[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 115 (Wednesday, July 10, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H5576-H5581]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     CONGRESSIONAL HISPANIC CAUCUS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Moore). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2019, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Castro) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Madam Speaker, I want to speak tonight about the 
very deep humanitarian situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
  Immigration has been the lifeblood of our Nation for generations. The 
United States has been blessed that people from all over the world have 
come to our country fleeing oppression, dictators, violence, poverty, 
desperation, and seeking opportunity in our Nation that has been built 
up by those very same people to become the most prosperous and powerful 
Nation on the face of this Earth.
  But our immigration system is broken. Our enforcement system is 
broken.
  And tonight, we want to talk about what we have learned, after 
repeated visits to Department of Homeland Security facilities, operated 
by Customs and Border Protection, ICE, and also HHS facilities operated 
by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
  I am going to be joined tonight by a few of my colleagues,   Jimmy 
Gomez, who represents part of Los Angeles, Darren Soto, a Congressman 
from Florida, and perhaps other Members of Congress this evening.
  Before I turn it over to Darren, I want to speak for a second about 
what is known as the largest for-profit center that is operated to 
detain children. It is in a town called Homestead, Florida, and it is a 
massive operation. The operators of this facility, it is reported, make 
over $700 per child per day, and its size continues to grow.
  There are many troubling things going on at Homestead, and about a 
system that keeps growing and growing for the sake of profit, holding 
and detaining children, some of them infants and toddlers, longer and 
longer.
  My colleague, Darren Soto, is here to describe Homestead and his 
visits there.
  I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Soto).
  Mr. SOTO. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas, 
Congressman Castro, for putting together this Special Order hour. And 
it is timely, to say the least.
  There are many borders that our Nation has. We have a lot of focus on 
the southwestern borders, such as in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and 
California. But there are also borders like what we have in Florida, 
with the Caribbean surrounding us, and a short, either plane ride or 
longer sea voyage to our peninsula.
  We have immigrants from Venezuela coming in, fleeing tyranny. We had 
for generations Cuban-Americans escaping the issues down there. We have 
folks of Mexican descent who are farm workers in Polk County, and in 
other areas, that are now second and third generation.
  And, yes, we have many refugees, particularly children, who have left 
the Triangle in Central America and are part of this great humanitarian 
crisis at the border.
  I got the opportunity to be able to visit the Homestead facility, a 
facility that had blocked several of us from several requests of 
touring it. And I saw over 900 children, between the ages of 12 and 17, 
that were in a facility not made for over 500. And I suspect those 
numbers have grown since then.
  There are a few of us who did speak Spanish, like myself, and were 
able to talk briefly to the children, even though they told us not to; 
but you know our responsibility that we have.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. That is an important point. When you went into 
that facility, this HHS facility, you were told, as a Member of 
Congress that has oversight authority over these Federal agencies and 
facilities, you were told not to speak to anybody that was inside that 
facility.
  Mr. SOTO. Sure. No speaking to the kids there; no photos. And then we 
were given kind of a song and dance about how well everybody was 
treated.
  These young people hailed from Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, 
countries that we hear over and over because of the strife from drug 
cartels down there that are warring.
  I saw six to eight beds per room, sometimes more, in rooms that 
couldn't be any bigger than 10 to 15 by 15, with shared showers between 
two of those rooms. And then I saw classrooms and recreation facilities 
in giant makeshift tents, these big, kind of puffy ones that were 
clearly not permanent facilities.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. And there has been concern because of the 
weather in Florida, because you have a hurricane season in Florida, 
about the ability of these tents to withstand strong weather and the 
danger that that could present to the kids there.
  Mr. SOTO. There is no question; those tents would be at great risk if 
a 3, 4, or Level 5 hurricane hit South Florida. And they are at the 
very end of it in Homestead, which is even south of Miami.
  I want to talk a little bit about the root causes of it. We go back 
to the Triangle and what is happening. You know, these families are 
fleeing as an act of love because if their kids stay, they could be 
brought into these cartel drug wars and may not even survive to be 18 
years of age, let alone go on to live productive lives.
  So one of the root causes of this is that the funding, the foreign 
aid funding down in the Triangle hasn't been where it was under the 
Obama administration.
  And of course, then, this idea that we have to detain all of these 
kids, which has really helped manufacture this border crisis. It could 
be easily resolved by getting them to families in the United States. I 
have been briefed that many of them are here to visit families, and we 
could have ways to track everybody; everything as tough as an ankle 
bracelet to having a case worker and having something less draconian.
  But they chose not to do that. They chose to hold these kids back 
because they don't want them to go out into the general population of 
the United States.
  So, if we just did things the way the last two t three Presidents 
did, Obama, Bush and Clinton, we wouldn't be in this situation right 
now, this deliberate holding of kids, as well as asylum seekers, in 
general, at the border that doesn't need to happen here in the United 
States.

