Madam President, I rise today to share stories that I have heard from detainees and families at Delaney Hall and to tell you why these stories should be a call to action to ground our immigration policies in humanity. There are, currently,…
Madam President, I rise today to share stories that I have heard from detainees and families at Delaney Hall and to tell you why these stories should be a call to action to ground our immigration policies in humanity.
There are, currently, approximately 800 detainees at Delaney Hall, which is located in Newark, NJ. Over the past week, it has become an example of our broken immigration system.
We have seen the images, but what you have not heard are the stories. It is the stories of people I have met and their families that have stayed with me over the past weeks and months. They have stayed with me because these are stories of people who are afraid, people who are asking to be treated with dignity, people who just want the humanity that any of us would ask for.
I have heard repeatedly--and seen with my own eyes--the substandard conditions at Delaney Hall. Food that is inedible. I had a man show me a container of milk that was curdled solid because it was clearly not stored properly. I have heard about the issues of mold and issues of safety and security.
What I have heard has been unacceptable. The totality of the stories that I have heard have been disturbing. But when I think about individual people, the failures really come into focus.
I spoke, over this week, for instance, with a man at Delaney Hall who has stage III lung cancer and has not been given the medical care that he needs. And he told me he knows his time is short. He actually just wants to go back home--to his home country of origin--to spend the rest of whatever remains in his life with his family, but he is not able to do so.
I spoke with an 18-year-old high school senior, and all she wanted to do was be able to graduate and go to prom. Instead, she is stuck there by herself.
I actually met with her mother outside of the facility. You can imagine how worried she was about her 18-year-old high school senior in this detention facility by herself.
This isn't someone who is a hardened criminal or someone we desperately need to get off of our streets. It is a kid. It is a high school student who is at least spending her time in there trying to translate for some of the other detainees that don't speak English. She is trying to figure out how to help other people. And, instead, we have her stuck in there for an indefinite amount of time. She has no idea how long it is going to take to resolve her circumstances. This is someone who--as a father, when I think about my own two boys--I worry about what is being robbed of her childhood as she is going through this situation.
There is a commonality with a lot of these stories: parents just trying to take care of their kids; parents who have been in the United States for many decades and many of them married to American citizens, many of them parents of American citizens.
These are people that deserve better, but they aren't getting better because we have a fundamentally broken system; a system that is built on corruption and profit, fueled by cruelty; a system that strips people of their humanity.
Let's start with the motivating factor of profit that drives some of this. Delaney Hall is operated by a company called GEO Group. You may not know that name, but it is the largest private prison corporation in America, which runs about 20 facilities for ICE, coast to coast--from New Jersey to California, from Florida to Pennsylvania, to Texas and beyond. They are making a lot of money. They got awarded nearly a billion-dollar contract to operate Delaney Hall.
This is something that is driving so much of the decision making, because when they are telling me that they have only one full-time doctor for nearly 800 detainees there--many of them have really significant healthcare needs--you can understand that they could hire more than one doctor. They could hire more doctors, but then that is going to be less profit for GEO Group.
When we are talking about the substandard food, they could get better food, at least some quality measure better, without the spoiled and disgusting milk that I was talking about. But, again, that would be less profit.
And here is just something that is just driving so much of this for so many of the problems that are out there.
When it comes to our immigration policy, that is no choice to me. From what we are seeing in terms of the profits and the conditions that are there, we should always be putting people before corporate profits.
It is not just GEO Group or CoreCivic or these other companies that are pushing this forward. We know that we can find ways to be able to address this, and it starts with not upholding their standards when it comes to these detention facilities.
At Delaney Hall, we have seen the detainees and the challenges to getting access to doctors. I talked to a pregnant woman who is not getting the care that she needs when it comes to doctors and medical checkups. And she has no idea how long she is going to be there for.
She literally asked me--she looked in my eyes and said: Do I have to be prepared to have a baby in Delaney Hall, in this detention facility?
