The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“IMMIGRATION POLICY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S7844-S7847 on Dec. 19, 2018.
The Department provides billions in unemployment insurance, which peaked around 2011 though spending had declined before the pandemic. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, claimed the Department funds "ineffective and duplicative services" and overregulates the workplace.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
IMMIGRATION POLICY
Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise to address a current-day scar, a wound in America--a wound in terms of how we are treating children arriving on our borders and seeking asylum.
George Washington said America is a nation open ``to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.''
This sense of the vision of America was repeated 100 years later through Emma Lazarus's poem that is carved into the foundation of the Statue of Liberty. Phrases of that poem include: ``Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . . Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,'' but that spirit is lost right now in the USA.
We are a nation almost universally of immigrants, and yet we are treating those children fleeing persecution as if they are criminals when they arrive at our borders.
I went down this last weekend with Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, with Representative Judy Chu of California and Representative Beto O'Rourke of Texas. Four of us visited two family internment camps--one in Dilley and one in Karnes--
and all five of us went to the Tornillo child prison in the desert in Texas outside El Paso.
This war against children--this Trump war against children--was most dramatically demonstrated back in May and June when the U.S. Government implemented a ``zero tolerance'' policy that, in fact, said, if you assert your international rights and come to the border of the United States, we will treat you as a criminal. We will lock you up. We will rip your children out of your arms, and who knows if you will ever see them again.
I went down June 3 of this year to shine a light on this and find out what was really going on. I saw children in cages. I tried to enter a facility--a former Walmart--that I was told had hundreds of kids locked up in it. I was denied entry because of the administration's desires to keep the effects of their child separation policy secret. There was an outcry from people across America saying the United States does not do this. We do not inflict trauma on children as a direct and deliberate strategy of sending a message to the world that we do not want you, if you are fleeing persecution, to come to our shores. We do not deliberately inflict trauma on children.
In addition to the public outcry, there was court action. The administration agreed and said: OK. We will stop doing child separation. We will quit ripping children out of their parents' arms, but the President said, if we can't rip children out of their parents' arms, instead, we will lock them up. We will lock them up with their parents--still treating them as criminals as they await asylum here. In fact, the bill to that effect passed the House of Representatives, and 35 Senators in this Chamber signed on to this bill to expand this system of family internment camps at the request of the administration.
I came to this floor. I pointed out the long and shameful history of family internment camps in America, and I proposed a different vision. I put forward a bill entitled the No Family Internment Camps in America Act. I noted it would be a fierce fight if those who want to proceed with internment camps attempted to do so. This body dropped that effort--stopped that effort. That is good, but the administration is still determined to pursue this, and they have been moving funds to people to expand family internment camps in places like Karnes and Dilley. So we went there to look at these family internment camps--one with fathers and sons; one with mothers and daughters.
You know, the right thing to do as families await asylum hearings is for them to get that hearing on a timely basis of 6 to 12 months and have them under a Family Case Management Program of not locking them up in prison. Locking up children in prisons does deep, traumatic damage to these children, so we must continue to fight this internment camps strategy.
The four Members of Congress who were there at Dilley met with a woman. She and her daughter have been locked up in Dilley going on 6 months. Yesterday was the daughter's 15th birthday. The Quinceanera is a big celebration--if you come from a Latin American tradition--of a young girl becoming a young woman. We asked the camp: Are you going to recognize this girl's birthday, this very significant 15th birthday, this quinceanera?
No, we can't do anything special to recognize one child.
We said: Well, why not have a policy of recognizing each child on his or her birthday, so you are doing the same for everyone?
They said: No, too much trouble. We will have a monthly gathering and list the names of those who had birthdays that month. That will suffice.
It is a symbol of the dehumanization with which we are treating people locked up--families we are locking up who have fled persecution and are awaiting an asylum hearing.
That young woman is suffering significantly. We met with her mother. Her mother told us she is not sleeping well, she is not eating well, and she was really depressed over the fact that this very significant day would go unrecognized. We should never be locking up children for long periods of time.
There is an agreement--a settlement--that said children will not be locked up for more than 20 days. It is called the Flores settlement. It was a settlement that came out of the fact that we recognized that locking up children hurts them, traumatizes them, that it should never happen, and it shouldn't happen for more than 20 days.
Well, it is happening more than 20 days and not just with the mother and her daughter who are locked up there. They fled persecution by a drug gang--a gang that was extorting the family to make payments from their beauty supply business or beauty parlor. When she couldn't pay, the gang came to her house and assaulted her daughter. She told us they fled the next day.
