[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 98 (Wednesday, June 13, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3925-S3927]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             ASYLUM POLICY

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, for generations, the Statue of Liberty--
Lady Liberty we like to call her--has stood as a symbol of how open 
America has been to treating those fleeing oppression when they arrive 
on the shores of America. We hear those famous words written by Emma 
Lazarus: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning 
to breathe free.'' That is a vision that we can connect to because 
virtually every American family has family roots tied to immigrants and 
tied to people pursuing freedom and fleeing oppression--fleeing 
religious oppression, fleeing civil war, fleeing famine--but who come 
to the refuge of the United States of America, knowing that here they 
could be treated well and have a fair chance to thrive.
  In modern times, we have converted this into an asylum policy. An 
asylum policy means, if you are truly fleeing repression, oppression--
if you are truly fleeing danger and your life would be in danger if you 
returned--you could gain admission into the United States of America. 
In fact, we put into international treaties and into national law--
there it is--the torch, the beacon, that signals to the world that we 
stand for human rights.
  Yet now we are in a new and different place. On May 7, our Attorney 
General announced a dramatic change that is completely contrary to the 
Statue of Liberty. What the Attorney General put forward was, should 
you flee oppression overseas and find yourself washed up on the shores 
of the United States of America, we will not greet you with a fair 
chance to present your case and thrive. Instead, we will grab you, 
treat you as a criminal, rip your children out of your arms, and lock 
you up. That is the new policy. That is the Jeff Sessions-Donald Trump-
John Kelly policy of the United States of America.
  When I heard about this, I didn't really believe it was possible that 
any administration could adopt a policy of inflicting deliberate trauma 
on children. There is no moral code in the world that supports such an 
action, and there is no religious tradition on our beautiful planet 
that supports such an action. Yet there it was--the decision to create 
a deterrence for people to come to our shores by our mistreating the 
children who had already arrived. Mistreat the child today, and deter 
some family abroad from ever thinking about coming. That is a dark 
stain on America, this strategy of deliberate harm to children.
  Last Sunday, a week ago Sunday, I went down to find out if this were 
really true. I went to a detention center and gained admission to the 
detention center. The detention center is a large space that is split 
into different cells--you can call them cells--of fencing. There are 
fencing posts, and there is chain link fencing. The first room that I 
went into had smaller cells, maybe 12 by 12 or 15 by 15. They looked 
like cages. People were just arriving and being put into them.
  It is, really, deeply saddening to see the terror in their eyes, the 
tears on their cheeks. They didn't know what was going to happen to 
them. Then they went through a series of desks, at which they were 
interviewed--many by computers because they were talking to people far 
afield, somewhere across the United States. They were being interviewed 
by electronic connection.
  Then they were taken to a very large room, a warehouse-styled room. 
This is not the facility I was in, and this is not a 2018 picture, but 
it looks very much like what I saw. Since people are not allowed to 
enter the facility with any camera now, I am using this picture to 
share with you approximately what it looks like. There are the same 
green pads. There are the same space blankets. There are the same chain 
links. There is the same fencing. There is a sad, big room.
  Now, what is there today in terms of that physical structure is no 
different than what was there in the last administration. That isn't 
the issue. The issue is how that is being put to work, because under 
this new policy, instead of treating families seeking asylum with 
respect until they have their hearing, instead of keeping families 
together so if they do gain admission into the United States they will 
be in good shape and they will be in good care, we are inflicting harm 
on them, harm on the parents, and harm on the children.
  Any child psychological expert will tell you that when people have 
fled trauma abroad, perhaps gone over some very tough hurdles to the 
United States, the one thing they hang on to is the parent's hand, the 
father's hand or mother's hand--that close connection that they will 
see this through together. It is the one little sphere of safety in a 
big, dangerous world.
  Then, in a room like this, after they have gone through the 
processing desks, the children are ripped out of their parents' arms. 
Their parents are incarcerated in one of these divided cells and 
children in another. They may not be able to see each other across the 
warehouse. They don't know what is going to happen.
  So when I was in a room that looked very much like this a week ago 
Sunday, I was standing in front of a big cell that held just young 
boys, and they were lining up. They were lining up to be able to get 
some food, and they were told to line up from the smallest to the 
largest. That made a pretty dramatic picture with the smallest tyke in 
front, knee-high to a grasshopper, maybe 4 or 5 years old. Then, older 
boys lined up, maybe through 16 or 17 years old. As you stare at this 
group of children and see this group of children, you realize that some 
of them are unaccompanied minors. They arrived in the United States by 
themselves. But there are others. Within the previous 24 hours or maybe 
just a couple hours before you were present, that child was separated 
from his or her parents. I asked about the dramatic scenes that come 
from this--the wailing children and the frantic parents. I was told 
that happens occasionally, but not so often.
  Then I heard the stories of how the children are now being separated, 
and I don't know how often this happens or if this is the way it is 
being done. But the parents are told: We are taking your child to the 
bathroom or we are taking your child for a bath, and the child

