Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 4371
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to seek unanimous consent that the Senate pass H.R. 4371, the House companion to my Kayla Hamilton Act, which passed the House with bipartisan support.
This bill is named in honor of Kayla Hamilton, a young woman who was viciously murdered by an MS-13 gang member. This criminal entered the United States as an unaccompanied minor and was released into the custody of an unvetted sponsor.
Kayla's death is a tragedy. I had the honor of meeting her mother Tammy Nobles--one of the Angel Moms who came and testified at a hearing I held last summer.
Kayla's murder highlights how irresponsible the Biden administration was in handling unaccompanied minors entering the United States during President Biden's 4 years in office. By some accounts, there were as many as a half a million unaccompanied minors who came into the United States during the Biden administration's open border policy and then were placed with sponsors, many of whom were unvetted. Many of these so-called unaccompanied children were 17-year-old boys--almost fully grown men.
Unfortunately, many of the children--the more vulnerable children-- were released to unvetted sponsors, and that should be illegal. If we are going to care about our children who are the most vulnerable among us, which is really how a society is judged--how we treat the most vulnerable people in our society--then releasing children to unvetted sponsors should be a crime. While Health and Human Services has reformed its policies under President Trump, the careless and, I would say, reckless way that unaccompanied minors were handled by the Biden administration was shameful.
My bill requires HHS, Health and Human Services, to obtain information about potential sponsors and any person who lives in the sponsor's household before a child is placed with them.
It was common practice for the Biden administration to so call vet the named sponsor but yet not everybody else living in that household who could be a sexual predator or could have another criminal record or could be a threat--an immediate and real threat--to that child.
But this bill requires HHS to obtain information about potential sponsors and any person--all persons--who live in that sponsor's household before a child is placed with them, and it bars criminal alien sponsors from being allowed to assume custody of these children.
This bill also requires Health and Human Services to conduct mandatory checks on all unaccompanied children, including considering whether an unaccompanied child poses a danger to themselves or the community--contacting the consulate or embassy or their home country and vetting them for ties to criminal organizations. As I said, some of these children were very vulnerable, but others were almost grown men in many instances. And without proper vetting of these unaccompanied children--a child, of course, is anybody under the age of 18--that, in and of itself, is a danger that should stop.
It is only common sense that we should not place our children in the custody of criminals, and we should also vet the unaccompanied minors themselves, including for ties to gangs and existing criminal histories.
I urge the adoption of this legislation.
Mr. President, I would ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 4371, which was received from the House; and, further, I ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as I listen to our colleague, he basically says: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
So the good thing about this legislation is it would protect a lot of innocent, vulnerable children, something the Biden administration turned a blind eye to during 4 years of its open border policies.
There is untold misery and hardship for these children who came here to the United States because the Biden administration said: If you come by yourself, we are going to turn you loose and let you into the country. So desperate parents sent their children from faraway places to come to the United States, only to be placed with individuals who were not properly vetted and certainly households that could have involved sexual offenders and other predators--and crimes. We don't know how many of them were recruited into gangs, trafficked for sex or involuntary labor. This is a catastrophe that I think we have only begun to understand.
Now, thank goodness, Tom Homan and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement have rescued many of these children, but nowhere near the number that have been released into the country by the Biden administration.
I don't know how much longer we can continue to turn a blind eye to the harm being caused to these children under the pretense of open borders and generous immigration policies. It is hardly generous to condemn a child to a life of sex trafficking or to be an object of harm from a person who wants to take advantage of them for labor or sexual favors or you name it.
So I think it is beyond disappointing that we have an objection to this, and I find the excuses given by our colleague from Connecticut to be just insufficient.
By not vetting the sponsors who received these unaccompanied children, the Biden administration encouraged and incentivized the irresponsible treatment of these kids. We don't know if they went to school. We don't know if they got the healthcare that they need in order to stay healthy. We don't know. And the Biden administration took the outrageous position that it is not their responsibility. Once the kids came to the United States and were placed with the sponsor, the Biden administration went: Our job is done.
And now it is up to the child protective services in the various States to look after these kids. Well, we know child protective services in the States are generally overwhelmed anyway. And to say that we have to wait for a child to be killed, raped, murdered, denied access to basic healthcare and education services before we can help them out is outrageous.
The only way to prevent this from happening in the future is to enforce our laws and to know who the adults are who are claiming these children and make sure they aren't a threat to their health, safety, and welfare.
Our children should not have to continue to pay the price for adults who break the law. And releasing minors into the custody of criminals is certainly not the answer.
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