Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, on May 5 of this year, NASA launched the InSight rocket. That probe, the InSight probe, has traveled 300 million miles since May of this year and has touched down safely on Mars. It is a remarkable achievement. The United States is the only country in the world that has any probes on Mars. We have several now that are moving around and are stable. The technology behind that--the thought, the design, the engineering, the work--is a remarkable achievement for the science community.

The 300 million-plus miles that it has traveled since May and to be able to land safely is a remarkable achievement. I compared that 300- mile journey of the InSight probe and safely landing on Mars to our now two-decades-long conversation trying to solve immigration.

As Americans, we have figured out how to travel 300 million miles, but we have not been able to figure out how to manage our own immigration policy. This is the 10th time I have come to this floor to talk about immigration in just the last 3 years.

Earlier this year in February, we had a tremendous amount of work that was happening here in the Senate to try to come to a set of agreements about how we can manage the immigration policy in the United States, and those agreements failed. While InSight was traveling 300 million miles, the Senate still did nothing to solve the issue of immigration.

We watched today several thousand people in Tijuana living in a soccer stadium after they left from Honduras. They traveled into Guatemala. The Guatemalans deported several thousands of them and said: You didn't cross legally from Honduras into Guatemala.

Then they approached the border between Guatemala and Mexico, and Mexico put their law enforcement and their military on the border and said: You can't just cross the border illegally from Guatemala to Mexico. Then they charged the bridge, overran the law enforcement and the military of the Mexican police, went around into the river, and then regrouped again and continued to move forward to Mexico.

Mexico offered them asylum, which I thought was incredibly gracious, based on the way they crossed into Mexico. Mexico offered them asylum and the ability to stay in Mexico. They offered them assistance all along the way. They did arrest some troublemakers along the way.

Now they have made their way all the way through Mexico, and they are just outside San Diego. A few days ago, the same group rushed our border to see if our border would cave the same way the southern border of Mexico did. Yet we did not.

Interestingly enough, that group of several thousand people who rushed the border, who are now parked on that border, are literally living within a few 100 yards of the largest legal border crossing in the world--the San Diego crossing. There are 100,000 people a day who legally cross the border from Mexico into the United States, within feet of where they charged the border and demanded to get entry into the United States. Let me just set that for you again side by side. There are 100,000 people every single day who legally cross the border from Mexico into the United States at the Tijuana-San Diego crossing. Yet the attention is not on the 100,000 who are legally crossing the border. The cameras are turned toward the few thousand who are trying to rush the border illegally. Our perspective is out of whack.

We are not a closed country to immigration. We are an open country to immigration. There are 1.1 million people who last year became citizens of the United States--1.1 million--but we are a Nation that has order and structure.

We have 1 million people every single day who leave the United States, coming in legally either through Canada or through Mexico or based on flights. Our law enforcement folks who handle all the issues there--Border Patrol, customs, and all of the different folks from ICE--do a tremendous job every single day.

I think Secretary Nielsen and her leadership has been stellar in their leadership to help manage through a PR nightmare that has been created because the cameras want to focus on a few people crossing illegally and refuse to turn the cameras just 15 degrees and focus on 100,000 people coming across the border legally.

We do have to do something about our immigration policy. We are a Nation that has been open to immigrants our entire history as a nation, and we remain so and should remain so.

But the question seems to get spun up on this one issue: What do we do about someone who intentionally breaks the law to come into our country? How do we treat them versus the person who has gone through the process and who is legally coming into the country? Are they to be treated the same if they illegally cross the border at San Diego as someone who legally crosses the border at San Diego, or do we treat them differently?

Last year, there were 400,000 people who were arrested for illegally crossing our southern border--400,000. Again, that may seem like an incredibly large number, but let me put that back in perspective. Half a million people--that would be 500,000 people--legally cross our border on the south every day. So we had 400,000 people arrested crossing our southern border illegally--400,000--but yet over the total of an entire year, there are 400,000 people arrested, but every single day 500,000 people legally cross our entire southern border. As I mentioned, 100,000 of those are just at San Diego.

We, as Americans, need to make decisions about how we are going to handle immigration. I think we have to get some numbers and some perspective in place because all of the attention seems to be distracting us from the actual facts and numbers. So let me run through some things.

