I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), the Senator from New York (Mrs. Gillibrand), the Senator from California (Ms. Harris), the Senator from Minnesota (Ms. Klobuchar), the…
I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), the Senator from New York (Mrs. Gillibrand), the Senator from California (Ms. Harris), the Senator from Minnesota (Ms. Klobuchar), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Massachusetts (Ms. Warren) are necessarily absent.
I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), the Senator from New York (Mrs. Gillibrand), the Senator from California (Ms. Harris), the Senator from Minnesota (Ms. Klobuchar), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Massachusetts (Ms. Warren) are necessarily absent.
I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), the Senator from New York (Mrs. Gillibrand), the Senator from California (Ms. Harris), the Senator from Minnesota (Ms. Klobuchar), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Massachusetts (Ms. Warren) are necessarily absent.
I announce that the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Bennet), the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), the Senator from New York (Mrs. Gillibrand), the Senator from California (Ms. Harris), the Senator from Minnesota (Ms. Klobuchar), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), and the Senator from Massachusetts (Ms. Warren) are necessarily absent.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Mr. President, the issue of immigration is one that is front and center in the minds of most Americans, as it should be.
For the last 2\1/2\ years, our country has been roiling with immigration controversy. This new President, now 2\1/2\ years into his term, came to office and immediately instituted a travel ban on a majority of Muslim countries. It was controversial.
In the city of Chicago, people showed up spontaneously at the airport, lawyers, to counsel travelers to try to find some volunteer effort that might respond to their worry and concern about the travel ban imposed by President Trump.
The case went to court. The court stayed this decision and, in a later adjudication, allowed it to go forward.
It was the first of many actions taken by President Trump on the issue of immigration--most of them very controversial.
I remember the repeal of DACA in September of 2017. This is a program I had worked on for years. It started with the DREAM Act, which I introduced with my fellow U.S. Senator Barack Obama as cosponsor. We tried to pass it here in the Senate but were stopped time and again by the rules of the Senate and the filibuster.
Regardless of that, time passed and President Obama became President, and I appealed to him, with the assistance of Senator Lugar, a Republican Senator of Indiana, asking if he could find some way as President to provide relief to these young people brought to the United States as children, who wanted a chance to earn their way to legal status in America.
President Obama came up with a program called DACA, and that program said that if you are one of those children, you could come forward, pay a substantial filing fee, go through a criminal background check, and if we established that you are no threat to this country, that you are moving forward with your education and had plans for a job and a career, we would allow you to stay legally in the United States and not be deported for 2 years at a time, renewable--check in and make sure that your status hasn't changed.
In the end, 790,000--790,000--young people across America took advantage of DACA. Their lives were changed overnight. With DACA, there was no longer a fear of a knock on a door. They could become students and, as students, become teachers.
They can learn skills to be nurses, engineers, entrepreneurs, even doctors. It was a liberation for these 790,000 given the chance, finally, to be part of America and its future.
As I have said so many times on the floor, and Senator Menendez was the first to ever say it, and I thought it was such an apt description of these
young people: They had spent their entire lives pledging allegiance to that flag every morning, believing it was their flag. They learned, at some point, they were not legally here in America. President Obama gave them a chance--790,000.
In September of 2017, President Donald Trump ended the DACA Program. He challenged Congress: Pass a law. Don't rely on an Executive order; pass a law. Well, we tried. We tried, on a bipartisan basis in the Senate, and President Trump rejected our effort. It was unfortunate, but it meant that these people--these 790,000 and hundreds of thousands of others who could have been eligible--were stopped in their tracks. Luckily--luckily--the courts came to their rescue and said for these people, despite President Trump's decision, the 790,000 should be protected from deportation. No new ones could apply, but it gave them temporary relief, which could end any day, any week, or any month. That, in my mind, was the second major move by President Trump to roil up this immigration situation in America, to get tough on 790,000 young men and women who simply wanted a chance to live in this country.
He then terminated temporary protected status. That was a category of immigration given to people who were in dire circumstances--victims of terrible extreme weather events or political and human disasters in their country--who were allowed to come here and live in the United States in a protected status, hundreds of thousands of them from all over the world. This President, Donald Trump, said: The end of it. We are going to put an end to it. It is over. That was the third strike as far as I was concerned, but it wasn't the end, by far.
Last June 2018, with a great deal of pride and with biblical quotes, Attorney General Jeff Sessions came forward and announced a zero- tolerance policy: Anyone presenting himself at the border would be considered suspect criminal, and if they had in their custody a young child, they would be separated. In the end, at least--at least--2,880 infants, toddlers, and children were separated from their parents. It was a dramatic move. It was an inhumane move, but it was done to create what they call a deterrence to discourage people from coming to our border. Within days, the public reaction against zero tolerance grew to a point where even this President, who does not have ``sorry'' in his vocabulary, came forward and said they were going to end that policy of zero tolerance.