  And with asylum seekers, it violates many treaties that we are a part 
of.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. The gentleman mentioned the point about the 
Trump administration has done something fundamentally different than 
the prior administration in a few ways. First, its zero tolerance 
policy. So it started aggressively separating fathers and mothers from 
their young kids. Thousands of those kids were lost in the system. 
Literally, the administration had absolutely no way ahead of time to 
track them and to reunite them with their parents.
  And also, what is known as the Remain in Mexico, or MPP policy; that 
once people come seeking asylum, the administration has done a few 
things: Number 1, for the people that do make it here, they then send 
many of them right back to Mexico. And these are, unfortunately, the 
cities that--some of these cities that the United States Government and 
the Department of State recommends that Americans do not travel to. And 
we are sending people back there, when we are recommending to our own 
folks that they don't go to these same cities.
  Then the other thing they have been doing is metering, as you alluded 
to, and trying to block people from legally--remember, these people are 
legally presenting themselves for asylum. And they are blocking these 
folks from presenting themselves for asylum.
  So what happens is, the situation that you have with the young man 
and his young daughter, 2-year-old daughter, the photo from about three 
weeks ago that the whole world saw. And I didn't speak to a single 
person who saw that photograph of the father and his 2-year-old 
daughter, dead in the water, with the young girl, her arm over her 
dad--I didn't speak to anybody who said that they saw that photo that 
didn't cry.
  Mr. SOTO. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership as 
our chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and that is why we 
are here tonight, for those injustices.

[[Page H5577]]

  I am proud to be joined by my good friend, Congressman   Jimmy Gomez, 
of Southern California, of L.A., who has been a champion of issues 
related to immigrants and related to Hispanics across the Nation.
  Jimmy, thanks for being here.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Thank you, Darren. Thank you for keeping an eye 
on the Homestead facility in Florida, for the CODELS, which are 
official congressional visits to these facilities. Thanks for all the 
work that you have been doing.
  Mr. SOTO. And as we go into the budget, the protections that we 
couldn't get in recent bills, we will double down on to make sure we 
have them going into the appropriations process.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Absolutely.
  Jimmy, I know you are from Los Angeles. You have also been on many of 
these CODELS. You have seen the horrific conditions that folks are 
being kept in, the separation of families, all of these things.
  Mr. GOMEZ. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for inviting me to 
participate today.
  I actually serve on the House Oversight and Government Reform 
Committee, and today we had a hearing about the conditions of the camps 
at the border, the conditions that the children are kept in.
  We have lost six kids at the border, and I want to just highlight 
their names, because we need to recognize that there is a human face to 
the tragedy that we see; it is not just numbers.
  We have Carlos Hernandez Vasquez; he was age 16. Wilmer Josue Ramirez 
Vasquez, age 2; Juan de Leon Gutierrez, age 16; Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 
age 8; and Jakelin Caal Maquin, age 7, and Mariee Juarez, age 1.
  Mariee's mother actually testified in front of the committee to tell 
her story of what she was trying to accomplish by coming to this 
country and about the fear that she had as she crossed and as she was 
detained.
  I want to remind people; a lot of people think that it is a crisis 
that is being created on its own. It is not. It is something that is a 
result of this administration's zero tolerance policy.
  I want to remind people that the zero tolerance policy started 
because this President, as he was running for office, said that he was 
going to be tough on this issue, and that he would be the only one that 
could solve it. So what we ended up seeing is that we saw the zero 
tolerance policy.
  And what is it? The zero tolerance policy states that anybody that 
crosses in between ports of entry will no longer be held civilly and 
administratively responsible; that they will be convicted criminally.
  Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General when this policy was started to 
be implemented said: Zero tolerance policy shall supersede any existing 
policies.
  And what this did is it caused people, when they are criminally 
convicted or being held for breach of criminal law, the parents are 
being separated from the kids.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. That is an important point, Jimmy. People 
wonder, well how is it that these families got separated? Why would the 
government do that?
  There is, in the law, which is known as Section 1325, a law that 
allows the government to basically charge the parents with a crime; 
therefore, separate them from their kids, and send the kids off 
somewhere else.
  Mr. GOMEZ. Correct. And that is where we want to make sure people 
understand that this crisis, the separating of the children, was a 
direct result of this policy. It doesn't say, yeah, they will be 
separated. But it is that they would be--zero tolerance led to the 
separation. One triggered the other.
  People then also try to make the argument that this happened under 
the Obama administration, but the Obama administration didn't do that. 
They were dealing with unaccompanied minors that were flowing into the 
country, and they had to deal with that humanitarian crisis at that 
moment.
  So this administration has really taken a zero tolerance policy, 
which has had a ripple effect on capacity to handle influx, the 
metering issue, the Remain in Mexico issue, the separating of the kids 
and not keeping appropriate track of those children to make sure that 
they are actually returned to their parents.