And instead of upholding a standard of basic humanity, what we are hearing from detainees now is about retaliation for them simply speaking out--detainees being transferred now away from their families to other detention sites because they were protesting, because of this retaliation that is happening before our eyes.
And, finally, we see a judicial system that has fundamentally failed detainees, their families, and our entire immigration system. Simply put, there are not nearly enough judges to hear the number of immigration cases we face at this moment. We already had a backlog of millions of cases before, and it is getting worse and worse.
And, yes, we see the Republicans here in Congress pushing forward on the enforcement, but what is it that we can do to be able to address the needs on the judiciary?
When I was there at Delaney Hall, one of the detainees ran out into the hallway to grab a piece of paper off of the bulletin board and showed me a piece of paper that said: When the courts come back into session, after the holiday weekend, one judge--one immigration judge-- had before them 74 cases in 1 day. How is that a fair process? It is a farce--74 cases in 1 day. That is about 5 minutes a case. That is if everything goes perfectly back to back, not to mention the translation needs of so many. We can do better, and I hope that all of us can agree that in this country, the rule of law is sacrosanct, and that is something where everybody has the opportunity for making their case in court.
What I have heard at Delaney is disturbing, and what I have seen in the brokenness of our immigration system is disheartening. But what we need to do is move forward with clarity, and here are three things we can immediately focus on:
First, let's surge the medical support. Again, 1 doctor for 800 people is not enough, especially when they have such things. ICE has something called ICE Health Service Corps. There are other means by which we can surge medical support to Delaney and elsewhere to make sure that people are not being looked over and their needs passed aside. That is something, again, that I hope all of us can agree on.
No. 2, we need to give people access to the courts. This is not just something that I said is important for us to have adherence to the rule of law, but it is costing the American people billions of dollars to just have this process continue to hold up because when someone is there at Delaney Hall 8 months, 10 months, 12 months, or beyond, with no sense of when it is going to end, that is on us. We are paying for it. The American people are paying for this. It is coming out of our pocket at a time when we have this affordability
crisis and so many people in the country struggling to pay the bills. People deserve their day in court, and the American people deserve to not have their money wasted by a process that is so clearly broken.
And, third, we need investigations into the conditions immediately. The nearly billion dollars going to GEO Group for Delaney Hall--those are your taxpayer dollars. You should know where it is going and how they are spending it.
We should have independent investigations into this and make sure that Members of Congress can effectively conduct oversight business because I tried to go this past week. I was denied. The guards at the gate by Geo Group said: Nope. You can't go inside.
I had to literally call our old colleague Secretary Mullin to get access to this facility that--by the way, I actually called ahead and got approval to go inside, but they still stopped me.
And when I went inside the facility and talked to the head of GEO Group in Delaney Hall and explained that his guards prevented me from going inside for an authorized visit, he looked me in the eye and called me a liar. That is not something that seems like it has any semblance of accountability, transparency, or obedience and accordance to the rule of law. We can and should do better.
This is at a time when this Chamber is getting ready this week to potentially send upward of another $70 billion for ICE and CBP without the reforms, without the accountability and the transparency. GEO Group is taking your money, and you should know what they are doing with it.
These are hard days for my State. Nobody should want the images that we have seen over the past week, but even more so, nobody should want the conditions to be able to continue, whether it is in Delaney Hall or elsewhere around this country because it doesn't just stop at Delaney Hall. These problems exist and persist all over the country.
Delaney Hall isn't one bad apple. It is part of a systemic failure that we are witnessing across the Nation. How we move forward is a choice, a choice between a status quo of corporate profit and cruel policies or moving forward to enforce our laws with humanity.
It doesn't have to be the way that we have seen, and I would urge my colleagues to work with me. Let's make the changes we know we need--not just at Delaney Hall but at every detention facility across this country--and let's fix this broken system once and for all.
I yield the floor.
