Jeff Merkley

The administration is conducting its immigration policy and strategy that traumatizes children without careful planning and perhaps with a lot of callousness perhaps incompetence and possibly both.

And there's an underlying philosophy that it's OK to treat refugees in this fashion.

From every direction you see that the children are being treated in a horrific manner.

I'm just like, `What world are they living in?'

Many of these conditions would be neglect and prosecutable in any other setting.

But under line administration's approach has been the argument that if people suffer as immigrants, it will discourage them from immigrating.

I think any American would be horrified to see these conditions.

No, this is a huge level of incompetence and lack of compassion.

We whole heartedly echo these sentiments and concerns across the entire rail industry.

What really bothered me about Nielsen is she does then lied to Congress and said, 'No, we didn't want to do deterrence, we didn't want to do child separation, it doesn't exist, the policy doesn't exist.'

There's been such pressure in this administration to force people back into Mexico, to proceed to throw them into prison, to separate the kids, to make their lives as miserable as possible as part of a strategy of deterrence.

He now has -- well, in December, 15,000 migrant children locked up in a child Gulag across America, which is just so out of character with who we are.

It's all Trump generated.

It's just absolutely horrific on the border.

Well, I think he got a lot of feedback yesterday from Republicans on Capitol Hill saying that this is an evil dark policy and don't go back there, that it was a mistake to begin with, and they don't want any part of it.

Referring to historical norms, it has been a historical norm to allow amendments on the floor of this Chamber so that they could be debated, and I recall very well listening to you complain a great deal about Harry Reid's blocking of…

We have thousands of children locked up in a series of child prisons across the country, migrant children.

The importance of this, and the reason of all the lies the administration has told, the reason I really wanted to kind of put this one in the spotlight and say this is not OK is because of the deep damage to thousands and thousands of…

I'm sick and tired of this administration lying to the American people.

I praise my colleagues from the Atlantic coast of New Jersey and Pacific coast of California for today putting our entire Senate on record and on a pathway to recognizing the deep darkness of this national scar on our justice system and on…

Symbolically, that is not where we want to be.

Would you commit to looking at Section 6 as a pathway to possibly joining the other 60 nations that have banned asbestos in order to ban it here in the U.S.?

I think it needs to be a multilateral response and not just a unilateral one.

We will give you access to our market... which means you will be able to undercut our products.

I think of the whole WTO process as clunky... and deeply dysfunctional.