  And this administration, time and time again, now says that they 
never had a child separation policy.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. That was bizarre. You remember, several months 
ago now, when Secretary Nielsen was still the Secretary of Homeland 
Security in, I think it was the first hearing, where she was asked 
about the government's, the Trump administration's family separation 
policy. She said, flat out, that there was no child separation or 
family separation policy; very bizarrely said that there was no family 
separation policy.
  Mr. GOMEZ. And it wasn't only Secretary Nielsen. It was Kelly Anne 
Conway. It is a fabrication and a lie that has been repeated by the 
administration; and that is something that we want to call out, to make 
sure people understand that what is going on now is a direct result of 
the zero tolerance policy.
  Additionally, we want to make sure that people understand that a lot 
of the decisions were made based on, I believe, on politics. My own 
personal belief was this, they wanted to seem tough, so they 
implemented policies without really understanding how they implement it 
on the ground.
  I have taken tours not only of Otay Mesa, Adelanto, I went out to 
Victorville; I went to Tornillo, Texas, so I have been to the border 
quite a bit of times, a number of times.

                              {time}  2100

  And when you start talking to the people who are responsible for 
implementing these policies, the men and women who are in Customs and 
Border Protection, some of them are trying to do a good job. They are 
saying that they are being put in an impossible situation by this 
administration by often determining policy at a whim. And the problem 
is, when you are making policy not on rational decisions but on 
politics, then you end up with this situation, which is a big mess on 
the border.
  I actually spent a night at the border with one of my colleagues.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. That is right, you and Nanette Barragan, who 
also represents part of southern California, and you saw the metering 
policy, what is known as the metering policy. Again, that is where they 
block people from legally presenting for asylum. You all saw it 
firsthand. In fact, you ended up spending almost the whole night, I 
think, sleeping there on the concrete.
  Mr. GOMEZ. Yes, at Otay Mesa. We spent the night at the Mexican side 
of the border, literally on the line, and we were there just to observe 
migrants to present themselves for asylum. They were on U.S. soil. They 
presented themselves. They were told that it was full. Congresswoman 
Barragan and I asked to see the facility. They refused to show us.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. These were CBP agents who were refusing to show 
you.
  Mr. GOMEZ. Yes, correct. Customs and Border Protection refused to let 
us in to see it. So the migrants sat down. We sat down with them. We 
got there around 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and we didn't leave until 
the next day, around 7 a.m. So we spent the night. It was cold. We 
slept on the ground.
  The migrants couldn't leave the U.S. soil or the Mexican authorities 
would have grabbed them. So we actually got corralled, using bike 
racks, into kind of a cage to keep us in a certain area. Every so 
often, Customs and Border Patrol would wake us up to ask us who is 
here, how many kids, how old, but these were questions that we answered 
three or four times.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. So it is a purposeful way to disrupt your rest, 
your sleep, to try to get as many people out of there as possible?
  Mr. GOMEZ. Correct. And what we were trying to remind them is that, 
by international law, by U.S. law, these migrants had a right to 
present themselves for asylum and then ask so that they can be 
processed. They ended up getting in. It was the woman who was tear-
gassed at the border in that famous----
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. With her kids.
  Mr. GOMEZ. With her kids. She was one of the folks, and she asked for 
a credible fear asylum hearing, and she went through the process. That 
is why we have this process, so that we don't

[[Page H5578]]

