[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 104 (Thursday, June 21, 2018)]
[House]
[Page H5367]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  ZERO TOLERANCE EQUALS ZERO HUMANITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POCAN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to talk about a trip I did on 
Sunday to the United States southern border in Texas to visit the 
processing centers and detention facilities that we are using to 
enforce the zero-tolerance policy that the President has put forth, the 
zero-tolerance policy that apparently means zero humanity.
  It is a policy that is cruel, inhumane, and un-American, and I want 
to share my firsthand observations with the American people about this.
  First of all, it is a cruel policy. We are separating mothers and 
fathers, parents from their children, brothers from their sisters, 
across the border as people come into the United States.
  I can tell you that when children are taken away from their parents, 
sometimes they are told a lie of why. Sometimes they are just taken 
away. There are no questions asked of the parents about the children: 
Do they have an allergy? Have they ever been abused? Do they have any 
diseases? The basic questions that you would ask, if you didn't have a 
cruel policy, aren't asked. So you are essentially separating the 
parents from their children without any information whatsoever.
  I talked to mothers at the ICE detention facility, and we asked about 
the situations, if they knew where their children were. One woman 
pulled out a little slip of paper that said where her children were, as 
if she knows New York, as if the other mothers knew Florida. It is not 
like the children are held in the next room, in the next building, in 
the next city, but they are being held several States away.
  One woman told us that she was told that her children would be put up 
for adoption. Another woman told us that she would be released and 
eventually her 9-year-old daughter held by herself in New York would be 
released.
  The policy is inhumane. People are being held in cages. And anyone 
who wants to contest that, come to my backyard and I will show you the 
dog run in my backyard that is made of the same material and the same 
construction, only with shorter walls than the cages that we are 
holding people in, in the processing center.
  There are no pillows. You have a mat. There are no toys for children. 
Then I visited the Walmart Supercenter where we have 1,500 10- to 17-
year-old boys held in a Walmart Supercenter where the sleeping space is 
6 by 10. Even though it is a little larger room with six or eight beds, 
it is a 6 by 10 allocation.
  I have done work with supermax prisons when I was in the State 
legislature. A supermax prison cell is 8 by 12. That is 40 percent less 
than a supermax prison cell. You get outside 2 hours a day. In a 
supermax prison, you get out about an hour a day. This is wrong.
  Parents don't often know the status of how their children are doing. 
When we were set up to interview one woman, she hadn't even seen her 
13-year-old daughter in 2 days. This is un-American.
  We are taking the points of entry that are legal points of entry, and 
we are making it impossible to get into the United States. So what 
happens is you either go back into Mexico where you can get kidnapped 
by a cartel and extorted for money from relatives in the U.S., or if 
you don't want to get kidnapped, you cross illegally across the river, 
and then you get detained under the zero-tolerance policy. And that is 
why we have this situation.
  But the bottom line is, Donald Trump did not do anything, nor did 
this Congress, to actually fix the situation. Donald Trump finally 
caved to enormous public pressure, saying he will no longer separate 
children and parents, but he won't fix the 2,300 children who are 
currently separated at all. That is not in the executive order.
  We don't have the facilities to deal with this. Again, because of 
this policy change, in 6 weeks, the population of the detention center 
at Walmart, which I refer to as the supermax prison, went from 500 to 
1,500 in 6 weeks. You can't make that process work.
  Everything I saw shows the President did this without any thought, 
and because no thought was put into it, people are treated 
thoughtlessly through the process.
  Ultimately, the President did this for one reason: he wants to force 
Congress to put up an unneeded and unnecessary wall at the border, and 
he will do anything and use anyone to get what he wants.
  This Congress today has a couple of bills up that will not deal with 
this issue. We need to act. This is a cruel, inhumane, un-American 
policy.
  This is a Trump policy, and if we don't act, we are also complicit in 
the horrors that are happening.

                          ____________________