[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 103 (Wednesday, June 20, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4293-S4306]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        FORCED FAMILY SEPARATION

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, many members of the Democratic caucus are 
coming down to the floor to speak to the abomination of a policy of 
separating children from their parents when people are seeking asylum 
in the United States of America. The Senator from Minnesota is going to 
speak first, followed by the Senator from Hawaii, then the Senator from 
Washington, followed by the Senator from Illinois.
  I yield to my colleague.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank Mr. Merkley, the Senator from 
Oregon, for his leadership and his calling attention to the tragedy 
that has been going on right on our border.
  I rise today to join my colleagues to express my deep concern about 
the policy that was adopted by this administration to separate families 
at the border.
  What we have seen over the past several days and weeks and actually 
months is simply unacceptable. While the President has now recognized 
publicly that we should not be taking children from their parents, this 
should not be happening in our country.

[[Page S4294]]

  According to the Department of Homeland Security, 2,342 children were 
separated from their parents at the border between May 5 and June 9. 
The pace of these separations had been increasing, with nearly 70 
children being taken from their parents up until today and being kept 
in facilities that are increasingly overcrowded.
  The American Medical Association and the American Academy of 
Pediatrics have expressed their opposition. They said that this type of 
family separation does ``irreparable harm'' to children. The president 
of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who traveled to the border, 
called it ``a form of child abuse.''
  It is not just the medical groups. A bipartisan group of 75 former 
U.S. attorneys called on the administration to end its policy. The 
group included a former Republican U.S. attorney who served under both 
President Bushes, Tom Heffelfinger from the State of Minnesota. Their 
letter emphasized that the administration's zero tolerance policy was 
``a radical departure from previous Justice Department policy'' and 
that it is ``dangerous, expensive, and inconsistent with the values of 
the institution in which [they] served.''
  All five First Ladies have been critical, and, as we know, probably 
the woman who said it best was First Lady Laura Bush. She said:

       This zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it 
     breaks my heart.

  I think that says it all.
  I am glad that several of our colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle have recently stood up and said they disagree with this policy.
  Senator Graham said: ``President Trump could stop this policy with a 
phone call.''
  The weeks went by, and the families kept getting separated.
  I am pleased that Senator Feinstein is leading a bill, the Keep 
Families Together Act. I was an original cosponsor of this bill, but I 
do want to note that we do not need the legislation to stop the 
separation of children and their parents.
  While I am still reviewing this Executive order, I will note that it 
still raises serious issues, including with respect to the indefinite 
detention of children and their families, and that there are major 
questions about the order. That being said, action on this was 
necessary, and now we must move forward.
  I see the Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, here, who has given so 
many speeches about Dreamers that I don't think we could even count 
them. We have more issues for this country besides the one that has 
just broken the hearts of Americans. We have people on temporary status 
who are sitting in Minnesota who don't know if they are going to be 
deported in a year, when they have been in this country legally for 
decades, working in our hospitals. We have Dreamers who came to this 
country through no fault of their own. We have immigrants who love this 
country, who want to be citizens here, and this Senate gave them a path 
to be citizens in a vote in this very Chamber years ago, and that bill 
never advanced in the House. We can do that again.
  If there is any silver lining to this tragedy as we work through it, 
I hope that it will focus the American people again on the fact that 
this is a country of immigrants and that immigrants do not diminish 
America; immigrants are America.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
  Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, I thank Senator Merkley from Oregon for 
his leadership and my other colleagues who are coming to the floor this 
evening.
  Like so many people across the country, I have been deeply affected 
by what is happening on our southern border. Children are being ripped 
away from their parents, placed into mass detention, deprived of 
adequate legal counsel, and isolated from everyone they have ever 
known. Millions of people are rising up with sorrow and horror over 
what is happening and with good reason.
  The President of the United States and this administration are 
playing games with the lives of these innocent children, and when 
confronted, they hide behind excuses that they are just ``following the 
law.'' This is just another lie from a President and an administration 
that have institutionalized lying to justify their unconscionable 
policies. There is nothing in the law that requires a zero tolerance 
approach at the border. It was a choice that Donald Trump and his 
administration made, and these children are suffering the consequences.
  The President's actions are unnecessary and cruel, but they aren't 
particularly surprising, coming from him. On issue after issue, Donald 
Trump creates a crisis through his own actions, blames others for what 
is happening, and uses the ensuing chaos to demand a legislative 
solution that often harms even more people.
  It is up to each of us and to the millions of Americans outraged by 
his actions to stand up, fight back, and demand action. This action 
remains urgent, even after the President announced earlier today that 
he would use his Executive authority to end family separation at the 
border. This Executive order just creates an entirely new problem. It 
does not end zero tolerance, and it does not end indefinite detention. 
It only means children are going to be incarcerated together with their 
parents. This is still unacceptable and echos back to one of the 
darkest periods in our history when, during World War II, the U.S. 
Government incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans. That this time we 
are incarcerating non-Americans misses the point. Due process applies 
to everyone--everyone--on American soil.
  The President's order also instructs the Attorney General to 
challenge the Flores settlement, which sets national standards for 
humane treatment of children in immigration detention and ensures their 
prompt release. The elimination of these national standards would have 
profoundly negative consequences for thousands of children every year 
and is yet another demonstration of the cruelty with which this 
administration treats immigrants to our country.
  The President has also hinted that legislation will accompany his 
Executive action. Any legislative solution must result in less chaos 
and more justice for these children and their families.
  Congress certainly has a responsibility to repair our broken 
immigration system, and we tried hard in 2013, with months of work and 
bipartisan compromise. But we cannot and should not enact a patchwork 
solution that enshrines Donald Trump's hatred and fear of immigrants 
into law. We need to think through the inevitable consequences of our 
policies and propose legislation that will actually help these families 
and their children. This approach stands in stark contrast to a 
President and an administration that rarely think things through. They 
never stop to consider the consequences of their actions.
  Instead of being ashamed about this, the President appears to take 
pleasure in the chaos he sows, but this chaos causes real damage to 
real people. These misguided, shoot-from-the-hip decisions of his have 
already caused significant harm to thousands of children who will face 
a lifetime of trauma after being separated from their parents.
  Let me tell you a story. It is one I haven't told very often because 
it is difficult to talk about. I often speak about my own immigrant 
experience of coming to this country when I was 7 years old with my mom 
and my older brother Roy. Mom was escaping an abusive marriage to start 
a new life for us. Mom brought us two older kids with her, leaving my 
3-year-old younger brother behind in Japan, because we were old enough 
to go to school, and at 7 and 9 years old, we could look after 
ourselves while she was at work supporting us. My younger brother left 
back in Japan never really recovered from the trauma of the separation 
from his mother and his siblings. My mother always had deep sorrow 
about having to leave her baby behind. We finally reunited almost 3 
years later.
  What is happening to these children feels personal to me. Like so 
many people, I find that my anger and emotion about this issue aren't 
far below the surface for me. I am very concerned about what will 
happen to these 2,400 children who have already been separated from 
their parents. These children have already been traumatized.

[[Page S4295]]

Yet the President's Executive order does not prioritize reuniting these 
children with their parents.
  Years from now, stories will be written about this dark moment in our 
Nation's history and what happened to these children. People will judge 
what we did and how we responded.
  I will continue to fight against this President's reprehensible 
actions that dehumanize immigrants, tear families apart, and undermine 
our country's moral leadership. I call on all of my colleagues, 
especially those on the other side of the aisle, to join us in this 
fight.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Hawaii 
for sharing her personal experience of how that felt because that is so 
important for us to hear. I thank the Senator from Oregon and all the 
Senators who are out here tonight to speak on this.
  I may be only one person, but today I bring to the floor of the 
Senate the outrage, the pain, and the frustration of millions of people 
in my home State of Washington and across the country who see what 
President Trump has been doing on our southern border, who have been 
watching the pain this forced family separation has caused so many 
innocent children, who have begged the President to pick up the phone, 
sign a piece of paper, do whatever it takes to make it stop, who have 
refused to be silenced as President Trump carries out his hateful and 
divisive attacks on immigrants, and who heard a recording with 
desperate cries of children calling for their parents. When I heard 
that, my heart stopped. Like every mom, like every human being, I just 
wanted to reach out and comfort that child. I could only think of how 
his mother felt because I assure you, whether she was in that room, a 
room 100 miles away, or a room 3,000 miles away, like every mom, she 
heard her child's cry, too, and her heart was broken.
  While today we saw President Trump change his story about whether he 
did, in fact, have the ability to make it stop, there are a lot of 
questions that remain--questions that actually I and others have been 
asking the Trump administration for weeks that have gone unanswered, 
like exactly how these parents are being informed about their 
children's safety. Where are they? Where are they being located? When 
will they be reunited? Those are just a few. There are more.
  President Trump says the Executive order stops the separation. Does 
that mean starting today? Next month? When? What about the thousands of 
children who have been removed? Will they ever see their parents again? 
When? Where? How?
  I have not gotten answers from the Secretary of Health, Alex Azar, 
whose Department should be focused on families' health and well-being 
but has instead spent that time complicit in a policy of separating 
families and traumatizing parents and children alike.
  Even experts, such as the president of the American Academy of 
Pediatrics, said that the practice of intentionally inflicting trauma 
on young children is child abuse.
  While it is a good thing that President Trump dialed back his 
systematic child abuse, it is not enough. We are not going to say 
everything is OK now. We are not going to stay quiet because while we 
are still digging into this new Executive order, here is what we do 
know right now: If this is implemented, there will continue to be zero 
tolerance for all asylum seekers, including domestic violence 
survivors. It is a system of locking up children by the thousands, all 
carried out in our great country's name.

