[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13700-13703]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   THE CRISIS AT OUR SOUTHERN BORDER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. 
King) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be 
recognized to address you here on the United States floor of the House 
of Representatives in this most deliberative body that we have and are. 
I appreciate the comments and the position taken by the gentleman from 
Arizona ahead of me. He is one who has lived along the border for a 
lifetime. He deals with the issue every day, every week. He is one of 
the individuals that I look to to inform me, but also I have taken a 
real interest in it myself.
  Even though I am from the heart of the heartland, from Iowa, Mr. 
Speaker, I have a great appreciation for the Constitution and the rule 
of law. Because of that, I have watched as the lawlessness has grown 
along our border.
  I will say that certainly in all of the time that I have been in this 
Congress and in the years building up to it, and less so in the years 
prior to that, and I take myself back to 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed 
the Amnesty Act of 1986 due to the counsel that he had around him, I 
believed at the time that he would veto that bill because of his 
reverence for the rule of law would overcome all of the counsel that 
came from the House and the Senate and the people around him. Well, 
Reagan relented and signed the bill on the promise that we would 
legalize roughly a million people in exchange for the enforcement of 
the law thereafter and that there would never be another amnesty again 
so long as this country would live.
  The 1 million became 3 million, and the amnesties that were added to 
that in smaller proportions added up to at least 6, perhaps 7, in 
addition to the 1986 amnesty. And here we are today, having fought off 
this amnesty these years for more than a decade that I have been 
directly involved in the immigration policy, and we are on the cusp of 
it again.
  The President of the United States stood up there in front of you 
where you are, Mr. Speaker, and he gave his State of the Union address 
here on the floor of the House of Representatives and essentially, and 
figuratively, he waved his ink pen at us and he said: Congress, you do 
what I tell you on immigration. I want comprehensive immigration 
reform. I want you to pass the Senate Gang of Eight amnesty act.
  Now I am speaking figuratively, of course, because that is not a 
direct quote of the President, but it is certainly the message that the 
President delivered: Do what I tell you to do, or I will use my, in one 
other setting, his cell phone, or his ink pen, to act in a unilateral--
he didn't say it, but he knows it--unconstitutional fashion.
  I can think of another night during the State of the Union address 
when our President came here and he spoke right in front of you, Mr. 
Speaker, and he pointed down here to the Supreme Court and he lectured 
the Supreme Court on what they should do, as if somehow he were article 
III, somehow he was the man who commanded the Supreme Court of the 
United States. And the camera was looking over at the Justices as the 
President lectured them on the Constitution and the rule of law as if 
the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the United States 
Supreme Court needed to get a lesson from an adjunct professor of the 
University of Chicago School of Law who taught Constitution law for 10 
years in Chicago. He should go to school with every one of those 
Justices, Mr. Speaker.
  And one of them, the television cameras repeated it over and over 
again until they read the lips, and they interpreted his lips to say 
``not true, not true.'' That seat that that camera was focused on has 
been empty ever since. It has been empty ever since because that 
Justice, and I suspect a number of other Justices, decided I am not 
going to listen to that again. I am not going to listen to a President 
that is out of bounds, a President who believes somehow he can lecture 
to the judicial branch of government, that he can lecture to the 
judicial branch of government, that he can stand here at this rostrum 
as a guest of the House of Representatives and wave his ink pen or 
finger at us and announce that we shall do in this Congress what he 
commands or he will do so in a unconstitutional fashion. Essentially, 
what did the President say? So sue me. The President says: I am going 
to do what I am going to do. I know it is lawless, it is 
unconstitutional, so sue me.
  So today we passed here on the floor of the House of Representatives 
a resolution that declares that the House of Representatives has 
standing to go before the court to command the President to take care 
that the laws be faithfully executed.
  We have had multiple hearings before the Judiciary Committee in the 
House of Representatives. We have had excellent constitutional scholars 
come forward. There hasn't been one who can carry water for the 
President's position and hold his own under the scrutiny of the 
constitutional lawyers and other scholars that we have on the Judiciary 
Committee who take them apart one by one, argument by argument, piece 
by piece. And yet the President of the United States persists in 
asserting that he can be article I, the legislative branch of 
government, the United States Congress, and he can be article III, the 
judicial branch of government, and the sole commander of the executive 
branch, article II.
  He is the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces. He leads from 
behind. He stepped back and followed the French into Libya, and he 
waited for the British to go before the House of Commons and vote down 
David Cameron's initiative to go into Syria, and then the President of 
the United States, following--and leading from behind is the very 
definition of following--the President of the United