end up with just a backlog at the border that is more dangerous for the 
kids and the migrants, and it is unnecessary under what we believe 
under our rule of law.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. You mentioned the Trump administration's 
policies, and there was a really excellent article written not too long 
ago by a gentleman by the name of Adam Serwer, and I think he wrote it 
for The Atlantic, although I could be wrong. But his point is that the 
cruelty is the point, it seems like, and the further along we go, the 
more it seems that that is the case, that some of these policies are 
done for sheer harshness towards the people who these policies are 
directed toward.
  And you know that last week there were a group of us from the 
Congressional Hispanic Caucus who went over to two Border Patrol 
stations in El Paso, Texas, first the El Paso Border Patrol Station 
number one, and then the Clint facility, which is now infamous.
  This was the same day or the day after that a story had broken about 
a Facebook page. I think it is the I'm 10-15 Facebook page that was set 
up as a secret group, or a private group, set up for Border Patrol 
agents, former Border Patrol agents and current Border Patrol agents, 
9,500 members of this group who had made some very vile and very vulgar 
comments about the people in their care, about Members of Congress, 
about the work that they do. A lot of it is stuff that I just can't 
read on the House floor because they would probably shut me down for 
being vulgar.
  Mr. GOMEZ. And if I can interject.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Yes.
  Mr. GOMEZ. I mentioned this article in the Oversight hearing. It is 
actually a ProPublica article, entitled: ``Inside the Secret Border 
Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke about Migrant Deaths and Post 
Sexist Memes.''
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. And if our colleagues have not read that 
article, Republican and Democrat, you should read that ProPublica 
article that was published last week, because it tells you exactly the 
problems with CBP right now and the culture at CBP.
  I want to read one thing. We were talking about the father, and when 
he and his daughter died they were face down on the river. She had her 
arm around him. So everybody saw that photo around the world and 
throughout the country. I want to tell you a post that was on this 
Facebook page, posted by a Border Patrol agent or a former Border 
Patrol agent, and so I am going to quote here. It says: ``Okay. I'm 
gonna go ahead and ask, have y'all ever seen floaters this clean? I'm 
not trying to be an `a,' but I have never seen floaters like this. 
Could this be another edited photo? We've all seen the Dems and liberal 
party do some pretty sick things.''
  Now, that was his post. There were a few responses to that post. Some 
of them were memes. One of the memes had a Sesame Street character, and 
the language below the Sesame Street character says ``oh, well'' about 
these deaths.
  Another meme from another agent or former agent has a picture. There 
is a famous scene in a movie ``Rocky IV'' of the Russian fighter, and 
he uses a famous line for anybody who has ever seen it. The meme says, 
``If he dies, he dies.'' They are talking about the little girl and the 
man who are hugging face down in the river.
  I reached out to Secretary McAleenan, I think still the Acting 
Secretary of DHS. I think he is still acting. I think I am right about 
that. And I said, over the weekend: I would like to have a discussion 
with you this coming week. And we are trying to set it up about the 
accountability and disciplinary system for CBP agents who have made the 
most vile and vulgar comments.

  Look, don't get me wrong. There were some people who were part of 
this group who I am sure never made a comment. There were people who 
were part of this group who never said anything close to some of the 
worst stuff on here, who would not be subject to discipline.
  A big part of the problem right now is the culture at CBP, and as far 
as I can tell, there is close to zero accountability for anything like 