  I just read the story of a woman named Blanca who left El Salvador 
after she received threats on her 8-year-old son's life. She took those 
threats seriously, she said. Why? Because another family member had 
already been kidnapped. And as Blanca said, when the extortionists 
don't get their money, they kill people.
  So Blanca left everything behind to seek safety for her son. Two 
months ago she arrived at the U.S. border to seek asylum. Blanca said 
that was the last time she saw or talked to her son, Abel, whose last 
words to her were ``Mom, don't leave me.''
  That is the last thing she heard.
  Blanca now sits in a Federal detention center at SeaTac in Washington 
State where she told her story through tears to an AP reporter. Her 
son, she has been told, is in custody in upstate New York. That is 
3,000 miles away from her, and she doesn't know when or if she is ever 
going to see him again.
  Blanca's story is horrifying. It is sad. Unfortunately, it is not 
unique. She is one of thousands of parents and children who fled 
violence and persecution only to find a new nightmare upon arrival in 
the United States of America--a nightmare caused deliberately, for no 
good reason, by President Trump, who has chosen to scapegoat asylum 
seekers and put their children into detention centers for an 
undetermined amount of time.
  We are better than this. We must be better than this. Turning 
children into bargaining chips or leverage points or deterrents--that 
kind of cruelty should not be an option in this great Nation.
  In recent days, my office has been flooded with thousands of calls 
and emails and letters from moms and dads and grandmothers and 
grandfathers--people from all walks of life, from every community I 
represent--who are angry at the President's new zero tolerance policy 
and who are horrified by these families who are being ripped apart. So 
I know I am not alone.
  If we can find hope in one thing, it is knowing that all those calls 
and emails and letters--all of that outcry--got through to the 
President to change course on one of his most heartless policies yet.
  But we cannot let up now.
  President Trump has claimed for days he needed congressional action 
to do anything at all. Today, he proved that to be simply untrue.
  So now we know President Trump will bow to stern pressure of a stern 
moral movement. Families in Washington State and in every State across 
the Nation are continuing to demand action, and I am going to keep 
working to make sure their voices are heard for the sake of so many who 
seek refuge in our great country and those who believe in the kindness 
and respect and compassion that does make this country great.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, first he came for the Dreamers. It was in 
September of last year when President Trump announced that he was going 
to abolish the DACA Program, an Executive order by President Obama that 
protected 790,000 young people who came forward, registered with the 
Federal Government, paid a $500 filing fee, went through an extensive 
criminal background check, proved that they had completed at least a 
level of education, and made clear that they were no threat to this 
country. For that, they were allowed, under the Executive DACA order, 
to live in the United States without fear of deportation for 2 years at 
a time, renewable, and to work in this country.
  Last September, President Trump decided to abolish that protection. 
He challenged Congress. He said: Now it is up to you. Pass a law.
  Many of us took him seriously. I worked on a bipartisan basis with 
many Senators, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, 
Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet, and Senator 
Bob Menendez, and we put a lot of hours into it. We wrote a bill to 
answer the President's challenge. We produced the bill and presented it 
to him, and he rejected it. He was not going to allow us to come to a 
bipartisan conclusion to solve this problem without changing other 
parts of the law, which he demanded.
  We couldn't find bipartisan consensus for the President's proposal. 
In fact, when President Trump's immigration proposal was called on the 
floor of this Senate Chamber, 39 of the 100 Senators voted for it--only 
39. It was a clear illustration that the President's approach to 
immigration was not even acceptable to all of the Members of his own 
political party.
  So, today, 790,000 young people across America, because of the action 
of President Trump last September, have only the protection of a court 
order that saves them from being deported, which allows them to 
continue to work, which allows them to renew

[[Page S4296]]

their DACA status. If that court decision changes in a matter of days, 
weeks, or months, their protection disappears. Clearly, this President 
could care less.
  First he came for the Dreamers. Then, in April, with the zero 
tolerance policy, he came for the children--the infants, the toddlers, 
the little boys and girls who accompanied their parents to the border 
of the United States.
  President Trump did something that most Americans--two out of three--
find not only objectionable but unimaginable. This President decided as 
a matter of policy--a get-tough policy toward immigration--that he 
would take children--babies, infants--away from their parents. So far, 
2,400, we believe, have been taken this way. What has happened to them? 
We don't know.
  You see, in this great country of America--this transparent and open 
democracy--the Trump administration will not allow any type of visits 
by Members of Congress, members of the press, to see exactly what is 
happening with these children. A few photos have made it out, showing 
these kids being held in cages--kids in cages. That is the Trump 
approach when it comes to immigration. The recording came out of the 
cries of these children when they were being separated from their 
mothers and their parents. There was the report of a father who had a 
son yanked out of his arms and in desperation went to his jail cell and 
committed suicide. That is the reality of this Trump policy.
  He has been unapologetic. From where he is standing, with the 
inspiration of Stephen Miller, his adviser and expert on immigration, 
getting tough is the only answer, the deterrent, putting pressure on 
Congress to pass the law this President demands--this ridiculous $25 
billion wall that he wants to build on our border with Mexico.
  So what has happened? People have spoken out, and I want to thank 
those Republicans who had the courage to stand up and speak out. Forty-
eight Democratic Senators joined Senator Feinstein in making it clear 
that we were prepared, if necessary, to pass legislation to solve this 
problem. Some Republican Senators have said the same, that this 
approach is unacceptable and reprehensible. And the First Ladies of the 
United States, including Laura Bush, who was quoted earlier by Senator 
Klobuchar, have just been amazing. They have come forward to let us 
know, on a bipartisan basis, that what President Donald Trump is doing 
at the border with children is not only un-American, it is inhumane by 
any standard.
  Treating children this way is something that can have long-term 
trauma on individuals. We heard from our colleague, Senator Hirono. She 
experienced an emotional moment here in the Senate, and I have never 
seen that before from her. She talked about her family's separation and 
what it meant to her brother and mom. That is the reality of life. It 
is a reality this President has ignored.
  Well, today, after days and weeks of objections from all across the 
United States, the President said that he would respond to the 
situation he created with an Executive order that I have in my hand. It 
is not that long; it is three pages. I read it closely. I read it 
carefully. I will tell my colleagues, this Executive order by this 
President does not solve the crisis that he created.
  The order doubles down on the President Trump, Attorney General 
Sessions, Stephen Miller zero tolerance policy that started this whole 
crisis of punishing children and families.
  The order provides no guarantee that families actually will be kept 
together. Here is what the language says: It just says the 
administration will try to maintain family unity, including by 
detaining alien families together ``where appropriate and consistent 
with law and available resources.'' That is from the President's 
Executive order. That is no guarantee that these families will be kept 
together.
  The order does nothing, speaks not a word to uniting the 2,400 
children who have been separated from their families--not one word in 
there. For goodness' sakes, that is where the President should start 
with his Executive order: ordering his agencies to reunite these 
families as quickly as possible so the children who are going through 
the trauma of this separation will finally have a chance to see their 
parents again.
  And the order provides for--this is the President's order issued 
today--the indefinite detention of mothers, fathers, and children who 
are fleeing violence and seeking asylum in the United States.
  There is no law on the books that requires this government or allows 
this President to rip children away from their parents. The horrific 
scenes we have seen and heard on television are the result of a Trump 
administration policy that could have ended today if President Trump 
had simply issued an order to end it. He has it within his power to end 
the crisis he created. He chose not to.
  Instead, on World Refugee Day, President Trump offered this remedy to 
the crisis he created: Lock up entire families together indefinitely.
  To do this, he has to ignore a court order that applies to his 
administration and every administration for the last 20 years. The 
Flores settlement between the U.S. Government and the petitioners 
resulted in a binding 1997 court order that required that children be 
released from custody without unnecessary delay. The Government of the 
United States of America was a party to that agreement. That Flores 
case recognizes that children should not be treated like criminals, and 
it prohibits the prolonged detention of children because of harmful 
effects.
  The Trump Executive order seeks to undo the Flores consent decree. 
Repealing Flores was actually a key component of President Trump's own 
immigration legislation. That was rejected, if my colleagues will 
remember, by 39 to 60 in the Senate in February.
  Is throwing kids in indefinite detention what we want to do as a 
nation? Is it a loophole that a 5-year-old child cannot be detained 
beyond 20 days under Flores? Of course not.
  Remember, the Flores settlement does not prohibit detention if it is 
necessary to ensure the safety of the child. The Flores settlement 
simply prohibits indefinite detention of children, even with their 
families, and any order to undermine this critical protection will 
almost certainly be challenged in court.
  This Executive order from President Trump will be challenged on the 
very first day that it violates the Flores settlement. In this order he 
sends Attorney General Sessions into court to undo the Flores 
settlement, which has been the law of the land and the standard for 
Presidents of both political parties for almost 20 years.
  Looking at the administration's policy of so-called zero tolerance, 
which Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April and on which 
the President doubled down on today, here is what we find: The policy 
means they are criminally prosecuting everyone at the border, no matter 
what reason brought them to that border.
  If someone is coming to the border to smuggle opioids or as part of a 
criminal gang, throw the book at them. But it makes no sense to throw 
the book at parents who come to the border with their kids because they 
are fleeing violence and death threats. There is no requirement--none--
to prosecute every border case as a criminal case. As with many laws, 
there can be criminal or civil penalties for crossing the border 
without authorization. Our Nation could criminally prosecute everyone 
who drives too fast, but we use discretion and prosecute selectively.
  Asylum seekers do not need to be caged to remain united with their 
families. The government has the power to individually assess each 
person apprehended at the border and determine whether that person 
presents a flight risk or a safety risk. Those who do not present a 
risk can be released with their families to await immigration 
proceedings. We have found that if they are given the benefit of 
counsel, over 90 percent of those who have court proceedings show up 
for the proceedings. We should do that. We have effective and cost-
efficient alternatives to detention available.

