Unaccompanied Immigrant Children

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Paul), and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Gardner), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Paul), and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cruz), the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Gardner), the Senator from Oklahoma (Mr. Inhofe), the Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Paul), and the Senator from Florida (Mr. Rubio).
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, if this sounds like a case of deja vu, it is because we have been here before. I am talking specifically about the flow of unaccompanied minor children coming across our southwestern border, primarily through my State--the State of Texas--which shares a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico.

As the Presiding Officer knows, these children are coming not from Mexico but from Central America. This is a situation that about a year or so ago the President and his administration called a humanitarian crisis because we had this flow of unaccompanied children and some with their mothers, but mostly without, who came flooding across our border, and we were just simply struggling to keep up with them to deal with their safety, their health needs, and their security needs.

At that time we had a discussion about what we should do to protect these children to make sure they weren't victimized by human traffickers and other predators who might prey on their vulnerability when they get to the United States. Indeed, this morning, under the leadership of Chairman Portman from Ohio, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing to explore a disturbing and tragic problem related to this flow of unaccompanied children coming across our Nation's southern border.

After these children are apprehended by the Border Patrol, they are placed in the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure they receive proper care. Many of these children are recovering from abuse, exploitation, exhaustion, exposure from this incredible trip they would make from their country in Central America through Mexico into the United States, many on the back of a train system known colloquially as The Beast. Many of us have seen pictures of this train with people on top of it, not necessarily inside of it, and falling off, being injured, people being assaulted. It is a terrible experience.

So many of these children come to the United States recovering from abuse and exploitation after traveling more than 1,000 miles. This is a very important point: These are not good people who are bringing them here. They are part of a transnational criminal organization--the cartels in Mexico, the gangs who help distribute drugs, traffic in human beings, help facilitate illegal immigration. This has become a huge international business. If you ask almost anybody who has had any experience in this area, it is not like the old days when coyotes, as we call them in Texas and elsewhere, smuggled people across in onesies and twosies. These are people who smuggle a lot of people for the money they are able to generate. They, frankly, don't care about the individuals, but they do care about the money, and that is why they are in the business of smuggling these children from Central America across Mexico and into the United States.

Here is the immediate problem that Senator Portman's Subcommittee on Investigations revealed: Because the U.S. Government--the Department of Health and Human Services--does not adequately vet the sponsors with whom these children are placed once they come into the United States-- we know, for example, they admit these sponsors do not have to be American citizens. They don't even have to be family members. Shockingly, Health and Human Services is releasing many of these children to sponsors who have been convicted of serious crimes, including human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and violent offenses.

Instead of using commonsense procedures as we see in place, for example, in international adoptions, including extensive background checks, thorough interviews, and multiple home visits to make sure a child is being placed in a safe and secure situation, the placement process for these migrant children is riddled with loopholes for those who want to exploit it, and unfortunately there are evil people who want to exploit it and take advantage of these innocent children.

Some who may not have been following this issue may wonder: Why are we taking these children who are illegally entering the country and actually placing them with nonfamily member sponsors who haven't been vetted? The problem is that under current law, the Border Patrol cannot turn back people who enter the country illegally from noncontiguous countries. We can from Mexico, we can from Canada, but we can't if they come from a Central American country. So that is why they have to process them and get a placement for them as they issue a summons to them and say: You have a court date in front of an immigration judge in 3 months or 6 months or a year that is going to determine whether you have a legal basis upon which to stay in the United States.

Lo and behold, this should come as a surprise to no one. The vast majority of these people who illegally enter the country in this way never show up for their immigration hearing in front of a judge to determine whether they have a legal basis to stay. Indeed, because the Obama administration and ICE--Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is responsible for enforcing our immigration laws--because they simply have quit enforcing our laws once people enter the country, unless of course you have been arrested for some serious crime, this is actually a way to thread the needle and to beat the system and to succeed in illegally staying--immigrating and then staying in the United States.

Here again today I wish to focus on once these children are here, and I would think every person with a heart would want to say: Well, we have a responsibility to take care of them, at least until we can return them back home.

So I am grateful to the junior Senator from Ohio, Mr. Portman, for dedicating his time and energy into investigating such an important issue. I commend him for his leadership in doing so in a bipartisan way. I think most of us can agree with the main point that he raised this morning, which is that the administration has a duty to ensure the safety of these children once they are in the country. I would hope all people of good will would agree, whether they have a legal duty or not, they have a moral obligation to make sure these children are safe and not place them, because of negligence or inadvertence or just recklessness, in the hands of people who will exploit them and abuse them.

The subcommittee also released an important report in conjunction with this morning's hearing after a months-long investigation. The report confirms that HHS placement policies are--surprise--wholly insufficient and fail to adequately screen sponsors. They know they have a problem. They just don't have the will to do anything about it.

This is unacceptable. This is unacceptable that Health and Human Services knows its own placement process does not even come close to foster care or international adoption standards. For the safety and protection of these children, the status quo cannot continue.

I hope somebody will ask the President of the United States about this, because when we tried to pass a piece of legislation called the HUMANE Act to deal explicitly with this issue to raise the screening standards for sponsors here in the United States for these unaccompanied children, the administration and the President of the United States opposed it, and this is what they get. This is what they get--certainly not what they deserve. This is something anybody could have predicted and indeed did predict at the time if we did nothing to address it.

