Justice for Children Now Act of 2014

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 696 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to my friend, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, on Wednesday, the Rules Committee met and reported a rule for consideration of three measures: H.R. 5230, the supplemental appropriations bill to deal with the influx of unaccompanied minors across the southern border; H.R. 5272, a bill that would prevent the administration from expanding the use of deferred action for individuals who are not legally present in the United States; and the Senate amendment to H.R. 5021, the Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2014.

The resolution provides a closed rule for consideration of H.R. 5230, the supplemental appropriations bill. This is consistent with the way all seven supplemental appropriations acts considered in the 110th and 111th Congresses were treated when my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were in the majority. The rule provides for 1 hour of debate, equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations, and provides for one motion to recommit.

In addition, the resolution also provides that after the passage of H.R. 5230, that it be in order to consider H.R. 5272, a bill that would prevent the administration from expanding the use of deferred action for individuals who are not legally present in the United States. The resolution provides a closed rule for consideration of H.R. 5272, provides for 60 minutes of debate, equally divided by the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary, and provides for a motion to recommit.

In addition, the rule also provides for consideration of a motion to disagree to the Senate's amendment to H.R. 5021, so we can send the bill that easily passed the House on an overwhelming bipartisan vote back to the Senate.

Finally, the rule provides for same-day and suspension authority today to

resolve any outstanding issues before the August recess.

Mr. Speaker, this rule demonstrates this House's careful consideration of the President's supplemental request. Earlier this month, the President submitted to Congress a $3.7 billion request to deal with both the urgent crisis of unaccompanied juveniles crossing the border and with wildfires.

Since then, Chairman Rogers, Chairman Granger, Speaker Boehner, and the Republican Conference have thoughtfully considered what resources the President needs to address this crisis through the end of the fiscal year.

The result, Mr. Speaker, is a significantly pared-down piece of legislation. It provides $659 million to meet the immediate border security and humanitarian needs. This supplemental sends the message that this administration has been unwilling to send, that if you come here illegally, you will be deported. And it provides the resources to effect just that.

It provides $334 million for Immigration and Customs Enforcement for boosted enforcement efforts, accelerates judicial proceedings by providing $22 million to hire temporary immigration judges and provide courts with video teleconferencing equipment, and makes smart policy reforms, like changing the 2008 sex trafficking law to require that all unaccompanied minors are treated the same, among others.

These important policy reforms, which the President initially asked for, are a reasonable, thoughtful response to the tenfold increase of unaccompanied alien children since 2011.

Mr. Speaker, the President's advisers warned him this crisis was coming back in 2012 and 2013, but he ignored that advice. In fact, Mr. Speaker, the administration has mismanaged this entire issue from the beginning.

If the President's FY 2015 budget had become law, we would have seen a reduction of nearly 3,500 detention beds, a 2 percent reduction in ICE's investigative capacity, and a 12 percent reduction to CBP air and marine operations, all vital tools to deal with this problem.

In addition, the President's budget request for the Central American Regional Security Initiative, which confronts narcotics and arms trafficking, gangs, and organized crime in that region and addresses border security deficiencies and disrupts criminal infrastructure, was actually proposed to be cut in the President's FY 2015 budget. The House FY15 foreign operations bill reverses those cuts and actually increases the resources to deal with these related problems.

Mr. Speaker, at every turn, the administration has failed to address the border crisis adequately, and now the President wants a blank check to proceed. His aim is not to stop and reverse the flow of unaccompanied minors into this country. He merely aims to manage that influx more efficiently. The House cannot accept that.

This legislation, H.R. 5230, adequately funds the shortfalls caused by this administration's policy by using existing resources. And Republicans are willing to provide additional resources should they be needed in FY 2015 appropriations, within the bipartisan budget cap set by the Ryan-Murray budget agreement. But we believe that this bill provides the appropriate resources at this time.

In addition, Mr. Speaker, the bill provides for consideration of H.R. 5272, which would prevent the administration from expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the so-called DACA program. I, like many of my colleagues, believe that DACA has incentivized juveniles to attempt the long and dangerous journey from Central America, with the hope of staying in this country permanently. Executive orders, like DACA, only serve to keep that hope alive. I believe it is important to send a strong signal that this program should not be expanded. H.R. 5272 does just that.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, the rule would send back the original House- passed highway bill to the Senate. While I appreciate what my friends in the other body have been able to do, I believe it is important to provide Members the maximum amount of flexibility to craft a long-term highway bill. By accepting the Senate amendment, which would only provide adequate funding of the highway trust fund through mid- December, we would be effectively creating a new crisis in the middle of a lame duck session of Congress. Given the limited number of session days before the election, this does not seem like a prudent course to take. Instead, the House should return to the Senate its bipartisan legislation, which passed this Chamber by a vote of 367-55.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, I believe it is important to move forward on these three important pieces of legislation before the August district work period. I urge support for the rule and the underlying legislation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Parliamentary Inquiries

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I want to disagree with my friend on a couple of points that he made. First, I would suggest the President actually hasn't taken action or suggested action. A month ago, he told us that the 2008 sex trafficking law was responsible for his inability to return people to their country of origin, unaccompanied minors.

We have been waiting for his corrective for 30 days; instead, Mr. Speaker, we get an open-ended supplemental that goes through from this fiscal year to the end of the next fiscal year with a lot of measures-- some of which, by the way, we agree with--to manage the flow, but absolutely nothing to stop and reverse the flow.

So we think, in that absence of leadership from the executive branch, we have acted. We have actually done what a month ago at least he was suggesting ought to be done, giving some discretion and giving some ability to try to deal with the loophole in the law.

In the meantime, Mr. Speaker, we have looked at what he put in front of us, and we have decided, look, we can actually offset this money. We don't have to spend extra money. This is a higher priority. We will take money from lower priority areas.

We will get us through the end of this fiscal year and through the end of this calendar year, and in that interim time, we will have an opportunity to work with the administration to continue to address the problem within the limits of the Ryan-Murray budget agreement that we agreed to on a bipartisan, bicameral basis not that long ago.

Now, Mr. Speaker, this issue of the DACA controversy that we have here, I would like to make the following points: first, nothing in this legislation changes the current state of affairs at all. In other words, what the President has done up to this point is left undisturbed.

However, we do believe the abuse of prosecutorial discretion is actually one of the things that contributed to the current crisis that we have--not deliberately, but, frankly, I think the President unwittingly or unknowingly sent a signal that if you get here and you get across our border, you are going to be able to stay. So we want to be very careful that doesn't happen again.

In addition, Mr. Speaker, the President has said if Congress doesn't do certain things by such and such a date or by the August work period, then I intend during that time to use my pen and my phone to effect some changes that I want.

What is interesting to us, by the way, less than 2 years ago, he said these kinds of things were unconstitutional and couldn't be done by the executive branch. Now, he has changed his view on that.

So we are going to finally put in place something that will prevent him in our absence from once again abusing prosecutorial discretion to achieve other aims.

With that, I would like to reserve the balance of my time, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, my friend is always a terrific and impassioned speaker, and I love to hear him. I genuinely do, but what he is saying is, frankly, at odds with the facts.

Look at the record. It was the President in his budget who wanted to cut border security, cut detention beds, reduce aid to Central America, and reduce law enforcement. That was the President's proposal.

Before this crisis, we had already corrected some of those mistakes in the FY15 Foreign Operations budget. So in terms of who has been willing to put resources not only in a law enforcement sense but in a humanitarian sense, it has been the majority side of the aisle, not the minority.

Frankly, our plan will not increase suffering; it will decrease it. What will increase suffering is continuing to send the signal that coming here illegally will be rewarded. The challenge of that is, number one, when you encourage that behavior, we are destroying the societies from which those young people are coming. The officials of those governments have met with ours, and they say that we would like our children back. That is a terrible thing that we are doing to those countries.

Number two, the people who are financing it, well-meaning people in most cases, trying to bring children into the United States, are turning their money over to criminal enterprises and cartels. They are strengthening the very people who are destroying their society and committing crimes across the entire region, not just our country.