[[Page S3926]]

never reappears. The parent is shepherded off to one holding cell and 
the child to somewhere else.
  There is something so wrong with the idea that this is the plan to 
deter families from seeking asylum in the United States by mistreating 
massively those who have already arrived, but that is what is going on.
  John F. Kennedy once wrote: ``This country has always served as a 
lantern in the dark for those who love freedom but are persecuted in 
misery or in need.''
  He uses the phrase ``lantern'' rather than torch, but I imagine he 
might have had in mind the glowing orb in the Statue of Liberty--Lady 
Liberty holding up that light.
  He said: ``This country has always served as a lantern in the dark 
for those who love freedom but are persecuted in misery or in need.''
  That is not so now, because the new policy is if you are persecuted, 
we will treat you as a criminal. We will lock you up. We will take your 
children away, and we don't care if it is inflicting massive trauma on 
the child, because we want to send a message to some other family that 
is still overseas. That is so profoundly disturbing.
  After the children have been separated, they are sent elsewhere. But 
to where? Some are sent to a large holding area or detention facility. 
I tried to visit one of those in Brownsville, TX. This is a converted 
Walmart. It is run by a nonprofit that, by all accounts, works hard to 
take good care of the children. Ironically, it is named Casa Padre, or 
House of the Father, because there are no fathers there because the 
children have been torn away, and they have been brought here. No 
matter how well they are cared for in this Walmart, it can't erase the 
stain of the trauma inflicted on the child by tearing them away from 
their parents.
  Now I wanted to go in and see how these children were being cared 
for. So I applied and I was told: Well, you can get in if you apply 2 
weeks in advance, and maybe we will grant you permission.
  So you can't put it on your calendar. That makes it difficult. No. 1, 
it makes it difficult for Senators to go because of the complexity of 
our schedules. Then, if permission is granted, they have 2 weeks to 
prepare to put on a show for you. So you will not actually see how the 
detention center is being operated. That is what Members of Congress 
need to be able to see. They need to be able to know what is really 
going on behind those doors.
  I was told that behind these doors there were hundreds of children 
being held, maybe as many as 1,000. I wanted to know how many are there 
and how many were unaccompanied minors; that is, arriving 
unaccompanied. How many of them were torn away from their parents? Do 
they have the right resources for counseling, and do they have the 
right food for nutrition? How crowded has it become with this surge of 
new children?

