Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Floor Speech: Calling on Congress to confront child refugee crisis at the border
- As delivered on July 9, 2014 -
Madam President, as you do now, I have just recently had the honor of presiding over this chamber. And I've had the opportunity in the hour that I've just finished presiding to listen to our colleagues and to listen as they come to this floor, as you just have, Madam President, and speak to the humanitarian crisis unfolding on the southern border of our country.
And, sadly, I think truly sadly, I've listened to a whole series of our Republican colleagues use this opportunity to line up on the floor and to wail upon our president and complain that this humanitarian crisis is his fault – that it is solely the fault of the President – that there are tens of thousands of children coming to the American border unaccompanied, seeking refuge in this country – that it is solely his fault.
It's tough to even know where to begin, Madam President, in responding to these suggestions, but let me try. Let me start from my perspective as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It's important first to remember that this is no ordinary issue of border security or of immigration enforcement, this is a humanitarian and a refugee crisis.
The tens of thousands of children, young children, presenting themselves alone at the border of the United States are not dangerous criminals who threaten our national safety. They are, so often, children who've traveled thousands of miles from their home countries at enormous risk and expense and they have come not because our border is wide open, not because it's unsecure. In fact, virtually all of them are being interdicted at the border by our effective border security. The challenge is that these children are being sent on these incredibly long and expensive and dangerous and difficult trips in the first place.
Our Republican colleagues have suggested this is solely caused by our president's lawlessness. That somehow either a law that was proposed and passed here in the Senate in the comprehensive immigration reform bill or the President's deferred action program with regards to those who are so-called “dreamers,” that that's what's causing this flood of child refugees to this country.
Well, as has been said by other of our colleagues just in the last hour, neither of those two things – neither the comprehensive immigration bill passed on a bipartisan basis by this chamber nor the deferred action program of the Administration – would create any relief, any legal opportunity for these child refugees to stay in the United States. Neither of them apply. In order to get access to the benefit of the opportunity to be in the United States under those two provisions you'd have to have been here years ago.
The problem is really instability, violence, tragic collapse of governance and safety in three Central American countries. If the magnet drawing thousands of refugees to this country were the actions or inactions of the President, wouldn't we see a huge surge in refugees from elsewhere in Central America, from Panama or from Belize or from Costa Rica or, even closer to us, from Mexico as well? But we haven't.
In the last five years, child migrants from Mexico have stayed relatively flat while children from the three countries that are the focus of current violence – El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala – have surged out of control. In 2009, child migrants from those three countries made up just 17 percent of all the children trying to come across the American border. This year, three-quarters are coming from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
Why are they coming from these three countries? Why these three countries? Well, if you ask them, they'll tell you. The United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees surveyed last year 400 child refugees and said ”Why have you made this long and dangerous and difficult trip to the American border?” Only nine of 404 surveyed said because they believed the U.S. would treat them well. More than half said they came out of fear, because they were forcibly displaced. They are refugees, not criminals. And we need to deal with the source of the problem in these three countries, not make this a partisan game on the floor of this chamber.
The evidence, I think, is clear that these children are being sent on this difficult, long, and expensive trip by their parents in desperation because they have no other choice. If they stay in their home countries, the levels of violence, of gang activity, of murder have skyrocketed off the charts. They’re fleeing not just to America but to Mexico, to Nicaragua, to Costa Rica as well.
Children are fleeing the violence in these three countries in every direction, not because they're drawn by the magnet of some failure of immigration policy here, but because they are driven by the centrifugal force of violence in these three countries. In fact, asylum applications by children are up more than 700 percent in the countries of Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize, the countries immediately around these three that are the very center of the violence.
And it is my hope, that with the emergency supplemental requests submitted by the President, as we consider it and debate it in a hearing in the Appropriations Committee tomorrow, and as we debate it here on the floor, that we will see more and more ways in which the emergency supplemental provides resources needed to ensure that these children are given the fair hearing that they're entitled to under the law – a law signed by President Bush, and passed unanimously by this chamber – that we will honor our international commitments and allow these children their day in court. And if they have no legitimate claim to refugee status, that they will be deported. But if they have a legitimate claim, that they are treated fairly.
Families and children are fleeing these Central American countries because conditions have become unbearable. Gangs, narcotic groups, and corrupt officials have weakened security situations and created an environment where innocent civilians are targeted by gangs. In Honduras, for example, as has been mentioned earlier today, in the city of San Pedro Sula, the murder rate is four times higher – the chance of dying through murder is four times higher – than faced by American troops in the highest years of combat deaths in Iraq. It has one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In Guatemala, a weak government lacks the capacity to address insecurity and poverty and these forces continue to drive Guatemalans to flee and to send their children to seek some peace outside their country. In El Salvador, after a failed truce, gangs have divided territory up and are challenging control of the state while bringing violence into every neighborhood. Despite these significant issues, we can and we should contribute and invest more in partnership with these three countries to hold them accountable for delivering on stability for their citizens.
Visits by the Vice President, by the Secretary of State, meetings with the leaders of these three countries, have laid out a path forward and a plan, and funding in this emergency supplemental will help contribute to prosecution of the coyotes and the criminal gangs that are profiting off of trafficking in these children, to increasing the capacity of these countries to receive back those children and adults who are being repatriated, and to lead a media campaign to make sure that parents understand that children sent to the United States are not automatically entitled to stay in the United States.
We have to strengthen our efforts to counter corruption, to hold these governments accountable, and to assist in building stronger security, judicial, and governing institutions in these three Central American countries.
Now, I’m also a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee and from those seats I know how important it is that we make sure resources are available to our badly overstretched immigration enforcement system. And this provides additional resources for immigration judges, for the legal orientation program, and for counsel for minors.
As has been mentioned earlier today on this floor, we have an international obligation when children fleeing violence present legitimate claims for refugee status, to make sure they have their day in court before either repatriating them to their country of origin or allowing them refugee status here. This emergency supplemental would increase the funding so that there wouldn't be such an enormous backlog of cases, so that there would be a legal orientation program, which has a proven record of success.
While it doesn't provide personal counsel to everyone awaiting trial, it gives out basic information so that legitimate claims can be made, and illegitimate claims don't waste the time of our immigration courts. Last, providing counsel to minor children – it's a small portion of this total supplemental – but if you've got a child who is a victim of child trafficking, who has a valid asylum claim, they have to be given the opportunity to present a valid claim.
We already know funding in these areas are insufficient to meet this surge in refugee minors seeking the relief of the American country and court system, and I think we have to do both. Invest in ensuring stability in the three countries in Central America from which tens of thousands of children are fleeing, and invest in ensuring that our border security, our immigration courts, and the reasonable and appropriate process for separating out those who are legitimate refugees from those who are seeking access to our country illegally is done in a fair and appropriate way.
A refugee crisis is not the time for us to abandon our laws or our values. It’s the time for us to enforce and abide by those laws fairly and efficiently. And to do so I think, frankly, our best solution would be to have the House take up, consider, and pass the comprehensive immigration bill, the bipartisan immigration bill that was taken up and passed by this chamber over a year ago.
Frankly, Madam President, I think this crisis is in no small part because of a critical opportunity that we missed a year ago to legislate in a responsible, bicameral and bipartisan way, to invest more on the border, to invest more in stabilizing the region, and to invest more in ensuring that we have the resources in our courts to deliver justice in this country appropriately.