Political Quotes

“I also rise on the floor together with my colleagues from New Mexico and Florida to talk about the refugee crisis at our Nation's border. I appreciate Senator Heinrich's leadership on this issue and his comments, and I am looking forward to hearing from Senator Nelson as well. I would like to share a little bit of a personal story and amplify a few comments I made on the floor last Thursday about this challenge. I feel very personally connected to this issue and to the children who are coming to the border, children such as Alejandro, whose picture was such a stark reminder that we are dealing with little kids. In 1980 and 1981, I was a student in law school, and I decided that I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and I needed to figure it out. So what I did was I took a year off from law school and went to work with Jesuit missionaries in the town of El Progreso, Honduras. El Progreso, Honduras, was at that point a small community at the edge of banana plantations in a large agricultural valley in that country. I worked there as the principal of a school that taught kids to be plumbers and carpenters. I was dealing with youngsters in that neighborhood. Well, today El Progreso is in the epicenter of this problem. There have been many hundreds of kids from El Progreso who have come to the border this year. San Pedro Sula--a nearby large city--is thought to be the murder capital of Honduras, which is now the murder capital of the world.…”