Unanimous Consent Request--S. 884
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. I will provide transcripts both in English and in Spanish of those paragraphs.
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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I have read the accounts and so have many of you. A young mother from Honduras, two young sisters from Guatemala, a 6-year-old child from El Salvador--they were all told by a local cartel that, for a price, a better life awaits them in America.
They are told, as evidenced by those chanting ``Biden, Biden'' at the border, that this new President has opened the borders and that amnesty is imminent, so get in while you can.
These vulnerable people are flocking to smugglers and violent criminals and paying them all that they have for their chance to get in while they can. In the last month, traffickers have allegedly made as much as $14 million a week smuggling men, women, and children across the border.
Once indebted to cartels and coyotes, the price these vulnerable people pay is far more costly than money. According to media reports, men are used as slaves; women are raped endlessly. In fact, one-third of the women making their way to the border are reportedly sexually assaulted, and 68 percent of the people coming across the border are physically assaulted.
Children are rented, trafficked, and ``recycled,'' as they put it, forced to pose as the child of one illegal immigrant after another to activate the so-called Flores get-out-of-jail-free card. One former Border Patrol agent told me that the smugglers prefer to use babies because they are unable to tell Border Patrol agents that these are not, in fact, their parents.
What of those who escape the clutches of the cartels? Well, estimates of how many children are currently in Customs and Border Patrol custody vary from more than 4,000 children to well over 15,000. Thousands of these children are being held, packed into housing facilities, for well over the 72-hour limit required by Flores--and with no end in sight.
The Biden administration is doing all it can to hide the humanitarian crisis created by its own immigration policies--a disaster that Secretary Mayorkas refuses to acknowledge as a crisis. It denied media access and appears to be enforcing an unofficial gag order on Border Patrol agents. Journalists have not been permitted inside the detention facilities since President Biden took office.
Now, it shouldn't be a surprise to any of us that the Biden administration's open border policies have resulted in this overwhelming crisis--and a crisis it is. This is what then-Candidate Biden promised us in the very first Democratic Presidential primary debate. He promised us that when he became President, there would be immediate surges along the border. Unfortunately, in this case, he has delivered exactly what he promised. How exactly did he deliver? Well, first, he made it known that once he was elected, the border would be open for business. Then he reversed course on a number of Trump-era commonsense immigration policies. This incentivized vulnerable people to entrust their lives and the lives of their children to dangerous coyotes and cartels.
What are these policies? The safe third country policy, implemented by the Trump administration, requires asylum seekers to apply for asylum in the first safe country in which they arrive. President Biden has moved to repeal that rule.
The expansion of the Flores Settlement agreement also creates perverse incentives in our immigration law. Flores is about protecting children, and yet, in the application of the expansion, we have put children in even greater danger of becoming victims of trafficking and cartel manipulation.
The Biden policy of keeping all unaccompanied alien minors in the United States, as my fellow Senator from Utah has pointed out, actually incentivizes parents to separate themselves from their children by entrusting their children to a cartel or coyote to bring them to the United States for their chance at amnesty.
By moving to loosen the requirements of asylum and expand its application, President Biden has invited immigrants, who could find safety in other regions of their own country or an adjacent country, to make the dangerous journey to the United States.
What we need are clear requirements to preserve the opportunities for asylum for those who need it the most. America is the land to which those seeking a better life look for relief, and we should provide relief where we can. We also have a duty to protect our border, our citizens, and our laws, our national interests. At the very least, we have a duty to eliminate policies that empower cartels and coyotes to exploit women and children. We must stop incentivizing vulnerable people to make a journey that will very rarely lead to the outcome they desire.
To this end, and together with Congressman Andy Biggs and several of my fellow Senators, I have introduced the Stopping Border Surges Act to address some of the more egregious loopholes in our immigration laws.
This bill remedies the expansion of the Flores Settlement agreement that puts so many children in danger by requiring the release of minors with any adult claiming to be the child's parent. It provides expedited processing for unaccompanied minors from all countries--processes currently available only to children from Mexico and Canada. Immediate processing will blunt the incentive for parents to send their children on this dangerous journey alone. In an effort to end the trafficking of children by cartels, it strengthens protections for children released to adults within the United States. It tightens the asylum process so that we can better serve those who genuinely need the protections we can offer, and it incentivizes immigrants to enter our country through official ports of entry.
This bill offers a new commonsense series of reforms that will help stem the flood of immigrants at our border and free vulnerable women and children from the clutches of the cartels and of the coyotes. For that reason, I urge all of my colleagues to support it, to join it, and to vote for it.
Now, having previously received consent, I would like to conclude these remarks in Spanish, remarks directed specifically to those who might be considering making the dangerous, perilous journey to the southern border of the United States before sending their families.
(The English translation of the statement made in Spanish is as follows:)
Please do not send your wives and daughters on this journey only to be sexually assaulted by the coyotes and cartels. We hear story after story of smugglers kidnapping women and children and holding them hostage even after they cross our border. In the year 2019, the New York Times documented dozens of cases of these women. This is just one of those stories involving Melvin, a 36-year old mother of three from Guatemala:
For weeks in that locked room, the men she had paid to get her safely to the United States drugged her with pills and cocaine, refusing to let her out even to bathe. ``I think that since they put me in that room, they killed me,'' she said. ``They raped us so many times they didn't see us as human beings anymore.''
Please, listen to Melvin's story. Do not make that the story of your family.
Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S.
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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the sentiment expressed by my friend, my distinguished colleague, the senior Senator from Illinois, particularly when he expressed the desire no longer to have people send their children on the long, perilous journey from Central America to the United States. On that, he and I certainly agree, just as we have agreed on a number of other issues over the years.
I do think it is regrettable that we are not able to reach this agreement today. This is something we ought to be able to solve right here, right now. This is a very dire set of circumstances.
We have to remember what we are talking about is dealing with the Flores agreement. We are in a position where so many of the children coming up through these caravans are in danger because we have in place policies that require the release of minors to any adult claiming to be the child's parent. We ought to have expedited processing requirements for unaccompanied minors, just as we have in place already for unaccompanied minors coming from Mexico and coming from Canada.
It makes me wonder: What is it about children from Central American countries--from any country other than Canada and Mexico--that makes them undeserving of that same expedited processing requirement? This is something we need to do.
Yes, I understand that our immigration system is a mess and needs reform, but I don't understand why it is that anyone would want to accept the default assumption that we can't fix anything with immigration; we can't even fix this problem subjecting these unaccompanied minors from Central American countries, including Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Why can't we give them any relief here until such time as we can come up with a comprehensive immigration reform proposal?
It is disappointing to me that we can't do that today. We will keep trying, keep moving on this effort. This is important.
Look, regardless of where one stands politically, what party one belongs to, I don't think it is too much to ask to suggest that we shouldn't give kids over to anyone claiming to be their parent without proof, without processes to make sure that is a safe person. We wouldn't want our own children treated that way. We shouldn't treat them that way.
Thank you.
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