[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 41 (Thursday, March 7, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1722-S1725]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Border Security
Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about
what I believe is a real crisis at the southern border. I think there
is even a case to be made that we have challenges at the northern
border, but I want to focus on what the narrative here in the country
has been over the past couple of months, weeks, or really years since I
have been here--sworn in in 2015.
I think it is very important. We all know that we have the Executive
order from the President or the emergency declaration. He clearly
believes there is a crisis at the border--so much so that he was
willing to invoke an authority Congress granted beginning in 1976--the
National Emergencies Act--and then amended throughout the 1980s. He
believes he is within his authority to declare an emergency so that he
can get resources down to the southern border as quickly as possible.
It is no secret that I disagree with the method the President is
using to provide funding down at the southern border, but make no
mistake about it--I do believe there is a crisis at the border, and I
take exception to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who say
the President is manufacturing a crisis.
I serve on the Judiciary Committee. I have since 2015. Yesterday, we
got a briefing from Homeland Security that was truly startling in terms
of the statistics on the number of crossings--a record number of
crossings; severalfold; in one case, 10 times--over the past few
months. I believe one of the reasons we are seeing the increase in
illegal crossings is that those who are coming from countries other
than Mexico--who are the majority of illegal crossings today--believe
that if they get across the border, there is a very low chance they
will be returned to their country of origin.
Speaker Pelosi said it is a manufactured crisis. It is not a
manufactured crisis. Take a look at the data. It is a real crisis. The
majority leader said the same thing. I think it is a crisis on several
levels. One has to do with the number of people coming across the
border today.
There is something that is very important that I think was missed by
many people in the committee hearing yesterday. There were a number of
my colleagues on the other side of the aisle whom I work with--in fact,
I worked with Senator Durbin on a solution for the DACA population. I
am not necessarily considered a hawk on all things immigration. But I
will tell you that when I hear the senior Senator from Illinois say
that everyone who is coming across the border is fleeing a dangerous
situation in their country of origin, that doesn't necessarily
reconcile with the fact that almost 80 percent--8 out of 10 claims of
asylum are adjudicated not to be valid. Eight out of ten claims for
asylum are adjudicated not to be valid. And I don't hear anybody on the
other side of the aisle saying that we should change the standard for
an asylum claim. So for someone to say that everyone coming from these
countries is fleeing a fear of some sort of harm by staying in their
country or maybe staying in Mexico while they sort things out--that is
simply not true.
If you take a look at the severalfold increase in illegal crossings,
80 percent
[[Page S1723]]
of them are deemed invalid in terms of a threat to life or liberty from
their country of origin based on our standard for asylum. I am not
making this up; this is a matter of court records. These cases are
being adjudicated by officials who were appointed by Democrats and
Republicans, so it is not as though we have someone down there setting
a different standard for asylum. Eight out of ten asylum claims for
people crossing the southern border are deemed invalid.
But now what is happening is that we are spending so much time
adjudicating, detaining, and processing this influx of illegal
crossings that we are creating a more dangerous situation because bad
actors are getting through. Our resources are being spent trying to
process this influx of crossings that we have to stop. How do you stop
it? You stop it by preventing future flows. You stop it by changing the
treatment of a family who crosses from Mexico being different from a
family who crosses from Ecuador, El Salvador, or any other Latin
America country. You treat them all the same. You treat them
respectfully. You try to give them an opportunity to make their case,
but you also send a clear message that if you can't come through the
normal asylum process, which means you show up and you lawfully request
that your asylum claim be heard, then you cross the border and you put
yourself and your children at risk.
We have a crisis at the border. I spent a week--in fact, Senator
Cornyn will be speaking after me. Senator Cornyn invited some of us to
spend a week down on the southern border, and it was very revealing to
see what is going on there--seeing crossings happen right before us,
seeing cane along the Rio Grande River that prevents border security
from even seeing somebody who may be 10 feet away as they are snaking
through in the middle of the night. We were on horseback, we were in
low-draft boats, and we were in helicopters. We saw the crisis at the
border in real time. That was last year. Now we have severalfold more
people coming across the border.