  President Trump and his allies have taken thousands of children 
hostage to try to enact their anti-immigration agenda into law. We will 
not be fooled. This crisis doesn't need legislation to fix it. It 
requires Republican Members of Congress to join us, stand up, say no, 
and put an end to this ill-conceived Trump policy.
  Instead, we face efforts like Senator Cruz's bill, which would not 
protect

[[Page S4297]]

children and could undermine the due process approach that we have used 
in this government. This bill, like the President's Executive order, 
would override the Flores settlement. That is not a good starting point 
to the humane treatment of children.
  Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen claimed: ``We do not 
have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.'' Like many 
of the President's tweets, that was just plain false. Attorney General 
Jeff Sessions established the zero tolerance policy that separated 
families--a policy that former First Lady Laura Bush called cruel and 
immoral. When asked to justify how we could take this immoral position, 
Attorney General Sessions appeared to find some quote in the Bible that 
gave him solace.
  The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics was more plain-
spoken. She called this Trump policy ``government-sanctioned child 
abuse.''
  I urge my Republican colleagues. People are watching and asking 
across this country: Aren't we better than this? Can't we treat the 
Dreamers in a more humane way? Can't we save these children from being 
caged away from their parents?
  Do we want this image in the world? Is this what America has come to? 
I don't believe so, and two out of three Americans happen to agree with 
what I just said. We are a better country than this. This President's 
Executive order does not solve this problem. It makes it worse.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I first thank Senator Merkley from Oregon 
for organizing this very important session tonight.
  Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled the Trump 
administration's new zero tolerance immigration policy. Whether you 
come to this land fleeing violence, poverty, or persecution, justice 
isn't blind. It is now also brutal.
  This inhumane policy sends a shudder down the spine of the Statue of 
Liberty, but not that of our President. Zero tolerance really means 
zero refuge. Zero tolerance really means zero discretion. Zero 
tolerance really means zero humanity.
  The Trump administration's mindless approach to our broken 
immigration system takes away the ability of Federal law enforcement 
officers to exercise any discretion that might be warranted based on 
the facts and circumstances on the ground. In other words, zero 
tolerance is an anti-immigrant dragnet, the shocking effects of which 
we have been witnessing these past few days as children have literally 
been ripped from their parents' arms and separated from them, as their 
mothers and fathers are taken into custody.
  These horrific images were finally enough, even for President Trump. 
This afternoon, he signed an Executive order that he says addresses the 
family separation crisis. It does no such thing. The Executive order 
that the President signed doesn't end the zero tolerance policy of 
prosecuting anyone and everyone who crosses the border. It reaffirms 
it.
  If all parents are still being prosecuted as criminals, which the 
Executive order requires, what does this Executive order actually do? 
We can only assume that this Executive order would imprison, remand, 
and incarcerate children--some as newborns--into the same correctional 
facilities as their parents. They would be sleeping in cages instead of 
cribs.
  In this country, our courts have decided that this treatment of 
children and families is malicious. In the Flores agreement, more than 
20 years ago, we stopped this practice. Now, the President wants to 
bring it back with a vengeance.
  The Executive order directs the Attorney General to try to modify the 
Flores agreement, but any attempt to undermine the critical protections 
for children that this landmark settlement has put in place should and 
will face immediate court challenge. Families and children don't belong 
in jail, period.
  Our President's Executive order does not ask for trained child 
welfare workers to carry out his wishes. He has called in the military. 
He expects this cold-blooded tactic--a tactic he is using to negotiate 
his wall--to be implemented by the Pentagon.
  Now, what does that mean? Apparently, he envisions internment camps, 
using existing military brigs or other facilities to lock up these 
families. It sounds like a return to the shameful internment camps of 
the 1940s, during World War II, one of the darkest chapters in our 
Nation's history. We know how that ended--with the Federal Government 
paying more than $1 billion to right a wrong that could never actually 
be corrected. It was a mistake that we should not even contemplate 
repeating.
  So President Trump first manufactured this crisis at the border, and 
his new Executive order makes it worse. The only thing President Trump 
wants to solve is the public relations nightmare he has plunged his 
administration into.
  This is not a PR stunt. These are children's lives at stake. How we 
respond to this crisis will define the character of each and every one 
of us. It will define our character as a nation. At this critical moral 
juncture, I ask each of my colleagues to choose humanity.
  To my Republican friends, your voices carry weight in this 
conversation, especially with this administration in power. Use your 
voices. Make clear that this Executive order will not end the suffering 
that this administration is inflicting on vulnerable immigrant 
families, because in the United States we do not keep children in jails 
or military prisons. We do not criminalize asylum seekers. We welcome 
immigrants for their contributions. We seek immigrants for their 
talents. We proudly remember our own families who came across a border, 
whether land or water, knowing this country meant a new start.
  We are better than this. We must be better than this. The President 
wants to send a message that immigrants aren't welcome in America. His 
leadership may be devoid of compassion, but the American people are 
not. This policy must end.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I begin by thanking Senator Merkley. 
Senator Merkley, in my view, delivered a wake-up call to the country 
several weeks ago when he went to the border, and I have been very 
pleased to be able to join him in this effort.
  A few days ago, we visited a detention center in Sheridan, OR. We 
spoke with a father who had been separated from his 18-month-old 
daughter. The day before Father's Day, colleagues, Senator Merkley and 
I listened to a father who had been separated from his 18-month-old 
daughter and had no idea where she was and didn't know when he would 
see her again. All over the country, as part of this national shame, 
these stories have been breaking our hearts.
  Now, the President has said, for example, that he is turning away 
gang members. What Senator Merkley and I saw last Saturday was that he 
is locking up innocent people who are in danger because they refused to 
submit to gangs in their home countries. That is what we heard at the 
Sheridan prison just a few days ago.
  These stories are particularly poignant in our household. The Wydens 
had the opportunity to flee the evils of Nazi Germany for the safety 
and the promise of the United States. My father came as a youngster. He 
barely spoke English. He studied hard, and when the war came he wanted 
to wear the uniform of the United States more than anything.
  He served in our propaganda arm, where his fluent native German was a 
great value to the war effort because he wrote propaganda pamphlets 
that we dropped on the Nazis telling them that they had no chance, that 
they had no opportunity to survive. Unlike the comical efforts of our 
enemies, who mangled English, the work of young immigrants like my 
father, wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army, struck at the morale of 
German soldiers freezing on the battlefield.
  My parents were lucky to be able to make a home in our country, and 
they raised my brother and me here. They did their part to add to the 
fabric of the United States.
  Now, the Wydens were able to come, but not everyone of their Jewish 
background was so fortunate. Shiploads of Jews fleeing persecution and 
violence

[[Page S4298]]

were deemed undesirable, and they were turned away from America. Let me 
be clear about what happened. The rallying cry for those who wished to 
keep people like my Jewish parents out of this country--those who 
denied Jewish refugees safety in their moment of desperation--was 
``America first.''
  What happened to those families who turned to the beacon of America 
for safety and opportunity? Many were forced back to Europe, and many 
of them ultimately ended up in concentration camps. People don't embark 
on the harrowing journey to America, much less with kids by their side, 
unless they are fleeing serious danger and deprivation.
  It is with that history that I wanted to join my colleagues tonight 
on this floor to talk about the heartlessness we see in the Trump zero 
tolerance policy--thousands of kids, refugees, forcibly separated from 
their parents. There are reports that border agents lied to mothers and 
fathers, telling them that their kids were being taken away for a bath, 
only to have them disappear--a terrifying scenario, colleagues, with 
grim historical echoes. There are nursing babies taken from their 
mothers and kids locked in cages for days, regimented like they are 
criminals facing hard time.
  There is a reason that the courts have barred the executive from 
holding child refugees for more than 20 days. However, it appears the 
President intends now to ignore the courts and hold children in jails 
for the foreseeable future.
  The administration has gone to great lengths to defend their policy, 
but they will not stand up and defend it with honest answers. The 
administration even buried a recent government report showing that 
refugees are a positive economic force. I gather it is because it just 
didn't fit the company line.
  I will close by saying that in my view a strong leader does not rip 
kids from their mothers and lock them in cages. A strong leader does 
not take child hostages to use as political pawns. A strong leader does 
not lie and mislead the American people about the true nature of the 
policy he enacts.
  In my view, these have been acts of weakness. My view is that the 
national shame which we have seen over the last few weeks is going to 
go down as one of the dark moments in American history. It is why it is 
so important in the days ahead that we come together--Democrats and 
Republicans--and we restore the greatness of America, which is that we 
are better and stronger because we stand up for refugees, refugees like 
the Wydens, who fled Nazi Germany decades ago.