There has been a lot of conversation about family units, about what it means for family units to be able to come in and whether family units should be separated. Let me make it very clear. I have been very outspoken to say that family units need to stay together whenever possible.

We are Americans. We are very passionate about families. If a family unit crosses the border illegally, as much as possible, we need to keep that family unit together. That may mean we need to have them in a spot in a detention unit or someplace where they can actually stay together as a family as much as possible, but, for whatever reason, the courts have not allowed us to go through that system. I think that is something that this Congress needs to respond to and needs to step up to, but this Congress has been unwilling to have the votes that it takes to make sure family units stay together because the drama of tearing families apart looks so much better on TV.

What has been the result of that? The result is a massive increase in the number of children who are coming to our border. This may sound familiar to you, and it should. In 2014, under the time of President Obama, he announced the DACA proposal, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, President Obama looked at those individuals who were living in the country here, who had been here for a long time, who came as children. Their parents broke the law by crossing the border, but they were children.

In American law, we do not punish children for the actions of their parents. We don't do that. So President Obama looked at these kids and said: You have grown up in our country. Your parents violated the law, but you did not. We are going to give you deferred action. We are going to give you the opportunity to be able to work and to be able to live here. It wasn't citizenship, but it is an opportunity to stay here and to work.

As soon as that was announced, within months, the American border started being flooded with unaccompanied minors--kids 17 years old and younger who would cross the border. They showed up in the thousands. They were brought by human smugglers from Central America who make their living moving people from Central America to the United States. That business started traveling all through Central America saying: President Obama is going to allow you to be able to stay in the country. He has just announced this program, and if you will go now with me, you will get to stay in America.

So parents were literally surrendering their teenagers, most of them boys, and saying to their boys: Go to America and go find a job and work and send money back. They would send their kids with human smugglers.

President Obama then said: Time out. That is not what I said. President Obama was very clear to say: You had to have been here years ago. You are not eligible if you cross the border now. Do not come.

Our State Department actively worked to get the message out in Central America, saying: Do not come. You will not be able to stay.

But the human smugglers were telling them: They are just kidding. I am going to take you, and we will show you that we can get you in.

What happened is that they started bringing kids by the thousands up to the border. When they got there, they were introduced to the border folks. They would go in, and they would get an opportunity to all stay. They would get a piece of paper that said they can't be deported while they go through their paperwork.

Those kids then were taking a picture of that piece of paper, saying: I got in. I am legal.

They were snapping that picture and sending it back on social media to their friends in Central America. It just accelerated, and it blew up into huge numbers.

In my State of Oklahoma, President Obama used one of the military bases there in Watonga, OK. He converted one of the dorms and was moving unaccompanied minors into this military base around a big giant fence in the middle of the base, just as he used other military bases to house unaccompanied minors because they were coming in such large numbers that they couldn't be managed. That was under President Obama's time.

It took a long time--several years--to get the message back out to Central America: Stop sending your unaccompanied minors because it is not just an automatic entry.

Then the conversation started about family units, saying: If you come as a family unit, you are going to be able to get in.

Now, that is not what everybody was saying here, but that is what the smugglers said back in Central America. They said: Hey, the Americans allow you to come in if you come in as a family unit. So bring a child with you, and you can get in.

Over the last year, we have watched the number of adults showing up with a child on our southern border dramatically increase by the tens of thousands--an unintended consequence.

It is interesting. Some may have noted over the weekend a Washington Post story that was titled: ``For Central Americans, children open a path to the U.S.--and bring a discount.'' The Washington Post story was a story about research they are doing in Central America on these human smugglers and what they are doing now in their business. In the story they detailed that it will cost $10,000 if you travel as an adult, but if you bring a child with you, you and the child can come for $4,500. So it is half price if you bring a kid, and families are so desperate in that area to get some kind of assistance that, literally, adult males, mostly, are going to families and saying: Let me take your child with me. I will get a discount, and then I will send you some cash back, and I will try to enroll this child in an American school or find somebody to take care of them.

We have individuals who are now showing up at our southern border who are bringing a child they are not related to because they get a discount on their human smuggling time, and they get more expedited process to be able to actually get across the border to request asylum. Although, they are not actually requesting asylum. They are just getting across the border and trying to find a job. It is economics.