What about the children, though, the ones who actually were separated? It took a Federal judge in Southern California to come forward and say there had to be an accounting of the children and their parents and a reuniting. It went on for weeks and months. Still, to this day, there are children adrift in America. Their families can't be found because zero tolerance--this inhumane policy--was such an abject failure. Even ``ending it'' didn't end the struggle that many of these young people are still going through to this day. That was the fourth thing this President did by way of getting tough on immigration policy.
Then he announced several weeks ago in one of his infamous tweets that he was going to initiate a policy of mass arrests and mass deportations. There are some 11 million--that is the best estimate-- undocumented people in this country, and the President said millions would be deported. We saw it in its earliest stages around the city of Chicago.
Betty Rendon, a grandmother who had been in the United States for more than 10 years, was deported. How dangerous was Betty Rendon to this country? Not at all. In fact, she was a seminary student at a Lutheran seminary near Chicago. She had deep family roots, children and grandchildren in the community who were American citizens, but that was not enough. ICE, the agency of enforcement of Department of Homeland Security, issued deportation orders, and she was forced to leave this country.
I have asked those in charge at the Department of Homeland Security: What threat was this woman to America? After being here 10 years and living a life that showed she was no threat to anyone, why was she a priority to deport from this country? They couldn't answer.
Now we have an unprecedented humanitarian crisis at our border. I thought long and hard about the statement I am about to make and the photo which I am about to display. Even though it has been on the front page of major newspapers like the New York Times, it is such a heartbreaking photo that I at least warn in advance anyone following this speech that if you would be troubled by the images in this photo, please look away or turn away from what I am about to show you, but I believe it has to be shown to the American people. It is a photo of a shocking and horrifying image of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria. They died in their effort to try to cross from Mexico into the United States. This is the photo which was in the newspapers. It is a shocking portrayal of the desperation this family faced.
We are told by his wife that they tried to come through the ordinary port of entry, the usual place to present yourself to seek asylum in the United States--this mother, father, and child--and they were told that the ordinary port of entry was closed to them. So they attempted to cross the Rio Grande River.
From what we were told, this father took his little daughter, less than 2 years old, and swam across the river. He put her on the bank and then went back to help his wife come across. His daughter panicked and jumped in the river behind him. He tried to rescue her. They both drowned.
This is an illustration of the crisis in real terms, a crisis we face at this border that should never be taking place.
Valeria, this 23-month-old girl, according to her mother, loved to dance, play with her stuffed animals, and brush the hair of her madre and padre. Her father Oscar had sold his motorcycle and borrowed money to flee from El Salvador to come to the United States. He and his wife, Tania Vanessa Avalos, were simply looking for safety and opportunity for their family. Vanessa's mother said: ``They wanted a better future for their girl.'' They planned to cross into the United States and seek asylum and try to find a safe place in the future.
That is the reality of what we are discussing on the floor of the Senate this evening and have been for the last several days. Unfortunately, President Trump responded to this tragedy with a political statement. He tweeted: ``The Democrats should change the Loopholes and Asylum Laws so lives will be saved at our Southern Border.''
I might remind the President that the same laws he now deals with in this border crisis were exactly the laws President Obama was faced with when he was President. Something different has happened. It isn't just the laws of this country; it is the way we are administering the laws that currently exist.
I sincerely believe we are better than this situation depicted in that photograph and what we have heard over and over. I believe America can have a secure border and respect our international obligations to provide safe haven to those fleeing persecution, as we have done as Democrats and Republicans for decades before this administration.
Yesterday I met with Mark Morgan. Last month, President Trump named him as Acting Director of U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement, ICE. Mr. Morgan, a former marine and former FBI agent, had been asked to carry out the mass arrests that President Trump talked about in his tweet several weeks ago and the mass deportations of millions of immigrants whom the President had threatened.
Shortly before I met with Mr. Morgan, he was named to a different position, Acting Director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. As of yesterday, he moved from being in charge of interior enforcement within the United States to be in charge of solving the humanitarian crisis we now face at our border.
If that sounds like a rash move and hard to explain, it is not the only one. In the 2\1/2\ years that President Trump has been President, we have had four different people leading the Department of Homeland Security--four--in 2\1/2\ years, and it is not the fault of the Senate or Congress for holding up nominations. They just change that often. Within the Department of Homeland Security, in every major department, we have had repeated turnovers
and changeovers in the leaders there. Even those today who are nominally in charge are in an acting capacity. They can't bring them through the regular order of vetting and background checks to be given these responsible positions. So as of yesterday, Mr. Morgan is in charge of this crisis at the border.