  I again thank my colleague from Oregon for his critical leadership on 
this matter.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
  Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise on World Refugee Day to thank the 
American public for standing up against the heartless decision by the 
Trump administration to separate children from their families at the 
southern border of the United States. Because the administration's 
policy triggered our moral gag reflex, you spoke up loudly--everyday 
citizens, business executives, faith leaders, Governors pulled back 
Guard troops from missions on the border, and airlines announced they 
would not facilitate separation of families by flying children hundreds 
of miles away from their parents. Because of you, the American public, 
this administration has altered its cruel policy, at least for the time 
being.
  A new Executive order suggests that families will not be separated, 
but many questions remain. Will they be detained indefinitely? Where 
will they be detained? What process will be used to determine their 
fate? Will people seeking to use our legal asylum process be treated 
like criminals?
  The most urgent question I have is this. What is the fate of the 
2,300 children you have stripped away from their families? How will you 
assure that these children are properly returned to parents who are 
worried to death about them?
  Congress has to exercise the most persistent oversight to ensure that 
these children are restored to their families. An administration that 
so cavalierly separated them from their parents out of a mistaken 
belief that the American public wouldn't care about it can hardly be 
trusted to reunite these families with speed and compassion. We have to 
stay on the task to ensure that they do.
  Much has been said about the trauma inflicted upon these children 
taken from their parents. I want to say a word about how traumatic it 
is for a parent to have a child taken away without any idea when or if 
a child will be returned. Marco Antonio Munoz was a 39-year-old father 
from Honduras who made the difficult trek to the United States with his 
wife and 3-year-old boy. They came here in May after his brother-in-law 
was murdered by a drug gang near Capon. Honduras has one of the highest 
homicide rates in the world, and they just wanted their family to be 
safe. The family crossed into the United States on May 12, in Granjeno, 
TX--a popular crossing point for Central American families and teens 
who want to turn themselves in and seek asylum in the United States.
  I know a little bit about families like the Munoz family. I lived in 
Honduras in 1980 and 1981 and have returned a number of times, most 
recently in 2015. The violence in these neighborhoods is severe, driven 
by gangs connected to a drug trade that has its origins in American 
demand for illicit drugs produced in Mexico, Central, and South 
America. The violence in these Honduran neighborhoods has a direct 
connection to the sad reality of addiction in the United States. When a 
family like the Munoz family leaves their home, they leave everything 
behind, and all they have is each other.
  When the Munoz family was taken into custody in the United States, 
Border Patrol agents told them the Trump zero tolerance policy meant 
they had to be separated, and Mr. Munoz, the father, had a panic 
attack.
  As one border agent said: ``They had to use physical force to take 
the child out of his hands.''
  That is called being a parent. If you tried to take my child out of 
my hands, I will hold on with every ounce of strength in my body.
  They took Mr. Munoz away. They put him in a car to take him to a 
kennel-like jail, and he fought in the car. He tried to escape when 
they took him out of the car. When they put him in the kennel, he 
rattled the cage he was in. They decided the cage wasn't strong enough, 
so they then transported him to a regional jail in McAllen, TX, and put 
him in a padded cell. The next morning, when they came to visit him, he 
was dead in his cell, a victim of suicide, with a piece of clothing 
wrapped around his neck.
  An agent who found him expressed confusion about why Mr. Munoz would 
``choose to separate himself from his family.'' It wasn't Mr. Munoz who 
chose to separate himself from his family; it was a decision by this 
administration to punish him and his family that separated him from his 
family, and with no knowledge when or if he would see his wife and 3-
year-old son again, he killed himself.
  When you have left your entire life behind, and all you have is your 
family, how can anyone fail to understand how painful it is to lose 
them?
  As we try to reassemble 2,300 families whom this administration has 
spread to the winds, there will be at least one 3-year-old boy who will 
not be able to reunite with his father.
  I ask this President, I ask the Attorney General, I ask the Secretary 
of Homeland Security, was it worth it? Was it worth it?
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont is recognized.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, let me thank Senator Merkley and others 
for organizing this important discussion--a discussion designed to 
reclaim American values. I also want to take this opportunity not just 
to thank Senator Merkley but to thank millions of people from coast to 
coast--people who are conservatives and progressives, Democrats, 
Republicans, Independents--for getting on the phone, for calling 
Members of Congress, for expressing their outrage that in the United 
States of America today, we have small children who are torn from their 
mothers and their fathers and locked up in detention cages. All over 
this country, regardless of one's political view, one understands that 
is not what this country is about and must never be about.
  Tonight, as I understand it, we have Democrats here, but opposition 
to this

[[Page S4299]]

policy is widespread. Let me quote from a recent op-ed that Laura Bush, 
our former First Lady, the wife of a conservative Republican, wrote. 
This is what she said:

       Our government should not be in the business of warehousing 
     children in converted box stores or making plans to place 
     them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These 
     images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for 
     U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during 
     World War II, now considered to have been one of the most 
     shameful episodes in U.S. history.

  This is former First Lady Laura Bush.
  The good news is, because the American people spoke up, because some 
Republicans finally had the guts to do the right thing and convey their 
displeasure to the President, Trump has changed his policy. Let us be 
clear that the Executive order he issued today goes nowhere--nowhere--
as far as it should go.
  Mr. President, I am going to ask consent to have printed in the 
Record an article from the Daily Beast, a publication that came out 
tonight.
  What they say is, there is no guarantee in this Executive order, as 
Senator Kaine has indicated, that the fate of the 2,400 children 
currently imprisoned will be changed. There is nothing specific in the 
Executive order that says those 2,400 kids will, in fact, be reunited 
with their parents. Presumably, this will apply to future apprehensions 
where children will be imprisoned with their parents.
  Second of all, there is an effort in this Executive order to overturn 
the 1997 Flores settlement, which limits the government's ability to 
keep children in detention and orders them to be placed in the least 
restrictive settings as possible.
  If you can imagine it, what this Executive order does is raise the 
possibility of children being in prison for very long periods of time. 
Is that better than them being separated from their parents? I guess. 
But does anybody really believe we should be imprisoning for an 
indefinite period of time little children? There are better ways to 
deal with this issue.
  What is clear to the American people is that once again we have a 
President who caused this crisis by undoing existing policy. We have a 
President who I believe just the other day said: Nothing I could do, it 
is law.
  Sadly, once again, he was lying. It is not Federal law. His decision 
to separate children from their parents was his decision and his 
decision alone, as he acknowledges today by announcing an Executive 
order ostensibly doing away with that policy.
  Let me remind the American people that this terrible Executive order 
he issued separating children from their parents is not the first 
terrible Executive order with regard to immigration. Let us remember 
that months ago, Trump created the DACA crisis and put 1.8 million 
young people in this country--young people who were raised in this 
country, who are working and going to school or serving in the 
military--in danger of deportation because of a decision he made.
  I say to the President, start working hard on a new Executive order 
and make that Executive order clear that the 2,400 children, now in 
jail, separate from their parents, will, in fact, be reunited, and make 
it clear that we will not keep children in prison for an indefinite 
period of time.
  By the way, while you are at it, why don't you deal with the DACA 
crisis you created and provide the legal status that 80 percent of the 
American people want to see for the young people in the DACA Program?
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the article I referred 
to from the Daily Beast printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                         [From the Daily Beast]

 Trump's Family Separation Order Does Nothing for Families He Already 
                                Broke Up

                  (By Betsy Woodruff and Justin Glawe)


 Kids are thousands of miles away from parents with no reliable way to 
     find each other--and they may never after adults are deported.

       El Paso, TX.--Immigrant families won't be separated 
     anymore, thanks to a new order from President Trump, but that 
     doesn't mean families will be reunited.
       Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday ending the 
     practice of taking children away from parents who enter the 
     U.S. illegally. Already, though, more than 2,000 children 
     have been separated, according to the government, and 
     advocates and attorneys for them fear they will never see 
     their parents again.
       Despite Trump's order, there is no clear, publicly 
     articulated plan to reunite families who are already 
     detained. Parents are held in facilities near the border like 
     McAllen, Texas while their children are sent to foster-care 
     homes as far as New York, Illinois and Michigan. While the 
     adults wait to be deported, their advocates must navigate 
     multiple federal agencies to locate their children.
       ``The executive order that President Trump signed is no 
     solution,'' said Michelle Brane, director of the Women's 
     Refugee Commission Migrant Rights and Justice program, in a 
     statement. ``First, there are more than 2,000 children 
     already separated from their parents. This EO does nothing to 
     address that nightmare.''
       The Department of Health and Human Services will not make a 
     special effort to reunite the children already separated from 
     their families, according to a CBS report.
       On Tuesday, an ICE spokesperson told The Daily Beast if a 
     parent asks to be deported with a separated child, the agency 
     will accommodate the request ``to the extent practicable.''
       A child immigrant advocate in the Midwest looking after a 
     6-year-old Guatemalan girl described ``cold-calling'' ICE 
     officials in El Paso and Washington, D.C. to reunited girl 
     with her mother so they can be deported together.
       The girl's mother is in ICE custody in El Paso after being 
     turned away at the Paso del Norte port of entry where she 
     sought asylum. The Daily Beast is providing the advocate with 
     anonymity to protect the identity of the mother and child 
     from feared retribution for speaking out.
       In her case, the advocate says an Office of Refugee 
     Resettlement agent was helpful in coordinating with ICE, but 
     that isn't always the case.
       ``There's some actors that are more willing to cooperate 
     than others,'' the advocate said.
       The advocate estimated many of the separated children will 
     be in the U.S. six months from now. ``I would say these 
     children will still be here,'' the advocate added.
       Even if a foreign government agrees to allow a immigrant 
     back into the country, there is no guarantee that U.S. court 
     cases for the parent or the child will be resolved at the 
     same time, allowing them to return together (Adults are being 
     tried in criminal court, while children are tried separately 
     in immigration courts.)
       DHS conceded that parents have been deported without their 
     children.
       ``When parents are removed without their children, ICE, 
     ORR, and the consulates work together to coordinate the 
     return of a child and transfer of custody to the parent or 
     foreign government upon arrival in country, in accordance 
     with repatriation agreements between the U.S. and other 
     countries,'' the spokesperson said Tuesday.
       Chris Carlin, head of the federal public defender's office 
     in Alpine, Texas, told The Daily Beast that he fears some of 
     his clients will never be reunited with their children.
       ``I think that's a real possibility,'' he said.
       Many of the deported parents return to homelessness and 
     poverty, Carlin said, and may not be reachable by the U.S. 
     government who is still holding their child days, weeks or 
     months later.
       HHS has put the children of Carlin's clients in foster 
     homes as far away as New York and Illinois, and he said this 
     makes the obstacle of reconnecting children to their parents 
     potentially insurmountable.
       ``In the cases that I'm personally familiar with, I don't 
     see any evidence of any plan to reunify the parent and the 
     child after the conclusion of the adult's criminal case,'' 
     Carlin said. ``I don't see any evidence of that at all.''
       Parents in detention are unlikely to have all the requisite 
     identification documents DHS and HHS demand to prove that a 
     parent and child are in fact related, according to Carlos M. 
     Garcia, an immigration attorney in Austin.
       Garcia said none of the people he met with had received any 
     paperwork on how to find their children. However, The Daily 
     Beast obtained an ICE document that is handed out to 
     immigrants once they're detained. It contains several phone 
     numbers for parents to try to find their children. One number 
     notes that the lines are monitored by DHS, possibly scaring 
     away undocumented members of immigrants' families.
       ``Who knows when they'll be reunified, if they are 
     reunified,'' Garcia said.
       A former ICE director told NBC News parents and children 
     may be separated for years, if not permanently. ``You could 
     be creating thousands of immigrant orphans in the U.S. that 
     one day could become eligible for citizenship when they are 
     adopted,'' said John Sandweg, who served as ICE's acting 
     director in the Obama administration from 2013-2014.
       The children of parents who have been deported may 
     sometimes be able to gain the legal right to stay in the U.S. 
     if they can make a valid asylum claim, qualify for special 
     immigrant juvenile status, or qualify for a visa for crime 
     victims, according to Ashley Feasley, the director of policy 
     at Migration and Refugee Services in U.S. Council of Catholic 
     Bishops. Her organization works

[[Page S4300]]

     with children who have been separated from their parents.
       ``How do we ensure that we can connect a mom that's been 
     deported to make sure she is fully informed of her child's 
     rights and responsibilities under the immigration system, and 
     do so in the timely manner that we'll need to as prescribed 
     by our immigration laws?'' Feasley said. ``That's a big 
     concern of mine.''
       Children who have been separated from their parents usually 
     get a brief legal orientation, but most don't have lawyers so 
     they have to face an immigration judge alone. If their 
     parents are deported or in detention, they may have no idea 
     what kind of legal decisions their children face.
       ``These kids are traumatized,'' the Midwest advocate said. 
     ``The families are heartbroken.''