And finally, the children that are encouraged to come are young people, mostly juveniles from three countries and, frankly, are subject to a horrific and dangerous journey. Along the way, they can be pressed into sex trafficking. They can be turned into drug smugglers. They can be physically abused. We don't know how many of them never make it here at all.

Any policy left in place that encourages that, wittingly or unwittingly, ought to be changed. Until the signal is sent unmistakably to these societies, don't spend your money, don't put your kids at risk, the flow will continue.

Now the President of the United States, at least 2 weeks ago, said:

The majority of these children are going to be returned.

That is his statement, not ours, not us doing something that he said isn't going to happen. He said the overwhelming majority of these children will be returned. Doing this quickly and humanely might keep other children from following the same route.

This is a tough, tough situation. It is a situation, quite frankly, that the President was warned would happen in 2012, was warned in 2013 by officials in his own administration, and ignored. You can see he ignored it in terms of the budget he actually proposed to present to Congress this year. Thank goodness we didn't actually do what he asked us to do.

I think if you look at this objectively, you can see the President was overtaken by a crisis. He fumbled it and mismanaged that crisis, in my opinion, and now my friends on the other side of the aisle are trying to turn this into something that it is not. It is a border crisis debate and discussion. It is not an overall immigration debate. It is not a political stunt. We certainly didn't plan for this to happen. My friends clearly did not plan for it to happen. The President didn't plan for it to happen or he would never have submitted the budget that he did. So we are trying to respond quickly and expeditiously to a crisis.

This is not, by the way, a once-and-for-all response. We are here in August. We will be back here in September. We will be back here after the election. We have an appropriations process, probably an omnibus bill waiting in the lame duck that will continue to address this, but something has to be done now.

What the President requests, again, doesn't address the problem. It is an open-ended check and, frankly, sort of

gets him off the hook until September 30, 2015, when we would have to come back here again.

The bill in front of us is a much more prudent, much more targeted, much more thoughtful, and much, frankly, more efficient use of resources in the interim while we continue to work to get a handle on the situation.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let's talk for a minute about the additional money to HHS. That is exactly, by the way, what this does. The difference--and I think there is probably some confusion here--is we are doing it for a short period of time, and then we are going to probably continue to do it next year, but do it within the constraints of the Ryan-Murray budget deal. The President, frankly, hot-wires around the congressional agreement that was made to lower the budget by extending these expenditures to the end of the next fiscal year.

So just to reassure my friend, nobody is more interested, I think-- actually, let me put it this way. I think we are both interested in making sure that, when anybody is in the custody of the United States, they are treated humanely and that there are sufficient resources there to do the job. So this does it in the short-term. I would expect in the appropriations process--again, within the overall spending caps that we have both agreed to--we would continue to do that by moving resources from less important areas to more important areas.

I am going to disagree with my friend on, I think, his point that most of these folks ought to remain inside the United States. Frankly, I agree with the President of the United States: most of them should not.

There is a process, by the way, if you want to apply for refugee status. You do that by going to an American Embassy which is actually in the countries there and they make that determination. You don't do it by breaking the laws of Mexico and breaking the laws of the United States by simply arriving here.

The President has said that most of these young people will be returned. The longer they are here, the more you are going to encourage other people to come, the more people will be subjected to that journey that we all know is dangerous and deadly, and the more often criminal enterprises will be enriched as people give them money to transport juveniles to what they think will be permanent residence in the United States when the President of the United States himself says it will not be permanent, that most of them will return. Better to act on this now.

Now, again, I will be the first to tell you that I don't expect this to be the final piece of legislation. This is an emergency measure. It is timely, it is focused, and it is funded at an appropriate level. We will be back here again in September. We will be back here working on the appropriations process, no doubt, in a lame duck. Frankly, at that time, the appropriate additional resources will undoubtedly be made available, but they will be made available within the budget caps of the Ryan-Murray deal.

I think sometimes when we compare this bill to the budget request the President made, the supplemental request, we really are comparing apples to oranges because the timeframes are much different. Remember, the President's bill also includes wildfire funding. That may be appropriate, but we just don't think it is appropriate in this vehicle, in what ought to be a focused approach.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me pull us back from arguing about rules and procedures to what the real essence of the conflict on the transportation bill is: 357 Members, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote, voted to send the transportation bill to the United States Senate.

That bill, by the way, ran through, if I recall correctly, May of next year, giving us enough time to actually then come to what I know both sides want, and that is a longer-term highway bill.

What the Senate did was send us back something with fewer dollars and a shorter timeframe that actually reaches simply into December, meaning a lame duck Congress would have to deal with the transportation deal. Not likely to happen, particularly

when we will also be dealing with the omnibus spending bill since the Senate, in its infinite wisdom, has been unable to pass a single appropriations bill.

So I think cluttering the calendar with the transportation fund dispute and problem in a short timeframe simply isn't wise. We think it was a political game on the part of the United States Senate. But regardless, the position of this House as expressed by a bipartisan vote of 357, is overwhelmingly clear. We want to expedite that and get it back to the other side so hopefully they can see that type of gamesmanship doesn't work and they accede to the position that, frankly, both sides of this Chamber adopted in overwhelming numbers.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This is a subject on which, obviously, there is considerable passion and considerable emotion. I respect that on all sides.

I will remind my friends who are insisting on immigration, they did actually control the Chamber for 4 years and didn't bring up an immigration bill ever, had two different Presidents who would have signed anything that they cared to pass, and never introduced one.

I will not yield until I finish my point. You have got plenty of time. I think you can make your points on your own.

I certainly will yield to my friend on that.

Reclaiming my time, I thought we were talking about comprehensive immigration reform--safely after an election I might add.

But the President of the United States, who ran in 2008, saying he would have a bill on the floor within 100 days, didn't do it.

My friends had basically complete control of this Chamber and the other Chamber. They demonstrated that by passing, again, ObamaCare without a single Republican vote, passing Dodd-Frank, and passing the stimulus bill, so they had the ability to do this and chose not to do it. That is their right. They were in the majority. But please don't lecture us on people stopping individual bills.

We have 350 bills, by the way, this Chamber has passed, sitting and waiting for the Senate to consider any of them, any of them. So I recognize, again, there is a great deal of passion here, but that is not what this debate is about.

This debate is about a border crisis that we both recognize exist. This debate is to give the President additional resources to deal with that, even though he in some measure contributed to creating it. And this debate is to make sure that we send the message unmistakably: if you subject children to this journey and pay criminals thousands of dollars to bring them across, they are not likely to get to stay--a point that the President of the United States has made. He has said a majority of these children are going to go home. If my friends have a quarrel with that, they should direct that to the President, not to us.

In this case, we do think if you don't discourage that, you are going to feed criminal behavior. You are going to put these children at risk, and you are going to destroy the society from which they came.

I don't think we can in a single bill have an overall solution to this problem of this level. I personally think it is going to take an effort somewhat similar to what we did in Colombia--in a bipartisan sense, I might add--on the drug trade, where we invested considerable resources in Colombia to help them deal with that problem. I am not going to tell you it is perfect there, but it is considerably better than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.

So that is where we worked together constructively and did something good for those societies and something good for our own country. That will probably be the model that has to emerge again in Central America.

But, again, that is a problem far ahead of us and legislative in scope. This is a response to a crisis. We think it is the appropriate response.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I have a great deal of respect for my friend from the Appropriations Committee. He is an excellent legislator and tremendous Member.

I am, though, going to point out the record of the Democratic majority the last time they were here and in control of what happened on the floor.

In the 111th Congress, the final 2 years of Representative Pelosi's time as Speaker, the House never considered a single bill under an open rule--not one bill. That is the definition of a closed process.

Under Republican control, the House has returned to consideration of appropriations bills under an open process, with 22 open rules. We had no open rules on appropriations when my friends were in the majority.

This year alone, the House has considered 404 amendments during the appropriations process, and 189 of them offered were by our friends on the other side.

When you actually compare the record overall, frankly, I think the comparison is much to the advantage of Republicans. So we are trying to deal with complex issues in a relatively short period of time.