The crisis has several layers to it. One of the ones that I think
every American should get behind is that the crisis is occurring
because our resources are being diluted by trying to police these
borders and apprehending people, 8 out of 10 of whom will ultimately be
deemed not to have a valid asylum claim. While we are tracking them
down, the cartels are smuggling millions of doses of poison across our
border that are killing people every year. These are the deaths that
have been reported, and they are reported, sadly, almost on an annual
basis--tens of thousands of people dying as a result of drugs coming
across the southern border. Because our resources are spread so thin, I
think this will get worse if we don't figure out how to secure the
border.
We have deaths of immigrants. Every year on American soil, we recover
nearly 300 bodies of people who paid hundreds or thousands of dollars
to the cartels so that they could pass through the plazas at the
southern border. There is no way you can cross the southern border
without paying a fee to these organized crime gangs who literally
control the border. In fact, we were told yesterday in the committee
that it will cost you $500 to put your foot in the Rio Grande River,
and if you don't, you are probably going to die before you ever leave
Mexico.
We have no earthly idea of the thousands of people--men, women and
children--who die trying to cross the border and can't pay a toll at
the appropriate time, or they get caught up in a conflict between the
cartels along the plazas of the southern border, but I know thousands
of people have died. Over the last 20 years, nearly 10,000 bodies have
been recovered on American soil--men, women, and children--because this
has become one of the most profitable enterprises for the human
smugglers, human traffickers, and drug traffickers in Mexico. That is a
crisis, ladies and gentlemen, and it is a crisis that we need to
recognize.
Gang members. Thousands of MS-13 gang members have crossed the border
illegally, and here is the sad reality. When they successfully cross
the border, they go into Hispanic communities. They go into
communities, many of them communities where the majority are legally
present, and make them more dangerous. They hide there. They coopt
them. They actually recruit kids into their gang activities and use
minors to do a lot of the illegal activities--distributing drugs,
trafficking humans, and all the other illicit activities that the gangs
are involved in. That is a crisis.
The human toll is devastating. When we were down at the border, we
were told of one massacre--this is one instance--where there was a
coyote. That is a person who is responsible for moving people through
the plazas, ultimately, to cross the border illegally. In one instance,
we had a human trafficker--a human smuggler--who apparently took a lot
of the money that should have been passed back to the cartels to pay
for the passage of these folks trying to get across the border, and
they didn't have the money to pay the cartel.
So what did the cartel do? They ordered the massacre of 72 people.
This is one group--one group--of 72 people on the other side of the
border who were murdered--men, women, and children. They never got to
the United States.
The sad fact is, statistically speaking, after they had spent
virtually all of their life's belongings, if they had gotten across the
border, 8 out of 10 of them probably wouldn't have had a valid claim to
asylum. We have to figure out a better way to help these countries,
where these folks want to come to the United States and enjoy our
liberties and enjoy our economic blessings. Crossing the border
illegally is not the way to do it.
That is why I have consistently supported any measure to secure the
border. There is no recommendation that President Trump has made that I
haven't supported. I supported a package last year that was nearly $25
billion for people, technology, and infrastructure to secure the
border--to build all-weather roads, to build walls where necessary, or
structures, to invest in technology, and to provide more personnel to
secure the border--not to harm these folks but to help them, to
actually protect people in the border States, but also to send a very
clear message: Don't try to come to this country illegally, where your
claim for asylum is more likely than not going to be rejected, and the
likelihood that you and your children could be hurt is very high.
So there is a crisis at the border. We need to fund the President's
priorities. The President's immediate priorities require $5.7 billion
to fully fund his 10 key priorities at the border. I support that. I
applaud the President for taking the steps he did. I am going to do
everything I can to continue to come down here and send the message to
those who may be contemplating making the dangerous trip--from whatever
country where they may be living--with their children and potentially
being harmed, to not do that. Let's find another way to help them and
their country of origin. Let's find another way to let them request
asylum that doesn't involve making the dangerous trip and then,
potentially, being denied.