There is a gaping leadership vacuum in the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security. To have four different heads of the Department in 2\1/2\ years, to have every position of responsibility for immigration or border security held by a temporary appointee is unacceptable, and the White House has not submitted names to Congress for permanent nominations to these positions.
The Trump administration can shuffle the deck chairs, but we know the obvious: President Trump's immigration and border security policies are failing. Their failures are found not only in the detention of children and families in inhumane circumstances but also this tragic photograph of a desperate couple turned away at the border who tried their best to find another way to present themselves in the United States.
We have a responsibility in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, to deal with this crisis that has been created by this administration.
In February, after the President finally agreed to end the longest government shutdown in the history of the United States, Congress passed a bipartisan omnibus appropriations bill that included $414 million--in February, $414 million--for humanitarian assistance at the border. I have asked what happened to this money. The explanations are hard to follow. Some said: Well, more than half of this humanitarian assistance has been invested in a building which will be ready for occupancy in about a year and a half.
Here we have kids without diapers at the border, questionable food sources, filthy clothes, separation of children from families, and they are setting out to build a building that might be open in a year and a half. It would seem to me that those who were in medical practice and triage cases would certainly start with the immediate humanitarian challenge before they start the long-term responsibility of building a building. More needs to be done at our border.
In April, I visited El Paso, TX. What I saw in the Border Patrol's overcrowded facilities was heartbreaking. I want to add here, as I do every time I bring this up, that I believe the men and women--the professional men and women at the border, the ones I met and spoke to-- are caring people. They are genuinely concerned by the humanitarian crisis they see unfolding before them every single day. Some undoubtedly have done improper things and mistreated these detainees, but the ones I spoke to understood, as human beings, the need for us to do more as a country.
Last month, I led 24 Senators in calling on the International Committee of the Red Cross and the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security to investigate these Border Patrol facilities, including the ones I visited in El Paso. The circumstances there were unacceptable by any normal American standard. To think that we were packing these people into detention cells far beyond the capacity-- ``capacity 35'' written over the door. I counted 150 standing shoulder to shoulder in that room with one toilet. It is just unacceptable and impossible to explain that this is happening in America.
For me to call on the international Red Cross to look at this circumstance is something I never thought I would do. I have done that before but only in foreign countries, asking that some of the horrible conditions in the detention of prisoners be investigated by the International Red Cross. I never thought I would be asking the same of the Red Cross, to look in America.
Earlier this month, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security released a report detailing the inhumane and dangerous overcrowding of migrants at the El Paso port of entry, which I had visited. The office found the overcrowding was ``an immediate risk to the health detainees and DHS employees.''
Earlier today, the Senate passed legislation with funding to alleviate some overcrowding at the CPB facilities and to provide food supplies and medical care to migrants. This bill we have passed also includes critical funding for the Office of Refugee Resettlement to care for migrant children.
The House of Representatives passed their own version of the bill last night. The House legislation, which I also support, includes critical oversight measures, particularly when it comes to these children. Now it is time for us to reach an agreement--the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans--and to do it in a timely fashion.
I am willing to work with my colleagues to find a bipartisan answer, as I did on the first version of this, which passed in the Senate. What is happening at our border is unacceptable. The President has to come to realize that just getting tough is not the answer; it takes more.
We need to commit ourselves to international assistance in these three countries that are the sources of these people: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Overwhelmingly, those are the origins of these migrants who come to the United States.
We have to realize, as well, that people are coming here in desperate circumstances, as this photograph I showed on the floor depicts. Many times they are prepared to risk their lives and even lose their lives as they try to make it to the United States in desperation. We have to find a way, an orderly way, to accept those who truly need our protection and need to be brought to a place of safety. And we have to have a timely process so that the determination of eligibility is not 1 year or 2 years in the future. It is time for us to work together on a bipartisan basis to do that.
Mr. President, I see another Senator, my colleague from Oklahoma, on the floor. I hope he can give me 10 minutes.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Iran
Mr. President, although I may not often say it, I want to make it clear. I think President Trump made the right decision the other day in deciding not to start a war with Iran. He must accept responsibility for some of the challenges we now face.
I think the decision to walk away from the agreement that prohibited Iran from developing nuclear weapons was shortsighted. By every report that we have received, this agreement--international agreement--with international inspectors was being followed by the Iranians. Yet the President decided to walk away from it. His attempt to isolate Iran from our allies, to seek regime change, and to declare economic war on Iran, unfortunately, have all led to this moment in history where a confrontation seems imminent.