this or what happened in Maine on the northern border a few weeks ago.
  It was reported, because if you take a Greyhound bus from McAllen, 
Texas, for example, and you are going to go to San Antonio or Dallas or 
Austin or whatever, you get stopped along the way by CBP agents. Same 
thing in California if you are coming up from San Diego or near the 
border. And the CBP agents will get onto the bus, go up to each person, 
or at least the people they suspect could possibly be immigrants, and 
they will ask you to basically prove your citizenship.
  So we have been in a battle with Greyhound over that because of the 
rights that Americans have, having to prove citizenship. But here is my 
point. I think it was ACLU that got emails made public of a few agents 
on a few occasions, or it may have been one agent on a few occasions, 
saying to his agents who were going out to do these checks on the 
buses, his message to them was ``happy hunting.'' Happy hunting.
  I asked Secretary McAleenan: Well, what are you going to do about 
that person? Somebody is describing going after human beings here as 
hunting. What is the disciplinary process?
  Congress has not gotten any answers about what the disciplinary and 
accountability process is at the Department of Homeland Security, at 
CBP for actions like this.
  Then one more thing--and then, of course, I want to hear more of your 
perspective--is also, besides the fact that there is hardly any 
accountability as far as we can tell, it is also very secretive. I 
mean, really, Border Patrol right now is probably the most--except for 
the Secret Service, probably the most secretive law enforcement agency 
in the country, the least transparent law enforcement agency in the 
country.
  You and I both know when we have gone and visited the border, when we 
have gone to these facilities, there are good agents who are doing 
their work, who are doing it honestly and earnestly, who are not 
mistreating anybody, who are helping to defend and protect the United 
States. But those people are overwhelmed by a system that is undercut 
by a bad culture at this point and by these rogue agents who have 
essentially ruined the culture at CBP, and I don't know that the 
higher-ups, right now, are lifting a finger to do anything about it.
  Mr. GOMEZ. I think you make some excellent points.
  One point I want to kind of talk about, this culture that is 
permeating Customs and Border Protection, I think that it is also based 
because of the leadership of this administration. The attitude of zero 
tolerance, as in, like: Nope, it doesn't matter what conditions you are 
leaving, it doesn't matter if you are fleeing violence, it doesn't 
matter if you are a victim of domestic abuse, you can no longer use 
that as a rationale for seeking asylum. That zero tolerance mentality 
is what is also helping drive this rotting of the culture within 
Customs and Border Protection.
  Changing the leadership makes a difference, but as long as there is a 
change in the civilian leadership.
  Oversight is crucial. A lot of people ask: What is the difference 
between Democrats and Republicans? What is the difference between you 
guys being in charge versus Republicans being in charge?
  One of the things that I noticed when I was on Oversight in the 
minority from my first year, year and a half in Congress is that we 
couldn't call in Customs and Border Protection and ICE and the 
Department of Homeland Security to have a public hearing on these 
issues. The only hearing we had regarding the zero-tolerance policy was 
behind closed doors, no cameras present. I don't even believe staff was 
allowed in the room.
  So we had to sit there and ask, and we asked enough questions to get 
more information about how the zero-tolerance policy worked, how it was 
the nitty-gritty. But if people don't hear it, the public doesn't hear 
their testimony, then it lacks the credibility because some people 
think we are making it up.
  So we need not only the right kind of leadership to reform the 
culture, we also need to make sure that there is direct oversight by 
Congress, and that is our job.
  I voted against the emergency supplemental because I didn't feel that