I also wanted to come to the floor today to send a very clear message
to the President and to the administration: I support the border plan.
I support funding the wall, people, technology, and infrastructure
proposals that the President has made. We just have to do it in a
sustainable way, and we have to do it in a way that goes far beyond the
$5.7 billion we need right now to fund the President's immediate
priorities.
I want to end by thanking Senator Cornyn. Senator Cornyn said
something yesterday that I think was extremely important. It is
interesting for somebody in a State, maybe in New England or far, far
away from the border, to say: There is no crisis. We don't have an
issue down at the border.
I have to believe that somebody like Senator Cornyn, who knows this
issue, knows the threat, knows the impact, and knows the human toll
better than just about any of us, can say: Why don't you come down
there and spend some time with me? Why don't you do what so many others
have done to see it firsthand?
Now, let's get out of the politics and saying that it is a
manufactured crisis the President is acting on. It is a real crisis.
Human lives are at stake. So many lives have been lost. We have to stop
the carnage, get the politics out of it, secure the border, and move on
to immigration reform and so many other things that we should do.
[[Page S1724]]
With that, I yield the floor, and, again, I thank Senator Cornyn for
all the great work he has done on this issue and for his leadership. I
am glad to follow him into any issue that, hopefully, will get us to
secure the border.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, at the risk of sounding like the mutual
admiration society, let me express my appreciation to the Senator from
North Carolina, who gave an outstanding presentation, talking about the
crisis that exists at our southern border. I really can't improve on
it, but I will try.
Fortunately, Senator Tillis is one of those rare Senators who
actually has traveled down to the border at my invitation. As he said,
he rode horseback as we tried to find our way through the carrizo cane,
which obscures visibility for the Border Patrol, and he saw it for
himself. I appreciate his bringing the benefit of that experience here
to the floor and adding to this important debate.
I was struck by a hashtag I saw being used in the House of
Representatives. It is ``FakeEmergency''--hashtag ``FakeEmergency.''
Well, let's mention two sets of parents. For the 7- and 8-year-old
boy and girl who recently died in CBP custody at the border who made
their way from Guatemala, I don't think this is a fake emergency for
them. As Customs and Border Protection Commissioner McAleenan said,
many of these immigrants who come all the way from countries like
Guatemala suffer from exposure, including dehydration. Many of them are
physically or sexually assaulted. Then, there is the danger of
infectious diseases, because many have not been vaccinated for common
childhood diseases that American citizens would be protected from.
Unfortunately, they are a commodity to the criminal organizations
that transport people for roughly $5,000 per person. The cartels--the
criminal organizations--are commodity agnostic. They will just as soon
usher a migrant from Central America up here who wants to join a family
member and perhaps find a job. They will just as soon charge somebody
who will ultimately be trafficked and become the victim of modern-day
slavery, involuntary servitude, or sex slavery, or they will be happy
to move drugs, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana--you name
it. In fact, 90 percent of the heroin that comes into the United States
comes from Mexico, and of the 70,000-plus Americans who died from drug
overdoses just last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control,
a substantial portion was from the opioids. In other words, that came
from Mexico--whether they be pills, fentanyl, or heroin, which is
perhaps the cheapest form of opioid.
The Senator from North Carolina and I serve on the Judiciary
Committee, and we heard at length from the Commissioner McAleenan of
Customs and Border Protection. The picture he painted was pretty bleak,
but it bears repetition. Unfortunately, around here it is hard to know
when people are listening. Sometimes you have to say the same thing
over and over and over before it begins to penetrate people's
consciousness. But this is important. So we need to emphasize this.
Many migrants make this arduous journey for days, weeks, or sometimes
for months, traveling without food or water. When they arrive, they are
often sick and require extensive medical treatment. Of course, there
is, as I indicated a moment ago, the horrific stories of physical and
sexual abuse. The percentage of women and girls who are sexually abused
en route from their homes in Central America is revolting, to use a
word.