Many around the President here in Washington and abroad have been anxious for a conflict with Iran. Many of the same people were anxious for a conflict with Iraq. I remember that. I remember it well because I was one of 23 Senators who voted against the invasion of Iraq. They are still there, engaged in a war some 17 years later. Thousands of American lives have been lost, and thousands more have been injured. We are spending trillions of dollars in taxpayers' money in a war without end in Iraq.
One of the great tragedies of the Iraq war, one of the few its architects have ever admitted, is that the Iraq war actually ended up empowering Iran. Today, the Iraqi Government is actually something of an Iranian client state. Yet the same unrepentant voices are again beating the drums for regime change and another war in the Middle East.
Do the American people want a third war in the Middle East at this moment in our history? I don't think so.
Some have even had the audacity to argue the 2001 authorization for use of military force approved by this Congress to respond to those who attacked us on 9/11 somehow gives this President authority and permission to invade Iran. I don't agree with that at all.
I cannot imagine anyone here who took that vote 18 years ago thought they were voting to start a war with Iran that would still be going on 18 years later. I find that impossible to believe.
The Constitution is clear. Article I, section 8 says that the power to declare war is the explicit power of the U.S. Congress, and it should be.
No one should ever send our sons and daughters into war without the consent
of the American people through their elected representatives. Our Founding Fathers were wise in making sure this awesome power did not rest with a King-like or Queen-like figure but with the people's elected representatives.
I have made this same argument in the House and in the Senate during my career, regardless of who sat in the White House, a Republican or a Democrat.
Recently, I was pleased to join with Senator Udall and others in legislation reaffirming no war with Iran without the consent of Congress. This bill is also now an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. I sincerely hope we will have a timely vote to make sure the President understands that he cannot authorize the invasion or military force in Iran without the approval and permission of Congress.
Some of the eerie, familiar statements and distortions used to sell the Iraq war are reappearing now. Vice President Cheney repeatedly warned us in those days that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. He even alleged there was ``no doubt'' that they were amassing those weapons to use against the United States.
Former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle argued that Iraqis could finance the postwar rebuilding from their own oil wealth, and he had ``no doubt that they will.''
President George W. Bush, who claimed war was actually his last choice, provocatively tried to link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein--a dubious claim echoed by his then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and one some are even trying to brazenly use today.
Secretary Rumsfeld even tried to claim war in Iraq would last ``Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that.'' That is what our Secretary of Defense said.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney said we would be welcomed in Iraq as liberators. Wolfowitz argued that ``hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark.''
Five days or 5 weeks, welcomed by the Iraqis? Well, the war started, and it has never ended. There are 150,000 American soldiers deployed in Iraq. The war continues into its second decade. Incidentally, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, no nuclear weapons, and we certainly weren't greeted as liberators. Iraqi oil did not pay the $2 trillion that American taxpayers were forced to pay for that war in Iraq.
More than 4,500 Americans have been killed and 32,000 wounded, including my brave and amazing colleague in the Senate, Senator Tammy Duckworth.
How do some of the current occupants of the White House driving Iran policy feel about that Iraq war disaster? Well, National Security Advisor John Bolton said in 2015: ``I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct.'' He made that statement 1 month after writing a New York Times op-ed piece entitled: ``To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran.''
Sadly, what I find most stunning about the administration's march to war in Iran is that its actions have, in fact, contributed to the current mess and Iran's threat to restart its nuclear program.
President Trump has been pursuing a policy impossible to follow: calling for a regime change, trying to flatter and meet with the Iranian President Rouhani, trying to negotiate a better deal, threatening Iran militarily, tightening sanctions. Who knows what the policy is going to be from day to day.
The President impulsively withdrew from the nuclear agreement without first designing a credible way to get a better agreement. He went on to designate Iran's military as a terrorist organization, even against the advice of our military. And he tried to starve Iran of the agreed benefits it was to receive from the original deal.
Let me be clear. There is no doubt that Iran is responsible for dangerous destabilizing actions in that region and beyond. Its proxies attack our servicemembers in Iraq and threaten our allies in the region. But why not push back against Iran without withdrawing from the nuclear agreement? Why give them the pretext for belligerence and undermine our credibility with the global powers party to our own nuclear deal?
The tragic end result of this dangerous incoherence is that our allies are united against us, and Iran may we start nuclear activities, which had been frozen for the last 4 years.
This Congress, already a rubberstamp for too many of President Trump's instincts, must not do so in a march to another war in the Middle East as well.
I yield the floor.