His name is Ramiro Garza, Jr., and he goes by Ram. I 
think he has probably gone by Ram all his life. I will always remember 
him as Ram. He is an outstanding Border Patrol officer whom we met last 
week in McAllen, TX, while we were visiting the Mexican border in South 
Texas--the three of us, the Presiding Officer, Senator Ron Johnson, and 
yours truly.
  This is Ram. Some of my colleagues may remember the pictures last 
summer, when an unprecedented surge of Central American children and 
families arrived at our Texas border. They are the kind of pictures 
that really burn into our memories for a lot of us. The pictures we are 
more used to seeing may be from war zones than to see here in our own 
country, with hundreds upon hundreds of unaccompanied minors and a lot 
of mothers with young children in search of protection, literally 
turning themselves in to our Border Patrol agents; not running away 
from them, but turning themselves in and asking for asylum.
  The Rio Grande Valley in South Texas is where Agent Ram Garza works. 
Ram is the acting patrol agent in charge of the Rio Grande Valley 
sector of the U.S. Border Patrol. The Rio Grande Valley where Ram works 
is the epicenter of that humanitarian crisis we witnessed last year. 
That is because most of the migrants were from the northern triangle of 
Central America, and they were fleeing violence, fleeing economic 
desperation, and fleeing a sense of hopelessness in Guatemala, 
Honduras, and El Salvador.
  These migrants had to travel some 1,500 miles through Mexico, risking 
life and limb to get to the United States. The shortest route--though 
by no means an easy one--runs up the east side of Mexico from Central 
America to the South Texas border, and many of the people who are 
making that 1,500 mile trek did it on top of a train. In fact, they did 
it on a series of trains--freight trains, not passenger trains--where 
people actually get on top of the trains and try to hold on for a 1,500 
mile trip. Some of them succeeded and some of them didn't. Some of them 
fell down between the trains and cars and lost their lives. Some made 
it to the border. Some fell off the train. Some got hurt. Some got on 
another train. Some didn't make it. But many of them rode on top of 
those trains to get here, and they suffered violence. If they made it 
safely on the train, a lot of them suffered violence at the hands of 
predatory gangs along the way.
  When these children showed up in South Texas, they literally 
overwhelmed the Border Patrol stations along the border. These stations 
are only supposed to hold detained migrants for a short period of time 
as they are processed for removal back to where they came from, or for 
detention. Usually along the border, they deal with the young men. 
However, last year stations were packed with mothers and young children 
who were trapped there for days as our government struggled to find 
suitable shelters and decide what to do with them. There were no 
adequate meals, no clothing, no diapers. There is literally no room at 
times for someone to lie down, either.
  Faced with this human crisis, Customs and Border Protection agents 
sprang to action. Among their leaders was our agent here today whom I 
especially want to put a spotlight on: Ramiro Garza. With the help of 
his colleagues, Ram went above and beyond to process the arrivals, 
according to the law, while also responding to the human needs of these 
people. Agent Garza helped create an emergency operations center to 
manage the crisis and worked to transfer unaccompanied children to the 
Office of Refugee Resettlement.
  Perhaps most impressive, though, he worked with his colleagues to 
convert an enormous abandoned warehouse that we visited in McAllen, TX. 
I will not soon forget that. It is just a few miles from our border 
with Mexico. He turned it into a processing center for detained 
migrants and they did it in 18 days. They looked at a place--and they 
described what it was like before they started working on it, and then 
what they did in 19 days, they did pretty remarkable stuff. And Ram, 
whom we honor especially here today, and those who worked with him 
deserve our recognition.
  This processing center helped greatly relieve the crowded and 
inadequate conditions in multiple Border Patrol stations along the 
border. When Senator Ron Johnson, our Presiding Officer, Senator Sasse, 
and I visited this past weekend the extraordinary processing center 
that Agent Garza helped set up, we were amazed to see a cavernous, 
orderly center equipped with the humanitarian necessities needed for 
hundreds of children and their parents. The center also had space for 
Central American officials to work with Customs and Border Protection 
in order to properly identify migrants and arrange for speedier 
repatriations, in many cases to their home countries, where 
appropriate.
  Agent Garza was instrumental in designing the processing facility and 
getting it up and running quickly. Today he is in charge of that 
facility.
  This is just the latest achievement in Agent Garza's career with the 
Border Patrol. As I said, known most of his life as Ram, he grew up in 
the Rio Grande Valley. There he attended high school and the University 
of Texas-Pan American. He joined the Border Patrol in 1996. His first 
assignment was to the Brownsville station in the Rio Grande sector. In 
2004, he was promoted to supervisory Border Patrol agent at the Rio 
Grande City station. That was followed by tours at the Rio Grande 
sector's intelligence office and at Harlingen station.
  Agent Garza also worked on detail here in Washington, DC, where his 
duties included supporting the agency's efforts in biometric 
collection--something we think is very important. While he is helping 
to humanely process migrants apprehended at the border, Agent Garza 
also cares for his own family--his wife and their own two children. We 
thank them for sharing with us their husband and their dad--a very good 
man.
  The Department of Homeland Security and our Nation are truly blessed 
by Ram's exemplary service.
  Agent Garza, if you are out there listening, we want to thank you for 
what you do each and every day for all of us. We thank you for your 
tireless service to our Nation for all of these years.

                          ____________________