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“Border Security (Executive Session)” mentioning Kyrsten Sinema was published in the Senate section on pages S1516-S1518 on March 15.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
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The publication is reproduced in full below:
Border Security
Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last Thursday night, I was able to return home to Texas, and on Friday, I went to the southern border. Texas has 100 miles of common border with Mexico, and, obviously, we are at ground zero whenever there is a border crisis.
I was glad to be joined by my friend Congressman Henry Cuellar, who has been a partner of mine on bipartisan, bicameral border security and immigration reform legislation in the past, and we were also joined by Congressman Michael Burgess, our friend from North Texas.
We visited a holding facility in Carrizo Springs, which houses young boys, ages 13 through 17, who were apprehended along the border. We were able to see the facility, which includes medical care, classroom space, dining facilities, and legal services for these young men. And we heard from the Health and Human Services workers who are doing everything they can to care for these children, despite being completely overwhelmed.
When we visited, there were 679 children between the ages of 13 and 17, but the facility is expected to reach capacity by today. This is no accident that we are seeing waves of unaccompanied minors coming across the border because the human smugglers and the drug traffickers understand our laws perhaps better than we do. And they know that if you are able to flood the zone with unaccompanied children, the Border Patrol are going to be distracted and diverted from their border security mission to take care of these children and to make sure that they are safe.
In the meantime, the drug smugglers exploit those gaps left when the Border Patrol leaves the frontlines to handle and process these unaccompanied children. Last year, more than 80,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in this country, and, unfortunately, a significant percentage of that involves the methamphetamine, the fentanyl, the heroin, and the cocaine that comes up through the southern border in the hands of the same criminal organizations that move people, traffic in human beings, and, again, smuggle drugs.
In the 2 months since President Biden took office, the situation along the border has come to rival the largest surges that we have seen in previous years. We remember the border crisis of 2014, when an alarming number of unaccompanied children and families came across the southern border and completely overwhelmed the system. That summer, the situation was so dire that President Obama called it a humanitarian crisis.
Then came the surge in 2019. That May, Customs and Border Protection reported a recordbreaking 144,000 encounters with migrants along the southwest border, more than double the amount we experienced during the 2014 humanitarian crisis.
So if 2014 was a humanitarian crisis, 2019 was a humanitarian crisis on steroids. And I am afraid the current situation is going to get nothing but worse and perhaps outpace even the humanitarian crisis on steroids that we saw in 2019.
What makes this even more complicated is, while this isn't the first surge of migrants we have seen across the border, it is the first time we have seen it during a COVID-19 pandemic. And based on the current trend, this one is shaping up to be far worse than anything we have experienced in the past.
Last month, Customs and Border Protection encountered more than 100,000 individuals coming across the border, the highest number since 2006. Out of those 100,000 individuals last month, it included 9,000 unaccompanied children and 19,000 migrants coming across as families; that is, some combination of a mother and father and minor children.
Based on the sheer numbers, this is a problem. It is overwhelming the capacity--physical capacity--to house and to take care of these children and to make sure that these individuals are processed according to the law. Border Patrol and Health and Human Services and our immigration courts do not have the capacity to manage an influx this large.
And when you add the operational challenges and risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes even more difficult to house and care for these migrants, especially the children.
The facilities like Carrizo Springs were previously at a 40-percent capacity to allow for social distancing--something we have heard a lot about in the last year--but the number of unaccompanied children has climbed so high that the Biden administration is now allowing those facilities to operate at 100-percent capacity, despite the obvious risk of spreading COVID-19 because of a failure or inability to socially distance.
At one point last week, there were more than 3,700 children in the custody of the Border Patrol. By comparison, there were about 2,600 children in custody at the peak of the 2019 crisis. So the numbers are significantly higher.
Reports over the weekend show that the number has increased to more than 4,200, with nearly 3,000 held beyond the 72-hour legal limit imposed by a court settlement.
While these migrant children are without a doubt the biggest victims of this crisis, there are cascading consequences. In Brownsville alone, more than 200 migrants were released from the Border Patrol's custody, having tested positive for COVID-19--200 positive for COVID-19, ushered into the country.
So despite the obvious health risks, many of these individuals continued their travels to their ultimate destinations, both within and outside the State of Texas. Some traveled, we know, as far north as Maryland, North Carolina, and New Jersey. And this rapid-pace catch-
and-release practice places a serious strain on the resources of our border communities.
During the deadly winter storm last month, the mayor of Del Rio pleaded for the administration to stop releasing migrants into the city and surrounding area. The city's capacities were already stretched thin. The mayor, Bruno Lozano, said: ``We will be forced to make a decision to leave them without resources under these dire circumstances.''
When the President's Chief of Staff was asked recently about the border crisis in a recent interview, he said: ``We inherited a real mess.''
Well, that is not the way I see it. The policies the administration inherited deterred the human smugglers, the coyotes, and cartels from even attempting to smuggle children into the United States, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. They required, under the Migrant Protection Program, migrants to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims were being processed.
Of course, the Biden administration has, in sort of a reflexive manner, reversed all of the previous administration's policies without any plan to put in its place and without regard to the consequences.
Well, the Migrant Protection Program, which was negotiated with the government of Mexico, worked pretty well. It allowed border communities to know that they wouldn't have to bear the brunt of thousands of migrants coming across the border into their communities while simultaneously battling a pandemic.
The Biden administration didn't inherit this mess; it helped create it. President Biden campaigned on the basis of policies that would lead to this very outcome.
One woman who crossed the Rio Grande on a smuggler's raft said the Biden administration is the reason she and her 1-year-old son attempted the journey at all. She said: ``That gave us the opportunity to come.'' And come they did.