I know the Congress will be back in session in September. We will be working on the appropriations process in the lameduck again, so there are going to be ample legislative opportunities, but we are in a crisis situation, which we are in this case.

We are trying to respond thoughtfully and expeditiously. We are trying to put resources toward the problem. We are trying to get at the core of the problem, which the administration itself a month ago identified as a 2008 law, but has now offered absolutely no suggestions how to fix.

So we have not tried to repeal it. We have tried to tweak it and address the problem. If my friends have a better solution, we would love to hear it, but we haven't heard it. Instead, we have been told the 2008 law caused the problem, but you can't change the law. That seems to me both politically and intellectually indefensible.

We are going to continue to try to solve the problem that has been identified by the administration. At some point, we hope they will join us in trying to actually correct the problem that they say exists.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Just a few correctives, if I may. We are actually putting in additional resources. We haven't cut resources. It is the President's budget that cut resources. It cut detention beds, enforcement, and aid to the countries in Central America that are dealing with this problem. That is the President's budget.

Those things were all corrected in the Foreign Operations budget that has not yet reached the floor, but has been passed by the full Appropriations Committee.

I am going to disagree with my friends on the other side that this has anything to do with comprehensive immigration reform. Quite frankly, it does not. It is a border crisis. It has nothing to do with this legislation.

The root cause of the problem here are criminals who go back and tell people: if you pay money and subject yourself to a dangerous journey and we get you to the United States, you will be able to stay. That is who is at fault here. That is where the focus ought to be.

When my friends point to specific cases, I always point out, number one, we have an avenue called the United States Embassy. In the country, you can go and plead refugee status there. You don't have to travel 1,000 or 2,000 miles across very dangerous country. You simply afford yourself of the available opportunities.

Finally, in the President's judgment, most of these children will be returned. That is the President's judgment. Frankly, I think he made that judgment, trying to discourage what is happening now. That is precisely what we are trying to do in this piece of legislation.

So I think there is a lot of passion, and it is appropriate because there are some heartwrenching cases, but there is also a lot of political theater here. The reality is, again, most of these children, according to the President, will be returned.

The quicker that can happen, the less likely it is that other children will follow them and be subjected to a very dangerous journey. That is what we are trying to achieve. We are going to try to do that in this measure today, but we invite our friends to work with us as we go forward, as I suspect that we will.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to my colleague, the distinguished Member from Texas (Mr. Culberson).

I do not. I am prepared to close whenever my friend is.

I would certainly do that for my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I am going to differ with my friends, obviously, on a number of important issues.

First, I think they, probably, without thinking it through, accused us of wanting to roll back a human sex trafficking bill that passed this body unanimously. Absolutely untrue. Nobody has any intention of doing anything like that. It is the administration that said that legislation--a loophole in it--is what caused this crisis. I would dispute that, quite frankly.

I think what has caused it is, first and foremost, the President's sending an unmistakable signal, a signal that may have been misinterpreted that, if you manage to get to the United States, you are going to be able to stay. He did that by unilaterally changing and thwarting whole sections of our own immigration law, by doing things that he, himself, had said a year

before were unconstitutional. That signal, I think, has been picked up by criminals and turned into a message that has been directed at naive and vulnerable people, saying, if you give us thousands of dollars, we will take you on this journey, get you to the United States, and then you are going to be able to stay.

When the President first addressed this problem--again, he was warned in 2012 and 2013 by his own advisers that this might well happen--he did not prepare for it. He submitted a budget that actually cut border enforcement and that cut security aid to the Central American countries so they could secure their own territory. When he finally dealt with this, he said this 2008 law is part of the reason.

What this bill does is tweak it. It simply says we are going to treat children coming from the affected areas, from noncontiguous countries, in the same way we treat Mexican children. It has always been a question as to whether or not we should have that distinction. There is no particular reason why somebody from Central America should automatically be treated differently than somebody from Mexico.

In addition, I will point out to my friends there is an easier way. Just go to the American Embassy in the country, and if you have got status that would qualify as refugee status, you can make your case there. You don't have to pay thousands of dollars. You don't have to subject yourself to a dangerous journey in the company of criminals.

The President, frankly, has said that this is an immigration issue. I don't think it is. I think it is a border crisis, and I think it needs to be dealt with that way. I think the record is, again, pretty clear on this, and that is exactly what we are trying to do. We have acted on a problem the President has identified.

When my friends express concern that the majority of these children will be returned, number one, remember they are going to be returned to the custody of their governments. They are going to be returned to the people who are actually responsible for trying to take care of them within their societies. Second, that is exactly what the President said is going to happen. Those were his words. The overwhelming majority of these young people will be returned. The quicker and the more humanely and the more expeditiously we accomplish that, the fewer of them will undertake this journey, and the fewer of these families will be conned out of their money. You are not doing the next people a favor by not dealing with the problem in front of us.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, this legislation continues this House's commitment to govern and deal with crises before they become even worse--the shortfall in the highway trust fund, for instance, in the supplemental request. They are all things the American people expect us to deal with before the August district work period. I would urge my colleagues to support the rule and the underlying legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 700 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Rules Committee met to report a rule that would provide for same-day authority for any resolution reported from the Committee on Rules related to the ongoing humanitarian crisis on the southern border, border security, and related immigration law through September 5, 2014. Additionally, the

rule provides suspension authority through September 5, 2014, on the same topics.

Mr. Speaker, this rule is very straightforward. It allows the House the maximum flexibility to deal with the crisis on the southern border during the district work period by providing both same-day and suspension authority through September 5.

Any legislation considered during this time period would still need to go through the regular process, by either a rule for consideration by the Rules Committee or under the standard suspension process. This resolution just allows for expedited consideration of those matters while preserving as much of the district work period as possible.

Mr. Speaker, I urge support for the rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, obviously, my friend and I are going to have a disagreement about the nature of the bill that I think will, in rather short order, be before us. Let's go back and look at a little bit of history here.

The administration was warned in 2012 and 2013 that we were going to have a crisis on our hands if we didn't do something, that we were going to get a flow of unaccompanied minors. They did absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact, the President of the United States submitted a budget to us which cut money for enforcement and detention at the border, which cut money for support of people that were here while they were being processed, and that cut money for aid to the countries where most of these folks are coming from. That is real foresight.

So we have been confronted with a crisis, and a crisis that, in our view, the President contributed to by unilaterally changing whole sections of the immigration law and leaving the impression, probably unwittingly, I would say, but leaving the impression to many people that, if we get to the United States, we are going to be able to stay.

There is no question criminal elements have picked that impression up, broadcast it. Thousands of people have sent them tens of thousands--millions, really--of dollars and put children on a perilous journey of over 1,000 miles to this country.

Now we are trying to act on that, and we think, number one, if we don't do that, the societies from which they are coming are going to be disrupted. And we have been told very clearly by the leaders of those countries: We would like our children back.

Number two, if we don't stop this process, we are going to continue to enrich cartels to an extraordinary degree. Frankly, as one border agent told me, he said, from a cartel standpoint, this is actually easier than drugs, because with drugs we try to interdict you every step along the way, and if you get to the border to cross, we continue to try and interdict you. In this case, we actually, once they bring an illegal unaccompanied minor here, complete the transaction. So it is encouraging the flow, and that is dangerous for the young people involved.

We all know that in the course of that journey there is a risk that sex trafficking will take place. There is a risk that people will be lured or forced into drug dealing. There is a terrific physical risk. We know a lot of those folks are abused in the course of this process or sexually assaulted, so we need to stop this flow. We need to do it in a humane and appropriate way.

The President, by the way, has suggested that this is due to the 2008 law which we all passed, in good faith, to deal with sex trafficking. I personally don't think that is the case, but if that is true, then we ought to make some tweak to that law. We don't need to repeal it, but we need to make sure that we do something so that we don't have an enormous backlog here and we can actually handle the flow appropriately.

We have waited in vain for the President to tell us what that tweak is. I mean, it was his Secretary of Homeland Security that actually raised this issue and said we need to be able--he said this in testimony in front of the United States Senate--we need to be able to treat people coming from the three Central American countries essentially the same way we treat Canadian and Mexican minors that arrive at our border. That was the position, but we have not seen any more requests.