  Mr. SANDERS. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.
  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues who are here tonight 
and Senator Merkley for organizing this evening.
  The President has taken a step back from a crisis he provoked, a 
crisis he caused, and it seems like it is a rare recognition on his 
part that when a President speaks and a President acts, he speaks and 
he acts on behalf of the American people, not on his own behalf. The 
American people could not stand the idea that this country would do 
what it did to these kids in their name. They could not stand the idea 
that the whole world would see the separation of children from their 
parents on the southern border of the United States of America--
perpetrated by our own government.
  Finally, probably for the first time ever, this President relented to 
the values the American people share whether they are conservatives or 
whether they are liberals or something in between that. That is a 
reason to say I am glad we are moving in that direction.
  Maybe another good thing will come out of this, which is that the 
people who stood up who work for this administration and defended this 
terrible, inhumane policy in the name of the law and in the name of 
religion--the Bible--might think harder the next time they do that at a 
moment of conscience like this one.
  As my colleagues have said, it is not clear tonight what is in the 
policy. I quote a New York Times article that is on the front page of 
the paper tonight.
  It reads:

       And a Health and Human Services official said that more 
     than 2,300 children who have already been separated from 
     their parents under the President's ``zero tolerance'' policy 
     will not be immediately reunited with their families while 
     the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration 
     proceedings.
       ``There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,'' 
     said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for 
     Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health 
     and Human Services. Mr. Wolfe said the decision about the 
     children was made by the White House, but he added, ``I can 
     tell you definitively that is going to be policy.''

  So what are they saying--that current kids aren't going to be 
grandfathered, that the current kids who have been on the TV this week 
and the week before are not going to have the benefit of this Executive 
order?
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, June 20, 2018]

 Trump Retreats on Separating Families, But Thousands Will Remain Apart

       (By Michael D. Shear, Abby Goodnough and Maggie Haberman)

       Washington.--President Trump caved to enormous political 
     pressure on Wednesday and signed an executive order meant to 
     end the separation of families at the border by detaining 
     parents and children together for an indefinite period.
       ``We're going to have strong--very strong--borders, but we 
     are going to keep the families together,'' Mr. Trump said as 
     he signed the order in the Oval Office. ``I didn't like the 
     sight or the feeling of families being separated.''
       But Justice Department officials said it was not clear 
     whether the practice of separating families could resume 
     after 20 days if a federal judge refuses to give the 
     government the authority it wants to hold families together 
     for a longer period.
       And a Health and Human Services official said that more 
     than 2,300 children who have already been separated from 
     their parents under the president's ``zero tolerance'' policy 
     will not be immediately reunited with their families while 
     the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration 
     proceedings.
       ``There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,'' 
     said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for 
     Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health 
     and Human Services. Mr. Wolfe said the decision about the 
     children was made by the White House, but he added, ``I can 
     tell you definitively that is going to be policy.''
       The president signed the executive order days after he said 
     that the only way to end the division of families was through 
     congressional action because ``you can't do it through an 
     executive order.'' But he changed his mind after a barrage of 
     criticism from Democrats, activists, members of his own party 
     and even his wife and eldest daughter, who privately told him 
     it was wrong.
       Stories of children being taken from their parents, audio 
     of wailing toddlers and images of teenagers in cagelike 
     detention facilities had exploded into a full-blown political 
     crisis for Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans, who were 
     desperate for a response to those who have called the 
     practice ``inhumane,'' ``cruel'' and ``evil.''
       The president's four-page order says that officials will 
     continue to criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the 
     border illegally, but will seek to find or build facilities 
     that can hold families--parents and children together--
     instead of separating them while their legal cases are 
     considered by the courts.
       But the action raised new questions that White House 
     officials did not immediately answer. The order does not say 
     where the families would be detained. And it does not say 
     whether children will continue to be separated from their 
     parents while the facilities to hold them are located or 
     built.
       Officials on a White House conference call said they could 
     not answer those questions.

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, the headline of the article reads: ``Trump 
Retreats on Separating Families, but Thousands Will Remain Apart.''
  We need to know, and that, obviously, isn't going to be acceptable to 
the American people if that is what it is.
  The last point I want to make tonight, because I know I have other 
colleagues here, is that it does not help matters when the President is 
completely allergic to the truth on any dimension but especially on 
this one.
  Today, at the White House, in front of all of the cameras and in 
front of the Republicans he invited there--he didn't invite any 
Democrats--this is what he said in lamenting the fact that he couldn't 
do a deal with Democrats.
  This is the President:

       We're having a lot of problem with Democrats.
       They don't care about lack of security, they would like to 
     have open borders, where anybody in the world can just flow, 
     including from the Middle East--from anybody anywhere they 
     can just flow into our country. Tremendous problems with 
     that. Tremendous crime caused by that. We are just not going 
     to do it.

  That is what he said is our position.
  As the Presiding Officer knows, I was on the Gang of 8 in 2013 that 
negotiated what was called the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, 
and Immigration Enforcement Act of 2013. The first two words in that 
title are ``border security.'' It got 68 votes on this floor. Every 
single Democrat voted for it. I want the American people to know what 
is in it because they will never hear from the President as to what was 
in it:
  There is $46 billion dollars for border enforcement; $30 billion to 
hire and deploy nearly 20,000 new Border Patrol agents, doubling the 
total number, a doubling of the number of Border Patrol agents; $8 
billion for a fence along the southern border at least 700 miles long; 
$4.5 billion for new surveillance technologies, including air and 
marine surveillance so we could see every inch of the border, so we 
would know what was happening there; $2 billion to enact 
recommendations of a newly established southern border security 
commission; $750 million to expand the E-Verify; the remaining $1.5 
billion dollars for administrative costs to the Departments of State, 
Labor, Agriculture, and Justice.
  That was the border security bill we passed in 2013, and that is the 
border security bill we should pass today. The only reason it is not 
the law of the land today is that the House would not let it come to a 
vote. Had they let it come to a vote, had the Speaker allowed it to 
come to a vote, it would have passed.
  I think, collectively, we should go back to that work and see if we 
can't actually solve the problem rather than just play politics with it 
or, in the case of what we have just seen, rather than play politics 
with the lives of the children on the southern border.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.

[[Page S4301]]

  

