[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 119 (Tuesday, July 16, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4832-S4834]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Immigration
Madam President, I went to Chicago on Friday. I went to the northwest
side of the city, and I met with a group called Communities United. It
was a meeting I am not going to soon forget. There were about 20 people
in the room. Most of them were women with their children, and a couple
of us were politicians. They talked about the fear that is running
through their community with President Trump's threat of mass arrests
and mass deportations. Each one of them had an important thing to say.
The one that stuck with me was a young lady--I will give just her first
name. Guadalupe was her first name. She is a high school student in
that section of Chicago. She started to read from a little piece of
paper on which she had written down the feelings of her family about
what was happening with the threats of these raids.
You see, one of her parents is undocumented. She is a citizen of the
United States, having been born here, but her mother is not so lucky.
Guadalupe said: I am tired of living in fear. I am tired of being
afraid that the next knock on the door means our family will be torn
apart; that my mother, who has been here for almost 20 years, will be
forced to leave.
She has never committed a crime. She has worked hard every single day
for the family, to bring a little money home, taking jobs that most of
us don't want to take, being paid low wages in the hope that her
daughter Guadalupe and others would have a better life in the years
ahead.
I remember that meeting because that was just the beginning of a
weekend filled with meetings just like those all across that great city
of Chicago, particularly among the Hispanic population--a genuine fear
that ICE would start knocking on doors. People are being told their
rights, their legal rights, if ICE comes to the door. Most of them are
being told: Don't open the door unless there is a real search warrant
from a real judge, not an ICE administrative warrant.
These people, I am sure, will find it hard to make that distinction,
but it really is a question of whether they may be able to stay in the
United States or cannot.
Keep in mind that we are not talking about people who have been
convicted of a serious crime. As far as I am concerned, if you come to
this country and you are undocumented and you commit a serious crime,
you have forfeited your right to stay here. I am not making any defense
of those people, but they are a tiny, small percentage of those who are
here undocumented. The vast majority came to this country, some
undocumented when they came, others who have overstayed a visitor's
visa, a work visa or student visa, and started a life and started a
family.
These are the people who have become a major part of our economy. Of
the 11 million who are undocumented in this country, 8\1/2\ million
actually work. They are employed. They pay taxes. They are not
officially or legally part of our economy. Yet they are all subject to
the mass arrests and deportation that President Trump has threatened.
As a Presidential candidate, Donald Trump regularly used inflammatory
anti-immigrant language. You will remember most of these quotes because
they were said over and over again.
Donald Trump said:
The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted
people into the United States. They are, in many cases,
criminals, drug dealers, [and] rapists.
Donald Trump said that a Federal judge was biased against him because
the judge was ``a Mexican.'' He called for a ``total and complete
shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.''
He attacked a family I have come to know, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the
Muslim American parents of the American soldier who was killed in the
line of duty. This Gold Star family gave their son to this country in
defense of it and were ridiculed because they disagreed with President
Trump.
For the last 2\1/2\ years, President Donald Trump has continued to
use divisive language. On January 11, 2018, I heard it personally. In a
meeting in the Oval Office that I will never forget, the President used
a crude term to refer to Haiti and African countries.
This weekend, President Trump sunk to a new low. His tweets saying
four Democratic Congresswomen should ``go back'' to their countries
were racist and reprehensible comments. Elected officials of both
parties should condemn the President's statement.
It is important to understand the President's hateful language is
also reflected in his policies. The Trump administration has shown
unprecedented cruelty on the issue of immigration, especially to
children and families.
The Muslim travel ban created chaos at airports across the country
and continues to separate thousands of American families.
[[Page S4833]]
The cruel repeal of DACA threatens 800,000 young immigrants with
deportation to countries they barely remember.
The termination of temporary protected status puts more than 300,000
immigrants at risk of deportation to dangerous conditions. Imagine this
for a moment. We have a travel advisory that says to American families:
Do not--do not--go to the country of Venezuela. It is too dangerous.
But for those Venezuelans who are in the United States and should
qualify for temporary protected status, this President has said: We are
returning you to Venezuela.
Really? It is too dangerous for Americans, but, Venezuelans, we are
going to force you to go back to the horrible situation in that
country.
The disastrous separation of thousands of families at the border has
done permanent damage to these families and especially to their
children. Under what was known as the zero-tolerance policy announced
by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, over 2,880 infants, toddlers,
and children were separated from their families at the border.
What was even worse, they were cast into this bureaucratic no-man's-
land, and they couldn't be located to be reunited with their parents
until a Federal judge demanded it. We still have some who have not been
reunited with their parents over a year later.
The inhumane overcrowding and migrant detention facilities that the
DHS inspector general found was ``an immediate risk to the health and
safety of detainees and DHS employees'' was so bad that after I
personally witnessed it, I joined with more than 20 other Democratic
Senators writing to the International Red Cross and asking for them to
send in a team to investigate American detention facilities. I never
thought I would do that.
This President's threatening, and now mass arrests and deportations,
of millions of immigrants who have committed no crime and pose no
threat--no threat--to the security and safety of this country has
created rampant fears, as I mentioned, in Chicago and across the
Nation.
Now, today, the Trump administration has put in place a new rule
which will block nearly all asylum claims at the southern border from
nationals of any country except Mexico, including families and children
fleeing persecution.
The UNHCR, the refugee Agency for the United Nations, said this rule
proposed by the Trump administration ``will endanger vulnerable people
in need of international protection from violence or persecution.''