So if you look at our bill, frankly, number one, it is going to take care of that problem with a tweak. Number 2, we are going to provide additional moneys to handle this process through the end of the fiscal year and the end of the calendar year. Number 3, then we can work, because there will probably be additional resources needed next year, under the caps in the Ryan-Murray budget agreement and redirect that flow of money from less urgent to more urgent problems.

So we think it is a responsible way to proceed. I think, essentially, that is

what we are going to try and put before the House. Regardless, once we pass something, then the Senate can pass something.

I am sad to say, Mr. Speaker, that the other body was unable to do anything yesterday and it has adjourned and gone home. Frankly, we were unable to get things done yesterday in a way that I think I certainly would have liked, but we stayed here, and we are going to continue to work through the problem, present a product. Hopefully, the Senate will come back and do the same, and then we can proceed legislatively and provide the resources and legislative corrections that are needed to deal with the situation.

I am pleased that we are in session. I am pleased that we are working toward a solution.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to disagree with my good friend, the minority whip, on a point.

I don't think the Senate left yesterday because of anything the House did. It failed to act, and it left. It went home because it couldn't pass a bill. That is something we are not going to allow to happen here. We are going to pass legislation. We are going to get our part of the job done.

The Senate, then, will be free to come back and pass something, and we can go into a conference and do exactly what my friend suggests, work out a compromise. So hopefully that is where we will end up in this process.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The gentleman may be surprised to find that, actually, we are not too far apart on the issue.

Now, currently, we have over $700 million still on hand to deal with wildfires. The gentleman and I actually cosponsored legislation that our friend from Idaho (Mr. Simpson) has offered so that we can actually deal with this and change the structure of how we fund wildfire fighting. I suspect that issue will come back again. As a matter of fact, I was willing to work during the budget process with some of my friends on the other side of the Rules Committee to actually write the change into the budget. We had the votes on our side, working with our friends, to do that. For some reason, the Democratic amendment was withdrawn. I don't know why, and I cast no aspersions. But that is an area where we would like to work with you. I don't think it is particularly appropriate to be done in this bill.

This bill is about dealing with the crisis on the southern border. It shouldn't be a Christmas tree or a grab bag. If we need additional resources, we should come back to do that. Again, we have sufficient resources on hand. Congress will be back in session in September, back in session after the elections. So I think we are going to have multiple opportunities to deal with this.

I look forward to working with my friends on this particular issue when those opportunities occur.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to disagree with my friend on the root of this issue. I don't think whether or not we passed immigration reform has anything to do with the border crisis. I really don't. Frankly, what is occurring there would be illegal had we passed what the Senate passed. So it just simply doesn't address the problem.

What the problem here is, by our own actions in this country, we have sent a message that if you get here, you can stay, whether you are legally entitled to or not. And it is going to take so long to process you, you will essentially never be sent back.

And we have allowed criminal cartels to distort our position and to make tens of millions of dollars off of this. That needs to be stopped. That needs to be reversed. It is not helpful to anybody.

Now, again, we may differ on the ideas. Although, I would point out for the record once more, the administration did ask: Please do something about the 2008 law. They asked that a month ago. And then they have sort of gotten quiet since then. We don't hear anything else about that.

They have asked for resources. We have looked at what they need. We said we will be willing to do that. We are going to take them from existing moneys. We are not going to spend new money. This is an urgent priority. We think you are right. We are going to redirect that. And by the way, if you are going to need additional resources next year, we will work with you again there. We are going to do it under the Ryan- Murray budget cap. We are not going to go outside the process. And we are using that.

I think my friend from Maryland, the minority whip, is correct. We are using exceptional procedures--but they are procedures within the traditions of this House--to react to a crisis situation, and we are trying to stay here to get our work done and hopefully challenge the Senate to come back and do the same thing. So we are working the process and the crisis as best we can. With that, we will continue to work.

And I will reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself such time as I may consume, Mr. Speaker.

I think we need to step back from the emotion a moment and look at the realities of the situation. Number one, anybody that seeks refugee status in the United States can go to any of the embassies in the country and request it. You don't have to travel 1,000 miles. You can go request it, and we will look to see whether or not you qualify.

Number two, the President of the United States has said that the vast majority of these children will be returned. That is not us. That is the President. He has said that. We are trying to do it and work with him in an expeditious way because we think sooner is better.

Number three, we are not returning them to criminals. We are returning them to the custody of their governments, their own officials, who are probably better situated to make these decisions than we are 1,000-plus miles away.

So let's be real. Nobody is stripping any rights away from anyone. We actually have a situation--a 2008 law--where a loophole has been exploited by criminals. That is what is happening. And we are trying to stop the loophole and keep people from embarking on a dangerous journey and discourage people from giving thousands of dollars of their hard- earned money to criminal cartels to participate in that. That is the effort that is underway here.

Nobody would have fewer rights than the people that are currently here from Mexico or Canada. We would still have the ability to adjudicate issues. The process would be a lot faster and, we think in that sense, more humane and more efficient and more expeditious.

And with that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, again, I just want to make the point to my friend. Nobody is trying to strip away the rights from anyone. The 2008 law has been abused. Those people have found a loophole in it, and they have clogged the legal system. We have offered not a repeal, but a relatively minor fix.

The President of the United States and his administration have also said this law is at fault. As a matter of fact, they are actually the ones who put that suggestion out there. The President of the United States is the person who said the vast majority of these people need to go home and will eventually go home. So if he has a better way to do this, we would love to see the proposal.

What he sent us was a funding proposal with no fix at all. It is a proposal aimed at better managing the flow of people, but not reversing that. It is a proposal, frankly, that goes well beyond this fiscal year, well beyond this calendar year, and allows him basically to operate outside the budget agreement limits--the caps--that we have all agreed to. We don't think that is appropriate. We think you reprioritize money toward the more urgent issue.

We agree with the President. This is an urgent issue. We are willing to find the savings in other parts of the budget. We are not willing to break the budget, and we are not willing to break the budget caps that both sides agreed to. That is really, I think, the essence of the difference. We are trying to offer a solution. It may not be the final solution.

I hope the Senate will offer their solution. We can go to conference, and we can work with the President, but so far, the only ideas that have been put forward to actually fix the problem, I think, have largely come from our side of the aisle.

I am sure that won't last indefinitely. I think my friends will do the same thing, but certainly, they dominate the Senate. The Senate can do the same thing. Sooner or later, they will get it done.

We will continue to work on this, but for right now, again, nobody's aim is to strip anybody's rights away, but we are going to try to confront an urgent crisis, and we are going to try and do it in an expeditious way, in a responsible way, and in a limited way.

We can come back here and look at the larger issues in September and after the election. With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Parliamentary Inquiries

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I couldn't disagree with my good friend from Texas more. I think everybody on both sides of the aisle cares about these children. Now, we care about them enough to restore the cuts that the President made in the aids to the country of origin.

We care about them enough to restore the cuts that he made in his budget to our own border security. Yes, our border security does need to be armed, not to deal with children, but to deal with the criminals that brought them here and abused them in the process. That is what we are talking about here.

Now, there is nothing to be gained by continuing this flow. Even if some of you would like every particular person that got here to stay-- and, again, I quote the President, the ``vast majority'' will not be allowed to, will be sent back--stopping the flow is what we ought to be focusing on and stopping people from giving thousands of dollars to criminal cartels to bring these children to the borders and abuse them in the process. The quicker that stops, the better off we are.

We are willing to work with the countries of origin, I think, on both sides of the aisle. We had the President up here saying, pretty emphatically, that they needed some assistance in dealing with that. We think that is appropriate. We try to do that in legislation, and frankly, we have done it in the foreign operations bill, where we are more generous to the countries of origin than the administration has suggested we should be in its own budget.

Mr. Speaker, we are interested in dealing with the problem, but we are also interested in helping countries keep their children in their country, which they tell us they want to do.

