Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. It is ICE that partnered with Border Patrol and Health and Human Services in this diabolical situation. It is ICE that holds the parents in detention camps. It is ICE that has failed to arrange for the knowledge within the system of which parents go with which children. It is ICE that often has prevented individuals from having access to counsel, from being able to even phone their children, and charged them for using the phone.

In this situation, some 2,500-plus kids have been torn out of the arms of their parents, and this particular resolution would engage in nice phrases of praise instead of addressing itself to solving the problem.

We should right now be considering Senator Harris's act, the REUNITE Act, which would accelerate the reunification of the children, would ensure that family separation never happens again, would coordinate actions between ICE and the Border Patrol and Health and Human Services, and would set up a family case management system that worked, according to the IG of Homeland Security, to deliver 100 percent of the time when individuals had a date for a hearing--100 percent of the time.

That is why I ask my colleague to modify his request so that the Committee on the Judiciary, instead, be discharged from further consideration of S. 3227, the REUNITE Act, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

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Mr. MERKLEY. I strongly object.

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