  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the 
President's Executive order about the separation of family policy and 
about the incarceration of family policy that has now replaced it. 
There are details that are unknown at this point about how this program 
will be working as we go forward, but we know enough right now to have 
the most serious and significant concerns about the President's 
Executive order.
  Every great nation--even the greatest Nation in the history of the 
world like the United States of America--has moments of extraordinary 
shame, times when it loses its moral compass, and it simply takes the 
wrong direction. We can remember a number of them in our own Nation's 
history. One of them was the internment of Japanese children who were 
thrown into World War II-era detention camps and imprisoned, in effect, 
with their parents. Almost every lawyer in the United States of America 
and most citizens know the name Korematsu, and that is because it was a 
moment of shame for this country.
  Ending family separation--the process of tearing children away from 
their moms and dads--is a welcomed and humane step, but the solution 
should not be the indiscriminate and indefinite detention of children. 
Family separation should not be replaced by family imprisonment. There 
is no moral advantage to incarcerating children as opposed to tearing 
them away from their parents. In fact, it is not only immoral, it is 
illegal. The courts have said so on a number of occasions--in 1997, in 
the Flores case, which is now well-known to everyone, but more 
recently, in fact, as recently as 2016. The reason goes to the core of 
our constitutional principle about how and when and whom we imprison, 
how we take liberty away from people.
  Indefinitely imprisoning children and families is still inhumane and 
ineffective law enforcement. President Trump's current policies will 
put children behind bars indefinitely and indiscriminately. Children 
will experience many of the same enduring of trauma, pain, and harm. 
The world will continue to watch the United States of America lock up 
innocent children and throw away the key.
  Much like the policy of family separation, this new policy of 
indefinite and indiscriminate family detention harkens back to those 
dark days, to those moments of shame in this country during World War 
II. History will judge us as harshly if we fail to speak out and stand 
up at this moment of testing. The gaze of history is upon us now. It is 
upon the President. It is upon every Member of the U.S. Senate.
  There are immense costs to this policy--$775 a day, per individual, 
at these detention camps. Yet the costs are way beyond dollars and 
cents; they are to the moral image and authority of this country and to 
our self-image--the accountability to ourselves, to our own sense of 
morality and humanity.
  The world was outraged when it saw children being torn away from 
parents, and now the President has acknowledged that his heart 
responded as well. Yet soon--and I would predict very soon--we will see 
images as striking, as stunning, and as repugnant as those images of 
taking children away from their parents when we see those images of the 
detention facilities, cages, and of children--young people behind bars 
and packed beyond capacity--on military bases and other places that 
were never designed to be holding facilities. The world will be 
outraged by those images as well--of the sights and sounds of those 
children.
  We owe this new policy a special scrutiny and a strong sense of 
outrage if it is what it seems like right now. We cannot remain silent 
about the children who have been already separated from their parents. 
Nothing in this Executive order--not a word--provides for the 
reunification of the thousands of children who have already been 
separated from their parents. What will happen to them? Where are they? 
Where are their parents? How will they be reunited? What trauma will 
they continue to endure? This policy remains as inhumane and cruel for 
them as it was earlier today or this week.
  All of us bear a responsibility in this moment. I urge my colleagues 
to take this day--World Refugee Day--to commemorate the great work done 
by brave individuals in this country who help to resettle refugees and 
the refugees themselves who had the courage and strength to come here 
after having made the journeys from shores far away and after having 
overcome obstacles most of us have never confronted.
  There are solutions other than putting children into detention camps. 
There are release programs that involve oversight and supervision. 
There is also a case management program that has been working, along 
with other cities' efforts, that has been used for releasing them. We 
should choose the least restrictive alternative, the least burdensome 
one that best serves the purposes of law enforcement. Make no mistake, 
we have that obligation not only as a matter of heart and morality but 
also of law.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Ms. HASSAN. Mr. President, I begin tonight by thanking my colleague 
Senator Merkley for his leadership on this issue.
  I rise to join my Democratic colleagues and millions of Americans who 
have been appalled and outraged at the humanitarian crisis that 
President Trump has created on our southern border.
  Make no mistake, these past few weeks have truly been an affront to 
our American values. By now, we have all witnessed the horrifying 
reality--the images of children being held in cages, the cries of 
screaming kids who have no idea where their parents are being taken or 
if they will ever see them again.
  The Department of Homeland Security announced that between May 5 and 
June 9, the Department took 2,300 children--approximately 70 children 
per day--from their parents. Pediatricians, psychologists, and health 
professionals have made clear the lasting harm of these forced 
separations. According to experts, when children are forcibly removed 
from their parents, the amount of toxic stress can cause neurons in the 
brain to be killed off, leaving damage that impacts brain development 
and can cause long-term behavioral health issues, although no parent 
needs a doctor to tell them that.
  The fact that our government has engaged in this type of physical and 
psychological damage to children is morally reprehensible. These 
actions have been unacceptable and completely unnecessary.
  Let's be clear. The President created this crisis, and over the past 
days and weeks, the President and his administration made false claim 
after false claim, saying that there was nothing they could do to 
reverse the President's own actions. The fact that the President bowed 
to pressure and signed an Executive order today cannot undo the trauma 
that has already been inflicted.
  We cannot forget about the children and parents that remain separated 
tonight, and immediate action must be taken to reunite children with 
their families. Earlier tonight, there were reports that the Department 
of Health and Human Services will not--will not--make special efforts 
to reunite children who have already been separated from families 
because of the President's actions. We cannot and will not accept this 
continued brutality. The President must act immediately to reunite 
these children with their parents. Surely the U.S. Government is 
capable of that.
  In the United States of America, we must work to secure our border in 
a manner that reflects our values, and I am committed to working with 
anyone on comprehensive bipartisan immigration reform.
  Separating children from their families was an abhorrent policy to 
pursue, and it will forever mark a dark and shameful period in our 
country's history.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California is recognized.
  Ms. HARRIS. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Merkley for 
bringing us all together to address what is, I think, as my colleague 
Senator Hassan has said, one of the dark marks in the history of our 
country.
  I rise today to call attention to what has clearly been a human 
rights abuse committed by the U.S. Government, and that is the 
outrageous and inhumane separation of children from their parents at 
the border. This morning,

[[Page S4302]]

thousands of children woke up without their parents, not knowing where 
they were, not knowing when they would see them again, not knowing the 
adults who surround them, having no relationship of trust with these 
people who have removed their ability to be in the arms and embrace of 
their parents. This is simply inhumane, and it is unacceptable.
  Even with the Executive order from the President of the United 
States, that number will be the same tomorrow. Those 2,000-plus 
children will be in the same situation tomorrow that they were in today 
and the day before and the day before and the day before that.
  Over the last few months, the Department of Homeland Security has 
separated more than 2,000 children from their parents at the border, 
many of them younger than 4 years old. Let's be clear about what that 
point is and that moment is in this stage of human development. Age is 
more than a chronological fact. There are phases of childhood that can 
never be replaced--phases of childhood that when that child experiences 
trauma, he or she will have lifelong impact; phases of life during 
which a child is so innocent and needs love and needs nurturing and 
needs that love and nurturing from their parents. It cannot be replaced 
by anyone else, and certainly not by the cage in which they are now 
being held.
  So let's look at where we are. It is a child's worst nightmare, a 
nightmare that is displayed, as my colleagues have discussed, in the 
stories of a child who was apparently ripped from her mother's breast 
while being breastfed. There are nightmare stories of a 3-year-old who 
was torn from the arms of his father and the father being so distraught 
that he took his own life.
  We should tell the truth. We have to speak the truth. The American 
public knows the truth. Let's speak truth here in the U.S. Senate. 
Let's speak truth as leaders and acknowledge the lifelong consequences 
of the separation we visited upon these children and their parents. The 
American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics 
have weighed in on this topic, and what they have said is that family 
separation in these cases, not as a general matter--it is generally 
true--but specifically in these cases it will cause lifelong trauma. 
They have indicated there is empirical evidence of the fact that it is 
likely to cause significant harm to the brain structure of these 
children and will affect these children's long- and short-term health.
  Let's be clear. A society is judged based on how it treats its 
children. A society is judged based on how it treats the least among 
us, and we will be judged harshly. History will judge us harshly 
because of what this administration has done.
  As I stand here at this moment, hours after the announcement of the 
Executive order on this issue, I find it shocking that the Executive 
order fails to acknowledge that over 2,000 children are currently, at 
this very moment, without their parents. I find it shocking that the 
Executive order fails to acknowledge, take into account or even concern 
itself with the fact that tonight there will be over 2,000 children who 
will go to bed, who will go to sleep without a kiss goodnight from 
their mother or their father. There are 2,000 children in our country 
tonight who will go to bed without a hug from their parents. The 2,000 
children tonight will go to bed asking: Where is my mommy? Where is my 
daddy? This is an outrage.
  It is an outrage--not to mention these children are innocent and have 
committed no wrongdoing whatsoever. Let's be clear.
  Thankfully, the American people have been speaking out over these 
last many weeks, and that is the only reason the administration finally 
had to acknowledge that politically it could not survive its misdeeds. 
There has still been no acknowledgment by this administration that it 
visited this policy upon itself and, after urging from every type of 
person from every walk of life, still held steadfast in supporting this 
policy. Then it started to snowball, and they couldn't stand by it any 
longer, but it was only because of the pressure, only because of the 
relentless coverage by journalists who went to Texas, who went to 
California and the activists who stood outside of those detention 
centers and demanded that there be justice and humanity in this system, 
and it was because of that activism and because of those people 
speaking out that finally this administration did what was necessary to 
end the thing that it started around the separation of these children. 
But this is not enough.
  The reality is that there is nothing about this Executive order that 
addresses those 2,000 children who are currently without their parents. 
There is nothing about the administration's stated policy as of today 
that indicates any plan to reunify those children with their parents.
  Let's look at the effect of this Executive order. The effect is there 
is still indefinite detention of families in America because of this 
administration's policy. So now we are going to go from babies in cages 
to babies with their mommies in cages.
  Let's be clear about the effect of this Executive order. Millions 
more taxpayer dollars will be used to expand detention camps on top of 
the billions of taxpayer dollars that have already poured into this 
detention system.
  Let's be clear about the effect of this Executive order. The so-
called zero tolerance policy that created this problem in the first 
place is still in effect. It is still in effect.
  Let's be clear about this Executive order. The effect is to suggest 
that a mother fleeing the murder capital of the world--which is what 
the zero tolerance policy suggests--that a mother fleeing with her 
child from the murder capital of the world should be treated as being a 
threat to our safety that is equal to being a member of a transnational 
criminal organization. As a prosecutor for most of my adult life, I 
find that absolutely disingenuous and absolutely wrong on a moral 
level, on an ethical level, and devoid of any reference to real fact. 
But I am not surprised, given the administration's track record on this 
issue.
  If you look at what has been coming out of this administration in 
terms of its policies, it paints a constellation of attacks on 
immigrant women, immigrant children, and immigrant families. Let's look 
at the constellation before us and what has been going on.
  Let's just look at how this administration has changed the policies 
about detention of pregnant women. Before this administration acted on 
this subject, it was the policy of the U.S. Government to place 
pregnant women in the least restrictive place, where they could be able 
to get the kind of prenatal care they so desperately need and deserve. 
This administration rolled back those protections of pregnant women.
  Let's look; there used to be a policy that gave a presumption that 
pregnant women would not even be detained and should be in less 
restrictive situations, but this administration changed that policy.
  Let's look at how the Office of the Inspector General and the 
Government Accountability Office have raised serious concerns about 
oversight and conditions in the detention facilities. There is nothing 
about this Executive order that addresses those concerns.
  Let's look at a complaint filed just last year by numerous 
organizations, such as the Women's Refugee Commission, that documents 
insufficient medical care and inhumane conditions for pregnant women in 
ICE custody--all of which is why I have been proud to work with 
Representative Jayapal to introduce the DONE Act, which will slash ICE 
detention beds by using alternatives to detention and would increase 
badly needed oversight of these facilities.
  Let's look at another policy. There are reports that the Department 
of Homeland Security is looking at decreasing the standard of care for 
children in detention facilities--decreasing the standard of care. 
These standards govern the types of meals that a child must eat in 
order to be healthy. These standards govern the kind of recreation a 
child should receive, again, in order to be healthy, and just this past 
month, the Attorney General of the United States announced a decision 
that makes it nearly impossible for victims of domestic violence, over 
90 percent of whom are women, to seek asylum in the United States.
  Let's look at one final policy that makes this administration's 
priorities around children very clear--the fact that they have ended 
DACA. We have talked about this extensively. We have talked about how 
the American Government made a promise to these