[[Page 13701]]

States then offers to Congress, through trial balloons through the 
press, that he would like to have Congress endorse military action in 
Syria.
  Where is our leader? Where is our Commander in Chief? Well, he is off 
in the never, never land of advancing administrative amnesty, calling 
together his smartest, leftist lawyers that he can find, Mr. Speaker, 
and saying to them: Put your think tanks together. You guys go grab the 
best brains you can find, attached to the leftist brains you are, and 
see if you can come up with a strategic plan that I can grant some 
administrative amnesty to the maximum number of people because, Lord 
knows, there aren't enough undocumented Democrats in America. We need 
more of them. We need an endless supply and endless stream of them. And 
where do they come from? Well, they come across our southern border 
primarily, although they come in other ways.

                              {time}  2130

  And Democrats in here, when the President says to Congress: Thou 
shall pass the bills that I tell you to pass or I am going to use my 
pen to unconstitutionally--that is in parentheses, Mr. Speaker--enact 
executive edicts that will do what I want done, regardless of whether 
it has the support and the will of the people or not--we are the 
support and the will of the people--when the President said that he is 
going to enact those immigration unconstitutional executive edicts, 
when the President uttered that, I saw a little less than half of this 
Chamber rise in a spontaneous standing ovation, enthusiasm for the 
President's statement.
  It reminds me of the one Democrat who said: I am marching for 
abortion rights because my mother didn't have that opportunity. Who 
would say that? If your mother didn't have the opportunity to have an 
abortion, but you want to march so that you wish she would have, that 
means you wish you had never been born. And this Congress with less 
than half of it, a bunch of Democrats over here, cheered the President 
when he said: I am going to usurp your article I legislative authority, 
and I am going to write legislative law with my pen the way I see fit. 
And they cheered.
  These are the same people that stood here on the floor of the House a 
year ago last January and took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend 
the Constitution of the United States so help them God. And they say: 
Well, we were glad when the President decides he is going to roll over 
Congress, roll over the House, roll over the Senate, roll over the 
judicial branch by intimidating them into, some say, a decision on 
ObamaCare that would not conform with the constitutional directives 
that they have.
  We are in a mess, Mr. Speaker. We are in a mess, and we have the 
President of the United States poised during August, when this Congress 
has every year been out of session because our Founding Fathers and our 
early, early leaders recognized that Washington, D.C., gets to be a hot 
and humid place in the month of August, and you need a little break to 
get out of the circle of the Beltway that causes Potomac fever to go 
back to your districts so you can look real people in the eye and hear 
from them. That has been the tradition of this country.
  Some people complain that Members of Congress actually go home. I 
would say on the other way around, if we didn't go home we would hear a 
lot of complaints. It is important that we go back to our districts and 
go out and hear from the people that we have the honor and privilege to 
represent, and we will do that, maybe as early as tomorrow, Mr. 
Speaker.
  But the President is poised to follow through on his threat to issue 
the edict, not a lawful act, not a lawful executive order, an edict, 
that he would give a lawful status to 5 or 6 million illegal aliens, 
many of them, maybe most of them, probably not all of them, criminal 
aliens.
  He has issued orders to the Department of Justice to examine how they 
can get an early release for people who are in our prisons who have 
been sentenced. That is hundreds of thousands, as many as 400,000 
felons that the President would release on the streets of America. He 