We are also interested in making sure those children are never subjected to this journey, which I think all would agree is difficult and dangerous, and we are also extraordinarily interested in making sure that the criminal cartels who are making profit off this are discouraged from doing this, that they can't go and tell their potential customers: Give us the money and put your kid at risk, but if we actually get them there, there is a good chance they will stay.

That false promise, that dangerous promise offered by criminals victimizing innocent people is frankly what we ought to be focused on and what we are trying to focus on.

Again, we will continue to work toward that end. I hope, Mr. Speaker, that we have a good product. I think that we will. The House will consider it, and then we hope the Senate actually comes back from its district work period and deals with it as well, and we will go from there.

That is the reason for the rule. That is the reason, so we can act during this multiweek district work period, should the opportunity actually occur to do that.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I will reserve the balance of my time.

No, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I will not yield, and I do want to reiterate my previous announcement that all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only. I am not yielding for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I enter into the Record the story of a young Honduran girl who resisted being robbed for $5, was clubbed over the head, dragged out by two men who cut a hole in her throat and left her in a ravine.

[From the New York Times, July 11, 2014]

The Children of the Drug Wars

(By Sonia Nazario)

Cristian Omar Reyes, an 11-year-old sixth grader in the

neighborhood of Nueva Suyapa, on the outskirts of

Tegucigalpa, tells me he has to get out of Honduras soon--

``no matter what.''

In March, his father was robbed and murdered by gangs while

working as a security guard protecting a pastry truck. His

mother used the life insurance payout to hire a smuggler to

take her to Florida. She promised to send for him quickly,

but she has not.

Three people he knows were murdered this year. Four others

were gunned down on a nearby corner in the span of two weeks

at the beginning of this year. A girl his age resisted being

robbed of $5. She was clubbed over the head and dragged off

by two men who cut a hole in her throat, stuffed her panties

in it, and left her body in a ravine across the street from

Cristian's house.

``I'm going this year,'' he tells me.

I last went to Nueva Suyapa in 2003, to write about another

boy, Luis Enrique Motino Pineda, who had grown up there and

left to find his mother in the United States. Children from

Central America have been making that journey, often without

their parents, for two decades. But lately something has

changed, and the predictable flow has turned into an exodus.

Three years ago, about 6,800 children were detained by United

States immigration authorities and placed in federal custody;

this year, as many as 90,000 children are expected to be

picked up. Around a quarter come from Honduras--more than

from anywhere else.

Children still leave Honduras to reunite with a parent, or

for better educational and economic opportunities. But, as I

learned when I returned to Nueva Suyapa last month, a vast

majority of child migrants are fleeing not poverty, but

violence. As a result, what the United States is seeing on

its borders now is not an immigration crisis. It is a refugee

crisis.

Gangs arrived in force in Honduras in the 1990s, as 18th

Street and Mara Salvatrucha members were deported in large

numbers from Los Angeles to Central America, joining

homegrown groups like Los Puchos. But the dominance in the

past few years of foreign drug cartels in Honduras,

especially ones from Mexico, has increased the reach and

viciousness of the violence. As the

United States and Colombia spent billions of dollars to

disrupt the movement of drugs up the Caribbean corridor,

traffickers rerouted inland through Honduras, and 79 percent

of cocaine-smuggling flights bound for the United States now

pass through there.

Narco groups and gangs are vying for control over this

turf, neighborhood by neighborhood, to gain more foot

soldiers for drug sales and distribution, expand their

customer base, and make money through extortion in a country

left with an especially weak, corrupt government following a

2009 coup.

Enrique's 33-year-old sister, Belky, who still lives in

Nueva Suyapa, says children began leaving en masse for the

United States three years ago. That was around the time that

the narcos started putting serious pressure on kids to work

for them. At Cristian's school, older students working with

the cartels push drugs on the younger ones--some as young as

6. If they agree, children are recruited to serve as

lookouts, make deliveries in backpacks, rob people and extort

businesses. They are given food, shoes and money in return.

Later, they might work as traffickers or hit men.

Teachers at Cristian's school described a 12-year-old who

demanded that the school release three students one day to

help him distribute crack cocaine; he brandished a pistol and

threatened to kill a teacher when she tried to question him.

At Nueva Suyapa's only public high school, narcos ``recruit

inside the school,'' says Yadira Sauceda, a counselor there.

Until he was killed a few weeks ago, a 23-year-old

``student'' controlled the school. Each day, he was checked

by security at the door, then had someone sneak his gun to

him over the school wall. Five students, mostly 12- and 13-

year-olds, tearfully told Ms. Sauceda that the man had

ordered them to use and distribute drugs or he would kill

their parents. By March, one month into the new school year,

67 of 450 students had left the school.

Teachers must pay a ``war tax'' to teach in certain

neighborhoods, and students must pay to attend.

Carlos Baquedano Sanchez, a slender 14-year-old with hair

sticking straight up, explained how hard it was to stay away

from the cartels. He lives in a shack made of corrugated tin

in a neighborhood in Nueva Suyapa called El Infiernito--

Little Hell--and usually doesn't have anything to eat one out

of every three days. He started working in a dump when he was

7, picking out iron or copper to recycle, for $1 or $2 a day.

But bigger boys often beat him to steal his haul, and he quit

a year ago when an older man nearly killed him for a coveted

car-engine piston. Now he sells scrap wood.

But all of this was nothing, he says, compared to the

relentless pressure to join narco gangs and the constant

danger they have brought to his life. When he was 9, he

barely escaped from two narcos who were trying to rape him,

while terrified neighbors looked on. When he was 10, he was

pressured to try marijuana and crack. ``You'll feel better.

Like you are in the clouds,'' a teenager working with a gang

told him. But he resisted.

He has known eight people who were murdered and seen three

killed right in front of him. He saw a man shot three years

ago and still remembers the plums the man was holding rolling

down the street, coated in blood. Recently he witnessed two

teenage hit men shooting a pair of brothers for refusing to

hand over the keys and title to their motorcycle. Carlos hit

the dirt and prayed. The killers calmly walked down the

street. Carlos shrugs. ``Now seeing someone dead is

nothing.''

He longs to be an engineer or mechanic, but he quit school

after sixth grade, too poor and too afraid to attend. ``A lot

of kids know what can happen in school. So they leave.''

He wants to go to the United States, even though he knows

how dangerous the journey can be; a man in his neighborhood

lost both legs after falling off the top of a Mexican freight

train, and a family friend drowned in the Rio Grande. ``I

want to avoid drugs and death. The government can't pull up

its pants and help people,'' he says angrily. ``My country

has lost its way.''

Girls face particular dangers--one reason around 40 percent

of children who arrived in the United States this year were

girls, compared with 27 percent in the past. Recently three

girls were raped and killed in Nueva Suyapa, one only 8 years

old. Two 15-year-olds were abducted and raped. The kidnappers

told them that if they didn't get in the car they would kill

their entire families. Some parents no longer let their girls

go to school for fear of their being kidnapped, says Luis

Lopez, an educator with Asociacion Compartir, a nonprofit in

Nueva Suyapa.

Milagro Noemi Martinez, a petite 19-year-old with clear

green eyes, has been told repeatedly by narcos that she would

be theirs--or end up dead. Last summer, she made her first

attempt to reach the United States. ``Here there is only

evil,'' she says. ``It's better to leave than have them kill

me here.'' She headed north with her 21-year-old sister, a

friend who had also been threatened, and $170 among them. But

she was stopped and deported from Mexico. Now back in Nueva

Suyapa, she stays locked inside her mother's house. ``I hope

God protects me. I am afraid to step outside.'' Last year,

she says, six minors, as young as 15, were killed in her

neighborhood. Some were hacked apart. She plans to try the

journey again soon. Asking for help from the police or the

government is not an option in what some consider a failed

state. The drugs that pass through Honduras each year are

worth more than the country's entire gross domestic product.

Narcos have bought off police officers, politicians and

judges. In recent years, four out of five homicides were

never investigated. No one is immune to the carnage. Several

Honduran mayors have been killed. The sons of both the former

head of the police department and the head of the national

university were murdered, the latter, an investigation

showed, by the police.