Do we not see what is happening? We are encouraging the human trafficking of children from Central America, from unrelated adults, to come here. It has a nickname in Central America now, which the Washington Post story highlighted. It is called ``adoptions.'' That is the new nickname--that I am going to take my child and adopt them out to some unrelated adult so they can get into America cheaper and faster, and, hopefully, things turn out for that kid as well. Our broken immigration system is encouraging this, and we need to address it.

Over the last 2 years, Congress has appropriated about $1.7 billion to build 124 miles of new or replacement fencing along the border. This funding is not some tall, concrete tapeworm running along the southern border. It is a fence.

In 2006, it wasn't controversial for the Secure Fence Act. The Secure Fence Act built 650 miles of wall--fence--along the southern border. That fence was very effective.

For instance, earlier this year, Congress provided funding to replace 14 miles of fencing along the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. For the last 20 years, the border between Tijuana and San Diego has been actually old metal sheets from the Vietnam era that were used in Vietnam to lay out on the jungle floor to land helicopters on. They took that old sheet metal decades ago when they brought it back, and then they used it as the fencing between San Diego and Tijuana. That fencing is being replaced.

Congress provided the funding, and DHS has done 18-foot-high, bollard-style fencing, open fencing that you can see through, not the solid sheet metal that is up there. Although the actual final results haven't been released on it yet, the border agents on the ground have said they used to have 10 illegal crossings a day through that old- style fencing. Now they have one illegal crossing a month through that new fencing.

For all of the whining and all of the conversation I hear, which is that if you build a fence, it is just a ladder, it has dropped from 10 a day to 1 a month, just when the fencing changed. It also allows our agents to see a danger or a risk on the other side and respond to it.

By the end of the next fiscal year, DHS will have completed about 120 miles of new fencing in California, Nevada, and Texas. They have also installed 100 different video towers because it is not about fencing, it is also about technology and the ability to see what is happening at the border. We don't need fencing in every area of a 2,000-mile border.

Just since January 2017 until now, DHS has put up 31 different fixed surveillance towers along the southern border. They have put in 74 different remote video surveillance systems all along our southern border and 7 command and control facilities on the southern border. They put up a tunnel threat program. They have put in what is called a linear ground detection system and a fiber optic detection system across our southern border in many areas to detect the tunnels that are being dug to move illegal narcotics, mostly, in those tunnels, rather than people. They put up mobile surveillance systems.

This is not just about fencing, it is also about technology. DHS has done both, and it is making a difference.

While the cameras are focused on children coughing from tear gas at our southern border, we need to ask ourselves a question: What are we doing in the policy that is encouraging people to bring children to the border thinking they are going to get faster access if they can illegally cross? Why is this happening? How do we stop it with our policy?

This Nation should continue to be open. We should continue to receive immigrants from around the world, including from Central America and from Mexico. I have neighbors and friends all through my community who are from Central America and from Mexico. They are welcome citizens of our country. They are part of the fabric of who we are--people from all over the world--but I have a very difficult time saying that 100,000 people at the San Diego crossing who are crossing legally should be ignored every single day for the sake of a few thousand who want to crash the fence, who crashed the barriers in Southern Mexico and who are working to crash the barriers here. We need to have a more reasoned response to this.

Listen, if you have never been to a naturalization service, you ought to go. I have a staff member whom I completely agree with who says: I can't ever go to a naturalization service and not cry. So far, I have never been to a naturalization service where I don't cry. They are exceptionally moving events, to watch a large group of people from all backgrounds, from all languages, standing and raising their right hand and pledging allegiance to a brandnew country. People who have set aside their old path to realize--for many of them this was years in the process, to legally go through all of the right checks and get to that point. For those 1.1 million people who do that every year, we honor those individuals and welcome them openly.

Let's honor people who are doing it the right way. Let's fix broken areas of the system that are encouraging people to bring children because they get a discount if they travel with children illegally across our border. Let's find a way to work out work visas. Let's deal with issues like temporary protective status that need to be resolved. Let's deal with the issues of our immigration, but let's not continue to stall.

If the Mars InSight probe can travel 300 million miles in 5 months, surely this Congress can sit down and resolve the immigration issue in a few months. I look forward to that in the next Congress and in the days ahead to finally getting this resolved.

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