We need to improve the programs with which we are trying to help stabilize those countries and help decrease the power of those drug gangs, but, certainly, when those fleeing persecution come here to our shores, let's treat them with respect and dignity.
This is a birthday card that several dozen Members signed yesterday that we are sending to this young woman locked up. The card says:
``Feliz Quinceanera.'' It is signed inside by dozens of Senators. It says: From your friends in the Senate of the United States. We want her to know--we want every child who is locked up in these child prisons under the Trump war on children to know that we are working to end this war.
We went on to Tornillo--the child prison that was initially established to be an emergency shelter for 1 month for 450 children. It has now been extended 3 times, and it has been expanded to hold not 450 children but 3,800 children.
At this moment, they cranked up the number of people there to 2,700, and they are purposely keeping this as a ``temporary shelter'' so they can bypass all the laws related to incarcerating children; they can bypass the requirements for education; they can bypass the Flores 20-
day standard.
I asked: How many children are here over 20 days of these 2,700, a couple of dozen?
The director said: No, more than 2,000 of the 2,700 children here are over the 20 days. Then we were told that 1,300 of those children already have a sponsor. They already have the sponsors who have filled out all the paperwork and have done their fingerprints and everything. They could be released immediately, if the administration would complete the paperwork.
He told us that 1,300 children could be in homes and schools and parks in 5 to 7 days from now if the administration would complete the paperwork. We proceeded to hold a press conference, and we said this is unacceptable that the paperwork is not being completed and these children are being locked up here.
We held this on Saturday. We said this Tornillo prison camp should be shut down. This is not the spirit of the USA and certainly is not being used as a temporary shelter for 1 month.
I have good news to report because yesterday the administration said they are changing the rules. They expect to release several thousand children within the next few days--that is the right thing to do--and we may shut down Tornillo.
So let's keep the attention of America on this. Let's keep the spotlight on it. Let's not let this war on children continue with our money, on our territory, under our government, deliberately inflicting trauma on children. It must end.
The Family Case Management Program, which was an alternative to locking people up, had a report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general who said 99 percent of people show up for their check-ins and there was 100 percent attendance at court hearings. There was a closeout report for the program because the administration shut it down, and the closeout report called the program a success. It said 99.3 percent attendance for court proceedings overall, 99 percent compliance with monitoring requirements, including check-ins, and it costs $38 a day compared to many hundreds of dollars for internment camps or prison camps.
Let's restart a program that made sense--a program that worked. We have seen this series of attacks on children--child separation, family internment camps, child prison camps. Let's put America back on track and treat children coming to this country fleeing persecution with respect and dignity as they await their asylum hearings.
Thank you.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cotton). The Senator from Missouri.
Government Funding
Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, we come to the end of what I think has been a very productive conference.
I am not happy, as most of us aren't, with an ending that doesn't allow us to get all of the principal work of the Congress done, which is to decide how we are going to fund the government, how we are going to spend money. We did--this year for the first time in a long time--
get 75 percent of that job done before the beginning of the fiscal year. There is nowhere else in America where that would be a bragging point, but we hadn't done that in 20 years, and so it is a pretty significant accomplishment.
What we need to figure out is what we did and how we can replicate that in the future. We have to get to this work. We have to have the kind of floor debates we had this year. We don't need to let it drag into the end of the year as too many of the bills did this time.
The worst possible thing to do, in my view, in terms of funding the government, is to shut down the government. The next worst possible thing to do is a long-term CR, where you just say: We couldn't decide how to spend the money this year, so we are going to spend it like we spent it last year.
The next option is the one we are following, which appears to be a short-term CR to, unfortunately, come back and begin next year's work with the obligation to finish this year's work. That is clearly a mistake, and it is a mistake that ends a Congress that otherwise was pretty successful.
All kinds of regulatory reform occurred. Some of it the Congress was involved in. For the first time in the history of the Congressional Review Act, the Congress--15 times--sent to the President a regulation that the Congress was not going to approve, and, 15 times, the President agreed with that decision. That happened exactly one other time in the 25-year history of the Congressional Review Act. There was one time before this Congress when it had happened 15 times.
The regulatory situation of the country is much better. The first major rewrite in the tax bill in 31 years has clearly had and is having an impact on our economy. The numbers in my State of Missouri are as good as they have been in a long time. I think our unemployment number is at its lowest in 18 years. The national unemployment number is at its lowest in almost 15 years. Missouri's number, at 3.2 percent, is even lower than that. There are things like the long-term extension for the FAA, or the Federal Aviation Administration, and the farm bill. There are a lot of things that we should be talking about.
I want to talk, for just a few minutes, about the things that have happened for Missouri this year here in the Senate. We have made significant progress in addressing some of the most important issues facing both the State and the Nation.