So what these children need now, as Senator Portman's report suggests, is certainly a more transparent process with robust oversight. That sounds kind of bureaucratic, but what we need is somebody who can make sure that no child is placed with somebody who is going to abuse them, exploit them or make their life a living hell while they are here. We also need to make sure they are given an opportunity to appear in front of an immigration judge because maybe they have some legal basis upon which to claim a right to stay in the United States under current law--but maybe not--and maybe the proper recourse is for these children to be returned to their home country. We have had this experience before, where there is no enforcement of our immigration laws when people know they can penetrate our border and come here and successfully stay, even though they don't comply with the law. Our laws lose all deterrent value; in other words, where there is deterrence, people don't come in the first place because they realize the likelihood is that they will be unsuccessful. That is an important goal of law enforcement. It is not necessarily to deal with every case once it is on our doorstep, but actually we want to deter people from breaking the law in the first place. That is why enforcement is so important.

So I wanted to come to the floor and express my appreciation to Senator Portman and his subcommittee for highlighting this issue but even more importantly to make sure that somehow, some way, somebody in the press, in the media is going to keep writing about this and exposing the facts. I hope we can reawaken the conscience of the Congress and the U.S. Government and say that this is simply unacceptable and we can work together to address it.

We must do more to protect these children who are vulnerable to exploitation. Back in November I joined the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. This was in response to a whistleblower who indicated those Departments were releasing unaccompanied children to criminal sponsors, many with ties to sex trafficking and human smuggling enterprises.

Unfortunately, recent news reports have just reinforced how broken the system is. Earlier this week, the Washington Post published an indepth account of several young Guatemalan children who were smuggled to a farm in Ohio to be used as slave labor after authorities released them from human traffickers. So these children from Guatemala went from being trafficked to being basically indentured servants for slave labor in Ohio. Instead of keeping them in protective custody in an HHS shelter or placing them in a suitable safe environment, these children were reportedly forced to live in roach-infested trailers and their lives were threatened if they attempted to escape.

This is a gut-wrenching story, but it is only one story. This Senator dares to say that the U.S. Government, Health and Human Services, and the Obama administration can't tell us how many other children have been exposed to such terrible abuse and mistreatment. We are now learning that these stories are not uncommon. Of course, given the process by which Health and Human Services and the administration place these children--not with American citizens, not with even family members without vetting them--what else would be expected?

The Associated Press recently reported similar stories from across the country, including accounts of teens forced to work around the clock just to stay in a safe place to live. One young girl was reportedly locked inside her house, basically kept in a prison, and there are reports of some unaccompanied children who had been sexually assaulted by their sponsors.

With more than 95,000 unaccompanied children crossing our southern border illegally over the last 2 years, these reports likely only scratch the surface of the horrors these children are enduring. And it is not over. There are more coming every day. Indeed, we have seen that the peaks and valleys of the flow of unaccompanied children across the border are seasonal. As we get out of the winter and into the warmer months, we will continue to see these children flow across at higher levels than they are now. But there were 95,000 in the past 2 years.

This surge of children coming across our border has exposed our Nation's vulnerability to human smugglers and these transnational criminal organizations. It has shown that inadequate border security can contribute to a humanitarian crisis that endangers the lives of the children who are turned over by their parents to dangerous predators and smuggled into the United States.

Let's be clear on this point. Once these children arrive in the United States, our government has a duty to protect them and ensure they are no longer preyed upon by criminals and traffickers. But then we have a responsibility to make sure that if they can't legally stay in the United States because they have no valid claim to asylum or refugee status--our laws need to be enforced until those laws are changed by Congress.

The United States could see a new surge of these children pouring across our southern border in the coming months. In fact, I will predict here today that we will. We know from historical trends that these types of surges are not likely until the spring or summer months. We shouldn't just stand around here or sit on our hands and ignore this growing crisis.

There is a legislative response that I would recommend to my colleagues. I was proud to sponsor a piece of legislation last Congress called the Helping Unaccompanied Alien Minors and Alleviating National Emergency Act, or the HUMANE Act in short. This legislation would require all potential sponsors of unaccompanied children to undergo a rigorous biometric criminal history check. Let's check to make sure the government is not placing these kids with known criminals. There are records we could easily discover if we just bothered to check those records and to make sure we don't inadvertently place these children in the hands of sex offenders or people who will merely traffic them to someone else.

Given the clear threat these children face and the anecdotes which I have described here and which are described in horrific fashion in Senator Portman's report, it is irresponsible for us not to do something about this while we can. There is more we can do and should do to ensure that these children are treated safely and securely while they are with us. I believe the provisions of my legislation would be a good start. If anybody has a better idea, I am certainly willing to hear and work with them.

Before we see another humanitarian crisis of huge proportion of young children coming across our borders, I hope the Senate will take a look at the concerns exposed in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report led by Senator Portman.

I look forward to reintroducing the HUMANE Act soon as a way to at least in part begin the process of addressing this new humanitarian crisis in the making.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source