USA Freedom Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I say to my colleague from Oregon, his leadership, along with Senator Crapo, on this firefighting budgeting and fire borrowing issue--that is really what it is--is critical to all of us in Western States. Every single one of us has seen communities touched by these catastrophic wildfires as our climate is changing and we see fires get bigger and bigger. But we have solutions, and the solutions are bipartisan and common sense.
I can only hope that we are able to move quickly to make these budget changes. They will make a real difference for all of us up and down in the Intermountain West.
BORDER CRISIS
Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I thank all of my colleagues who have been vocal about their commitment to address the Central American refugee crisis along our southern border.
We have heard the stories of unimaginable violence, of corruption, of instability in places such as Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala--factors that are driving many children to the United States and to other neighboring countries in Central America.
In some cases these children are literally fleeing for their lives.
Our Nation has responded with a spectrum of attitudes toward immigrants ranging from hostile to downright hospitable. It is my hope that our attitude as a nation continues to be defined by the image of the Statue of Liberty and not by shouting protesters holding signs labeled ``Return to Sender'' as they stand in front of buses full of Central American children.
I recently received a letter from a constituent in my home State of New Mexico whose grandmother, as a result of extreme poverty, left her family and emigrated by herself to the United States from Ireland at the age of 14 at the end of World War I. Brendan said that when he was growing up, his grandmother frequently shared this Irish proverb with him. She said, ``Courage is the trust that your feet will bring you to where your heart is.'' Brendan asked that I continue to remind my colleagues that the immigrants who arrive at our borders come by foot following their hearts and do so in the hope of building a better life.
Last week I sat down with Ambassadors from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and we discussed how our Nation's approach to stemming the influx of unaccompanied children to the United States must be collaborative and get at the root cause of the dire situation in these countries. With out-of-control drug cartels and nearly 90 murders for every 100,000 persons annually, Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world. Similarly, El Salvador and Guatemala have the world's fourth and fifth highest murder rates. There is no easy solution to these problems, but Congress has an opportunity and a responsibility to act on pragmatic measures before time and resources run out.
Secretary Johnson has warned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will run out of money in August and Customs and Border Protection will run out of money in mid-September if nothing is done. With resources already running scarcer by the day, Customs and Border Protection won't have any other choice but to direct border agents away from other sectors of our southern border and into the Rio Grande Valley.
So let's be clear. Those who would choose not to support this emergency supplemental are putting our border security at risk. New Mexico, California, Arizona, and West Texas will all see fewer agents and fewer resources on our border if the House and Senate do not act.
This is no way to address a crisis. We must pass the Senate's emergency supplemental funding bill introduced by Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman Barbara Mikulski. This emergency funding bill includes important resources to help stem the current refugee crisis while continuing to treat these refugee children humanely as required by the law. This situation is an emergency, and we need emergency funding.
Passing the emergency supplemental would also allow the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to deploy additional enforcement resources, including immigration judges, Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys, and asylum officers, as well as expanding the use of the alternatives to detention program.
Instead of ensuring that we provide these necessary resources to address this crisis on our border, some of our colleagues are actually proposing that the solution is to actually weaken Federal child trafficking law and to roll back protections for unaccompanied child refugees seeking asylum. The proposal introduced by our colleague from Texas Senator Cornyn would weaken the 2008 William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Act and short-circuit justice in order to deport refugee children faster and without the due process afforded under our law.
According to a poll released Tuesday by the Public Relations Research Institute, 69 percent of those surveyed believe that U.S. authorities should treat the children as refugees and allow them to stay in the country if it is determined it is not safe for them to return to their home country.
Some would use this crisis to eliminate crucial child trafficking protection, punish some of our Nation's brightest DREAM Act students, and promote a narrow border-enforcement-only agenda. I believe we are a better nation than that, frankly.
Let's step back and remember that just 1 year ago the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included provisions to further strengthen the border but that would also protect refugee children and crack down on smugglers and transnational criminal organizations. Notably, the bill was widely supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. Public support and good economics have not been enough to convince House Republican leaders to hold a vote on immigration reform, but they cannot turn a blind eye to the current humanitarian crisis along our southern border.
The bipartisan Senate bill that passed more than a year ago includes provisions for family reunification and for the protection of children who have been the victims of human trafficking. The bill also includes measures that would address refugee and asylum laws.
The public, including faith-based organizations, educators, local elected officials, small businesses, and many others, overwhelmingly supports this balanced approach to immigration reform. However, here we are more than 1 year later, and House Republicans are still unwilling to even hold an up-or-down vote on the Senate's proposal. Each day the House fails to act on serious solutions to our broken immigration system is another day our Nation and our economy suffer.
The Congressional Budget Office reported that last year's bipartisan immigration reform bill that passed this body would reduce the budget deficit by $197 billion--billion with a ``b''--over the next decade and about $700 billion in the second decade. In a companion analysis, CBO also estimated that fixing our broken immigration system would increase our country's GDP--our economic output--by 3.3 percent in 10 years and 5.4 percent after 20 years.