Just this month, we had a land transfer for the National Geospatial-
Intelligence Agency. It started out as an ocean mapping agency in St. Louis, MO, decades ago, and then it became a full partner in our overhead architecture that tries to figure out what is going on in the world at any given moment on any given day--things like mapping out what we know about the outside of the place where Osama bin Laden was hiding and where he was eventually found, guessing from watching traffic going in and out of there, what might be on the other side of the door when you go in. That is just one of the things that happens at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency every day.
That one and others happened at Next NGA West, the St. Louis facility. There was big competition on what we should do about that. The decision was made to put that $1.3 billion new facility in the city of St. Louis, right next to one of the great Federal disasters of all time.
The Pruitt-Igoe housing complex--not well thought out--had to be imploded within a short time of people's moving in there. Within a decade or so, it was known to be a disaster. Not too long after that, it just imploded. That is sort of, again, the implosion of so much of that part of a city that, at one time, was the fourth biggest city in the country in terms of population. It is not there any longer. There are things like the GEOINT workforce--the national geospatial location being there--that will make a difference.
Certainly, there is aviation, and we make lots of military aircraft in our State. The bill that we funded that we worried so much about in recent years really brought it back to where we have the multiyear funding of things like the Super Hornet, the Hornet, and the Growler. It just so totally disrupts the efforts of our enemies to figure out what that formation of planes is all about. It is an important part of flying, whether they come off of the deck of a ship or off of a runway or anything else. Boeing won the opportunity to make the Air Force's T-
X trainer, and it is beginning the process right now. The nonmanned tanker is important. Just a few years ago, keeping those lines open in a way that we were concerned about wouldn't have happened.
I had the chance this weekend to be a part of the launching of the future Freedom Class ship USS St. Louis. The Navy asked for 32 of those ships, and this Congress gave them 35. Now, if you are listening out there and you are a taxpayer and are thinking about this, well, why would the Congress give them 35 when they asked for 32? We look not just to the immediate need of that line but at the long-term and unfunded need. It hasn't been that long since the Navy would have asked for 32 ships but might have gotten 18 or 16. We are in a place in which, once again, we are looking at our defense obligations. We also had the biggest pay increase for men and women in uniform in over a decade. All of those things matter.
Senator McCaskill and I worked on one piece of legislation to allow the historic Delta Queen, which will be based at Kimmswick, MO, which is just south of St. Louis on the Mississippi River, to get back in operation again. It is a 1920s riverboat on which, not too many years ago, President Carter took his summer vacation with the other passengers.
The Gateway Arch was reopened. Officially, 60 years after the arch was built, it was time to restore it. It was also time to connect the arch in better and different ways to the city of St. Louis--to the historic courthouse where the Dred Scott decision was started. That is where the local Federal court case was that wound up in a Supreme Court disaster. In the hearts and minds of the people, they are looking back at how wrong-headed that particular court was, but that old courthouse is still there. It is now connected to the arch, as it was not before, and to downtown.
I talked yesterday to the designated person who runs the Park Service. I said that we wanted the second century of the Park Service to be a public-private partnership. There is no greater example of that than the reopening and the restoring of the arch and in the connecting of it to downtown. There has been 300-and-some million dollars spent. Almost all of that money was either privately or locally raised with a tax on the city of St. Louis. I think about $20 million of that 300-
plus million-dollar project was Federal highway money.
The message there is that if you are going to expect a different source of money, you also have to expect a different kind of partnership. I think one of the things the Park Service learned with that big project was if the second century of the system were going to be different, it can't be just like the first century. You get your money from somewhere else, and then do whatever you want to do. What happens is you get your money from somewhere else and you have to create a sense that you really have partners in that.
In St. Louis, during World War II and after, a lot of the work on atomic weapons was done. In September, Congresswoman Wagner and I were able to join a signing ceremony on a record of decision of what to do with some of that military waste--that radioactive waste that had been left from the years before and after the end of World War II. It had been discarded by the Federal Government in ways that were not well thought out, in the West Lake Landfill.
Families there have been tireless advocates in demanding that things be done for the health and safety of their children and their community. They waited for 27 years for some real criticism out there by Scott Pruitt, who was the EPA Director. When we first talked to him about this, he said that you can't be on the priority list for almost 30 years if it is really a priority list. With his and Administrator Wheeler's leadership, somehow we came to a conclusion there that has generally been met positively by people who have worked so hard to get that Federal decision--there is a public-private partnership--and the private companies they worked with to do something with this material--
to now do the right thing with the material, which means moving it out of our State.