has released criminals to the tune of 36,000-plus out onto the streets. 
That is in one category. There is another category of tens of thousands 
more.
  And he has opened up our borders by signing the documents and the 
Morton Memos--not physically signed, he had his subordinates do that--
and the Morton Memos say we are not going to enforce a law against 
people who didn't commit a felony or aren't guilty of these three 
mysterious misdemeanors. And they said that if you came into the United 
States illegally, theoretically through no fault of your own, if you 
did so before your 18th birthday and you did so before December 31 of 
2011, then you get to stay for the duration of this permit that he 
manufactures lawlessly out of thin air.
  And then he manufactures a work permit so that these people can 
compete for jobs against naturalized and natural born American citizens 
and green card holders, who likely did it the legal way.
  Because he gets a political kick out of this, a political bonus out 
of this, because he is bringing in undocumented Democrats, and they 
have a plan to document them so they can vote, we have a situation here 
where the constitutional underpinnings of America are in crisis mode. 
The employment in America is at great risk and under great threat, and 
the security of our border is very weak.
  I went down, Mr. Speaker, last weekend, down to the southern tip of 
Texas, down to the mouth of the Rio Grande, planted a flag right there 
at the southern tip where the waters of the Rio Grande flow out into 
the sea, and then followed the river to Brownsville and went through 
the ports of entry at Brownsville, other facilities in Brownsville, on 
up into McAllen and to the ports of entry there, to the border patrol 
centers there, to a resettlement center there, and on up all the way to 
Laredo.
  And from what I saw and what I heard, from our Border Patrol, from 
our Customs and Border Protection, from the Department of Public Safety 
in Texas, and others, they are good people, a lot of them with uniforms 
on, that are doing a good job, doing the best they can with what they 
have to work with.
  We have a lawless order from the President, DACA, Deferred Action for 
Childhood Arrivals, which is more accurately DACA, Deferred Action for 
Criminal Aliens. DACA has become the magnet that the coyotes have used 
to advertise throughout the Central American countries, in particular, 
El Salvador, Honduras, and also Guatemala. People that are already in 
the United States oftentimes will save up money, maybe borrow money, 
and send it down to Central America to the tune of, the lowest number 
that I pick up is $4,000 a head, on up to 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe even 
$9,000, for the coyotes to transport an illegal alien into the United 
States.
  They are coming into America in the southern tip of Texas and the Rio 
Grande Valley sector of the border in numbers that work out this way. 
The unaccompanied alien children, UACs as they are known, and referred 
to sometimes as ``unaccompanied alien juveniles,'' number this way: 
this fiscal year, from October 1 to June 15, 57,000 UACs, unaccompanied 
alien children--57,000. That number has surely grown to over 60,000, 
probably over 70,000, predicted to go to 90,000 for this fiscal year.
  The peak of this thing seems to have passed behind us. We are either 
in a temporary lull, or we have seen the peak behind us. But, in any 
case, when we think of numbers in the area of 60,000 unaccompanied 
alien children coming into the United States, that is only 20 percent 
of the overall population coming in. So we are at 300,000 or more. But 
of those roughly 60,000--the number that we surpassed--here is how they 
break down: 80 percent male, 20 percent female.
  The 80 percent male and the 20 percent female also need to take into 
account that these are not kids that range from age 1 day to 1 day 
before their 18th birthday, Mr. Speaker. These are unaccompanied alien 
children that have a demographic breakdown that works like this: 80 
percent male, 83 percent that are either the ages of 15, 16,