[[Page S4303]]

Dreamers, these young people, and this administration has failed to 
keep that promise.
  So what we see is an administration that is engaged in an act of 
complete hypocrisy, pretending to care about families and children, 
when in fact, they have a track record of policies that are 
specifically damaging to families, women, and children.
  In conclusion, there is no medical or logical reason that dictates or 
requires this administration to detain more pregnant women, and it has 
to stop. There is no evidence that says you should reduce care for 
children in detention facilities. That has to stop. There is no reason 
not to have a plan to reunify the 2,300 children who will go to sleep 
tonight torn from their parents and alone. There is no reason, and it 
has to stop. This is not reflective of who we are as a country. We are 
better than this.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I really appreciate the comments of my 
colleague from California. She brings her background as a prosecutor, 
as attorney general to bear, as well as the heart of an American who 
understands that it is not within the scope of America's history or of 
our traditions or of our culture to treat those who are fleeing 
persecution by then persecuting them when they arrive on our shores. It 
is quite the opposite. Thank you for your comments tonight.
  Thank you to my colleagues who have spoken before, the 13 Members of 
the Senate who came and spoke this evening, sharing some very powerful 
stories. In several cases, they told powerful stories about their own 
family history, about their own parents or grandparents coming here to 
the United States of America, placing themselves in a situation. They 
spoke about how they might have suffered if President Trump had been in 
office when their families came to the shores of the United States and 
if they had been separated from their parents when they arrived.
  It really helps sometimes to put yourself in the shoes of others, to 
recognize that outside of our Native Americans, virtually all of us 
have roots that involve families fleeing persecution, fleeing civil 
war, fleeing religious oppression, fleeing starvation, and coming here 
to the United States of America. When they came to the United States, 
they knew that the general principle of our country was to treat them 
with respect and dignity.
  It has always been symbolized by Lady Liberty. Lady Liberty says: 
``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to 
breathe free.'' That quote is the one we all know from Emma Lazarus. 
Her poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty has some other powerful 
lines, like this one: ``From her beacon-hand glows worldwide welcome.'' 
That has been the attitude of America. She says ``the wretched refuse 
of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me. I 
lift my lamp beside the golden door!''
  Well, that golden door, Lady Liberty's torch lighting the path, has 
been desecrated by President Trump because he has a new inscription, a 
new message he wanted to send. That message is called a deterrent. If 
you are fleeing oppression abroad and you wash up here on the shores of 
the United States of America, we are going to put you in handcuffs, we 
are going to throw you in prison, and we are going to take away your 
children. That is hardly the powerful vision of respect and dignity 
that has been the hallmark of how we treated those fleeing oppression 
throughout our history.
  Pregnant and fearing for her unborn baby's life, a woman fled a death 
threat from a drug cartel in Honduras. She made her way to America, 
delivering her baby girl, Andrea, along the way. On Sunday, a group of 
seven Members of Congress--myself included--met her and her baby. We 
had gone out on the bridge to see what was going on because we had 
heard that our American border guards were blocking those seeking 
asylum from coming across that bridge. They were demanding to see 
papers of people on the pedestrian bridge, saying: You have a visa, 
fine. You have a passport, fine. You have no papers and you are seeking 
asylum, you are not welcome. You may not enter.
  I found it hard to believe that we would treat those fleeing 
persecution, seeking asylum, in that manner, but I heard from others 
that was the case, and there were articles in the newspaper. We went 
out there, and we saw it firsthand.
  Here is this mother with her baby girl. We were able to talk to her 
because when we came off the bridge and went into the Hidalgo Port of 
Entry, through those doors, they had a variety of counseling rooms 
there. One room was holding 10 or so individuals.
  I said: Have you let in anyone who is seeking asylum?
  They said: Oh, yes.
  I said: Can we meet that person?
  They said: Yes.
  They brought her out to us with her little girl. She sat down. I sat 
down beside her.
  We asked her some questions.
  Why are you fleeing from Central America?
  She said: My family took a loan from a private bank. The private bank 
has a relationship with the drug cartel or criminal empire that runs 
that part of the city. We can't repay the loan. We had been told that I 
am targeted to be killed. I was safe as long as I was pregnant, but as 
soon as I delivered, I would be at high risk. With a month to go in my 
pregnancy, I fled. I fled to protect the life of my child and my life. 
I fled.
  Unfortunately, her uncle was killed. She escaped, but her uncle was 
killed. I think we all have to conclude that her fear was very real. 
There she is, 8 months pregnant, taking the journey from Honduras north 
up through Guatemala, through Mexico, to get to the United States, 
stopping along the way to deliver her baby.
  I think about the journey of Mary and Joseph with Mary pregnant, 
seeking shelter, a place to deliver her child, Baby Jesus. She was let 
in, given accommodation, taken care of, welcomed.
  This woman was largely on her own, as far as I could make out. She 
continued north with her newborn, and she made it to our border 
finally, escaped the drug cartel, escaped the death threat, and 
delivered her baby. She made it through Guatemala and Mexico. She got 
to our shore--the shore so long symbolized by Lady Liberty and her 
beacon of hope and welcome. She got to the border, and she tried to 
cross the pedestrian bridge, and she was stopped. She was sent back. 
She said she tried multiple times to get across that pedestrian bridge, 
and she was rebuffed again and again.
  I said to her: How did you get across the bridge?
  We had been out there. We had seen the border guards stopping those 
without papers.
  How did you get across?
  For just a moment, an absolute smile lit up her face. She said that 
as she was sent back time and again, she would study the situation, and 
she saw that there were people out washing the windows on the car 
bridge.
  She said: I had a plan.
  She went out and she borrowed a squeegee from one of the car window 
washers who were washing car windows and asking for tips. She washed 
windows all across the bridge, making her way through the cars to the 
United States of America, and then she was able to open that door to 
the port of entry in Hidalgo.
  That is how hard it was for one young woman with a 65-day-old child 
in her arms to get the opportunity to seek asylum in the United States 
of America.
  It troubles me to reread the transcript of Secretary Nielsen, who 
proceeded to say that there is no reason for people to cross our 
borders; all they have to do is come to the port of entry. That is all 
they have to do. But she is in charge of this program of slow-walking 
those seeking asylum to only let in a few at a time and send them back 
time and time again.
  There was an attorney who was doing pro bono legal work for 
immigrants. On my first trip down 2 weeks ago before last Sunday, she 
told me that when she got out to that bridge, there were some 40 
families sleeping on the bridge, waiting to be allowed to come in.
  When I went on Sunday with the congressional delegation, we said we 
wanted to go out on the bridge.
  The officer said: Well, there is nobody on the bridge.

[[Page S4304]]

  I asked: Why not? They were there 2 weeks ago.
  He said: There is no one on the bridge. You can go out and see for 
yourself.
  Well, here is why there was nobody on the bridge: There is nobody on 
the bridge because they are not being let past the American border 
guards to come to the American side of the bridge.
  This pro bono immigrant advocate and attorney said that those folks 
are trapped in a terrible, no-win situation because if they return to 
the Mexico side, the gangs in that city know they are easy prey. She 
recounted how some had been kidnapped and then their families had been 
extorted to get the money to free them. It is almost better for 
somebody to be on the bridge waiting than to be sent back to the 
Mexican side.
  Those who run out of patience and end up crossing the border by going 
across the nearby river--the bridge is actually over the Rio Grande 
River. If they do that, then the administration says: You have 
committed a crime. We are going to lock you up and take your children 
away.
  Another young woman we met on this trip was hanging her head with 
hopelessness and resignation. She told us she had presented herself for 
asylum at an official port of entry because she heard the right thing 
to do was to ask for asylum. Despite doing it at a port of entry, she 
was charged with illegally crossing the border. Now she sits in an ICE 
detention center with no idea where her child is, no communication with 
her family, no legal representation. Will she ever see her toddler 
again? She doesn't know. I don't know. Do you know whether she will 
ever see her child again?
  Another mother we talked with was panicked over her child's health. 
She said that her child had medical conditions. When the border guards 
took the child away, they didn't get any of the information from her 
about how he needed to be cared for. She is deeply disturbed. She was 
pleading with them to take the medical information. She still doesn't 
know where her child is. She doesn't know how he is going to be cared 
for. How is that mother going to find out about her son's health?
  Here is what we know. This policy, which was run as a pilot project 
last summer, was officially sanctioned with a policy memo on April 6 
and was officially announced on May 7. This policy of separating 
children from their parents is an extraordinarily egregious assault on 
the welfare of the parent, and it inflicts massive trauma on the 
child. The American Academy of Pediatrics describes it this way: 
``irreparable harm.'' It is harm that cannot be fixed.

