[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 105 (Thursday, June 15, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2111-S2113]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Southern Border

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I wanted to come to the Senate floor this 
afternoon to talk about a scandal of incredible proportion.
  Since President Biden became President of the United States, 300,000 
unaccompanied children have been encountered at the border and then 
placed with sponsors inside the interior of the United States--300,000.
  Ordinarily, there would be a process by which Health and Human 
Services would attempt to contact those minor children, in the custody 
of those sponsors, for a wellness check 30 days after they were placed 
with them. The New York Times has documented that at least 85,000 of 
those 300,000 children cannot even be reached--no response to the phone 
call or any other outreach.
  So under the Biden administration's policies, an untold number of 
minor children have been placed with sponsors in the interior of the 
United States, and the Biden administration can't tell you where they 
are; the administration can't tell you what their condition is, whether 
they are being sent to school, whether they are being recruited into 
gangs, whether they are being sexually or otherwise physically 
assaulted, or whether they are being neglected. They simply don't know.
  Now, I know it takes a lot to get people's attention these days 
because there is so much competing for our attention--so many different 
types of outrage. But the fact that this hasn't been front page news 
for a long time now or hasn't motivated the Biden administration to 
actually do anything to change this situation leads me to the 
conclusion that President Biden simply doesn't care. He doesn't care. 
He doesn't care what happens to these children. If he did care, he 
would do something about it, but he doesn't, apparently, care.
  These are some of the most vulnerable individuals encountered at the 
border. They come to the United States, not in the care of their 
parents, but in the care of transnational criminal organizations, the 
cartels--the coyotes, as they are called--who treat them like a 
commodity. They don't treat them like a human being. They treat them 
like a commodity because the only thing these cartels care about is 
cold, hard cash.
  This is a huge cash cow. And it is not just the children. It is the 
other 5 million migrants encountered at the border, as well. All of 
them pay these criminal organizations to transport them here to the 
United States.
  I mentioned previously that when I went to Yuma, AZ, with a 
bipartisan group of Senators, that Border Patrol sector chief greeted 
us by saying: Welcome to the Yuma Sector. It is a sleepy little 
agricultural community.
  He said: We encounter people from 176 countries, speaking 200 
languages.
  So people are literally being transported around the world to show up 
at our border and claim a right to be admitted, and the Biden 
administration continues to roll out the welcome mat and not deter 
illegal immigration by people who cannot qualify, whom we know will not 
qualify for any legal relief.
  The children, particularly, endure a dangerous and long journey to 
our country, and they are often exploited en route. We heard from one 
of the witnesses in the Judiciary Committee yesterday about them being 
particularly vulnerable to sex trafficking, but we know they are 
subjected to violence and other forms of exploitation as well.
  You would hope that once these children arrive at the border, they 
would be safe. I think that is our obligation, to make sure they are 
safe.
  But over the last few years, we have seen mounting evidence that 
shows that tens of thousands of these migrant children who show up at 
our border without a parent or legal guardian are placed with sponsors 
and are essentially lost by the administration. Again, they don't know 
where they are. They don't know what is happening to them.
  And, of course, we all should be concerned that they are being taken 
advantage of in a multitude of ways and being damaged in ways that we 
don't want to even imagine.
  In August 2021, Bloomberg reported that Federal law enforcement was 
investigating unaccompanied migrant children who had been released to 
labor traffickers. This is kind of like modern-day slavery. The 
reporting uncovered situations where dozens of children were released 
to the same sponsor--dozens of children to the same person. You think 
that would have raised some questions, and maybe they tap the brake a 
little bit and investigate further--apparently not, because this same 
individual then exploited them for labor in poultry processing 
facilities. It is impossible for me to understand why the 
administration wouldn't see the warning signs.
  About a year later, Reuters reported on another deeply concerning 
discovery. Federal and local officials were struggling to locate a 
dozen migrant children in Houston. They simply lost them. The Health 
and Human Services refugee office conducted an emergency review and 
found that 57 migrant children had been reported missing in Houston 
since the year prior--lost by the Biden administration.
  As bad as those two reports are, the story does not get any better. 
Recent reporting by the New York Times has