[[Page 13702]]

or 17. Once they are 18, they are no longer qualified as UACs--83 
percent.
  So I do the simple math, Mr. Speaker, and I say: 0.8, 80 percent, 
times 0.83, 83 percent, 15, 16, or 17 years old--that means that 66.4 
percent of these unaccompanied alien ``children'' are young men ages 
15, 16, and 17 years old. They come from the most violent countries in 
the world. The six most violent countries in the world are south of 
Mexico. It is not Mexico, it is south of Mexico, Mr. Speaker. Eight of 
the 10 most violent countries in the world are also south of Mexico.
  It is a fact, according to the United Nation's data, that of the most 
violent countries in the world, only Honduras is more violent than the 
city of Detroit. Yet, there are those in this Congress that are 
convinced, because the Central American countries have a high degree of 
violence, that the people are leaving those countries because of the 
violence, and they are scared and they are running off. Well, if that 
is so, then one would think they would be running out of Detroit at a 
pace similar to the pace they are running out of Guatemala and El 
Salvador and other violent countries down there--probably run a little 
faster out of Honduras than they are out of the other countries, than 
they are maybe out of Detroit.
  But as I said in a Judiciary Committee hearing, in response to the 
witness' testimony that was there, I said: If we are going to bring 
these kids to the United States because they are afraid where they are, 
we had better not take them to Detroit because they will be in more 
danger there, unless they came from Honduras. Those are the facts, and 
those are the data. Yes, they come from violent countries, and they 
come from countries that are controlled to a high degree by drug 
cartels.
  But here is what is happening. The families that are sending people 
here usually have one or more members in the United States now. They 
may have left their kids back in their home country in Honduras. They 
will send money down there, they might borrow money. Then usually 
locally they will hire a coyote that is going to smuggle them up into 
the United States.
  Then the family most often, not 100 percent of the time, but most 
often, whoever is in custody of this young girl that might be 12 or 13 
or 14, or on up to 17 or older, they go down to the local pharmacy, 
where a prescription is not required, and they buy a monthly supply of 
contraceptives, birth control bills, and they take it back and they 
start giving those birth control pills to that girl, and then send her 
across 2,000 to 2,500 miles of dangerous Central America and Mexico to 
get on the train of death--it is called ``The Beast,'' and ride that 
train up as near the Rio Grande as possible. Then that child has to get 
off of there and make their way to the Rio Grande River, then pay a 
coyote to get a ride across the river, and then submit themselves to 
the U.S. authorities.
  We went to center after center, we talked to people after people that 
had been working with these unaccompanied alien children, and we asked 
them how many of them are sexually assaulted, how many of them are 
raped? And the answers came back a guess, but a range, a range between 
30 percent and 70 percent.
  Think of it, Mr. Speaker. Think of having a daughter and living in El 
Salvador and deciding, I want to send her to her mother in the United 
States or her aunt in the United States, or being an aunt in El 
Salvador and you want to send your niece to her mother in the United 
States. You get a wire that sends you down $5,000 or $6,000, and you go 
out into the neighborhood and you solicit a coyote, and then you say, I 
want to send this niece or my daughter up to America, but why don't you 
wait a few days because I have got to go down and buy some birth 
control pills and make sure she is ready for the trip, because I am 
pretty confident she is going to be raped along the way.
  That is what is going on, Mr. Speaker. It is not going on now and 
then; it is going on from a third to 70 percent of the time for the 
girls, and they told us that the numbers of boys were equivalent to the 
numbers of girls who were sexually assaulted. That was a question that 
was repeated over and over again.
  So this President has done real damage and destruction to the rule of 
law. The result of that is America is flooded with illiterate, 
unskilled people into the job categories where we have the highest 
available employment, the highest ratios of unemployment. The double-
digit unemployment exists in the lowest-skilled jobs. There is no 
metric out there that suggests that we should be bringing more 
unskilled people in, more people who are illiterate in their own 
language into America, thinking somehow that that is work that 
Americans won't do.
  Nuts. There is no work that Americans won't do. There has been no 
work that I won't do. I have done some of the toughest, nastiest, most 
difficulty, and some of the dangerous jobs that the country has to 
offer, and I haven't come close to doing the jobs that the United 
States Marine Corps does on a regular basis.
  What is the most dangerous job that we ask an American to do? How 
about rooting terrorists out of places like Fallujah? How about taking 
on radical al Qaeda extremists in places like Afghanistan?
  When the Marine Corps goes into Fallujah for the first or second 
battle, and we have seen what has happened since then, what do they get 
paid to put their lives on the line? If you figure it at 40 hours a 
week, something like $8.49 an hour, Mr. Speaker. That is back then when 
I calculated it, when we had operations going on then. If you can pay a 
United States marine $8.49 an hour to lock and load and go into a place 
like Fallujah, you can't convince me that there is work that Americans 
won't do, especially if it pays an appropriate wage and we respect the 
work that gets done.
  So we have a President who has decided he is going to defy the rule 
of law, and he is going to manufacture law as he goes and create work 
permits out of thin air.

                              {time}  2145

  When we see this calamity of the huge hole in our southern border, 
primarily at McAllen, Texas, the House of Representatives decides it 
wants to overreact to the President of the United States, and since 
they are afraid that they will somehow get the blame if nothing gets 
done in the month of August, they decided to bring a piece of 
legislation here to the floor.
  This piece of legislation was written by a staff person that was once 
that of John McCain, and we know what he has brought for immigration 
policy. It has been very troubling to me to deal with the legislation 
that he has supported, but I have this in my hand here on the floor, 
Mr. Speaker.
  It doesn't do what it is advertised to do. It doesn't do what needs 
to be done, but it grants this. If there is an unaccompanied alien 
child, here are the consequences for failure to appear to a hearing:

       Any alien who fails to appear at a proceeding required 
     under this section, shall be ordered removed in absentia if 
     the government establishes by a preponderance of the evidence 
     that the alien was at fault for their absence from the 
     proceedings.