The Border Patrol spends a vast amount of their time dealing with the
human needs of children. In other words, these are law enforcement
officers who are basically trying to supply diapers and juice boxes to
children who are coming with their families and overwhelming our
capacity at the border. While the cartels exploit the fact that the
Border Patrol is tied up with this sort of processing of asylum
seekers, the drugs come into the country. That is part of the cartel's
plan. They have studied our laws. They know where there are gaps in
coverage. They know what they can do to distract law enforcement
officers so that drugs and human trafficking can get through the
border.
Despite all of this and despite the facts that the Senator from North
Carolina detailed, we still hear our friends on the other side refusing
to engage or offer any solutions whatsoever. As a matter of fact, one
of our colleagues on the Judiciary Committee yesterday said: We need to
preserve the two things that are the biggest obstacles to getting to a
solution. We need to preserve those. In essence, what she was saying is
that we need the Border Patrol not to secure our border. We need the
Border Patrol to just wave people on through, like a traffic cop. As
long as we have these gaps in our asylum laws where we treat people
from noncontiguous countries differently than we do from Mexico or
Canada and as long as they can wait for years before their asylum claim
can be finally adjudicated by an immigration judge, the criminal
organizations are winning. They have won because they can successfully
place a person in the United States, notwithstanding our laws, by
overwhelming our resources at the border and in our interior.
I have talked about the need to increase border security many times
on the floor, and I know I risk sounding like a broken record, but as
long as we have people in the other body sending out hashtags on social
media calling this a fake emergency--when President Obama himself, in
2014, called this a humanitarian crisis--it is going to be necessary, I
am afraid, to keep telling the story and talk about what is necessary
in order to bring security to our southwest border.
My State has 1,200 miles of common border with Mexico. Our
relationship with Mexico is very important because they are one of our
main trading partners. There are a lot of good and important things
that come back and forth across the border in terms of people legally
visiting the United States and in terms of commerce and trade. I have
seen one estimate that about 5 million American jobs depend on trade
with Mexico. It is not just Texas, either. But the toll that the
current status of our immigration laws has on the lives of immigrants
crossing our border is real, and the strain it puts on our ability to
engage in legitimate trade and commerce to flow freely through our
ports is real as well. All of these need to be addressed and without
delay.
Let me talk a little bit about the records that have been broken. We
saw last month alone that 76,000 people illegally crossed the border
and were apprehended by U.S. Customs and the Border Patrol--76,000
people. According to the Commissioner, we are on track to see 600,000
to maybe 650,000 during the next calendar year. This is an 11-year high
and averages more than 2,000 people a day. This is not a record we want
to be proud of.
We have seen a growing number of family units. The reason why the
cartels and criminal organizations bring family units is because they
know what our law requires in terms of separating the children from the
adults and then placing the children with a sponsor in the United
States, only to have them raise their asylum claim in front of an
immigration judge years hence. As I said, many simply don't show up for
that, and so game over.
We have seen a growing number of family units coming across the
border, a 338-percent increase in 2018. The cartels have studied our
laws. They are advertising down in Central America, saying: If you want
to come to the United States, all you have to do is come as a family
unit. We have studied American law, we know where the gaps are, and we
are going to exploit them.
Already Border Patrol has apprehended more family units than in all
of 2018, and the border regions of Texas are feeling the strain. Our
local officials--the mayors, the county judge--and our medical
facilities are just not designed for this massive influx of humanity.
In the Rio Grande Valley, family unit apprehensions have increased 209
percent since this time last year. Here is a staggering figure: In El
Paso, TX, it is a 1,689-percent increase.
