[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 188 (Thursday, November 29, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7199-S7201]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Border Security

  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, the clock is ticking and the days are 
passing us by, but we know we have a deadline to meet on December 7, 
and if we don't meet that deadline, then there will be a lot of lives 
disrupted and a lot of people will say: There they go again. Congress 
is unable to work together to try to solve problems, just creating more 
distrust and undermining confidence in our ability to actually do our 
job to govern.
  What I want to talk about specifically is this fight over border 
funding because that is what the deadline is on December 7. Our 
Democratic friends have said: We are not going to fund President 
Trump's wall. On the other hand, we see caravans of people coming from 
Central America, coming through Mexico, closing down the ports of entry 
at the San Ysidro bridge between Tijuana and San Diego. What I fear is, 
we have made a parody out of what the problem is. We have thought about 
the challenge of border security and immigration in too small a way and 
not given the complete picture of what the challenges really are.
  I just have to believe that if we were willing to acknowledge the 
facts, that we would be more inclined to work together to solve the 
problem, and I feel like we are looking at these problems like we are 
looking through a soda straw.
  I have heard people talk about the humanitarian crisis at the border 
there at Tijuana caused by this huge caravan of Central Americans who 
want to storm the barriers and enter the United States illegally, and 
people question why would we stop them, why would they use nonlethal 
means like tear gas and pepper spray like President Obama did during 
his administration and which now Customs and Border Protection is doing 
again in order to protect the sovereignty of our country and to protect 
our borders from those who would enter it illegally.
  So let's not look at this through a soda straw. Let's open up the 
aperture and look at the larger problem because it is a very serious 
problem, and it affects many lives, both here, in Mexico, and in 
Central America.
  Our Democratic colleagues have offered a lot of criticism of the 
Trump administration when it comes to border security, but anytime you 
ask them, well, what is your solution, what are you offering as an 
alternative, it is crickets--complete silence. In other words, they are 
not offering any constructive solutions, just criticism. Our 
constituents deserve more than just for us to criticize one another. 
They deserve our working together to try to come up with solutions.
  This is a crisis that has arisen as a result of our inability to 
acknowledge that this is a failure to enforce our immigration laws, a 
failure to fix our broken immigration system, and a failure to secure 
our borders.
  Coming from Texas, representing 28 million constituents in a State 
which has a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico, this affects my 
constituents in my State directly. We are at ground zero, and I have 
tried my best to get educated about the problem and potential 
solutions. My trips to the border, talking to people in border 
communities who live and work in those communities, talking to our 
heroic Border Patrol agents, and visiting our ports of entry where 
millions and even billions of dollars of commerce flow legally between 
the United States and Mexico--that is important not only to our border 
communities but to jobs in the United States.
  The border communities that rely on the flow of legal commerce 
through our ports know that without border security, legitimate trade 
can easily be brought to a standstill. In fact, that is exactly what 
has happened at San Ysidro, the port of entry between Tijuana and San 
Diego. They had to shut down the port of entry. So people whose jobs 
depend on those ports of entry and the trade and commerce that goes on 
between our countries, they are the ones who are being hurt by the 
uncontrolled disruption of legal immigration. Any disruption of 
legitimate trade has an immediate impact on the businesses and the 
employees and affects the livelihoods of our border residents.
  An unsecured border creates avenues for the entry of drug cartels and

[[Page S7200]]

transnational criminal gangs to exploit because they are the same 
people who are facilitating the passage of migrants from Central 
America to our borders. Those are the same people who are transiting 
the heroin, 90 percent of which comes from Mexico, which contributes to 
our opioid crisis in the United States.
  As I mentioned before, last year the Centers for Disease Control 
estimates 72,000 Americans died of a drug overdose--about 50,000 of 
those from some form of opioid, either prescription drug, synthetic 
fentanyl, or heroin coming across the same borders these migrants are 
attempting to storm across.
  The people who are organizing that, as I said, are the same people. 
They are the drug cartels that are getting rich because we have not 
found a way to come together to fix our border, to reform our laws, and 
come together to try to protect the people we represent in the 
process. We know that the gangs, the cartels, and the transnational 
criminal organizations are ever evolving. They are always adapting. 
They spread terror, they prey on the weak, and they have taken control 
of large swaths of Mexico and Central America. They are, as I have said 
before, commodity-agnostic--they don't really care whether they are 
trafficking children for sex or heroin that will cause an overdose in 
the United States or a migrant who just wants a better life in the 
United States, because they do want a better life. The same people 
facilitate that for money.