[[Page S2112]]

confirmed that these aren't just the exception. These are part of a 
deeply disturbing trend, and it shows what bad things can happen to 
innocent children when their own government doesn't even care.
  Of course, many of these are migrant children so, technically, I 
guess, the United States isn't their government. But we owe them a duty 
while they are in our country to protect them from the predators and 
the exploiters--the traffickers.
  In February, the New York Times published its first story detailing 
widespread exploitation of migrant children. It includes countless 
stories of unaccompanied migrants who are working dangerous jobs that 
violate child labor laws: a 15-year-old girl, for example, who packages 
cereal at night in a factory; a 14-year-old boy working on a 
construction job; a 13-year-old day laborer; children working at meat 
processing plants, commercial bakeries, and suppliers for automakers. 
These are not after-school jobs. These are grueling and dangerous full-
time jobs that are meant not for children but for adults.

  Two months later, the Times published another story that detailed the 
extent to which the Biden administration officials knew about these 
abuses and chose to ignore them--willful ignorance.
  The Health and Human Services Department received warning after 
warning that some of these migrant children were at risk. These 
warnings came through government staffers, outside contractors, and on 
the Department's own hotline established for that purpose. But not only 
were whistleblowers ignored, many were silenced, pushed out of their 
jobs. They were retaliated against for trying to protect these 
vulnerable children. These concerns made their way to the highest 
echelons of the Biden administration.
  Health and Human Services Secretary Javier Becerra was aware of the 
credible reports of trafficking abuse but continued to push for the 
expedited placement of migrants with sponsors, with no regard for the 
dangers that presented.
  At one point, he reportedly told his employees:

       If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have 
     never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an 
     assembly line.

  So here is the highest level government official, the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services, a member of President Biden's Cabinet, who 
considers placing vulnerable migrant children in a dangerous situation, 
as he regards it as an assembly line.
  Then-Labor Secretary Marty Walsh was aware of the situation as well. 
Last year, the Department's investigators identified major instances of 
child labor violations that took place in auto parts factories and 
meatpacking plants. Former Secretary Walsh even confirmed that the 
Department included details about these situations in its weekly 
reports to the White House. So at least Secretary Walsh was appearing 
to do his job by reporting this to the top-level officials at the White 
House.
  Until last month, Susan Rice served as the Director of the White 
House Domestic Policy Council, where she oversaw virtually every aspect 
of domestic policy matters, including the placement of migrant 
children. When the border crisis reached a fever pitch during the 
summer of 2021, Ms. Rice's team received a memo from Health and Human 
Services managers about possible labor trafficking. Two people 
confirmed that Ms. Rice was told about the contents of the memo, but 
the White House now disputes that claim.
  High-ranking Biden officials saw clear warnings that children were in 
danger and chose willful blindness. They did nothing to rescue these 
children from a dangerous situation or to prevent more young migrants 
from meeting the same fate.
  In the wake of these damning reports, we have yet to see a thorough 
investigation or explanation of how this happened. How could the 
administration fail these children so badly over and over and over 
again? How could they not act on credible reports that children were 
being exploited?
  This is a disgusting failure of leadership, and it is dangerous. We 
need to get answers and accountability, and we need to fix it, 
something the Biden administration apparently does not care enough to 
do. If they did care, they would fix it. But they obviously don't care.
  Following the second New York Times report, I wrote a letter to 
Chairman Durbin of the Judiciary Committee that was cosigned by every 
Republican. We urged him to invite these three Biden administration 
leaders who failed to act in the face of these warnings to testify in 
front of the Judiciary Committee. That included Secretary Becerra, 
former Labor Secretary Walsh, and former White House adviser Susan 
Rice.
  The Judiciary Committee, on which I am privileged to serve, is 
charged with oversight of the Unaccompanied Children Program, and we 
have a duty to ensure that these children are treated humanely. We need 
to know who made the decision to loosen vetting requirements for 
sponsors and why those decisions were made. We need to hear from the 
current and former administration officials who knew about the 
widespread abuse of migrant children and yet chose not to act. We need 
a thorough explanation of how the Department is changing its policies, 
assuming it is, to prevent more children from being placed with 
dangerous sponsors. And we need to know how those responsible for these 
grotesque abuses will be held accountable.
  But in the Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, we didn't get any 
of that information. None of the officials that I mentioned that we 
requested actually testified. They didn't show up. So not only have 
they neglected the cries of these vulnerable children to do something--
anything--they didn't even care enough to show up at the Judiciary 
Committee yesterday to explain why they failed to act in the face of 
these cries for help. We didn't hear from a single current or former 
Biden administration official. There was not one witness on the five-
person panel who could shed light on the decisions that caused so many 
of these migrant children to be exploited.
  If our Democratic colleagues are as disturbed as I am about what I 
described, I hope they will join Republicans in a bipartisan push to 
get Secretary Becerra, Secretary Walsh, former White House domestic 
policy adviser Susan Rice to testify under oath before the Judiciary 
Committee and before the rest of the country.
  These senior administration officials saw the warning signs, and they 
chose to ignore them. They continued to press for the rapid placement 
of these children with sponsors, and they didn't apparently care enough 
to make sure that they could track where these children were and what 
was happening to them. Now they need to explain their decisions on 
behalf of the Biden administration to the Senate.
  I can't imagine the Biden administration doing a worse job responding 
to this border crisis than it has.
  If you set out to design a system that would fail, it would look 
something like the current policies of the Biden administration. By 
refusing to secure the border, the administration has allowed criminal 
organizations to smuggle fentanyl and other deadly drugs into the 
country. It has enabled more than 1.5 million ``got-aways'' to evade 
Border Patrol and slip into the United States.
  And it has released hundreds of thousands of migrants before we had 
sufficient information about who they were, where they were going, and 
when they needed to report to court. Migrants in some cities reportedly 
wait as long as 10 years to present an asylum claim in front of an 
immigration judge. And we know that only maybe 15, max 20 percent of 
them will be able to legitimately show a right to asylum.
  So the 80 to 85 percent have had to wait in line for 10 years--or the 
15 percent or so with valid claims have had to wait in line for 10 
years because of the 80 to 85 percent who can't qualify; but they have 
gummed up the system so bad by the sheer volume of cases, even people 
with legitimate claims can't get heard. And now we are seeing how the 
administration looked the other way and allowed migrant children to be 
exploited on American soil.
  So my question is, how long will we have to go before our colleagues 
join us in demanding a change? Because failure to do something is, in 
fact, a choice. Are we going to choose to let