Whether you call this a mess, as the President's Chief of Staff did, or a human challenge, as the Secretary of Homeland Security did, I can tell you one thing: Unless the Biden administration reverses course, it will only get worse. We usually see the peak numbers of migration happen during the springtime and in the early summer, frankly, because of the weather and the ease of passage. So we haven't seen nothing yet compared to what we will see unless action is taken.
During my visit last Friday, one of the people involved in the operation of the Carrizo Springs facility said: This is a category 5 hurricane with tropical storm force winds on the coast. It is coming.
Well, we have seen this before, as I said--many times, in fact. And unless action is taken to stem the flow of migrants across the border, that category 5 hurricane is going to break the entire system.
In my time in the Senate, I have always looked to the men and women on the ground--the Border Patrol who wear green uniforms, the Customs and Border Protection officials who wear blue uniforms. I have looked to them to learn more about how things are going and how Congress and other policymakers can provide support.
As I said, we share a 1,200-mile border with Mexico, and our border communities are made up of incredible networks of law enforcement, local leaders, and nongovernmental organizations that work together to help keep the migrants safe, as well as communities safe. Many of them are motivated solely by their humanitarian impulses, and we couldn't do as well as we are doing without them.
One frustration I have heard in recent weeks is over vaccine distribution for Border Patrol and other Federal officers who have no choice but to come in contact with COVID-19-positive migrants coming across the border. These men and women--Federal employees, Federal law enforcement officers--are at significant risk of contracting COVID-19 because of their work with detained and vulnerable populations.
We know that more than 8,000 Customs and Border Protection employees have tested positive for COVID-19, and 27 have died since the start of the pandemic. More than 2,800 of these 8,000 cases have been in my State of Texas. But despite this knowledge, the administration has not made vaccinating these men and women on the frontline a priority.
Last week, Senator Sinema of Arizona and I sent a letter to Secretary Mayorkas to advocate for Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security's other Federal law enforcement officers to be prioritized for vaccination. I am glad to announce that the administration responded by opening a vaccination clinic in the Rio Grande Valley, which is a great first step, but law enforcement across the entire border deserve to be vaccinated as soon as possible. If the administration is going to implement policies that create even more dangers to these frontline officers and agents, the very least they can do is offer them protection from COVID-19.
After visiting the Carrizo Springs facility, Congressman Cuellar and I traveled to Laredo, TX, where we met with a group of mayors, county judges, and a range of community leaders for a discussion on the ways this crisis is impacting them.
We discussed the bungled mess of the immigration courts, which have a backlog of 1.2 million cases. In fact, the human smugglers and drug cartels know that because of our laws and our failure to offer consequences associated with illegal entry into the United States, that we will never get to those 1.2 million backlog cases and that people can simply evade the law by refusing to show up for their court-
appointed date.
Well, we talked about how the biggest beneficiaries of the crisis weren't the migrants crossing the border but, rather, the transnational criminal organizations--the cartels, the human smugglers, and the coyotes who bring them here. Border Patrol told me that the average smuggling fee for cartels to bring a single unaccompanied child into the Del Rio Sector was more than $7,300--$7,300 per child. The Chief of the Border Patrol sector there in Del Rio told me that just this year, they have detained people from 54 separate countries--54 separate countries--coming through the Del Rio Sector of the Border Patrol. So this is like the United Nations coming across our border, and, frankly, it is such a financially rewarding business for the human smugglers and the criminal networks, they will literally bring people from anywhere around the world across our southern border into the United States. That ought to concern all of us.
Well, the Border Patrol is mounting a struggle against the border crisis and the pandemic simultaneously. Like cities across the country, our border communities have already had a very difficult year battling COVID-19. They had to cover a range of expenses created by the pandemic in order to keep their communities safe and healthy. But, unlike other communities across the country, they had the added economic hardship created by nearly a year of legal limits on nonessential cross-border travel.
Prepandemic, visitors from Mexico would travel across the border to shop, eat at restaurants, and visit their family members. They were a huge economic driver in our border communities from El Paso all the way down the Rio Grande to the Rio Grande Valley. But the ``pause'' on legitimate nonessential travel has created a serious economic strain on these communities, and those leaders are struggling to understand the disconnect between the Biden administration's two different approaches.
One of the participants at the roundtable said: ``I don't understand how you can catch-and-release and not let our neighbors across the border come over and spend money in our communities to help [grow] our economy.''
This confluence of crises is a one-two punch for our border communities, and it is unfair that they are expected to carry the burden of a crisis that should be the responsibility--is the responsibility of the Federal Government.
In many cases, nongovernmental organizations carry a significant amount of weight that, quite frankly, is unfairly placed on their shoulders. Congressman Cuellar and I were joined in Laredo with three incredible NGOs whose resources are already stretched thin because of the pandemic and have managed to take on a substantial amount of work in managing this humanitarian crisis.
I want to commend Catholic Charities of Laredo, the Sisters of Mercy, the Holding Institute Community Center, and other NGOs along the Texas border for everything they have done to respond to the humanitarian crisis. I encourage anyone who is interested in understanding the crises and working to find solutions, including President Biden, to visit our border and to hear from these same individuals firsthand.
No matter what party controls the Senate, the House, or the White House, these law enforcement, local leaders, and NGOs are doing everything they can to keep both migrants and their communities safe. They are currently overwhelmed, frustrated, and eager for change, and their voices must be heard.
We are at an inflection point in the humanitarian crisis, and unless the administration acts and acts quickly, we are headed down a very dangerous path. We have seen enough of these surges in the past to know what to expect.
If you are opposed to human trafficking, human suffering, drug smuggling, pushing migrants into the shadows, then you should be absolutely alarmed by what is happening along the border today.
The hurricane is on the way. I hope the administration and Congress will take a serious interest in acting before it makes landfall.
I yield the floor
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
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