[[Page H5579]]

there were enough constraints on the money that was going to be sent to 
the agencies, that they were going to actually use it to improve the 
humanitarian crisis that was going on on the ground at the border 
region.
  So we need to continue pushing that oversight, and that is what I 
plan on doing. I know that, under your leadership, the Congressional 
Hispanic Caucus is doing so.
  At the same time, I want to highlight another issue. People act like 
ICE has been around forever. We have to remind people that our system 
was restructured after 9/11 to make sure that we do have appropriate 
security at the border, at the ports of entry, through the airports, 
right, that we had major flaws. So reorganizing and changing and 
holding a bureaucracy accountable, that is the job of Congress. That is 
the job of everybody who gets elected.
  So the idea of what should be done, I think that first we need to 
make sure that we are more specific on our money, make sure there is 
better leadership and, at the same time, never run away from our values 
that this country is based on immigrants and built by immigrants.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. In fact, I want to talk to you, because 
Americans ask the question, rightfully, of Members of Congress, ``Okay. 
So you have identified a problem or you are complaining about a 
problem. What is your solution to it?'' So I want to talk about that 
for a second.
  But a few more examples on the Facebook group, because I really want 
our colleagues to have a sense of how deep this problem is and that it 
is not just imaginary.

                              {time}  2115

  This is right here in writing, in pictures, and in language.
  There was a post, and this is one of the milder posts, but it is a 
meme. The language on the meme says: ``You know what? I'm just going to 
say it. . . . Hondurans have the stupidest names ever.'' Again, this is 
either a current or former Border Patrol agent.
  One more, and before I read this, I want to explain something. In 
Border Patrol, they have their own language. One of the slurs that they 
use talking about the desperate people who are presenting themselves is 
the word ``tonk.'' People probably wonder what that means. That word is 
supposed to be what it sounds like when they hit one of these folks 
over the head with a flashlight. It makes that sound, ``tonk.'' They 
are using that as a slur to describe the folks who are at the border.
  The meme is a picture of red, dead meat laid out flat. The caption 
says, ``Little tonk blanket ideas!''
  I mean, this is sick stuff.
  I told McAleenan that some of these people need to be taken off the 
beat. These people, some of them are clearly a danger to human life, in 
the way they are talking and acting.
  Combine that with a system where there is hardly any accountability, 
if any accountability at all, and it is very dangerous, very dangerous 
not only for the people who come into their care but dangerous for 
their coworkers as well.
  These good agents are overrun. When they try to do the right thing, 
try to report abuse, try to report neglect, try to report malfeasance, 
they are thwarted by people higher up in Border Patrol who take that 
information and do absolutely zero about it.
  What happens? A lot of people then figure, ``Well, nothing is going 
to happen if I actually report it, and there is a chance that if these 
people find out I am reporting it, they are going to take retribution 
against me.''
  There is a whole group of people who are working in the system who 
actually want to do the right thing, do their jobs honestly, who are 
undercut, thwarted, and slowly brought into this rotten system because 
the people at the top will not do anything to change it.
  Madam Speaker, Mr. Gomez mentioned some of the solutions. He 
mentioned the supplemental bill.
  The supplemental bill was the Trump administration coming forward and 
asking for billions of dollars more in funding because, it argued: 
There is a surge at the border; there are more people coming; so we 
need more money for ICE, CBP, and HHS, which are the kids.
  There was a House version of that bill. There was a Senate version of 
that bill. The Senate bill is what finally passed.
  As Mr. Gomez mentioned, a big concern that we had was that this 
President likes to play games with funding in this administration. They 
like to take money that Congress appropriates for one purpose and then 
go use it for something else.
  Madam Speaker, as Mr. Gomez knows, the biggest example of that was 
when they wanted to take this military money and use it to build a 
wall.
  When I was in law school, and maybe every law student studied this, 
there is, of course, a famous jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In legal 
theory, he had this ``bad man'' theory. The idea was that laws needed 
to be written in such a way that somebody who has no shame at all, a 
bad man who is looking to take advantage of any little crack in the law 
that he can, we need to write a law that prevents that from happening. 
Right now, we are not in that situation because the Trump 
administration is able to do all these things and move money around.
  One of the big problems we had was a lack of guardrails. They could 
take this humanitarian aid and, instead of using it for humanitarian 
purposes, direct it toward a wall or toward something else, toward more 
ICE beds, toward more HHS beds so that the private contractors who run 
Homestead and who also run private prisons can make another $775 a day 
per child because they are growing their number by 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, 
10,000 people.
  Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. GOMEZ. Madam Speaker, Mr. Castro makes a good point regarding the 
guardrails, the funding.
  One of the things that I would like to point out is if this 
administration, this President, as he claimed, was the only one who 
could solve this problem, then why hasn't it been solved?
  It is a bigger mess and a bigger disaster than we have ever seen, and 
that is resulting in these conditions on the border where people are 
mistreated. This culture that is becoming rotten to the core is 
starting to just fester. We have seen an uncounted number of children 
who have died.
  According to Newsweek, there were no migrant children who died while 
in CBP custody during the final 6 years of the Obama administration. 
Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen previously admitted that it had 
been more than a decade since a child had died in CBP detention until 
December of last year when the 8-year-old Guatemalan national passed 
away on Christmas Eve. Since then, at least four other children have 
died while detained.
  We are seeing this crisis get worse and worse, and my fear is that we 
haven't hit the bottom yet. Until Congress steps in and puts those 
guardrails in place, until we flex our constitutional muscle, we are 
going to see things deteriorating further.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Madam Speaker, in order to make sure that we 
start to solve this problem, there is legislation that the 
Congressional Hispanic Caucus and others are pushing immediately.
  There are a few specific things that we need to do. One of them is 
that we need to raise standards of care. Many of us went out to 
Antelope Wells, New Mexico, parts of rural New Mexico, and we witnessed 
that CBP is understaffed, underprepared, and under-resourced to handle 
medical emergencies by these asylum seekers, the folks who come in with 
medical emergencies. Maybe they go into diabetic shock. They encounter 
some respiratory illness, and they are very sick.

  It is not that they were unprepared to handle medical emergencies by 
asylum seekers. They are also very unprepared to handle emergency 
situations by their own workers, Federal employees, CBP agents.
  Dr. Raul Ruiz, also from southern California, is an emergency room 
medical doctor. He was in Haiti after the earthquake. He has been in 
disaster situations. He and his staff have done an excellent job and 
spent a lot of time coming up with legislation that raises those 
standards of medical treatment and of care.
  We believe, based on everything that we have seen, that some of these 
deaths of these young children could have been prevented if the 
standards of

[[Page H5580]]

