On the recordJuly 10, 2019
Mr. Castro makes a good point regarding the guardrails, the funding. One of the things that I would like to point out is if this administration, this President, as he claimed, was the only one who could solve this problem, then why hasn't it been solved? It is a bigger mess and a bigger disaster than we have ever seen, and that is resulting in these conditions on the border where people are mistreated. This culture that is becoming rotten to the core is starting to just fester. We have seen an uncounted number of children who have died. According to Newsweek, there were no migrant children who died while in CBP custody during the final 6 years of the Obama administration. Former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen previously admitted that it had been more than a decade since a child had died in CBP detention until December of last year when the 8-year-old Guatemalan national passed away on Christmas Eve. Since then, at least four other children have died while detained. We are seeing this crisis get worse and worse, and my fear is that we haven't hit the bottom yet. Until Congress steps in and puts those guardrails in place, until we flex our constitutional muscle, we are going to see things deteriorating further.