  On average, I have read that a migrant from Central America has to 
pay about $8,000. You multiply that $8,000 times thousands and 
thousands. Last year, in 2017, there were almost 400,000 migrants 
detained at our southwestern border. Just multiply that number by 
$8,000, and you get just a glimpse of what we are talking about in the 
huge criminal enterprise. We are continuing to enrich these cartels and 
transnational criminal organizations when we fail to do our job when it 
comes to securing our border and fixing our broken immigration system.
  This is more than just about whether President Trump gets his money 
for the wall. As a matter of fact, many of our Democratic colleagues 
voted in--I think it was 2006 for the Secure Fence Act, which called 
for 700 miles of secure fencing along the southwestern border. So they 
have already voted for tactical infrastructure that is part of the 
piece of the puzzle of securing our border; yet they stand intransigent 
against our effort to try to improve border security now even though 
they have supported similar funding in the past.
  As I said, we know that the cartels are very shrewd, adaptive, and 
are always evolving. They know that if they can tie up the Border 
Patrol with processing children and family units, those same Border 
Patrol agents aren't available to stop the drugs that come across the 
border. So it is a method of distracting the Border Patrol and law 
enforcement in order to exploit that vulnerability for the purposes of 
bringing those drugs into the United States.
  When I want to learn more about what is happening at the border, I 
talk to my constituents in the Customs and Border Protection business, 
such as Chief Manny Padilla, who is the Chief of the Rio Grande Valley 
Sector of the Border Patrol, and Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost. 
Customs and Border Protection does all it can do with the tools 
available to it to stop flows of illegal immigration and to stop 
illegal contraband, including drugs, from making it across the border, 
but they need our help. We basically have not given them the tools they 
need in order to do the job we have asked them to do. Shame on us.
  We know the cartels are cunning. I have seen produce that appears to 
be watermelons or other vegetables that basically contain heroin or 
fentanyl or some other illegal drug. The creativity of the cartels is 
amazing. I have seen them put human beings, migrants, into the 
upholstery of a seat in a car so they are obscured or pack them into a 
truck or put them in an 18-wheeler--unfortunately sometimes leaving 
them to die as a result of exposure to heat and other conditions. We 
also know that these same organizations traffic women and children 
through Central America and enslave them, essentially, here in the 
United States. They traffic them for sex--again, to generate money 
because that is all they care about.
  The operations of these cartels are increasingly sophisticated, and 
they are always diversifying their income streams to avoid detection 
and defeat our efforts to stop it. They are strategic about when and 
how they cross the border, and they have developed this strategy over 
many years.
  To put it simply, they are taking advantage of and exploiting our 
inability to deal with our porous border, and a lot of innocent people 
are getting hurt in the process.
  Again, this is about more than just funding President Trump's border 
wall; this is about our pulling back and looking at the complexity of 
this problem and using our very best efforts in order to stop it. But 
somehow it becomes trivialized over a fight over tactical 
infrastructure that our Democratic colleagues have already voted for in 
the past under the Secure Fence Act.
  Well, the instability and violence created by the criminal 
organizations in Central America and Mexico over the last few years are 
part of the strategy. Violence, unfortunately, is at an alltime high in 
Mexico. That is one of the reasons President Lopez Obrador was elected. 
He said he wanted to decrease the violence in Mexico. I learned 
recently that more people have died in Mexico since 2007 than have died 
in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. It is terrible, and we 
need to work together to try to stop it. We know that gangs control 
much of El Salvador, and as a result, many Central Americans have their 
lives and safety threatened daily. It is no wonder they try to flee.
  But the United States cannot bear the burden of this crisis alone. I 
believe the United States is the most generous country in the world 
when it comes to legal immigration. We have always considered ourselves 
a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws, and we see 
what happens when the law is ignored and when Congress fails to fix the 
problem to the best of our ability.
  We have seen uncontrolled illegal immigration. We see thousands of 
people banding together in caravans trying to storm our ports of entry 
into the country, overrun our Customs and Border Protection personnel. 
Until we deal with this problem, new caravans will continue to arrive 
on a daily basis. In fact, they have. It is just now in the news 
because it is so large. We have had literally many caravans show up on 
a daily basis, but that doesn't make a lot of news. As I said, 400,000 
people were detained on the southwestern border in 2017 alone.
  What is frustrating is that the tools we need to address these 
problems are at hand and available to us. We can begin to work together 
to fight these gang cartels and organizations and secure our border by 
partnering with the governments of Central America and Mexico because 
our War on Drugs, our effort to provide safety and security to our 
constituents, is part of their war too. It is a fact that border 
security doesn't begin at our southern border; it ends at our southern 
border. It starts in Central America and Mexico.

