[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 53 (Monday, March 22, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1667-S1669]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Immigration

  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, from El Paso to Brownsville, my home 
State shares a 1,200-mile border with Mexico. If you were daring enough 
to attempt to walk that entire stretch, you would trek through deserts, 
mountains, big cities, small towns, and maybe even stick your big toe 
in the Rio Grande. You get to know folks who are proud of the strong 
bonds that our country has with our southern neighbor, including many 
who have relatives in both countries. You would meet entrepreneurs 
whose businesses depend on legitimate trade and travel between our 
countries. You would talk with local, State, and Federal law 
enforcement officials who go above and beyond the call to keep our 
communities safe. And I have no doubt that along the way, you could 
enjoy some great Tex-Mex, and depending on the season, you would find 
the best grapefruit you have ever eaten in the Rio Grande Valley.
  Our Texas-Mexico southern border is a beautiful, vibrant region with 
a rich sense of community that you can't find in any other part of the 
country. I believe it is truly unique.
  Throughout my time in the Senate, I have had the opportunity to spend 
a lot of time in our border communities and work with their incredible 
leaders: mayors, county judges, sheriffs, school superintendents, 
NGOs--nongovernmental organizations--and countless others.
  Well, I am sure you have heard the song ``God Bless Texas.'' It is 
true, I believe, and the folks I have come to call friends along the 
border are certainly doing the Lord's work. These men and women work 
around the clock to create safe communities and thriving economies, 
something that has been especially tough during the hand they have been 
dealt this last year with the pandemic. But they have lived through a 
pandemic, hurricanes, droughts, a winter storm that presented subzero 
freezing temperatures for a week. All have hit my State in the last 12 
months.
  Folks in these communities, as they have throughout the country, have 
lost friends and loved ones. They have lost jobs. They have lost 
businesses and opportunities and so much more. Now they are trying to 
deal with another crisis, one they had no hand in creating and should 
not be responsible for managing alone.
  Unfortunately, the administration continues to play a high-stakes 
version of the game Taboo as they try to find a word--any word--but 
``crisis'' to refer to what is happening along the southern border. 
President Biden himself has called it a ``humanitarian challenge.'' 
Secretary Mayorkas prefers the term ``situation.'' And the President's 
Chief of Staff referred to it as a ``mess.'' The problem here isn't the 
choice of the word you use to describe it but the implication of 
downplaying the seriousness of this migration surge.
  In an attempt to lessen the impact of this dramatic increase in 
illegal migration, the administration has revoked policies that were 
helping deter such an influx. It failed to rapidly provide the 
resources needed to respond to the crisis once it revoked the previous 
policies, and now the border communities in my State along that 1,200-
mile common border with Mexico are expected to pick up the slack.
  Regardless of how you want to brand what is happening, here are the 
facts. Last month, Customs and Border Protection encountered more than 
100,000 individuals along our border last month alone--100,000. That is 
the highest number since 2006. More than 9,000 of these 100,000 people 
were children, unaccompanied children, separated when their parents 
sent them, along with human smugglers, criminal organizations, to make 
their dangerous trek from Mexico or Central America or somewhere else 
into the United States. Another 19,000 are what are euphemistically 
called family units, usually 1 parent and 1 or more children.
  Now, we know that this journey to our borders isn't safe or easy, and 
you can imagine that is especially true fo unaccompanied children. Many 
arrive at our border in critical health, having endured days and weeks 
or even months of exposure on the road. I have heard horrific stories 
of physical and sexual abuse that occur in the hands of these criminal 
organizations who move migrants from place A to place B. But they are 
nothing more than cartels, human smugglers, criminals who care nothing 
about the individuals whom they are ferrying from their point A to 
point B. All they care about is the money that they make, and they make 
a lot of money.

  By law, children cannot be in the custody of Customs and Border 
Protection for more than 72 hours. Within that window, they are 
required by law to be transferred to the custody and care of the 
Department of Health and Human Services. But right now, the system is 
so overwhelmed that thousands of children have been in custody beyond 
the legal limit, including hundreds who have been held for more than 10 
days in border detention facilities.
  Axios has recently released some pictures taken inside, I believe, 
the Donna