In southeast Missouri, there was a port authority, an inland port authority. An almost $20 million bridge grant was announced the other day that will allow that inland port, with two new rail lines, to become much more multimobile than it had been before.
What is going to happen to rural food demand? It is critically important. No country in the world is better suited than we are to meet the doubling of world food demand between now and 2050. In the doubling of the biggest area of commerce in the world, our inland ports in that discussion become particularly important.
Both the Congress and, in this case, the Missouri General Assembly are paying attention to the inland port structure like they have not before. The biggest single piece of contiguous agricultural ground in the world is the Mississippi River Valley. Unlike the others in the world that may be almost as big, it has its own built-in transportation network. The Missouri, the Ohio, the Arkansas, and the Illinois are rivers that flow into the Mississippi River and create that network that now links through the Panama Canal easily. You can go to Asia. You don't go through the Panama Canal. You easily get to the east coast of our country or you get to Europe and Africa. It is a great opportunity for us, and that kind of investment makes that opportunity more likely to pay the kind of dividends we would hope it would pay.
In September of this year, Congress passed and the President signed the Energy and Water appropriations bill, which included $25 million for the Delta Regional Authority, which is an authority designed to benefit a part of our country in which the early focus on labor intensive occupations, particularly farming, has given way to looking at that part of our economy without thinking about what has happened to rural communities and the rural workforce as that has moved on. Broadband is part of that, and I think we are going to see that continue to be a big part of what goes on in the future.
We have the small ports and the Mississippi River and tributaries project. We have the Ste. Genevieve National Historic Park, and the President signed that bill in March. Ste. Genevieve has French architecture that goes back to the late 1700s and to the very early 1800s. It is unique in the kind of architecture that is preserved there. Some of the oldest buildings, certainly, in the middle of the country and, in some cases, west of the Mississippi are there, and we are moving forward. I hope, even this week, to do a couple of additional things that will make that historic park work and be open to people from all over the world. The French Ambassador wants to go there in the near future and see what we are doing, as an example, to maintain those buildings that are reflective of a different part of our heritage than we have in most of the country.
Research institutions, like the University of Missouri, the USDA ag research facility in Columbia, and other places across our State, have benefited from additional research money.
In East Locust Creek, in August of 2018, it was announced that the final investment would be made for an East Locust Creek Reservoir in North Central Missouri. Water is a bigger and bigger challenge as we look toward the future, and thinking now about how we are going to have the kinds of water opportunities we need for drinking water or agriculture water and other water is very important.
In Sedalia, MO, a project to help--Congresswoman Hartzler and I worked on a project to help make the industrial park work better. Nucor just announced this year a significant and brandnew steel facility in that part of our State.
In Kansas City, the Buck O'Neil Bridge, across the Missouri River, is something that has needed to be done for a long time. The community had come up with 90 percent of the money needed, a bridge grant that Secretary Chao called me about, that the community had applied for, gets that last $25 million of that 200-and-some million-dollar project.
There has been a long fight at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg to maintain the A-10s and then do what we could to get the replacement wing there. That is important, as were the things that happened in Saint Joseph with the lift capacity, the ability with those C-130s, where 19 different countries come to that facility and train to figure out how to get the kind of support we need for military all over the world, including our NATO allies.
Senator Boozman and I, from the days we were in the House together, formed an I-49 caucus. Another announcement just in the last month will allow the last few miles of I-49 to be completed in our State. I was there about 8 years ago when Highway 71 in Missouri became I-49, and in most of our State now it is I-49, and it will be I-49 in all of our State.
So what has happened there and what has happened with opioid grant funding and with our mental health leadership in our State have resulted in significant legislative achievements this year.
The HIRE Vets Act is legislation that provides not only for hiring vets, but it also establishes recognition. Everybody says they hire vets. This is following up on legislation that was passed here in the Senate and in the House and signed into law in May of 2017. The Labor Department came up with that new standard of acknowledging who hires vets and who is better at hiring vets than anybody else. The first five Missouri employers were recognized this year with dozens of employers all over the country, in a tiered situation. It is sort of like the LEED standard for energy efficiency; we now have a standard for hiring vets.
As with the FAA reauthorization bill I mentioned earlier, our efforts to move toward more rural broadband have moved significantly this year, but, still, that is one of the things we need to be looking at next year.
I would argue that this is certainly one of the most effective right-
of-center Congresses in a long time. I think it has been an effective Congress. We looked at the issues facing the country, and we have done the best we can, in a long- and short-range way, to deal with those issues. It is something we ought to be talking to people we work for about, trying to use that as a standard. We were good this year; let's figure out how to be even better next year.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
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