  I know it is sometimes difficult to grasp the complexity of these 
problems, and that is why it is so tough to resolve them. There are 
social, political, historical, and moral aspects to all of them. Many 
people and facets of our society are implicated.
  Because of corruption and powerful criminal organizations in Mexico 
and Central America, a genuine rule of law is missing in many parts of 
these countries, and it has been for a long time. That is why it is so 
important for us to work together with these countries in Central 
America and with Mexico to help them stabilize their governments, root 
out the corruption, and stop the violence, which will benefit them and 
their economy, as well as the United States. These countries can in 
turn restore the relationship between their government, their law 
enforcement, and their people. When their people begin to see 
opportunity and safety in their home countries, making the long haul 
from Central America to the United States becomes less of an imperative 
and less of a necessity for them. They would probably be happier 
staying at home if they could do so safely and enjoy some modest 
prosperity.

[[Page S7201]]

  We have already had some successes in partnering with our closest 
neighbor in the crisis; that is, the Government of Mexico. I believe we 
can and should continue to build on some of the things we have already 
put in place.
  We have already partnered with Mexico in recent years through 
programs like the Merida Initiative to combat drug trafficking, 
organized crime, and money laundering.
  We have directed funds toward strengthening communities and 
empowering the Mexican criminal justice system and judicial system to 
combat the rampant culture of impunity.
  We have collaborated on intelligence matters and cooperated on 
providing various forms of security.
  The Bureau of International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement 
Affairs continues to work to develop programs to combat international 
narcotics and crime, especially in Central America, but U.S. funding 
for this program in Mexico has stagnated. Why? Because we somehow fixed 
the problem? No. It is because we have taken our eye off the ball once 
again.
  Additional aid for these programs would help not only improve drug 
interdiction and train Mexican law enforcement and judicial personnel, 
it would help them help us work together to combat the threats of these 
transnational criminal organizations. We should begin to look at the 
effectiveness of these programs so we can take full advantage of the 
work they do and make sure they are modernized and are more efficient 
and more effective.
  I was encouraged to see that the State Department, the Department of 
Homeland Security, and the Trump administration have already begun to 
negotiate new partnerships with Mexico to implement a new strategy to 
address some of the migrant flows from Central America. I appreciate 
Secretary Nielsen's and Secretary Pompeo's work with Mexican 
officials--primarily those associated with the incoming administration 
of President Lopez Obrador--toward an arrangement where migrants can 
seek asylum in the United States but wait in Mexico while their claims 
are being processed.
  I look forward to attending the inauguration of Mexico's incoming 
President this Saturday with Vice President Pence and other Members of 
Congress. I think this is--hopefully--a gesture that will be 
appreciated and reciprocated when it comes to our desire to work 
closely with this new administration to address many of the problems 
that I have talked about this morning.
  Ignoring this problem is not going to make it better; it is only 
going to get worse. Working together--not just here in Congress but 
with the administration and our partners to the south--to secure our 
borders is the only path forward. Solving this crisis takes a whole-
government strategy and one that looks at all pieces of the puzzle.
  Instead of shutting down the government by refusing the President's 
request for border security measures, we need to get to work and fix 
our broken immigration system. I hope our friends across the aisle are 
ready to leave their criticism behind and join us in solving the 
problem.