care had been appropriate and if these kids had just been treated 
better. We have to raise the standard of care.
  When we went over to Antelope Wells, they get 200 people who come to 
present themselves for asylum. They put them all in this sally port. 
They have 200 people there, including some infants, toddlers, et 
cetera.
  What do they give them to eat? They give them frozen burritos that 
they heat up, frozen burritos for a 3-year-old.
  Pumping more cash into the system is not the full answer to this. We 
don't just pump more cash into the system so they can buy people 
burritos and still not have nurses and doctors when there is an 
emergency. We have to raise the standard of care.
  The second part is that we have to move people through the process 
faster. Remember, I said that with President Trump and the zero-
tolerance policy, the remain-in-Mexico policy, all this stuff, it has 
created a situation where people are being held longer.
  When we saw these dozen or so Cuban women who were in this cell at El 
Paso Border Station 1, some of them had been at that Border Patrol 
station for 50 days. Some of them said they had not showered or taken a 
bath for over 15 days. Some were grandmothers. Some had been separated 
from their kids and didn't know where their kids were. There were a few 
who said they had not been given their prescription medication. One of 
them had epilepsy, and she said she had not gotten her medication for 
epilepsy.
  We walked over to what is this steel toilet, because it is basically 
like a prison cell. They are sleeping on concrete floors. There are 
painted cinder-block walls. We go over to this steel toilet. Directly 
above it, it has a sink. The sink is not working. There is no sink.
  All these people going to the restroom, they can't wash their hands 
because the sink doesn't work. They are staying there many, many, many 
days, well beyond what the law prescribes and the court settlements 
have prescribed for how long somebody should be staying there.
  The final piece, as we know, is a longer term thing, which is that we 
believe the United States and other countries in the Western 
Hemisphere--and I believe that we should wrangle our allies from around 
the world because whenever there is some major crisis in some other 
part of the world, those nations ask the United States to help out. We 
should ask the same of those countries when something happens in the 
Western Hemisphere, in this case, in Central America.
  My point is that we need to make serious investments in the Northern 
Triangle countries of Central America because I don't believe that 
these people want to get up and leave their homes to make a 1,200-mile 
journey to the United States if they don't have to, if they weren't so 
desperate, if they weren't fleeing violence, if they weren't fleeing 
oppression. But that is where they find themselves.
  By the way, one more point on this: The President wants to spend 
billions and billions of dollars on the wall but over the last several 
years has committed only hundreds of millions of dollars in Central 
American aid.
  I was speaking with Matt Cartwright the other day, our colleague from 
Pennsylvania. He made a great point, which is if we took those billions 
of dollars that we are spending on a wall and used that as seed money 
to start investing in Central America, what we would do is help create 
safety and opportunity in those countries so that people don't feel the 
need to come to the United States, and we wouldn't have a surge of 
migration.
  Like I said, I think those people want to stay in their countries.
  Also, Madam Speaker, even a few days ago, I saw an article where 
there was a very famous columnist, a writer who made the case that this 
is a different situation. This migration from Central America is a 
different situation from refugees who have fled to the United States in 
previous generations. His point was that they are not fleeing state-
sponsored oppression.
  I believe that kind of thinking is an anachronism. It is old 
thinking.
  The fact is, somebody who is living in Central America or anywhere 
around the world can be just as oppressed and put in danger and have 
their life threatened and the lives of their family threatened 
systematically by a drug gang or a drug lord and these groups as some 
dictator did in the 1960s or 1970s in some other country.
  I believe that threats to people have evolved, that the refugee 
situation, the asylee situation, has evolved and that the United States 
should recognize that evolution, just like other things have evolved.
  We should recognize that evolution and recognize that the threats 
these people are facing, even though it may not be coming directly from 
the Central American governments, are just as dangerous as people who 
were fleeing Vietnam in the 1970s or are just as dangerous as the 
Cubans who were fleeing the dictatorial Castro regime in the early 
1960s. We should recognize that.
  Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. GOMEZ. Madam Speaker, I want to stress a few points.
  Mr. Castro mentioned that this administration hasn't invested in aid 
to the Northern Triangle countries. One of the things that we need to 
recognize is that the zero-tolerance policy isn't working. It might 
feel good for hardliners to say: ``It is zero tolerance. We are not 
going to take it anymore. We are going to push back,'' but it is not 
solving the problem.
  For example, the statistics show that net migration from Mexico to 
the United States is zero. In some instances, it has declined, where 
more Mexican nationals are returning to Mexico than ever before.
  Why is that? Mexico still has issues regarding security, but its 
economy has built up more and more.

                              {time}  2130

  I have family members who are in Mexico, and they have no desire to 
move to the United States because they believe that their opportunity 
there is just as good as it is here.
  So imagine if we want to be serious about tackling the issue of 
undocumented immigration to the United States, especially from Latin 
American countries. The way you do it is first by, of course, creating 
a comprehensive immigration reform here in this country but, at the 
same time, investing the resources and the policies that build up the 
economies of Latin America, thereby creating a situation where people 
feel that, instead of risking their lives to get here, they would 
rather stay at home.
  That is one thing that this administration doesn't understand, but we 
also need to highlight for the American people. The zero-tolerance 
policy, the tough on undocumented immigration hasn't worked.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. In fact, more people have come since the 
announcement of that policy. It is an abject failure.
  Mr. GOMEZ. And they know about the conditions on the border, they 
know about the risk that they are taking, but they are leaving some 
desperate situations. So the way you make it so that they don't want to 
leave is that you make things better for them at home.
  Some folks will say, well, that is not our responsibility; that is 
the responsibility of their home countries. But if you want to be a 
political realist about how we solve it, you have to have international 
aid, almost a Marshall Plan, for Latin America in order to build up 
their countries, their economies, their infrastructure, their training, 
and then make sure that we have a system here that has enough legal 
immigration in order for people to not try to come into this country 
illegally.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Absolutely. We talked about that piece, 
basically a Marshall Plan for Central America, the investment. And Zoe 
Lofgren, another colleague of yours from California--northern 
California, San Jose--has got legislation that addresses, essentially, 
the start of a Marshall Plan for Central America, which I believe she 
has filed already.
  And I mentioned Raul Ruiz's bill on lifting standards.
  Another bill that we are pushing very strongly is the accountability 
piece. We were talking about the CBP officers and the fact that I can't 
tell whether there is any legitimate accountability over there. My 
colleague from Texas, Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, has got 
a bill on accountability that she has also filed.

