Forced Family Separation
Floor Speech
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I thank Mr. Merkley, the Senator from Oregon, for his leadership and his calling attention to the tragedy that has been going on right on our border.
I rise today to join my colleagues to express my deep concern about the policy that was adopted by this administration to separate families at the border.
What we have seen over the past several days and weeks and actually months is simply unacceptable. While the President has now recognized publicly that we should not be taking children from their parents, this should not be happening in our country.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, 2,342 children were separated from their parents at the border between May 5 and June 9. The pace of these separations had been increasing, with nearly 70 children being taken from their parents up until today and being kept in facilities that are increasingly overcrowded.
The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have expressed their opposition. They said that this type of family separation does ``irreparable harm'' to children. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who traveled to the border, called it ``a form of child abuse.''
It is not just the medical groups. A bipartisan group of 75 former U.S. attorneys called on the administration to end its policy. The group included a former Republican U.S. attorney who served under both President Bushes, Tom Heffelfinger from the State of Minnesota. Their letter emphasized that the administration's zero tolerance policy was ``a radical departure from previous Justice Department policy'' and that it is ``dangerous, expensive, and inconsistent with the values of the institution in which [they] served.''
All five First Ladies have been critical, and, as we know, probably the woman who said it best was First Lady Laura Bush. She said:
This zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.
I think that says it all.
I am glad that several of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have recently stood up and said they disagree with this policy.
Senator Graham said: ``President Trump could stop this policy with a phone call.''
The weeks went by, and the families kept getting separated.
I am pleased that Senator Feinstein is leading a bill, the Keep Families Together Act. I was an original cosponsor of this bill, but I do want to note that we do not need the legislation to stop the separation of children and their parents.
While I am still reviewing this Executive order, I will note that it still raises serious issues, including with respect to the indefinite detention of children and their families, and that there are major questions about the order. That being said, action on this was necessary, and now we must move forward.
I see the Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, here, who has given so many speeches about Dreamers that I don't think we could even count them. We have more issues for this country besides the one that has just broken the hearts of Americans. We have people on temporary status who are sitting in Minnesota who don't know if they are going to be deported in a year, when they have been in this country legally for decades, working in our hospitals. We have Dreamers who came to this country through no fault of their own. We have immigrants who love this country, who want to be citizens here, and this Senate gave them a path to be citizens in a vote in this very Chamber years ago, and that bill never advanced in the House. We can do that again.
If there is any silver lining to this tragedy as we work through it, I hope that it will focus the American people again on the fact that this is a country of immigrants and that immigrants do not diminish America; immigrants are America.
Thank you.
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