[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 94 (Wednesday, June 5, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3229-S3231]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                Tariffs

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, since President Trump announced his intent 
to impose tariffs on goods imported to the United States from Mexico, I 
have been perplexed at the reaction from our Democratic colleagues on 
both sides of the Capitol. They seem to have washed their hands of the 
humanitarian crisis occurring at the border.
  Again, these are President Obama's words. In 2014 he identified this 
crush of humanity coming across from Central America into the United 
States claiming asylum as a humanitarian and security crisis. But our 
Democratic friends are simply washing their hands of any responsibility 
and have not offered any solutions or any ideas on how to solve the 
problem.
  Perhaps they feel like this is President Trump's problem, but this is 
more than just the President's problem. It is America's problem and 
challenge: How do we deal with this flood of humanity?
  I would like to be clear on one point. I agree with the President 
that Mexico needs to do more to staunch the flow of people across its 
borders and into the United States. They must do more and we must do 
more to stop this mass migration, but any action must prioritize both 
our country's physical and our economic security.
  Tariffs are not my first choice on how to address this problem. In 
fact, that is not the most responsible way to address this. The most 
responsible way to address it is by taking up, debating, and voting on 
bipartisan legislation that would actually fix the vulnerabilities in 
our current law that are being exploited by the human smugglers who are 
charging between $5,000 and $10,000 per person to smuggle people from 
Central America, across Mexico, and into the United States.
  Tariffs, on the other hand, would be a massive tax. The U.S. Chamber 
estimates that Texas alone would face $5.35 billion in increased costs 
as a result of a 5-percent tariff that could take effect as early as 
Monday. This translates into about $1,000 more on a car.
  I am happy that the Vice President and Secretary Pompeo are meeting 
with the Mexican Foreign Minister and other officials today. Actually, 
I am encouraged by the response of the Mexican Government, and I can 
only hope that they come up with some sort of agreement so that these 
tariffs do not go into effect.
  Stronger action by Mexico would be a step in the right direction, but 
it doesn't come close to solving the underlying problem. I feel like a 
broken record at times, constantly reminding my colleagues here of the 
challenges we are facing in Texas because of this crisis.
  More than 100,000 people illegally crossed our southern border 
between March and April--100,000. That is not a combined figure. It is 
about 100,000 each month. The Department of Homeland Security has not 
released statistics for the month of May, but I am not expecting any 
good news.
  As a matter of fact, if nothing changes, the pull factors--the 
reasons why people would leave their homes in Central America, cross 
Mexico, and make this dangerous trip into the United States--are doing 
nothing but getting worse, encouraging more and more people to take 
that dangerous trip.
  Unlike in previous years, the vast majority of those crossing aren't 
from Mexico, as I said. So far this fiscal year, 74 percent of the 
Border Patrol's apprehensions across the southern border were people 
coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
  And if you talk to the McAllen Sector Border Patrol chief, he will 
tell you that last year alone people from 140 different countries--140 
different countries--came across our southern border with Mexico and 
into the United States. That is because they realize, if you can fly or 
get any way you can--take a boat, swim, get to Central America--you can 
make your way up from Central America into the United States. The 
individuals illegally entering our country are overwhelmingly either 
families or unaccompanied children, which means we don't have the 
facilities, the resources, or legal authorities. We need to 
expeditiously process them and care for them properly.

  What is more, 70 percent of unaccompanied children and family unit 
apprehensions are occurring in just two sectors--El Paso and the Rio 
Grande Valley--making the State of Texas and its border communities the 
hardest hit.
  We are ground zero for this crisis. As I said, this is equated to an 
all-out humanitarian crisis along the border. Our law enforcement 
officials, city leaders, nongovernmental organizations--everyone who 
wants to treat these migrants compassionately and appropriately is 
being completely overwhelmed by the massive waves of people who are 
entering our country.
  We need to get to work on both short-term and long-term solutions.
  First, we need to get additional funding to the departments and 
agencies that are trying to manage this crisis and care for the 
migrants in their custody. Without action here in Congress, funding 
could dry up by the end of this month, creating an even more dire 
situation. That should be our most immediate focus--getting funding to 
the agencies responsible for managing this crisis. I know the 
appropriators are working on this, and I hope we can come up with a 
solution soon because time is not on our side. But that is not a fix; 
that is a patch.
  Any sort of lasting change cannot be solved by a funding bill or by 
tariffs. It has to be solved by something only Congress can do--passing 
legislation that addresses the root of the problem.
  From what I know, there is only one bill that would address this 
humanitarian crisis at the border, a bill that