  No evidence can be admitted into that proceeding after the fact, and 
it can't be admitted if they don't anticipate that there is not going 
to be an appearance of the alien, so that means the government has to 
prove by a preponderance of the evidence that it was the alien's fault 
they didn't show up.
  The only way I know that you can do that is if you have a video 
camera on them, and they are sitting on the couch, Mr. Speaker. This is 
a wide open hole that grants a pass under that provision. Then it says:

       In General--at the conclusion of a proceeding under this 
     section, the immigration judge shall determine whether an 
     unaccompanied alien child is likely to be admissible to the 
     United States.

  They get a new hearing under a new section created, which is 235, and 
if the preponderance of the evidence indicates that they might receive 
asylum and if they think they are likely to receive asylum in a 
separate category, then 50 percent plus 1 is preponderance--likely is 
50 percent plus 1. Fifty percent of 50 percent is 25 percent, plus

[[Page 13703]]

one, are the odds that they need to claim in order to receive a hearing 
for asylum.
  So if you have got a one in four shot at it, Mr. Speaker, you are 
going to get a hearing for asylum. Then you are going to get an asylum 
hearing, and then if you are turned down at the asylum hearing, you get 
to go to a removal hearing. That is three bites at the apple. They are 
all renewable; times two, that is six different bites at the apple.
  No such thing exists for Mexican unaccompanied alien children. The 
determination is made under the Wilberforce law of 2008 by the Border 
Patrol whether or not they go back to Mexico.
  They purport that this bill treats the other than Mexican 
unaccompanied alien children the same as the existing law treats 
unaccompanied alien Mexican children. Mr. Speaker, if it does, there is 
language in here that then diminishes our ability to send the Mexican 
kids back. That is what we have. We have a bill that has been whipped 
to be something that it is not.
  I offered an amendment to the Rules Committee tonight. There was a 
long discussion and debate over it, Mr. Speaker, but here is what we 
have: my amendment said that we have got to fix the 2008 William 
Wilberforce language.
  By the way, no Republican voted for that, not one. It was introduced 
on December 9, 2008. It was taken up by a unanimous consent request 
after everybody left town on December 10, 2008. It was passed by voice 
in the House, sent to the Senate. The Senate caught the lateral and 
passed it by voice to the President.
  We didn't see that bill. It became a component of what they have 
utilized as an open door; coupling the 2008 bill with an expansive 
reading of the asylum language and the President's DACA language is 
what is bringing these tens of thousands of unaccompanied alien minors 
here, which are only 20 percent of the overall group that are coming.
  There are also family units--usually, mothers with a child or 
children. There are individual males coming in, in significant numbers. 
I have said that we have imported at least 40,000 15-year-old, 16-year-
old, and 17-year-old boys--prime gang recruitment age--and that doesn't 
give you the data on those that are 18, 19, 20, 25 to 31; and those are 
just the ones that are covered under DACA.
  I offered an amendment that would have cut off all funding to DACA. 
It mirrors the Cruz-Blackburn language. It is good language, and it 
should be part of this bill. It is not, by the information I have, Mr. 
Speaker.
  There is a 2008 fix that I wrote over a month ago that needs to be 
part of this bill. It is not, by the report I am getting from the Rules 
Committee, Mr. Speaker. I don't know that there was even a vote on it 
up in the Rules Committee.
  There is asylum language that has been offered by the chairman of the 
Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, that fixes some of the expansive 
utilization of asylum that is allowing for people to be distributed all 
over the United States at taxpayers' expense. That is not part of this 
bill, Mr. Speaker.
  We don't have a deliberative process in this Congress because they 
are not going to allow a legitimate vote, and the language that is out 
here is bad.
  Mr. Speaker, I will vote ``no'' on this bill that has come before us, 
and I am going to have to consider what I do on the rule, but if this 
House sends a message to support cutting off all funding to enforce or 
implement DACA, that will be constructive because it will say to the 
President: these are the Republicans that have at least a chance of 
standing up against you if you decide that you are going to function in 
a lawless, unconstitutional manner in the month of August--or any other 
month--with regard to this granting any expansion of the lawlessness 
that we have seen today.
  Mr. Speaker, with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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