[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 109 (Thursday, June 27, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Page S4607]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





                            BORDER SECURITY

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the 116th Congress, so far, has just 
talked about the humanitarian crisis at the border. Most of our 
Democratic colleagues have claimed up to this point that there is no 
crisis or emergency at the border.
  We will recall that we started out the year with a government 
shutdown because of the battle over border security, and our Democratic 
friends made one thing perfectly clear: They would oppose any effort to 
fund our security mission at the border. That resulted in the 35-day 
shutdown.
  The Speaker of the House at the time called the situation ``a fake 
crisis at the border,'' and the minority leader here in the Senate 
referred it to as ``a crisis that does not exist.'' Well, they weren't 
the only ones. Throughout the Halls of the Capitol, Democrats in 
Congress used terms like ``phony,'' ``imaginary,'' and ``make-believe'' 
to describe the challenges our frontline officers and agents were 
facing every day.
  While our Democratic colleagues have reflexively denied the existence 
of a crisis at the border, the problems have grown only bigger each 
day. Of course, it was 2014, I will remind my friends across the aisle, 
when Barack Obama, then President of the United States, declared a 
humanitarian and security crisis at the border. So it seemed very odd 
to me that, in 2019, they decided--when the numbers kept getting bigger 
and bigger and conditions worse and worse--all of a sudden that the 
humanitarian and security crisis had gone away.
  The fact is, over the last 3 months, the number of illegal crossings 
across the southwestern border have hit six figures, something we 
haven't seen since 2006. We surpassed the number of unaccompanied 
children apprehended at the height of the 2014 crisis that President 
Obama was speaking about.
  This mass migration has nearly depleted our Federal resources, 
causing the President to request $4\1/2\ billion for humanitarian 
assistance and border operations. That request came almost 2 months 
ago--almost 2 months ago, and Congress has not acted.
  Now, it seems, our Democratic colleagues have finally accepted the 
facts. There is a very real and very urgent humanitarian crisis on our 
southern border. The bill they passed earlier this week meets the 
dollar amount requested by the President, but the substance of the bill 
shows that House Democrats don't want to send funding where it is 
actually needed the most.
  Unlike the Senate's bipartisan bill, the original House bill excluded 
funding for the Department of Defense, immigration judge teams, and 
underfunded both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and 
Border Protection. This morning, they made a last-ditch effort to 
inject some of their deeply partisan provisions back into our Senate 
bipartisan bill. While the House Democrats did increase needed funding 
in some areas, the newly amended version still includes divisive 
provisions and reduces funding in areas that the Senate overwhelmingly 
rejected yesterday.
  Here is just one example. Democrats in the House cut the Senate 
bill's appropriation of $21 million for ICE Homeland Security 
investigations to conduct--get this--human trafficking investigations. 
So the House wanted to cut $21 million in the Senate appropriations 
bill that was dedicated to investigating human trafficking. This is 
just the latest example of their fundamental lack of interest in 
sending money where it is needed most--only where it is politically 
convenient.
  It is unfortunately not much of a surprise. Our Democratic friends 
are trying to keep up with their candidates running for President, 
whose positions on immigration and border security get more extreme 
each day. Now, more than one Democrat running for the nomination for 
President actually supports making entering the country illegally 
legal--in other words, no orderly immigration system at all--a free-
for-all, where it is easier for human traffickers and drug smugglers to 
come and go as they please. And, of course, there is this: no 
consideration given for those would-be immigrants who are trying to 
wait patiently in line and do things exactly the right way and no 
consideration of the unfairness of those who would jump ahead of the 
line and enter the country illegally before those who are trying to do 
it the right way.
  The House bill stands in stark contrast to the bipartisan agreement 
we passed here in the Senate, which funds a range of programs at the 
Federal departments and agencies working to manage the crisis, and, 
importantly, it is the only bill in town that has the support of the 
President. It is, after all, important to get the President's signature 
on legislation for it to become law.
  The Senate Appropriations Committee overwhelmingly supported this 
bill, and it passed the committee by a vote of 30 to 1. When the full 
Senate voted on it yesterday, only eight Members of the Senate voted 
no.
  We have simply waited long enough. We waited too long, in my view, 
for Democrats to acknowledge this real humanitarian crisis. The House 
bill is inadequate and mostly a partisan effort.
  Our Democratic colleagues have resisted acting for far too long 
already, making this humanitarian crisis worse. They circulate the very 
tragic pictures of a father with his young child face down in the 
waters of the Rio Grande River, and they somehow fail to acknowledge 
their own complicity in failing to act to provide the sorts of fixes to 
our asylum laws that would deter, if not prevent, that sort of thing 
from occurring in the first place. They really do need to look in the 
mirror.
  We need to take action now, and I hope we don't have to wait any 
longer for our colleagues in the House to pass the Senate's bipartisan 
bill.

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