Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I want to be the first to acknowledge that this legislation may not indeed be the appropriate place in which to address the issue raised in the amendment. But I do believe the amendment is an appropriate way to highlight a problem that simply must be addressed by the President and by the Congress. In recent weeks, there have been many news accounts reporting that we have had an explosion of unaccompanied juveniles coming and crossing our borders, largely from Central America, from the countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. This population has overwhelmed facilities that we normally use to house people that have entered our country illegally, and military facilities have now been used, pressed into service, to deal with this population. In full disclosure, one of those facilities happens to be in my district, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the home of the Field Artillery School. But other facilities have also been used, at Ventura, at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, and the State of Washington, and still others are being considered. I am concerned about this for three reasons. First, these military facilities are absolutely inappropriate places to house this particular population. They are not designed for that purpose. They are not equipped for it. They have gotten very little notification of it. It is simply the wrong place to put folks.…”