  We know there was a surge in roughly one time period in May. The 
Department of Homeland Security told us they took 658 children away 
from 638 parents in 12 or 13 days. That is hundreds--more than 600. 
That is over 50 kids a day being taken away. How is that per month, if 
that was the same schedule going on, at 50 per day? Well, it would be 
about 1,500 kids per month.
  We are told that the number of children in the care of the United 
States of America increased by 21 percent between April 29 and May 29. 
So that is a real concern about who is being crowded in and how they 
are being taken care of. Well, I didn't get behind those doors. 
Instead, our good friends inside called the police. Now they had to ask 
me to leave, and, in fact, when I called up the phone number that was 
posted on the wall of the Walmart, the wonderful nice secretary said 
the supervisor wanted to come out and talk to me. It actually turned 
out that the supervisor wanted to come out and talk to the police who 
had been called.
  I find it quite interesting--that level of defensiveness about seeing 
what was inside the facility. I knew I didn't have official permission 
because I tried to arrange it and I had been turned down, but I also 
thought: Really, a supervisor of a children's facility can't walk you 
through and explain to you what is going on there? I wanted to draw 
attention to the fact that this secrecy has to end.
  We have to be able to know, as Members of Congress, what is going on 
with these children across the country. First and foremost, they should 
never be torn away from their parents while the family is seeking 
asylum, but if they are unaccompanied minors, they need to be treated 
with incredible, appropriate care, not concealed in buildings where 
Members of Congress can't gain access.
  That is why I am putting forward the Congressional Access to 
Children's Detention Facilities Act. There is no clever acronym for it. 
It is straightforward. We are having to legislate that in our role 
under the Constitution of supervising and understanding what is going 
on in the executive branch so we can enact appropriate policies or 
allocate appropriate resources. Do we actually have to pass an act to 
be able to do it?
  I am told by the nonprofit leaders at this facility that they are 
lobbying. They have no problem showing a Member of Congress what is 
going on and talking about what they need and what they don't need, but 
we need the administration to have the same philosophy, the same 
respect for the people who serve here.
  We also have another bill, and this is Senator Feinstein's bill. It 
is called the Keep Families Together Act. It is just a simple statement 
with some additional advice, caveats, and supporting structure and 
arguments. Basically, it comes down to a simple statement: If people 
are seeking asylum, do not injure the children. Do not injure the 
parents. Let them be a whole family until they have their hearing. That 
is the best thing if they do win asylum, and if they are going to be 
deported and don't win asylum, there is no reason to inflict harm 
deliberately on the children or on the parents.
  This is so distressing that one refugee father, who came with his 
child and his child was torn away from him, was so upset, as I would be 
if my child was torn out of my arms, that he committed suicide. Marco 
Munoz from Honduras came to our shore with a vision of the Statue of 
Liberty and was met by people who tore his child away to who knows what 
end, so that he would ever see his child again. Who knows what kind of 
treatment that child was going to receive and what kind of stress that 
father went through to get his child safely from the most abominable 
conditions one can imagine--to get them safely to the United States to 
apply under international law. Yet we responded by treating him like a 
criminal.
  There is more going on here. There are these ``no man's land'' areas 
between Mexico and the United States, and people walk across from one 
side to the other. The idea is you walk across one side and go in the 
door on the other. But when I met with an immigration attorney, a pro 
bono volunteer who works with refugees, she had gone out on the bridge 
and found that there were people left on that bridge, she said, in one 
case for 10 days and in another case for more than 10 days.
  This is very hot territory. How would you like to be stranded in no 
man's land between two countries for more than a week, perhaps not 
being prepared with water or food? Where do you go to the bathroom in 
that 10-day period while you are stranded in between those places? I 
was told it appeared to be a deliberate effort to slow-walk people at 
the border point, where it is absolutely legal to come into the United 
States of America seeking asylum, in order to persuade them to leave 
and go back to the Mexican side, where they were incredibly vulnerable 
to Mexican gangs and had no support structure.
  She told me that there had been kidnappings and then extortionists 
who asked the families for money to release individuals who had 
returned to the other side. She told me how people had gone elsewhere 
and crossed the border and presented themselves to the border guards in 
order to get into the custody of the United States and present 
themselves for asylum, but then they were treated, once again, as 
criminals.
  Now, to add insult to injury, the day before yesterday, the Attorney 
General announced a new asylum policy. Here is the policy that has been 
forever, but now we are going to change the definition so that those 
who are fleeing domestic violence, those who are fleeing organized 
crime, those who have been attacked by drug gangs and have had their 
lives threatened and their children's lives--no matter how well you

[[Page S3927]]

document it, no matter how well you can prove it, no matter that you 
can prove that if you go back, you will be targeted for death--do not 
qualify for asylum in the United States of America. That is a change 
that has to be closely examined.
  I met a woman in a respite center down in Texas. She had been 
released because she was very pregnant. So they said: Well, we are not 
going to put her in prison. We are going to release her until she has 
her hearing. She told me her story. Her family had gotten into a 
dispute with the drug gang that ran the community. So they had sent a 
team of people to gang rape her.
  Her life had been threatened, and she had to leave immediately. She 
couldn't make accommodations for her children. Her children couldn't 
come with her. She didn't know how they were. She said: I have no idea 
who the father of this child is because it is a product of the gang 
attack. She qualified under our rules for asylum if she could document 
her case, until 2 days ago, but now she can't go to that asylum hearing 
under this new rule designed to keep people who have experienced 
enormous trauma abroad from qualifying--who have always qualified.

  Not only is this administration inflicting trauma and pain on 
children to send a message to some other group of families overseas, 
but they are changing the rules for folks who arrived here, who have 
stood up for so long and stood up so well.
  I think about how Lady Liberty no longer has a torch. Lady Liberty's 
torch has been snuffed out. The symbol to the world under the Sessions-
Trump-John Kelly policy is, you will be treated as a criminal if you 
flee persecution and come to the United States. She doesn't carry a 
torch. She carries a pair of handcuffs, and that is absolutely wrong.
  When John F. Kennedy wrote that ``this country has always served as a 
lantern in the dark,'' he could never have imagined the evil policy, 
the darkness of heart, the deliberate infliction of pain and trauma on 
children that would come out of this administration's policy.
  It is our responsibility in this Chamber to debate this issue, to 
change that policy, and say America will never allow children to be 
deliberately harmed to send some political message to some family 
overseas. In fact, we will never allow them to be deliberately harmed 
under any circumstance. Let's restore the lantern that Lady Liberty has 
so proudly borne for so long.
  Thank you.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.

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