[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 43 (Monday, March 11, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1765-S1766]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            CENTRAL AMERICA

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, it was a powerful opportunity to join my 
colleague from Delaware, Senator Carper, in traveling to the Northern 
Triangle of Central America--Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador--to 
try to understand more about the dynamics in that region, which are 
driving so many families to come north, to take the difficult journey 
through Central America, through Mexico, to come to our border and to 
ask for asylum.
  This has been a significant flow, which has expanded greatly. We have 
seen in the past that most of those arriving on our border were men 
from Mexico who were seeking work but not so much now. Now we have this 
flow of families from Central America. These families are traveling to 
find something better for their lives and for their children's lives. 
It is not an easy journey, and it is a journey that has created quite a 
conversation here in the United States of America.
  The conversation coming from our President has been this: How do we 
stop them from asserting asylum at the border?
  President Trump has a number of strategies to deter families from 
coming. His strategy was to separate children from their parents, treat 
those fleeing as criminals, create great trauma for the children, and 
use this as a strategy of deterrence. This was first laid out very 
clearly by John Kelly just months into the administration. In March of 
2017, he said: Yes, this is exactly what we are considering.
  The administration then proceeded to implement it first as a pilot 
project and later as an all-out strategy to treat those migrating as 
criminals, lock up the parents, separate the children, inflict trauma, 
and deter people from coming. I can state that any strategy that 
involves mistreating children as a political tactic--a political 
message of deterrence--is simply evil. It comes from a very, very dark 
place in the heart of this administration to deliberately injure 
children in this fashion.
  Why doesn't the President look to Central America and ask: What is 
motivating these families to come? How can we change that motivation? 
What are the forces at work in that region?
  Those were the questions that Senator Carper and I were undertaking 
to answer on our recent trip, and I appreciate so much that he went 
through the great work of organizing it.
  We went first to Guatemala, then to Honduras, then to El Salvador. We 
met with the President. We met with the incoming President of El 
Salvador. We met with the civil society organizations--those who 
understand the roots of what is going on within the society--and here 
is what we learned. We learned there were three powerful forces driving 
families to leave those countries: security, economics, and corruption.
  Let's talk a little bit about those three things.
  Security. I had the chance to meet a woman and her daughter, 
Gabriella and her baby Andrea. Gabriella told me about her journey. She 
said that her family took a loan from a private bank, which probably 
meant a financial loan from the local drug cartel or financial group 
associated with a drug cartel. The family wasn't able to repay the 
loan. They were given a deadline. They were told: If you don't repay 
the loan, one of your family members dies, and that will be you, 
Gabriella.
  Gabriella was pregnant. She figured that as long as she was pregnant, 
they would not kill her. So when she was 8 months pregnant--1 month 
ago--she fled the country to save herself and to save her baby.
  I met her and her baby on the border. They had just crossed the 
bridge into the United States of America. I asked her: How did you get 
past the American border guards, who wouldn't allow anyone across the 
bridge if they didn't have a passport or visa? Her face lit up for a 
moment. She said: Well, I was rebuffed time and again at the center of 
the bridge, not allowed to come across and assert asylum, and I was 
desperate, blocked on the Mexican side.
  Then I saw there was a pedestrian bridge and a car bridge, and on the 
car bridge were folks who were washing windows for tips. So I asked to 
use an extra squeegee from one of the window washers, who gave it to 
me, and I washed windows on the car bridge to get into the United 
States of America. And there she was at the foot of the bridge with her 
baby.
  She told me that because she fled with her baby, those who were 
enforcing that private loan from that private bank killed her uncle. 
That is the security issue that comes with all of the various versions 
of that story.
  I met another woman, Patricia. Patricia had a 14-year-old daughter. 
Patricia had to pay extortion money. The President of Guatemala told me 
that every business has to pay extortion money. In this case, though, 
Patricia had no money left to pay the extortion. So the drug gang--or 
the gang that controls the streets and runs the extortion--came to her 
house and assaulted her 14-year-old daughter. So she fled. She fled to 
protect her daughter from any other such horrific circumstances. She 
came to the United States.

[[Page S1766]]