As Secretary Nielsen said yesterday, testifying in front of the
House, our border is at the breaking point. Our capacity to deal with
this influx of humanity is creating a genuine crisis. These are not
just percentage points or numbers; they illustrate the human
[[Page S1725]]
misery and the challenges of the dedicated law enforcement personnel
along the border and also the folks who work trying to deal with the
children, whether it is providing them medical care or trying to find
them a safe place to live in the United States. This is not a
manufactured crisis. This is a real crisis.
In a normal political environment, these numbers would raise the
alarm bells, and we would take action--we would actually do something
about it--but we aren't operating in a normal political climate, to be
sure.
Back in 2006 and 2008, Republicans and Democrats voted on something
called the Secure Fence Act. It wasn't particularly partisan or
political. This year, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called
physical barriers ``immoral.'' The Democratic leader of the Senate, the
Senator from New York, said not one penny was going to be appropriated
for any physical barriers along the border.
For those who would argue this is a fake crisis, I would ask them to
check with the Texans who live across the border and deal with this
every day.
I recently got an email from a friend of mine who has a ranch outside
of San Antonio, my hometown. He said he and his wife basically have to
arm themselves, and they have to take precautions against people coming
across their land because they don't know whether it is going to be
some hungry migrant who is just simply looking to find their way to San
Antonio or to Houston and then north or whether it is going to be
people wearing backpacks carrying fentanyl and heroin. They just don't
know, so they have to prepare. They basically have to lock their doors,
and they are captives in their own house.
So what has changed since we talked about this back in 2006? What has
changed?
My question is more of a rhetorical one because we know Democrats
will stop at nothing to prevent President Trump from delivering on his
promise to provide border security, even if it means turning their
backs on something they have historically supported.
As you might imagine, I have made a point to spend a lot of time in
communities along the border. I have talked to the experts--our Border
Patrol agents, sheriffs, mayors, landowners, and countless others--on
how to best deal with this security and humanitarian crisis. These are
the people who know best. They are the experts. They know how best to
secure the border.
They will be the first to tell you that when it comes to border
security, one size does not fit all. I have mentioned before my friend
Judge Eddie Trevino from Cameron County. I was in a meeting with
Senator Cruz--my colleague from Texas--local stakeholders, elected
officials, along with Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol.
What Judge Trevino told us then was: Look, if it is the experts, the
Border Patrol agents, telling us what we need, we are all in, but if it
is people from Washington, DC, trying to micromanage the border, who
don't know anything about it, then count us as skeptical.
What we have heard from the experts is that border security is a
combination of three things: barriers in hard-to-control places,
people, and technology.
While a physical barrier may work best in an urban or high-traffic
area, it doesn't make any sense in places like Big Bend National Park.
Anybody who has been out west to Texas knows the cliffs over the Rio
Grande River, in parts, can rise to 30 feet. It doesn't make much sense
to put a physical barrier there.
The determination of what is needed and where it is needed should not
be a top-down Federal mandate. It should come from the experts who know
the threats and the challenges along every mile of the border and whom
we entrust on a daily basis to secure it.
We should continue to listen to our vibrant border communities, which
are the economic engine of the region, and ensure that we can maintain
the flow of legitimate trade and travel also through these areas.
Implementing a solution that would allow our law enforcement experts
to work with the Federal Government on the right combination of
technology, people, and physical barriers is what we ought to be
focusing our attention on.
I would add just a footnote to that on dealing with this problem of
people abusing our laws on asylum. Again, the cartels have figured this
out. I have worked with my friend Henry Cuellar, who is perhaps one of
the last remaining Blue Dog Democrats in the House of Representatives.
He represents Laredo, TX. We actually introduced a bill called the
HUMANE Act, which would establish parity of treatment of immigrants
coming from noncontiguous countries like Central America.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to get that passed.
We could fix this pretty quickly, but it requires our Democratic
friends to drop their Trump derangement syndrome and come to the
negotiating table in support of something they have historically been
for during this time of need.
The crisis is staring us in the face, and it demands action. I can
only hope our colleagues across the aisle will answer that call.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Scott of Florida). The clerk will call the
roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Fischer). Without objection, it is so
ordered.