[[Page S3230]]

already has Republican and Democratic support. That is a bill I 
introduced called the HUMANE Act.
  I have learned a lot when it comes to legislating on immigration 
issues. A lot of folks are more interested in talking about it than 
they are interested in finding a solution. But that wasn't the case 
when I picked up the phone and called my friend Henry Cuellar, a 
Democrat from Laredo, TX. Obviously, I am a Republican. Henry is a 
Democrat in the House. But he understands this situation better than 
most, and he has been my consistent ally in working on a number of ways 
to bring commonsense reform to these issues.
  We don't always agree on everything, but we do agree on some things, 
and where we do agree, we work together to try to provide effective 
solutions. As I mentioned, we introduced the HUMANE Act last month, 
which will make targeted, long-overdue reforms to our immigration 
system. Importantly, it includes provisions that both Republicans and 
Democrats should be able to agree on. First, it closes a major loophole 
that is often exploited by families and the human smugglers who move 
them across the border illegally. This is the Flores settlement 
agreement. This is a lawsuit and a settlement.
  Flawed court rulings have looked at the Flores settlement and have 
turned this once well-intentioned agreement into a major pull factor 
for migrants hoping to game the system. They know we can't detain 
children and family units for more than 20 days, and they are using it 
against us to game the system, to win, to successfully place people 
into the United States because we simply don't have the authorities to 
detain them until they can present their claims to an immigration 
judge.
  Rather than single adults arriving at the border alone, we know that 
the smugglers are sending children, sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes 
posing as a family unit when they are not even biologically related--so 
much that the Department of Homeland Security has now been giving DNA 
testing to determine whether an adult is falsely claiming a child to be 
their biological offspring so that they can make their way into the 
country, exploiting the gaps and loopholes that I have talked about.
  Children are literally being kidnapped to serve as free tickets into 
the United States. Tragically, they are often abused, physically or 
sexually, along the way, and many arrive at our border in critical 
health.
  I have shared the concern expressed by Members of Congress on both 
sides of the aisle when we see children die in some of our facilities 
along the border, but that is not because they got sick there in the 
first place. They got ill on the way, coming from Central America, 
across Mexico, into the United States, suffering from exposure, being 
exposed to all sorts of infectious diseases. By the time they get into 
U.S. custody, some of them simply don't survive. That is a terrible 
human tragedy. But the problem is not trying to create more medical 
facilities at the border; it should be to try to stop people from 
making this dangerous trek in the first place.
  The HUMANE Act would stop that practice by clarifying that the Flores 
agreement applies only to unaccompanied children, which was the 
original agreement, not family units as it was subsequently interpreted 
by another court. It would provide more time for processing and 
immigration proceedings to take place before families could be released 
from custody.
  Under the current practice, because the numbers are overwhelming the 
capacity of the immigration courts to hear these cases--and there is 
simply not enough time to get to these cases when you have to release 
them in 20 days--they are given a notice to appear for a future court 
date. Guess what. The vast majority of them simply don't show up for 
that court hearing, and they remain in the United States perhaps for 
the rest of their lives unless, perhaps, they get picked up for an 
unrelated crime.
  Our legislation would require that all accompanied children be 
processed exactly the same, regardless of their country of origin.
  Under current law, children from Mexico or Canada can be promptly 
returned home. But the process for other countries moves much more 
slowly and represents another vulnerability in our legal authorities. I 
believe we should make every effort to safely return all children to 
their home countries as soon as possible, regardless of what country 
they are from.
  This bill includes other provisions to protect children who have been 
brought to our border, such as biometric screening to ensure that they 
are literally the biological offspring of the people who claim to be 
their parents rather than a human trafficker.
  It would also place prohibitions on certain individuals who would 
serve as guardians. For example, no child should be released into the 
custody of a sex offender or human trafficker. We don't have that 
confidence now.
  The HUMANE Act would enable families to stay together. There has been 
a lot of discussion about separation of children from their families. 
We want them to stay together. I think we all agree that should be the 
standard, but we also need to streamline the processing of those in 
custody.
  Consistent with the recommendations by the bipartisan Department of 
Homeland Security Advisory Committee, the bill would require the 
Department of Homeland Security to establish at least four regional 
processing centers along the southern border to house and process these 
families. They would literally serve as a one-stop shop, with 
Department of Homeland Security personnel, folks from Custom and Border 
Protection, ICE--Immigration and Customs Enforcement--the immigration 
service, and FEMA all working together to assist migrants and working 
to process their claims on a timely and respectful basis. Asylum 
officers would also be required to be onsite to adjudicate claims as 
soon as they could and expedite the entire process, which we hope would 
begin to ease the burden of our current debilitating immigration court 
backlog.
  I believe that if we actually did this, people with legitimate claims 
would find their claims recognized earlier, and people with 
illegitimate claims would be returned to their country of origin, which 
is the way our laws should be enforced.
  It is important to recognize that we should not only enforce our 
immigration laws; as long as they are on the books, we ought to use the 
time-honored principle of deterrence. In other words, if people realize 
they are paying good money to try to make their way into the United 
States in the hands of a human smuggler but because of the way we have 
corrected and reformed our laws, it is no longer possible to exploit 
the vulnerabilities of the system, fewer and fewer of them will 
actually start that trek--that dangerous trek from their home in 
Central America.
  So deterrence is something we need to use on our side, and right now 
there is no deterrence because the smugglers know this is a money-
making machine for them. They care nothing about the people involved. 
They are commodity agnostic. They will just as soon traffic someone for 
sex as they will move a migrant from Central America for economic 
reasons or move drugs from across the border into the United States. We 
need to deter all sorts of criminal activity like that.
  In addition to these changes, the legislation also includes other 
provisions that I think are just commonsense improvements, like 
additional Customs and Border Protection personnel and training for CBP 
and ICE employees who work with children.
  There is one last point on what is happening at the border and its 
impact on the economy and trade. In Laredo, TX alone--I think it just 
surpassed Los Angeles as the largest port of entry into the United 
States--there are between 14,000 and 16,000 trucks a day that traverse 
the U.S.-Mexico border between Nuevo Laredo and Laredo. A lot of that 
is a part of the manufacturing process, which happens on both sides of 
the border. But when these trucks can't make their way across the 
border on a timely basis, then that means the parts or the 
manufacturing processes fall apart--and the border economies.
  I would argue the larger economy in the United States is threatened 
when just-in-time inventory control no longer works. If you are living 
in Detroit, MI, and you are expecting that the delivery of a part 
coming from Mexico will make its way to Michigan