``You never call the cops. The cops themselves will

retaliate and kill you,'' says Henry Carias Aguilar, a pastor

in Nueva Suyapa. A majority of small businesses in Nueva

Suyapa have shuttered because of extortion demands, while

churches have doubled in number in the past decade, as people

pray for salvation from what they see as the plague predicted

in the Bible. Taxis and homes have signs on them asking God

for mercy.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently

interviewed 404 children who had arrived in the United States

from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico; 58 percent

said their primary reason for leaving was violence. (A

similar survey in 2006, of Central American children coming

into Mexico, found that only 13 percent were fleeing

violence.) They aren't just going to the United States: Less

conflicted countries in Central America had a 712 percent

increase in asylum claims between 2008 and 2013.

``If a house is burning, people will jump out the window,''

says Michelle Brane, director of the migrant rights and

justice program at the Women's Refugee Commission.

To permanently stem this flow of children, we must address

the complex root causes of violence in Honduras, as well as

the demand for illegal drugs in the United States that is

fueling that violence.

In the meantime, however, we must recognize this as a

refugee crisis, as the United Nations just recommended. These

children are facing threats similar to the forceful

conscription of child soldiers by warlords in Sudan or during

the civil war in Bosnia. Being forced to sell drugs by narcos

is no different from being forced into military service.

Many Americans, myself included, believe in deporting

unlawful immigrants, but see a different imperative with

refugees.

The United States should immediately create emergency

refugee centers inside our borders, tent cities--operated by

the United Nations and other relief groups like the

International Rescue Committee--where immigrant children

could be held for 60 to 90 days instead of being released.

The government would post immigration judges at these centers

and adjudicate children's cases there.

To ensure this isn't a sham process, asylum officers and

judges must be trained in child-sensitive interviewing

techniques to help elicit information from fearful,

traumatized youngsters. All children must also be represented

by a volunteer or government-funded lawyer. Kids in Need of

Defense, a nonprofit that recruits pro bono lawyers to

represent immigrant children and whose board I serve on,

estimates that 40 percent to 60 percent of these children

potentially qualify to stay under current immigration laws--

and do, if they have a lawyer by their side. The vast

majority do not. The only way to ensure we are not hurtling

children back to circumstances that could cost them their

lives is by providing them with real due process.

Judges, who currently deny seven in 10 applications for

asylum by people who are in deportation proceedings, must

better understand the conditions these children are facing.

They should be more open to considering relief for those

fleeing gang recruitment or threats by criminal organizations

when they come from countries like Honduras that are clearly

unwilling or unable to protect them.

If many children don't meet strict asylum criteria but face

significant dangers if they return, the United States should

consider allowing them to stay using humanitarian parole

procedures we have employed in the past, for Cambodians and

Haitians. It may be possible to transfer children and

resettle them in other safe countries willing to share the

burden. We should also make it easier for children to apply

as refugees when they are still in Central America, as we

have done for people in Iraq, Cuba, countries in the former

Soviet Union, Vietnam and Haiti. Those who showed a well-

founded fear of persecution wouldn't have to make the

perilous journey north alone.

Of course, many migrant children come for economic reasons,

and not because they fear for their lives. In those cases,

they should quickly be deported if they have at least one

parent in their country of origin. By deporting them directly

from the refugee centers, the United States would discourage

future non-refugees by showing that immigrants cannot be

caught and released, and then avoid deportation by ignoring

court orders to attend immigration hearings.

Instead of advocating such a humane, practical approach,

the Obama administration wants to intercept and return

children en route. On Tuesday the president asked for $3.7

billion in emergency funding. Some money would be spent on

new detention facilities and more immigration judges, but the

main goal seems to be to strengthen border control and speed

up deportations. He also asked Congress to grant powers that

could eliminate legal protections for children from Central

America in order to expedite removals, a change that

Republicans in Congress have also advocated.

This would allow life-or-death decisions to be made within

hours by Homeland Security officials, even though studies

have shown that border patrol agents fail to adequately

screen Mexican children to see if they are being sexually

exploited by traffickers or fear persecution, as the agents

are supposed to do. Why would they start asking Central

American children key questions needed to prove refugee

status?

The United States expects other countries to take in

hundreds of thousands of refugees on humanitarian grounds.

Countries neighboring Syria have absorbed nearly 3 million

people. Jordan has accepted in two days what the United

States has received in an entire month during the height of

this immigration flow--more than 9,000 children in May. The

United States should also increase to pre-9/11 levels the

number of refugees we accept to 90,000 from the current

70,000 per year and, unlike in recent years, actually admit

that many.

By sending these children away, ``you are handing them a

death sentence,'' says Jose Arnulfo Ochoa Ochoa, an expert in

Honduras with World Vision International, a Christian

humanitarian aid group. This abrogates international

conventions we have signed and undermines our credibility as

a humane country. It would be a disgrace if this wealthy

nation turned its back on the 52,000 children who have

arrived since October, many of them legitimate refugees.

This is not how a great nation treats children.

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, again, if there is discretion that can be shared, that was directly from the article that I asked to be entered into the Record. On many occasions I have been on this floor and been part of many debates in the 5 years I have been honored to serve with the Congress and have used the exact same approach and have never been charged. Is there any discretion that the Speaker can give us direction on?

Mr. Speaker, I have a further parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, with that being said to debate, even though the same practices are used by Members, rulings can change by the Chair on this particular issue?

Mr. Speaker, for clarification, that is exactly what I did, which is I read a statement from the article.

I am confused, Mr. Speaker. I am just maybe a junior Member from a small farm in New Mexico, but it seems that if I am reading from the article directly, that I don't appear to be violating any rules to be charged time.

Mr. Speaker, this was not an embellishment. This was a direct quote from the article. It appears to me that my understanding of an embellishment are my own words being added.

Mr. Speaker, last week, we were part of a conversation and debate around strengthening antihuman trafficking laws. We all came to this floor, and Democrats and Republicans found a way to talk to one another and talk to the American public about what we should do to protect these children that are in harm's way, not just fleeing street violence, but being brutally murdered and raped, Mr. Speaker.

This week, what my Republican colleagues are doing is coming out of a conference and weakening antihuman trafficking laws.

Mr. Speaker, at this point, all I can say is God help this Congress if it is now our policy to weaken human trafficking laws. It is a sad, sad day, Mr. Speaker, and I certainly hope that my colleagues take a chance to look at this and look into their hearts and pray on that and come to the floor and do the right thing.

Mr. Speaker, I will further yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I want to address the underlying rule, and I appreciate the gentleman from Maryland's efforts to get clarity as to what is in this rule.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, we saw this rule for the first time late last night. We saw the bill for the first time late last night. I believe the underlying bill was dropped shortly after 8 p.m., and Rules Committee convened after 10 p.m.

We are still in the process of trying to understand what is in this rule and this bill. I know that there are legitimate questions with regard to how it changes the rules of our entire House of Representatives, as well as what this bill actually does.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to both the process of the rule and the underlying bill. The bill, of course, prohibits certain actions with respect to deferred actions for people who are already in our country.

This provision was added at the last minute in the midnight hour to restrict the deferred action for the childhood arrivals program, which is a form of prosecutorial discretion, which is used by all prosecutorial and administrative agencies.

When you have a situation where 10 or 11 or 12 million people have illegal presence in our country, clearly, with our limited enforcement resources, we need to have prosecutorial discretion and priorities. Whom should we be going after and in what form, given that it is not possible with the limited resources they have, to in any way address the entire issue?

Mr. Speaker, I would like to think that it makes perfect sense, with regards to the deferred action program, that we focus our limited enforcement resources on criminal aliens. Those are people who, in addition to having unlawful presence here, have committed some kind of crime. It might have been a DUI. It might have been an assault.

We need to focus on promptly bringing people who have committed crimes to justice and deporting them under our laws. So whom does it make sense to not focus on, given our prosecutorial discretion?

I think the deferred action program is a perfect example, and this bill, in our understanding, even recognizes that, that many of the people that grew up in our country, that know no other country, that came when they were 2 or 3, that were cheerleaders or high school football players and know no other country than the United States of America and owe their loyalty to us, of course, should not be the enforcement priority of laws that are broken until we can fix our immigration system.