The evidence is clear. Immigration reform is good for our economy, good for our workforce, and it is good for the future of the American middle class.
I am familiar with the promise America represents to its families. My father fled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s as a young boy. As the son of an immigrant, I know how hard immigrants work and how much they believe in this country and how much they are willing to give back to our Nation. Those of us who represent border communities understand the difficult challenges we face, but there are solutions before us that are pragmatic, bipartisan, and that uphold rather than compromise our American values.
In the short term we must approve the Senate's emergency supplemental bill, and in the long-term we should partner with Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to stabilize their nations and end the cycle of gang violence we see there. A key part of our long-term solution is for House Republicans to finally put the Senate's immigration reform bill on the floor for an up-or-down vote.
We in Congress have a historic opportunity to pass comprehensive immigration reform and to address root causes rather than just symptoms for a change. I believe we will have failed if the only immigration legislation we pass as a body in this Congress is to weaken legal protections for refugee children. With this in mind, I will continue to work with my colleagues to ensure that we address this humanitarian crisis and fix our immigration system once and for all. Let's seize this opportunity.
Mr. President, I see that I have been joined on the floor by the Senator from Florida, and I would ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy with Senator Nelson.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Florida is recognized.
Mr. NELSON. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his leadership, and I wish to ask my colleague if he is aware of the testimony the commanding general of U.S. Southern Command, General Kelly--a marine four-star general--gave to the Armed Services Committee and to the Foreign Relations Committee recently, in the last couple of weeks?
Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I am aware of the testimony of General Kelly, but given his role at SOUTHCOM and in particular its location in Florida and the fact that the Senator from Florida was there for the testimony, I would ask him to remind us exactly what General Kelly had to say about how we are or in some cases are not interdicting and dealing with the flow of narcotics and particularly cocaine that has been at the root of so much of the instability and violence we see in these three Central American countries today.
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Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I am aware of the testimony of General Kelly, but given his role at SOUTHCOM and in particular its location in Florida and the fact that the Senator from Florida was there for the testimony, I would ask him to remind us exactly what General Kelly had to say about how we are or in some cases are not interdicting and dealing with the flow of narcotics and particularly cocaine that has been at the root of so much of the instability and violence we see in these three Central American countries today.
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Mr. HEINRICH. If I understand the Senator from Florida correctly, General Kelly simply does not have the resources to do the job we have done historically in terms of interdicting cocaine moving north for the market that, frankly, is in North America--
Mr. NELSON. That is correct.
Mr. HEINRICH. --in the United States and Canada. They have to literally sit there and watch these narcotics go by without having the resources to stop them in their tracks.
Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct. Whereas General Kelly--and I am just using him as the symbol since he is a four-star general. It is the Joint Interagency Task Force in Key West that is actually headed by a Coast Guard admiral. They can interdict, and do interdict, about 25 percent of those big shipments coming from South America. They go through the Caribbean on the east and also through the Pacific on the west. And because they have been effective at 25 percent of the shipments, what we are seeing is a shifting of those shipments. They are now actually sending more of them to the east--not only to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but now to Puerto Rico, which is a U.S. territory. When they get those drugs into Puerto Rico--and that is American territory--they can ship them by mail from there to the rest of the United States and avoid detection.
Mr. HEINRICH. My understanding is that the resource situation in Southern Command has changed so dramatically in recent years that not only is this interagency task force limited, but they have literally canceled more than 200 engagement activities and multilateral exercises with our partners in the region who can multiply that effect and interdict even more narcotics as they are moving forward.
Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct. As a matter of fact, the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee, with whom I have consulted, is very familiar with the great operation of the Joint Interagency Task Force to go after these drugs. As the Senator from New Mexico said, you can imagine their frustration when they know about the boat shipment, and sometimes they can watch it from their overhead assets, and they can't do anything about it.
As a result, look at what has happened over the last several months. We are trying to solve the problem on the border. We have all of these children showing up at the border. We ought to solve that problem. We need to go back to the very beginning and stop what is causing this problem.
Mr. HEINRICH. The Senator from Florida also brought up another issue that I think is worth exploring. It is my understanding that he was recently briefed on the relationship that exists between these drug cartels and the entities that are actually engaging in human trafficking and moving people, for a fee, through Central America and Mexico and to the U.S. border. Can the Senator tell us a little bit about the nature of that relationship?
Mr. NELSON. The Senator is correct on how all of these things are interlocked. You can imagine how a sufficient quantity of drugs, which is worth so much, is a corrupting influence on any kind of law and order. As a result, the systems of governments--and Senator Kaine and I both met with the President of Honduras. He is trying as hard as he can. He has a bounty on his head by these drug lords because he is opposing them. The judicial system is corrupted. The local police are corrupted. When that happens, then you can imagine when other criminal activities occur, in addition to other drug activities, such as human trafficking, and terrorists potentially being utilized in these efficient delivery networks, then it is all the more a threat to the national security interests of the United States.