[[Page S2113]]

this exploitation of these migrant children continue when the U.S. 
government who placed them with these sponsors doesn't even know where 
they are, whether they are getting a good education, whether their 
healthcare needs are being attended to, or whether they are being 
recruited in gangs, sex-trafficked, exploited, neglected?
  I started out by saying I don't believe the Biden administration 
cares; but I do believe Members of this body care. And it is within our 
power to change it. That is a choice, in and of itself.
  Now, some of my colleagues like the chairman of the Judiciary 
Committee said, yeah, we need to get together and talk about 
comprehensive immigration reform, but we have had those conversations 
the entire time I have been in the U.S. Senate. We cannot leverage 
these innocent children for other unrelated measures.
  The same problem with the fentanyl and drugs coming across the 
border. People say, well, we need to do something. Well, we can't do it 
until we do comprehensive immigration reform. The DACA population, the 
Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival, these young people who came here 
as children who now are in a box canyon not of their making because 
President Obama overreached and created a program without working with 
Congress.
  Each of those problems, I think, deserves to be addressed on its own 
merits. But you can't tell me that you are serious about solving the 
problem if you say, well, we can't do this, we can't fix those problems 
until we deal with all of the immigration issues as a whole, because I 
don't see that happening anytime soon. Meanwhile, these children will 
be languishing, being exploited, and worse.
  The young people who are uncertain about their future because they 
received this Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival, but now it has been 
held illegal, unconstitutional by a Federal judge in the Southern 
District of Texas--and the families that are grieving because their 
loved ones took a pill they thought was relatively innocuous, but it 
was contaminated with fentanyl, and their son or daughter lost their 
life--do you want to tell these people to keep waiting? Just wait until 
we pass a massive immigration reform bill containing other matters. You 
wait. They shouldn't have to wait. And we shouldn't let the neglect and 
the willful blindness of the Biden administration prevent us from doing 
our duty, Republican and Democratic Senators alike. It is within our 
power to do it. But doing nothing is a choice too. And I hope that is 
not a choice we will make.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Peters). The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I would ask unanimous consent to speak 
as if in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.