[[Page S1668]]

detention facility showing children basically stacked end to end, 
trying to stay warm, trying to sleep because the Border Patrol 
facilities are simply overwhelmed.
  The situation has grown so dire, the administration has sent the 
Federal Emergency Management Agency to help, and now they have set up a 
new influx care facility in Dallas and Midland to provide for these 
children. The Midland facility has experienced so many issues that no 
additional migrant teens are being sent there. In the first few days of 
operation, more than 10 percent of the population housed there tested 
positive for COVID-19, and at least one child has been hospitalized. 
One government official described the process of setting up the 
facility as ``building a plane as it's taking off.''
  There is simply no reason the administration should have been caught 
flat-footed by this surge of illegal migration. After all, the 
President campaigned on promises of policies that were sure to lead to 
this very situation. When you remove the policies that deter illegal 
border crossings, what do you expect?
  We know that the spring months are typically the busiest for 
migration because mild temperatures make the journey a little less 
dangerous and folks want to come to the United States for summer work.
  We know the cartels and criminal organizations are very knowledgeable 
about our immigration laws. They know them perhaps better than most 
Americans do, and they know how to navigate them. We know a flawed 
court ruling on the Flores settlement agreement means even more 
children will come across our border because now families are subject 
to the same requirements as unaccompanied children. We know we have an 
immigration court backlog that is roughly 1.3 million cases deep, and 
the average time for a case to be presented in court is now 2\1/2\ 
years. Nevertheless, the Biden administration, by revoking the previous 
policies without having a plan to replace them, has created a perfect 
storm that anyone could have told them would end up in this situation. 
We have experienced migration surges in the past but never of this 
magnitude.
  In the midst of a pandemic, Secretary Mayorkas has said that we are 
on track to see the highest number of border crossings in 20 years and 
the administration needs to take action now to keep things from getting 
any worse.
  As migrants continue to make their way to our southern border in 
record numbers, law enforcement, local officials, and nongovernmental 
organizations, notwithstanding their best efforts, are not equipped to 
manage the influx, certainly not in these numbers. They don't have the 
facilities. They don't have the policies, the funding, or the resources 
to manage the crisis in a fair, efficient, and humane way. That needs 
to change.
  For folks who are not from a border State or haven't spent much time 
at the border, it is difficult to understand just how complex the 
situation is. They may have learned what they think they know about the 
border from movies or novels, or they may have read news articles and 
assume border communities are dangerous or lawless places. That 
assumption could not be farther from the truth. But it is true that our 
border communities are being asked to carry more than their fair share 
of the weight during this crisis, when the past year has already been 
challenging enough with the pandemic.
  Like cities across the country, border communities have had to cover 
a range of expenses created by the pandemic, but unlike those other 
communities, they now have the added economic struggle created by 
limits on nonessential border travel.
  Prepandemic, folks from Mexico could travel across the border to 
shop, to eat at restaurants, and visit family members. These were huge 
drivers of the economy along our entire border region. But the pause on 
legitimate, nonessential travel by title 42 has created a serious 
economic strain on these communities, and leaders are struggling to 
understand the disconnect between the Biden administration's two very 
different approaches.
  At a recent roundtable my friend Congressman Henry Cuellar and I 
hosted in Laredo, someone said: I don't understand how you can catch 
and release the migrants and not let our neighbors across the border 
come over and spend money in our communities to help bolster our 
economy.
  This confluence of crises is a one-two punch for our border 
communities, and it is unfair they are expected to carry the burden of 
this crisis. That is the Federal Government's responsibility.
  This Friday, my colleague Senator Cruz and I will welcome a number of 
our colleagues to the Rio Grande Valley, where they can hear and see 
about these challenges firsthand. I welcome any Member of the Senate or 
the Congress to join me at the border at a time of their choosing. I 
know I have benefited from the feedback and advice from the experts on 
the ground who are dealing with this crisis firsthand, and I am glad to 
bring some of my Senate colleagues on Friday along for a visit at this 
critical moment.
  Hopefully that will help us to find a way, along with the 
administration in a bipartisan way, to reduce some of the pull factors 
that incentivize people to come and navigate our system.
  You are never going to deal with the fact that people want a better 
life or are fleeing violence. We all get that. We understand why, as 
human beings, people would want to leave that, but we also know that 
the cartels are getting rich off of this business model, and certainly 
they are incentivized to encourage as many people as possible to come 
and pay their extortionate fees in the process. But the combination of 
those at this point--both the push factors and the pull factors, 
especially with the Biden administration putting a green light on our 
border and basically saying ``All comers are welcome to enter the 
country''--is creating an unreasonable expectation about what people 
are going to encounter, as well as overwhelming the capacity of our 
Border Patrol, Health and Human Services, and the Office of Refugee 
Relocation to be able to deal with them.
  We know that the incentives involved in a catch-and-release system, 
in which people are asked to return in perhaps months, maybe years, for 
a future court date to consider their asylum claims, are nothing but an 
invitation for them to not appear and simply melt into the great 
American landscape and, again, continue to incentivize people to come 
because they know they can beat the system. They certainly can game the 
system, and, unfortunately, too often people beat the system, creating 
the situation we find now at the southern border.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hirono). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BURR. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered


                   nomination of martin joseph walsh

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam President, I rise to support the nomination of 
Marty Walsh to be our Nation's next Secretary of Labor. Mr. Walsh is an 
experienced leader who has always been a fighter for working families 
as the mayor of Boston, a State legislator, and as a union president. 
We need a Secretary of Labor who will make workplaces safer and prevent 
the spread of COVID-19 on the job, ensure that unemployed workers get 
the benefits they need and deserve, and support workers exercising 
their rights to form a union and bargain collectively.
  Only 11.6 percent of workers were represented by a union in 2019, 
down from 27 percent in 1979. The decline in unionization has coincided 
with a marked divergence between overall productivity growth in our 
economy and paychecks for workers. While productivity has grown 
significantly, hourly compensation for rank-and-file workers has been 
nearly stagnant once inflation is taken into account.
  In a January 22 Executive order on protecting the Federal workforce 
which faced especially harsh attacks from the Trump administration, 
President Biden reaffirmed that it is ``the policy of the United States 
to encourage union organizing and collective bargaining.'' 
Strengthening and enforcing the laws that enable workers to do so must 
be at the core of our efforts to build an economy that works for all 
Americans, and Marty Walsh is the right person for the job.

[[Page S1669]]

  

  Mr. BURR. Madam President, I am going to support the nomination of 
Mayor Marty Walsh to be the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
  Now, why is a guy from North Carolina here to encourage my colleagues 
to vote for the mayor of Boston, MA? Well, it is quite simple. Mayor 
Walsh has the background and skills and the awareness for the need of 
balance in conversations between labor and management.
  He has been a mayor; he has been a State representative; and he has 
also been a union leader. The Department of Labor serves an immensely 
important role in our economy and in the lives of the American people. 
Especially in the midst of a pandemic, with unemployment at 6.7 percent 
and 12.6 million Americans unemployed, this is a job that needs 
filling.
  But our Nation can't have a Labor Secretary that will ever be accused 
of being in cahoots with labor or beholden to management. I have made 
it clear that the Labor Secretary's job is to play a balanced role and 
to confront both, when necessary, for the protection of the rank-and-
file workers.
  Mayor Walsh emphasized during his nomination hearing that he wanted 
to work with us collaboratively to help the American workers improve 
and expand opportunities. He respects the importance of job creators 
and the need for better coordination of numerous job training programs.
  Mayor Walsh is committed to making sure commerce and labor work 
cooperatively. He stated that the workers in a representation election 
have the right to listen to both sides. Mayor Walsh agreed to be 
responsive to our oversight requests and to keep us updated on his 
plans and departmental actions.
  Now, we won't agree on everything, but we should be able to find 
places that we can agree, in a bipartisan way, to move forward. I 
support the nomination of Mayor Marty Walsh, and I look forward to 
working with him. I encourage my colleagues to support this nomination 
as well.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                        vote on walsh nomination

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, all postcloture time 
has expired.
  The question is, Will the Senate advise and consent to the Walsh 
nomination?
  Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant bill clerk called the roll
  Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. 
Murkowski), and the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Heinrich). Are there any other Senators in 
the Chamber desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 68, nays 29, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 127 Ex.]

                                YEAS--68

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Booker
     Brown
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Cramer
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Feinstein
     Fischer
     Gillibrand
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Hoeven
     Kaine
     Kelly
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Lee
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Markey
     Marshall
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Ossoff
     Padilla
     Peters
     Portman
     Reed
     Romney
     Rosen
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Tillis
     Tuberville
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                                NAYS--29

     Barrasso
     Boozman
     Braun
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Ernst
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hyde-Smith
     Inhofe
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lummis
     McConnell
     Moran
     Paul
     Risch
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Shelby
     Thune
     Wicker
     Young

                             NOT VOTING--3

     Blackburn
     Murkowski
     Toomey
  The nomination was confirmed.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the motion to 
reconsider is considered made and laid upon the table, and the 
President will be immediately notified of the Senate's actions.
  The majority leader.

                          ____________________