I think the U.S. Congress and the U.S. administration better wake up to the fact of what is happening right under our nose and get at this, in addition to solving the problems that we see that are a symptom, ultimately, of the root cause--the creation of a whole criminal network that is, in large part, fueled by the drug trade.
Mr. HEINRICH. If the Senator from Florida will yield for a minute, the sad thing is it didn't used to be that way in this part of Central America, and I know that for a fact because my wife and I traveled there 15, 16 years ago. We traveled extensively in Honduras, and at that time these gangs simply did not have the influence. They did not have this level of destabilization and they did not have this murder rate.
I always joke about trying to drive into Tegucigalpa, and I would not recommend it to anybody who has not had time to acclimate to the speed and crush of cars in that capital city, but it was a completely different country at the time. We traveled extensively in urban areas in San Pedro Sula and rural areas such as Santa Rosa de Copan, and it was an economically challenged country.
For those folks who have claimed that all of these immigrants are simply heading north out of economic desperation, the economic situation has not changed all that much. It is worth looking at the rest of Central America. The surrounding countries, such as Belize and Costa Rica and other countries in Central America, are also seeing refugees from these countries.
Nicaragua, which has substantial economic challenges right now, is losing economic immigrants, and those immigrants are not making it to our southern border in any substantial numbers. In fact, less than a year ago, I was in Costa Rica and many Nicaraguans are working in Costa Rica because the economy is better there. Yet we don't see them showing up--especially the unaccompanied minors, 7, 8, 12-year-olds--at our border by themselves. They are not being driven out by the extreme violence we have seen in these three nations where the drug cartels have such a disproportionate influence on their country's stability.
Mr. NELSON. If the Senator will yield, to underscore his point, we can look at the extraordinary success of Plan Colombia. Outside of Central America--if you go a little further south, you are on the continent of South America. And lo and behold, 15, 20 years ago, a large part of Colombia was controlled by elements that were controlled by the drug lords. With the assistance of the United States and extraordinary heroism on the part of the Government of Colombia, we have seen the Government of Colombia take back control of most of its country. Even though cocaine is still grown there and the FARC is still operating, their criminal element is a diminished insurrection of what it used to be. If you visited a place like Bogota, the capital city, it was not safe to go out alone and walk on the streets. Now you can easily walk on the streets. The situation there has changed.
We are seeing the same replicated now in Central America where the drug lords have basically taken over by buying off people with considerable money, and therefore it makes it very difficult to have the rule of law in those struggling governments, as it is for the President of Honduras, who is trying so hard to bring back his country.
Mr. HEINRICH. If the Senator from Florida will yield for a moment, having formerly served on the House Armed Services Committee, I know the Department of Defense budget is somewhere in the order of $550 billion. Surely SOUTHCOM must have a substantial amount of resources to be able to meet this, right?
Of that $550 billion, does the Senator from Florida know how much actually goes to Southern Command?
Mr. NELSON. What this Senator knows is that before the sequester started hitting the defense budget--even though we were conducting a war in two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq--with all of the multiplicity of threats that are around in the region, including what we see now with ISIS between Syria and northern and western Iraq, the Department of Defense had to make some hard choices. They had to cut back because of this mindless budgetary meat ax called the sequester, and as a result they had to set their priorities.
When they came down to it, they had to support the troops out in the field and had to cut back on other commands. The U.S. Southern Command is one of those commands that was cut back. But now we are seeing the lack of wisdom to these budgetary policies--sequester--and the scarcity when you cannot allocate the defense resources to other agencies. Remember, this is a Joint Interagency Task Force. We are now seeing the effects of that in what has been on the front pages of the newspapers which is reporting all of the children coming to the border.
By the way, the children are just a diminutive percentage of the total people still coming to the border. I can't remember if it is 20 percent or 40 percent, but it is something well less than half of all of the people who are still coming to the border. But, of course, the children, because of the humanitarian crisis for them, are the ones who have received the attention.
If we know there is a problem, how do we fix the problem? Well, we need to go back to the root cause, and that is the case I have been making on that side of the aisle and on this side of the aisle. Yet we are at this point of impasse, and needless to say, it is very frustrating to this Senator.
Mr. HEINRICH. I thank the Senator from Florida for continuing to be an advocate for this cause. I know that Southern Command's annual budget now is about $1 billion--literally $1 billion out of $550 billion in the Department of Defense.
Given the necessity of engaging with Central and South America on these issues, I think it is time to reevaluate, in terms of resources but also in terms of priorities, how we look at Central and South America, to reengage with our neighbors and try to address some of these issues at the root level instead of always at the symptom level.
I see we have been joined by our esteemed chair of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Mikulski of Maryland. So I thank the Chair for allowing the Senator from Florida and I to indulge in this colloquy. And, once again, I wish to say how much I hope we take this opportunity to do something, not just about the symptoms of the current crisis which has to be dealt with, but also the underlying causes of this crisis.
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