Secure the Border Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 2, which should be known as the child deportation act.

Last year, my family marked 100 years since my grandmother, Victoria Castro, came to the United States as a young orphan in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. On her paperwork, the San Antonio relatives who took her in wrote that she was coming ``to live,'' to live in the United States.

From the discussions on the floor today, it seems that many of my colleagues have forgotten about the lives of the asylum seekers who will be affected by their legislation.

Under this bill, for example, if a Uyghur Muslim family escapes from one of China's concentration camps in Xinjiang and seeks asylum in the United States by way of Mexico, they will be turned away.

If a group of Cuban dissidents sail to Florida and land outside of a port of entry, they will be turned away.

Ukrainian families fleeing from Putin's state-sponsored kidnapping, Catholics fleeing religious persecution in Nicaragua, and Christians in Iran would all be required to remain in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador at the mercy of cartels and violent gangs.

Under the Trump-era remain-in-Mexico policy, human rights observers recorded thousands of violent attacks against migrants, including kidnapping, rape, and other brutal crimes.

That policy, as cruel as it was, included exemptions for unaccompanied minors and people who don't speak Spanish. This bill includes neither of those exemptions.

H.R. 2 would also end humanitarian parole for tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees who fought side by side with our troops for over 20 years of war. These heroes and their families barely escaped from the Taliban last summer, and less than 1 year later, Republicans are trying to send our Afghan allies back to die.

Many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns about how the current immigration system will be able to handle a rising tide of immigrants post title 42. I agree that we need to build a more resilient, more effective, and more efficient system, but this bill is not the way to do that.

Time and again, we have seen that cruel, restrictive policies like those in this bill do not stop desperate people from fleeing persecution, oppression, and violence.

This bill would send the world's most vulnerable people to places where many Americans won't even drink the water. It would force asylum seekers to take dangerous, irregular paths to the United States, which is the exact kind of journey that led to the deaths of 53 people in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer in my hometown of San Antonio last summer.

There are meaningful bipartisan solutions to address the causes of forced migration to the United States. I have been proud to work across the aisle to introduce several bills that would do that, but this is not the answer.

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Mr. CASTRO of Texas. Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, H.R. 2 does not include any serious attempt to address the root causes of immigration, and it will not make any real progress to fix our Nation's broken immigration system.

Mr. Speaker, for that reason and many others, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''

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