  Our colleague from Hawaii shared the story of family separation when 
her mother was not able to bring all of her children with her when she 
escaped domestic violence and came to the United States to start a new 
life and the lifelong impact that this has had on her brother.
  Well, here is a piece of the puzzle we should spend a lot of time 
thinking about. Attorney General Sessions just changed the policy of 
the United States about what qualifies for asylum. So my colleague from 
Hawaii, whose mother fled domestic violence, would no longer qualify 
for an opportunity for asylum in the United States of America. She 
would have been turned away and sent home, back to the horrific 
circumstances from which she escaped, and my colleague today would not 
be a U.S. Senator, sitting here helping us to understand this issue 
through her personal, powerful experience. That mother, the window 
washer who carried her baby, Andrea, 65 days old, she told us, in one 
arm and a squeegee in the other, washing windows to get across and 
finally bypass the American border guard so that she could present her 
case for asylum--she was fleeing a gang. A drug cartel is defined as a 
gang, so she is not eligible for asylum--a change that was just made by 
Jeff Sessions unilaterally. This was an established policy to serve 
thousands of families fleeing from oppression overseas, and they have 
just lost their legal standing to be able to present their cases.
  I was distraught about this Executive order that came out. It is very 
vague. The President--was he ready to stand up and take responsibility 
for the policy he implemented? Was he ready to say: I thought it was 
right, and here is why. I hear the American people. I hear the Southern 
Baptists. I hear the evangelical leaders. I hear the United Methodists. 
I hear the citizens profoundly disturbed by the treatment of children 
from every corner of the United States, from every part--from Alaska to 
Florida, from Maine to Southern California, and across Hawaii. I hear 
them, and I am going to do better. I am going to change this. I am 
going to modify what we do.
  Did he take responsibility? No.
  He titled it ``Affording Congress An Opportunity To Address Family 
Separation,'' and then he proceeded to say nothing about actually 
uniting the families he has already separated. There is not a thing in 
here about actually remedying the harrowing plight that he has now put 
several thousand families into--and counting. The last count I heard 
was 2,300, and that was days ago. Where are we now? There are 2,500 
families separated, children separated from their parents.
  What do we know about this situation in which the existing children 
are going to be united or not united? We have an article from the New 
York Times that my colleague from Colorado referred to this evening. It 
answers the question very plainly. I have heard various analyses saying 
that this Executive order fails to address what is going to happen to 
the current children, those children who were sent far away from their 
parents and their parents are incarcerated. The parents are in prison 
far away. Where are the children? Far away. What is going to happen to 
them? This doesn't say.
  It does say that it is the policy of this administration to maintain 
family unity, as if it has always been the policy of the administration 
to maintain family unity. It doesn't announce that they are reversing 
the previous policy. It doesn't announce a new policy. It says that it 
is the policy to maintain family unity.
  If it is the policy to maintain family unity, then why do I have this 
in my hand, this article from the New York Times, quoting Kenneth 
Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families?
  Realize this: When the Department of Homeland Security takes children 
away from their parents, it then ships them out to a different agency, 
the Administration for Children and Families, which is a part of the 
Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of 
Human Services. So the children are torn away by Homeland Security, and 
then they are put in a different department over here, a subsection 
called the Administration for Children and Families. So here is the 
spokesman, and he says: ``There will not be a grandfathering of 
existing cases.'' ``Cases''--what a word to describe children ripped 
away from their parents. They are cases; no ``grandfathering of 
existing cases,'' he said.
  He goes on to say: ``I can tell you definitively that is going to be 
[the] policy.'' Well, I can tell you definitively, I am going to fight 
that policy. I am going to fight that policy of failing to reunite 
these families after the administration says that it is policy to keep 
families together and then says: But not all the children we have 
already harmed.
  This is pretty disturbing, but it is only the half of it. What is the 
other half? The other half is that the administration has not given up 
on its strategy of deterrence based on injuring children. It is a 
strategy laid out by Jeff Sessions, supported by Chief of Staff John 
Kelly, with Steve Miller chiming in to say: This will work. They want 
to deter people from seeking asylum here in the United States of 
America by mistreating those who arrive and try to seek asylum. They 
use the word ``deterrence'' to send a message of what will happen to 
you if you try to come here.
  There is no moral code in the United States of America or in the 
world that would support hurting children to send a message to families 
still overseas. There is no religious tradition on this planet that 
supports injuring children to send a message overseas. But here we have 
Mr. Wolfe speaking definitively that nothing is going to be done for 
those children, those more than 2,000 children who have been separated 
from their parents.
  Moreover, the other half of the policy is that for those now coming 
in, it will

[[Page S4305]]

be the official strategy of the United States of America to incarcerate 
the children along with the parents. That is the plan. We have already 
gone down that path in the past. Experts have already weighed in, 
saying that incarcerating children with their families--they may not be 
separated, but they are incarcerated. They can't go to school. They 
can't play on the playground. To continue this policy of deterrence, 
that is another strategy of injuring children. That is deeply, deeply 
disturbing, and it is profoundly unacceptable.
  We have done this before. We have put families together in prison 
camps. We did it in World War II. We took our Japanese-Americans, and 
we put them into prison camps. It was a profoundly disturbing chapter 
in our history. Now the President says that is his new plan--to put 
families together in prison camps.
  So, no, I am not happy that the President has ended the policy of 
family separation because he hasn't ended the strategy of harming 
children. The fight must continue. The pressure must continue. The 
weighing in by religious group after religious group needs to continue. 
The legal challenges need to continue. The debate here on the floor of 
the Senate needs to continue. We cannot accept family prison camps here 
in the United States of America.
  I was struck by the fact that we had a program that was working 
pretty well. That program is called the Family Case Management Program. 
Here in my hand is the report from the Office of the Inspector General 
of Homeland Security. This is the inspector general's analysis of the 
Family Case Management Program to keep families together and out of 
prison and to make sure they show up for their hearings, their asylum 
hearings. This report is from just a few months ago, November 30, 2017.
  For those who want to look it up online, just look up OIG--for Office 
of the Inspector General---18-22. That is OIG-18-22, and you will 
immediately see a copy of the inspector general's report. It takes a 
look at this program, the Family Case Management Program, which 
addresses this challenge in a whole different way.
  Here is what it says, in summary:

       As of March 30, 2017, ICE reported that it expended $17.5 
     million in program costs to enroll 781 active participants in 
     FCMP--

  the Family Case Management Program--

     across all five locations. According to ICE, overall program 
     compliance for all five regions is an average of 99 percent 
     for ICE check-ins and appointments, as well as 100 percent 
     attendance at court hearings.

  It doesn't get much better than 100 percent of people showing up for 
their court hearings. This didn't require a family prison camp. This 
got 100 percent by treating people with respect and having a case 
manager who actually spoke their language check in with them, making 
sure they had their cell number and their home number and knew where 
they were living, and making sure they knew the date and understood the 
importance of showing up both for their check-ins and appointments and 
their court hearings.
  They didn't have 80 percent show up for their court hearings; they 
didn't get 60 or 40 percent. They got 100 percent.
  So there is no argument--no argument--that you have to incarcerate 
people to have them show up for a hearing, and there is no morality in 
continuing to injure children in order to send a message of deterrence 
to people overseas.
  Then we have the plan, through all of this incarceration, to build 
prison camp after prison camp. We have a picture of the tents.
  There are children in this new prison camp that is near El Paso, TX. 
They ran out of room. They ran out of room at Casa Padre. Casa Padre is 
a big former Walmart that was serving as a detention center for 
children--children who were unaccompanied minors and children who were 
separated from their parents. They said earlier this year that they had 
300 children there, and in April they had 500 children there.
  When I went down there 2 weeks ago and stood outside that Walmart, 
trying to gain entry after having been denied a waiver to visit it with 
less than 2 weeks' notice, I said that I had heard from refugee 
advocates that there were hundreds of kids behind those doors in 
Walmart--hundreds--and there might even be as many as 1,000 children 
behind those doors. Even as I said those words, I thought: That is not 
possible. It is not possible that 1,000 children are locked up in that 
Walmart.
  What did we find out 2 weeks later? A congressional delegation going 
down and getting a waiver to be able to visit--there weren't 1,000 
children there. There weren't 1,100 children there, not 1,200, not 
1,300, not 1,400. They had gotten a special adjustment to their permit 
to allow 1,500 children to be in that Walmart. There were 1,500 
children sleeping, living, spending the day, apparently trying to go to 
class--1,500 in this one building. They said they actually were at 
capacity. They said: We do have a few slots. But it was something like 
1,467 kids. So maybe they had one busload that they could add.

  That is why the government is building this tent city--for all the 
children they are detaining, for all the children they are ripping away 
from parents.
  Now the administration says: We will take these same tent cities, 
these same prison camps, only we will put whole families in there. By 
the way, for those children we see in this picture--the almost 1,500 
boys I saw at Casa Padre--they don't get to be united with their 
families because Kenneth Wolfe, the head of the Administration for 
Children and Families, says that there will not be a grandfathering, 
meaning those kids are out of luck. For as long as their parents are 
incarcerated, they are out of luck.
  Now, a lot of parents were told: You are only going to go through a 
court proceeding. It will just take a day or two, and you will be 
united with your children. That, in many cases, is a lie. If they were 
asserting asylum, the administration has decided to keep the parents 
incarcerated until their asylum hearing which, at this point, could be 
many months into the future, sometimes over 1 year into the future.
  There is one woman who said that she came here expecting to be able 
to assert her asylum claim. She didn't know if it would be judged to 
breach the standard for asylum in the United States, if she would have 
enough evidence to demonstrate legitimate fear of return and that she 
had been persecuted before she came. She didn't know if she would meet 
those standards, but she said: What I have learned is that my child has 
been shipped off. She actually said ``children.'' She had several 
children. She said: It may be that I will be in prison for a year. So I 
have two choices. One is to give up my asylum claim and be shipped 
home; the other is to be in prison for a year. She said: For my 
children's sake, I will ask my sister to adopt my children. She was 
trying to find some decent way, with asylum blocked and threatened with 
a year in jail, just to get an asylum hearing.
  For those Members of the Senate who have family histories with people 
who have come from abroad--and I would say it does include every single 
Member of this Senate; I don't think a single Member of this Senate is 
100 percent Native American; so every Member here has a family history 
with all of these branches going out for generations--imagine your 
grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandmother, and 
what would have happened if they had arrived in the United States and 
they told them: You must leave your children aside and be in prison for 
a year, knowing what harm it will do to your children, and knowing that 
at the end of the year you might not be granted asylum anyway when you 
got that hearing.
  So let's wrap this up. I believe that we must return to the vision of 
the Statue of Liberty. I believe that our Nation is a Nation that 
deeply resonates with the understanding that when those individuals 
flee persecution--they flee persecution--they should be treated with 
respect and dignity when they arrive on the shores of the United 
States.
  We absolutely must not go to a family policy of incarceration. That 
is handcuffs for all, and it is completely unacceptable. We had, under 
family separation, handcuffs for the parents, and now the 
administration proposes handcuffs for all of the people and to put them 
in prison.
  This must not stand. We must resist it with every particle of our 
being and

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return to treating those who flee persecution with graciousness and 
fairness and dignity.
  Thank you, Mr. President.

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