Stop Prosecuting Asylum Seekers and Separating Families

Floor Speech

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Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, last week a group of about a dozen of us wrote a letter to the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and the Attorney General. We demanded that the Trump administration cease its practice of prosecuting asylum seekers, to reunite the children they separated from their families, and to allow Members of Congress to visit the facilities where the children are being held.

We gave these three Trump administration Cabinet Secretaries a deadline to get back to us, and so far we have heard nothing, not a peep. So now we are trying to figure out how to make it clear to the Trump administration that agencies taking children from the arms of moms and dads is absolutely 100 percent unacceptable to us and most Americans.

Let's look at what is going on here. In order to get more of you on that side of the aisle elected or re-elected, the President and his henchmen have devised an election-year strategy to be as mean and nasty as possible to asylum seekers, to immigrants, refugees, and Latinos in general.

The President, and the Attorney General, and others have said that this is a national security strategy, and that our national security depends on taking toddlers, infants, and children, most of whom are under the age of 12, away from their parents.

Come on, really? How does jailing a scared, frightened, terrorized 8 year old who barely escaped with her life from Central America, make any of us safer?

Well, it doesn't. The only person who might be safer because an 8- year-old child is in jail is a Member of the House running for re- election on a get-tough-on-immigration platform.

And it isn't like they are taking these children from their parents and putting them on the other side of the jail or the other side of the for-profit detention center. No, they are taking the toddler, the infant, the 8 or 9 year old and taking them to a government facility somewhere else, maybe in New York, Chicago, Seattle, thousands of miles away.

And we are hearing the most horrific stories. Parents who have had their children taken from them have committed suicide.

Imagine how you would feel if you had to walk from El Salvador to Texas to save the life of your son or daughter, only to wind up in detention. Now, imagine that a man in a uniform comes up to you and says, hey, we are going to take your child for a bath. We are going to take them to see the doctor. And then hours go by and you realize they are gone, maybe forever. Can you imagine?

Can you sit quietly and do nothing when that is how your tax dollars are being spent?

We are scarring these children for the rest of their lives. We know this. Taking children from their families and institutionalizing them at a young age will have consequences for that child, and for this country, and our taxpayers, for the rest of their lives.

And we don't know for sure because none of the agencies have responded, but we hear that parents are going to court in mass trials and having their asylum claims denied--not heard, but denied--and then the parents are deported.

Does the government then go out and find the child in Chicago or Detroit, and send them back to their parents? Who knows? But probably not.

There is a certain devious and genuinely cruel kind of evil in separating a child from their mother. And they don't expect anyone on the Republican side of the aisle to say anything, because it is part of the strategy to help them keep their job.

Well, do you know what? Look, today, I am going to be joining with a group of hundreds of advocates from a diverse array of organizations, issues, and areas of this country, and we are going to demand answers.

And it is just not Luis Gutierrez, but my friend and ally, Joe Crowley. We will be together today at a rally at Freedom Plaza at 1:30 here in Washington, D.C., and Joe and I will have other Members, including some who signed that letter I talked about and got the ball rolling.

Because do you know what? We cannot sit back and let our government systematically ruin the lives of families and scar children for life. When we said ``never again,'' we meant it. Never again, and that means right here in the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a letter to the Cabinet Secretary, signed by 11 Democrats, demanding that answers be placed in the Record.

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