[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
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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.
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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.