It makes sense that the President work--any President, Democrat or Republican--to identify additional groups that we can use with our prosecutorial discretion and offer some kind of deferred action to, so that we can further focus our limited enforcement resources on those who would do us harm or represent a threat to our safety or our economy.

If there is a way, for instance, to include the parents of American children who are here unlawfully and are not violating any criminal laws of our country, it would make sense that their enforcement should come after those who have committed criminal violations in our country. That is a customary aspect of prosecutorial discretion ranging from any DA to the Attorney General to the President of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, under the language of this bill, it would further restrict the ability of the President to focus our limited enforcement resources on criminal aliens who would do us harm, reducing the security of the American people.

Now, we all know the real answer here is to replace our broken immigration system with one that works. The answer is not to have 10 million, 12 million, who knows how many million people here illegally and just focus on which group we can actually enforce the law on. We need to have a law that we can enforce universally.

There should not be people that are here illegally in our country. We need to secure our borders, we need to reunite American families, and we need to grow our economy. Later on today, if we defeat the previous question, Mr. Garcia will offer a bipartisan bill that will do just that.

Instead of even allowing amendments on these controversial bills, including amendments that are extremely commonsense, we have a closed process that, as Mr. Van Hollen pointed out, changes the very rules of the House, in the name of preventing the President from focusing on deporting criminal aliens.

Look, Republicans and Democrats alike acknowledge that there is a crisis on our southern border. Unaccompanied minors are fleeing from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, fleeing horrific situations. I had the opportunity to visit the border the weekend before last, along with many of my colleagues, and got to speak to some of the kids, as well as the Customs and Border Patrol and HHS officials, and hear some of those stories firsthand.

We had this discussion yesterday in Rules Committee. Action means a bill passing the House, a bill passing the Senate, and the President signing it. Instead of taking action to address the crisis on our southern border, the House is considering a House-only bill that the President has said he would veto, that the Senate won't likely even bring up, and then promptly going home for a 1-month vacation. We wonder why Congress has a 12 percent approval rating.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), my colleague on the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. O'Rourke).

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), the ranking member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

I yield an additional 25 seconds to the gentleman from Texas.

Will the gentleman yield?

Will the gentleman yield on just a quick correction on that point?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

The House of Representatives did pass the DREAM Act during the lame duck session.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. O'Rourke) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Mr. O'ROURKE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Garcia) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Mr. GARCIA asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlelady from California (Ms. Lofgren) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Ms. LOFGREN asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I have a point of parliamentary inquiry.

When these requests are submitted, the Members are merely stating the title of the document that is being submitted, which clearly has to have a name. I want a clarification as to whether that is charged to our time, if they are simply submitting a document and telling you the name of that document?

Again, Mr. Speaker, I inquire--I would like your judgment, in fact--on when these motions are made and the document is submitted, clearly the document that is being referred to has to be referred to in the remarks. These Members are submitting a document, and they are, in fact, naming that document that they are submitting. I want to ensure that that complies with the Chair's interpretation of the House rules.

Mr. Speaker, I have a further parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, what is the Chair's conclusion with regard to these unanimous consent requests?

Mr. Speaker, have the previous submissions of documents gone beyond the unanimous consent request compliance that the Chair stipulated?

I thank the Chair.

I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Ms. SLAUGHTER asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Mr. DOGGETT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Mrs. CAPPS asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that the only unanimous consent request that has been charged to our time is Mr. Doggett's. Is that correct?

Again, Mr. Doggett stated the title of the document that he submitted, which seems to be a prerequisite for submitting a document. I would like to inquire as to why the Chair has ruled to charge the time to us.

Mr. Speaker, how can submitting a document and saying what the name of the document is constitute debate?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Roybal-Allard) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Ms. ROYBAL-ALLARD asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Lujan) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Mr. BEN RAY LUJAN of New Mexico asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico for submitting that powerful testimony.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Ms. SCHAKOWSKY asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Chu) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Ms. CHU asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I further yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cardenas) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Mr. CARDENAS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I further yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) for the purpose of a unanimous consent request.

(Ms. LEE of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Farr), the ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of a unanimous consent request, I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velazquez).

(Ms. VELAZQUEZ asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hinojosa), the chair of the Hispanic Caucus and the ranking member

on the Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Ben Ray Lujan).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), the distinguished ranking member on the Committee on Homeland Security.

I would like to inquire if the gentleman from Oklahoma has any remaining speakers.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to inquire as to how much time remains on both sides.

I would ask the gentleman from Oklahoma for the courtesy that, if somebody else shows up on my side, I might further yield, but, otherwise, I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The House Republican proposal includes a provision that would roll back our bipartisan antihuman trafficking protections that have been in place for 20 years and that were most recently reaffirmed unanimously by Congress in 2008. This is a debate to maintain our due process laws under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which this bill strips, that help promote the safety of unaccompanied minors.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, 58 percent of children fleeing to the U.S. from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico may have valid claims to asylum or other legal protections. Our existing laws ensure that these children receive due process. Many of them are victims of human trafficking, of sexual violence, or of other persecution, and they need to have the meaningful opportunity under a law to present their protection claims before an immigration judge. The underlying bill would, according to the UNHCR, drastically weaken the due process protections by subjecting Central American children to an inadequate screening process.

We have had our additional speaker arrive to offer our PQ, Mr. Speaker; and if the House had taken up the Senate immigration reform bill, the current influx of migrant children from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala may never have even become the humanitarian crisis that is facing us today. That is why today, Mr. Speaker, I am proud to give the House a second chance.

If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up H.R. 15, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, so the House can finally vote on a broad, long-term solution to overhaul our country's immigration system and to address the border crisis. At the same time, it addresses the systemic causes rather than simply trying to apply Band-Aid, after Band-Aid, after Band-Aid. The House will soon find there are not enough Band-Aids made. We need to address the health of the patient.

To discuss our proposal, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Garcia).

I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

In our last week--on our last day--before this House adjourns for a 5-week recess, we have an opportunity with Mr. Garcia's previous question in that, if we can defeat the previous question, we can actually address these issues with a bipartisan bill, H.R. 15, comprehensive immigration reform, nearly identical to the Senate bill. I am confident that, if this body passes that bill, Senate Majority Leader Reid will promptly act on it and send it to the President's desk so that we not only can address this border crisis but can prevent future border crises from arising by securing our border and restoring the rule of law to our Nation. The American people expect this body to act in a way that is consistent with our values. We have that opportunity today.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question to bring up H.R. 15, the House's bipartisan immigration reform bill.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question so this body--this House and this Congress--can tackle immigration reform and restore the rule of law to our country. I further encourage my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the underlying bills.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Madam Speaker, I rise to speak in strong opposition to H.R. 5230, a bill to make supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2014 to address the humanitarian crisis on our nation's southern border.

As a senior member of the House Committee on Homeland Security and the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, I have visited the border and seen the children that this bill intends to help.

This bill offers too little in funding to address the need that over 50 states are attempting to address by providing shelter and assistance to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who are now living in our country.

Over two-thirds of the language in H.R. 5230 will make significant changes in existing law or creates new law regarding immigration policy without going through the committees of jurisdiction such as the House Committees on Homeland Security, Judiciary, and Foreign Affairs.

H.R. 5230 contains too much language that is legislative such as:

The bill makes significant changes to 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Act. This change will subject all children to the initial screening process that now applies only to children from Mexico and Canada; erects a new expedited immigration court screening for any children who pass the initial screening; prohibits administrative appeals from children ordered removed through the new expedited process; requires detention of certain children who demonstrate a credible fear of persecution throughout the pendency of their asylum proceedings; establishes new, high burdens of proof; and sets up a principle of ``Last In, First Out'' in the adjudication process.

The bill prohibits the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture from impeding, denying, or restricting the activities of U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Federal land located within 100 Miles of the U.S./Mexico border--This issue has already been addressed. Both Interior and Agriculture have existing Memorandum of Understanding (MOUs) with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and all these agencies, as well as the GAO, have testified that these agreements are working and that federal land management laws and activities do not impair border security.