[[Page H5581]]

  So we are pushing these pieces of legislation really hard, working 
with the Speaker and others, to try to get some of them passed before 
the end of this July, before we go on the long August recess.
  Lori Trahan, another member of the CHC, from Massachusetts, has got a 
bill.
  One of the problems, and you spoke to it, is that DHS and HHS will 
often try to deny Members of Congress access to the facilities. People 
might say: Okay, well, you are Members of Congress and they are a 
different agency. Why should you be able to go in whenever you want; 
right?
  Well, remember, the legislative branch has oversight over these 
executive agencies, and you can't do your job of oversight if they 
don't let you in. Or, if you have got to give 7 days' notice, they have 
a chance to just clean everything up. In fact, if you read that 
Facebook page by the Border Patrol agents, they are talking about the 
fact the facilities are cleaned up before Members of Congress actually 
have a chance to visit. So that is a problem.
  Lori has got a bill that says that, with 24 hours' notice, we could, 
as Members of Congress, go in there and inspect these facilities.
  So these are some of the pieces of legislation, practical solutions, 
that we are working on to overhaul the system and improve this 
situation.
  And, real quick, I mentioned that trip last week to Clint and to El 
Paso Border Patrol station number one. It was a very intense visit and 
very tense, also, a lot of people on that trip. It was about half and 
half, half CHC members, half not CHC members, but there were many 
people who stepped up, and particularly the women who were on that 
trip.
  I got some video that I released. But there are other portions of 
that, in that room, other times in that room, where Madeleine Dean, 
Ayanna Pressley, and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were pressing 
the CBP officers and a doctor there to explain why these folks were 
being neglected.
  In fact, to give a lot of credit to Alexandria, we would not have 
been able to go into that room and I would not have been able to 
document what had happened except for the fact that she basically 
insisted and barged into that room to go see and talk to those women.
  Nanette Barragan was great.
   Joe Kennedy, he and I went over to another cell, and we spoke to a 
woman who was in the early stages of pregnancy. She was there with 
another family that included a young boy. They had a seat that was 
working, actually. But what I noticed was, in their cell, they were 
reusing the same, like, seven or eight or nine paper cups over and 
over.
  Paper cups are cups you throw away or you recycle and you get another 
one. They were making these people use the same paper cups day after 
day. For what?
  Mr. GOMEZ. And we know, because of that, you have a situation where 
people are getting sick in these facilities, and then putting the kids 
and the people whose immune systems are compromised into more 
vulnerable positions.
  We definitely have a lot of work to do, but in order to do that, we 
need to make sure that the American people know what is going on, to 
tell the story and to not let people forget about the kids who have 
passed away: Wilmer, Carlos, Juan, Jakelin, Felipe, and Mariee. Because 
if we forget, we turn away, only more kids will perish and more people 
will die at the border
  It is our moral obligation. It doesn't matter if they are not U.S. 
citizens. It is our moral obligation to ensure that doesn't happen.
  Mr. CASTRO of Texas. That is absolutely right.
  These folks may not be citizens, they are not legal residents when 
they present themselves, but they are human beings. This is the most 
powerful, prosperous, and, we believe, humane country on the face of 
this Earth. We should be treating them a lot better than we are 
treating them. I firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of 
Americans believe that, regardless of their politics.
  Madam Speaker, Mr. Gomez read the names of the six children who have 
died over the last several months. Over the last few years, there have 
been about 24 adults who have died. I have only been able to find 16 of 
their names, but I want to read their names also to remember them:
  Yimi Alexis Balderramos-Torres;
  Johana Medina Leon;
  Simratpal Singh;
  Abel Reyes-Clemente;
  Guerman Volkov;
  Mergensana Amar;
  Wilfredo Padron;
  Augustina Ramirez-Arreola;
  Efrain De La Rosa;
  Huy Chi Tran;
  Zeresenay Ermias Testfatsion;
  Roxana Hernandez;
  Ronald Cruz;
  Gourgen Mirimanian;
  Luis Ramirez-Marcano, and
  Yulio Castro-Garrido.
  May all of them rest in peace. May the children who also died rest in 
peace. They were doing what people throughout the generations have 
tried to do from all over the world who were fleeing oppression, 
violence, and desperation. They were trying to make it to the United 
States of America. They were trying to live in the United States of 
America, and they died.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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