[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.