The bill provides too few emergency immigration judges--the bill only requires the Department of Justice to designate up to 40 temporary immigration judges within 14 days of enactment of this legislation. Then the bill permits hiring of retired judges or magistrate judges, or the reassignment of current immigration judges, to conduct expedited hearings for unaccompanied alien children to try to meet the new requirement that their cases be heard within 7 days of being screened by DHS officials.

This is a rushed process for an emergency situation involving children. They require our best efforts to ensure their safety and wellbeing not a rushed job.

The bill undermines a long standing policy regarding asylum--H.R. 5230 Prohibits anyone believed to have been convicted outside the U.S. of any drug-related offense punishable by a prison term of more than a year from being granted asylum.

This provision has nothing to do with unaccompanied children entering the United States and clearly is an immigration reform that would impact several committees such as the House Committees on Judiciary and Foreign Affairs.

This provision is problematic because what is considered unlawful in one country is a constitutionally protected right in the United States. Often people are fleeing religious, ethnic or political persecution.

Persecution means that they are experiencing or have experienced actions taken by their countries governments, which often includes imprisonment or torture while in custody.

This one change would hand repressive regimes like North Korea with an easy way to block the United States from helping those seeking to escape that country--charge and convict them of a felon.

A Sudanese woman was sentenced to death for being a Christian--would this Congress bar her entry into the United States?

The bill makes the wrong decision on border security by sending the National Guard support for border operations--H.R. 5230 would deploy National Guard under Title 32 Status. National Guard troops with this change may be assigned duties as deemed necessary to provide assistance in operations, with priority given to high traffic areas experiencing the highest number of crossing by unaccompanied children.

Sending armed soldiers to greet children escaping violence--Mr. Speaker what is the leadership thinking?

These children need our help not frightening images of more adults with guns.

The bill denies safe shelter to children through its sense of Congress--the states that the Secretary of Defense should not be allowed to shelter unaccompanied children or other migrants unless certain conditions are met.

The military and the administration are well aware of the conditions that are acceptable for children and this Congress should provide what is needed so that their needs can be met.

This bill does too little to actually help the thousands of children who are awaiting immigration hearings. They are victims of human trafficking, sexual violence, and witnesses to murders as well as acts of violence against other children who took that dangerous trek to the United States.

We should be focused on learning what they know and what they experienced to be sure the guilty are found and punished.

I offered, along with several other members of the House amendments in attempts to improve the bill, but all were rejected by the Rules Committee, which chose to place H.R. 5230 before the House in the form of a closed rule.

The Jackson Lee Amendment would have authorized designated federal agencies to reimburse State and local governments and private nonprofit organizations for the costs incurred in providing psychological counseling, housing, education, medicine and medical care, food and water, clothes, personal hygiene and other indispensable consumables, other human services in response to the humanitarian crisis on the Southwest Border.

This Congress has had the Senate's version of a Comprehensive Immigration reform bill for nearly a year, without accomplishing the task of taking up the issue and passing a House version.

Our nation's immigration system is broken and needs reform, but the only attempt at addressing immigration into the United States is this bill that is being presented as an appropriations bill.

H.R. 5230 is not an appropriations bill it is an immigration reform bill, which covers the jurisdictions of the two committees I serve on-- the House Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees. Neither of these committees were given the opportunity to hold hearings or make the needed changes to the bill to make sure it conforms with long standing policies relating to unaccompanied minor or issues related to refugees.

The Jackson Lee amendment would have helped nonprofits, local and state governments in all of the 50 states who are now providing assistance to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors within the United States.

The message has gotten to families in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Parents are no longer sending their children to the United States once they learned of the dangers and the prospects for their children surviving the journey without becoming victims of human trafficking.

These children have found the compassion and love of thousands of Americans found in the states of Texas, Alabama, Alaska, California, Illinois, North Carolina, South Dakota, New York, Utah, Virginia and-- yes even the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The nature of America is that of the Good Samaritan.

On July 3, 2014, I went to McAllen, Texas and observed a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility where unaccompanied children were being processed by the Border Patrol.

As I walked through the facility, I saw frightened and needy children, some as young as five years old.

Madam Speaker, some members of this body who have not taken the time to visit the border or visit the children who are now in their own states will stand before this body and accuse them of being dangerous-- but they are not.

They are traumatized and frightened children driven from their homes by violence and inducements of these same gangs to get payments from desperate parents seeking to save the lives of their children to bring them to the United States.

These children had risked their lives to make their way to the U.S. by riding atop freight trains through dangerous territories in Mexico. One can only imagine the desperation and hopelessness that would prompt a parent to send their young child on such a treacherous journey.

It takes courage and desperation to escape senseless violence and I know that is what Cuban Americans faced, and Christians, Jews and all other groups facing violence have endured.

These are refugees and their status requires that the United States act appropriately.

Some may mention that the United States has a quota on refugees that we can take each year and that number has been reached. The program that refer to is for refugees that other nations around the world are providing shelter--but if the refugees are crossing our own border there is not limit.

This international law that the United States has backed for decades and pressured other nations to enforce. If the refugees are Christians escaping ISIS or Boko Haram or they are children escaping violent gangs in Central America they are not and should not be turned back.

Children do not leave their homes and families by the tens of thousands unless fear is driving them from their homes.

Upon my visit to South Texas borders, I witnessed hundreds of children whose young faces were pressed against glass jails with tears running down their faces. We are dealing with helpless children who have traveled a treacherous journey, and it should be within our American values to care for these children who fled their homes to escape violence.

These children are not perpetrators or criminals--they are in many cases victims fleeing deadly violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and are seeking temporary safe haven in the United States, as so many people before them have done for centuries.

The surge of unaccompanied children on our southern border does not pose a threat to our national security. Contrary to the shrill rhetoric used by some commentators, the nation is not being invaded by an army of children dispatched to do us harm.

We are confronted instead with a humanitarian crisis resulting from the alarming scale of violence and economic desperation in three Central American countries that now lead the world in murder rates: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

Politicizing the issue will not solve the problem. Taking actions that address the root causes in the short and long term will. We should be taking up Immigration Reform to deal with the wide range of immigration problems.

The current status on the border is the number of children coming across the border has abated. Those children remaining in detention shelters along the border number only a few hundred.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, these three Central American countries have among the highest per capita homicide rates in the world, with Honduras topping the list and the other two nations in the top five.

To address this issue of the humanitarian crisis, I introduced H.R. 4990, the ``Justice for Children Now Act of 2014,'' which authorizes the immediate hiring of an additional 70 immigration judges in the Executive Office of Immigration Review.

This bill will help but it is not sufficient to address the backlogs to help advance the flow of the children's immigration court hearings.

The amount allowed under this bill will leave states and aid agencies footing a significant portion of the cost for assisting these helpless children--when it is the role of the federal government to be present and actively engaged in leading the effort.

I support the President's request for $3.7 billion to respond to the humanitarian crisis on the border and urge my colleagues in leadership to reconsider the level of funding for this great need.

Congress should allocate the resources needed to deal with the increase in unaccompanied children seeking refuge in the United States. Some of these persons are attempting to enter the country unlawfully and without justification. Our laws do not permit this and they should not be allowed entry.

The Administration is following immigration law as it relates to these unaccompanied minors.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, signed by President George W. Bush establishes the legal status of the children who have entered the nation unaccompanied.

That law provides persons fleeing lethal violence or escape from human trafficking the opportunity to have their case heard by an immigration judge.

Over the time Congress has delayed acting and an additional 366,000 pending cases were added to the immigration courts that must have hearings before any action can be taken.

Because this situation is untenable for everyone--law enforcement, taxpayers, and individuals petitioning for relief, the first thing that we can and should do to reduce the backlog is provide the funding needed to appoint 70 new immigration judges, as provided under legislation.

Ensuring that there are available sufficient facilities to house detained children in a humane manner while they await their immigration hearing is another challenge.

I ask that the Rules Committee approve the Jackson Lee Amendment for inclusion in H.R. 5230.