  That is a security issue. This is not a situation where if you don't 
pay the extortion money, they break your window. This is: If you don't 
pay the extortion money, we kill you; we rape your daughter; we kill 
your family--maybe we torture them. That is the security issue.
  Then there is the economic issue. In Guatemala, the median age is 18. 
I believe they said it is the youngest median age on the planet. A huge 
number of young people are coming into working age, and while they are 
working to create jobs, they are not possibly creating enough jobs. So 
you have this huge number of people without jobs. What are they going 
to do?
  I will state that one thing they do is go hungry. Malnutrition is a 
horrendous demon haunting the country of Guatemala. One individual 
showed us a picture of Guatemalan children against a wall and their 
average heights; they had lines across the wall for their heights. They 
had a similar picture of Guatemalan children being raised in the United 
States. It was to dramatize the fact that the children growing up in 
Guatemala at age 9 are 6 inches shorter than the Guatemalan children 
growing up in the United States at the same age. It is stunting--
stunting from persistent malnutrition. So joblessness and malnutrition, 
an insufficient network of schools and trained schoolteachers--all of 
these things are economic challenges.
  Let me tell you, it is not just the fact that you don't have a job. 
It is that in your small village across the country--across all three 
countries--you may see on a street, as was described to us, a shack, a 
second shack, a third shack, a fourth shack, and then a beautiful 
house. That beautiful house was there because somebody in that village 
made it to the United States of America, and they have been sending 
back money year after year in sufficient quantities that the family is 
now prosperous. They can build that beautiful house.
  That beautiful house stands as a billboard. It is an advertisement 
for what might happen if you can make it to the United States and get a 
job. So on the one hand, there are no jobs, and on the other hand, this 
beacon of hope is saying to you: If you can make it across the border, 
you might be able to be prosperous yourself and, basically, enable your 
entire family to be prosperous.
  Then we have corruption. This isn't garden variety corruption. For 
generations--for hundreds of years--there has been a class in these 
countries that is beyond the law. They call their efforts to change 
this a campaign against impunity. That is not a word we use a lot in 
America--``impunity''--but it means individuals who are never touched 
by the legal system. They can do whatever they want. They pay no fines. 
They never go to prison. They suck money out of the country. They suck 
money out of all of those layers of the economy below them. They have 
become extraordinarily rich. They talk about the 8 families in 
Guatemala and the 14 families in El Salvador.
  So that corruption we have been working to take on. We, the United 
States, in partnership with the governments there, have been working to 
take that on. So those three things--security, the economy, and 
corruption--are the factors driving people to flee north.
  A few years ago, then-Vice President Biden went to Central America to 
understand those issues better. Out of that came the Alliance for 
Prosperity--the Alliance for Prosperity--a strategy based on Plan 
Colombia, as my colleague from Delaware laid out, that would strengthen 
the programs to take on the security issues, to take on the corruption 
issues, to take on the economic challenges that are draining those 
countries so that people didn't feel that to survive, they had to flee 
north.
  We funded this at a modest level in fiscal year 2016. It was $754 
million. Think of that as it compares to money we have been spending on 
the border--billions and billions and billions of dollars for physical 
infrastructure, for border security, for high-tech sensors, for a 
system of courts to adjudicate asylum, all of that. We spent only about 
three-quarters of a billion dollars to strengthen those three 
countries.
  Along comes the Trump administration, which says that it is 
concerned--very concerned--about this flow of people coming from 
Central America to our border, and they propose a 34-percent cut in 
this program. They propose cutting it from $754 million to a proposal 
of $460 million. Well, the Democrats and Republicans restored funding, 
put it back, not quite to the $750 million number but to $627 million.
  The Trump budget came out the next year and cut it again; they 
proposed a 30-percent cut. Again, here in Congress, we worked to 
restore those programs, not where they were before but, basically, $100 
million more than the Trump administration asked for.
  So to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle: Doesn't it make sense 
for us to support the Alliance for Prosperity? For each dollar we send, 
they provide between $4 and $7; that is $4 to $7 in very poor 
countries.
  Doesn't it make sense to support the commissions against impunity, 
the commissions against corruption? In the last 2 years, the Trump 
administration has been undermining these commissions against 
corruption. Well, that is just wrong.
  The result, as you saw in El Salvador, was the election of the mayor 
of San Salvador, Nayib Bukele, a very young fellow in his thirties. 
What did he run on? Taking on corruption, taking on impunity. Shouldn't 
we be a partner with them in this?
  If we don't want families to flee north, then we shouldn't want the 
elite to operate with impunity and suck all of the resources out of the 
country and leave people starving. Let's partner with the governments 
there to take on corruption, not undermine these commissions of 
support.
  A trip to Central America will make you really appreciate our 
institutions, our economy, our education system, our healthcare system, 
our court system, our opportunities for our children. We can do far 
better, for sure, but every piece of what we have that works so much 
better than those parallel systems in Central America calls out to 
those there to come and participate in our society. If we want families 
to stay where they are, they are going to have to have an opportunity 
where they are, which means we have to take on the security issues, 
including the street-level extortion. We have to help them take those 
on. We have to help them improve their economy and their education 
system. We have to help them take on the systemic, high-level, massive 
corruption that drives resources into the hands of the very few at the 
expense of the very many.
  That is the mission we should be talking about here on the floor--
wrestling with here on the floor. Maybe we shouldn't return to the 
levels that Obama had that we had passed in a bipartisan way here. 
Maybe we should do double what was done in 2016--or triple--if we 
really want to help anchor those societies' rudders that have people 
fleeing for their lives to come here.

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