On the recordJune 21, 2018
Mr. Speaker, this bill wouldn't end the separation of children from their parents, but it would also provide that the parents could be put in jail with their children. The alternative, which is false, seems to be to put the mother in the cage with the toddler or they run free and we will never see them again. It is not true. There was something called the Family Case Management Program--100 percent attendance rate at the immigration hearing. Those are not my figures. Those are figures from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. One hundred percent of the people showed up at their hearing, either to get relief or to be removed, at a cost of $36 a day, as compared to $711 a day to keep a child in a temporary tent facility. We don't want to see the equivalent of internment camps, as we saw in World War II, for these asylum seekers. We need the orderly administration of the immigration laws. This bill will lead to mass incarceration of mothers and their toddlers.