[[Page S3231]]

in time to build a car, you can't do it. Eventually, this is going to 
damage our economy and kill jobs.
  So I would like to reiterate, in conclusion, that the HUMANE Act is 
bipartisan; it is bicameral; and it would provide real relief for folks 
in Texas and other border states who are struggling to manage the 
crisis. Most importantly, it would be a much more humane way to treat 
these children and families who are flooding across our southern 
border.
  I know most of our congressional Democratic friends have adopted the 
posture of reflexively standing against the President on anything and 
everything he asks for rather than standing for policies that would 
actually become the law and make the situation better.
  I think this is a much better solution than tariffs on Mexican goods 
brought into the United States.
  The President's team is negotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada 
Agreement, the USMCA, and I am hopeful we can get that passed here in 
the Congress once it is sent over from the administration. But I worry 
that not only are these tariffs that are potentially being placed on 
goods brought in the United States going to hurt our booming economy 
and jobs here, they also are going to jeopardize the passage of the 
USMCA--the successor to NAFTA, which I think we should all acknowledge 
is a big, positive development for the administration. Why would we 
jeopardize the passage of the USMCA? Why would we hurt our economy 
while trying to punish Mexico for not doing more--which they should do 
to stop the illegal passage of people across their country when there 
is a reasonable and responsible alternative.
  I urge all of my colleagues to take a serious look at the HUMANE Act 
so we can finally do our part, which only we in Congress can do to stem 
the flow of Central American migrants who are flooding our borders and 
to prevent criminals and human smugglers from infiltrating our country 
as they are doing now.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.