How did we reach this point? During World War II, we made a fateful
decision in the United States to turn away hundreds who were fleeing
Europe. Many of them were people of the Jewish religion who believed
the Holocaust, which Hitler had initiated, would eventually reach their
families and take their lives. There were 700 or 800 of them who were
on a ship called the USS St. Louis. They came to the United States and
asked for refuge here, asylum here, to escape the Nazis. Sadly, our
government turned them away. They went back to Europe, and 200 died in
the Holocaust. After that, after that horrible experience, we said we
were going to do this differently from this point forward.
Since World War II, the United States has led the world in accepting
refugees and asylees. Other countries have done more than their part. I
think of Jordan immediately. We have tried to be a leader among
developed countries in accepting refugees and asylees, and we have done
it. When you look at all of the Cubans who came to the United States to
escape communism under Castro--we have three Cuban Americans serving in
the U.S. Senate whose families were part of that exodus from the island
of Cuba. We did the same thing with Jews who were facing persecution in
the Soviet Union. We did it, as well, after the Vietnam war, when those
Vietnamese who had stood by American soldiers and risked their lives
were given refuge to the United States. The list goes on and on, and it
reflects who we are as a nation. We screen those who come in, but we
say our doors are open to give them a second chance in life and the
protection of the United States.
That was what we did from World War II until the election of Donald
Trump as President of the United States. Now he has turned back the
clock. We are back in the USS St. Louis era, where we are turning away
refugees who are simply coming here trying to find some safe place to
be.
America is better than this. We can keep our Nation safe and respect
our heritage as a nation of immigrants. We can have a secure border and
abide by our international obligations to protect refugees fleeing from
persecution, as we have done on a bipartisan basis for decades.
The reality is President Trump's cruel and ineffective policies on
immigration have made our southern border much less secure than when he
took office. The President's obsession with his almighty border wall to
be paid for by the Mexicans, as he suggested, led to the longest
government shutdown in the history of the United States--35
days, paralyzing agencies and the government, ironically paralyzing
immigration courts that were supposed to process the people presenting
themselves at the border. More refugees have been driven to our border
because the President has shut down legal avenues for migration and
blocked all the systems to stabilize Northern Triangle countries in El
Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
There is also a gaping leadership vacuum at the Trump
administration's Department of Homeland Security. In less than 2\1/2\
years, there have already been four different people heading this
Department. Every position at the Department of Homeland Security with
responsibility for immigration or border security is now held by a
temporary appointee, and the White House has not even submitted
nominations to fill these positions.
The Republicans have tried to blame Democrats for the President's
failure to secure the border, but Democrats have tried to work on a
bipartisan basis to solve this crisis. In February, after the President
finally agreed to end the longest government shutdown in history,
Congress passed an omnibus appropriations bill that included $414
million for humanitarian assistance at the border. When I hear Vice
President Pence and others saying they were begging the Democrats to
give them money for the border, we did--$400 million in February.
Then, last month, Congress passed an emergency supplemental
appropriations bill with $4.6 billion of additional funding to
alleviate overcrowding at detention facilities and provide the basics--
food, supplies, and medical care.
Last year, before the border crisis began, Senate Democrats supported
a bipartisan agreement--bipartisan agreement--from centrists in both
caucuses that included robust security funding and dozens of provisions
to strengthen border security. We put this together last year. It was a
compromise. I didn't like parts of it, but it is the nature of the
Senate that you can't get everything you want; you have to do the best
you can to solve a problem. We had a bipartisan solution. This was a
chance last year for the President to step up and accept a bipartisan
approach. The President rejected it. He threatened to veto it. Instead,
he wanted to push for his hardline, get-tough immigration reform
instead. The Senate rejected the President's bill, his proposal, with a
strong, bipartisan supermajority. It was that unpopular and unworkable.
In 2013, 6 years ago, I was part of a gang of eight Senators--four
Democrats and four Republicans--who wrote comprehensive immigration
reform legislation. It passed the Senate 68 to 32. Unfortunately, the
Republicans who controlled the House of Representatives refused to even
consider the bill.
The acting DHS Secretary, Kevin McAleenan, recently said that if our
2013 bill had been enacted into law, ``We would have a very different
situation. . . . We would be a lot more secure at our border.'' That is
what he says now about a bill we passed 6 years ago.
Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who supported the
2013 bill, said: ``If that bill became law, most of the problems we're
having today we'd not be having.'' There are ways to deal with this in
a sensible, bipartisan way. Our comprehensive bill did that.
Getting tough, threatening a wall, and cutting off foreign aid has
backfired on this President. It has created failure when it comes to
immigration.
[[Page S4834]]
The Democrats have introduced the Central American Reform and
Enforcement Act as a comprehensive response to our current border
crisis. Let me tell you the highlights.
It addresses root causes in the Northern Triangle countries that
drive migrants to flee. It cracks down on traffickers who are
exploiting migrants. It provides for in-country processing of refugees
and expands third-country resettlements so migrants can find safe haven
without making that dangerous and expensive trip to our border. It
eliminates immigration court backlogs so asylum claims can be processed
quickly. It expands the use of proven alternatives to detention, like
family case management, so immigrants know their rights and show up for
court.
Democrats stand ready to work on smart, effective, and humane border
security policies, but we need our Republican colleagues to condemn
President Trump's cruel campaign against families and children and to
work with us on a bipartisan basis.
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. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Roberts). Without objection, it is so
ordered.