>> i want to talk about an issue that has gotten a lot of attention herein in washington d around the country over the past week or so and that is the issue of children across the border both of those who crossed illegally with their parents and those who, while in. those who come alone are known as unaccompanied children. first i want to reiterate something i said a numbe i've sf times over the past few weeks and that is i oppose the policy of separating children from their i parents. i think it is counter to our

american values. as we will talk about this afternoon, it's also inconsistent with the infrastructure we have in place to be able to deal with it. i was pleased to see the administration agree we should keep families apprehended at the border together as the executive order of the president issued to that effect yesterday. i cosponsored legislation on this issue that has now been cosponsored by 32 of my colleagues i'm told, so it has the support of almost one third of the chamber which would in effect take the executive order and put that into law butha also make other changes necessary to ensure we can have a sustainable policy with regards to children coming across the border. i believe we can have strong border security without separating families at the border. i believe we can enforce the nation's law and we should while remaining true to our values. children should be

kept in a safe hearinsafe hearing impairmh their appearance while immigration officials quickly assessed each family's individual case. that'slt the best solution. beyond the argument for going the policy by the way the logistics of separating families is just not practical. let me talk about wha what curry happens with unaccompanied children we talked about two categories those that come with their parents but there's a bigger issue t with regards to those children in the sense of the number of children who are in the system and that is those who come on their own. as the chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, i've been investigating over the past couple of years the handling of these kids who come over unaccompanied. i've done this during the obama administration and during the trump administration and from the work we've done i can tell

you the department o the departd human services and the department of homeland security are not prepared to effectively deal with even more children unaccompanied minors were those who come with their parents. there are two things we needdd o address.fi first, we need to ensure i ensur government takes charge of these children they are not trafficked or abused. they are children and they need to be treated as such. second we need to uphold the rule of law and make sure our immigration system actually works. to do that we need to make sure that these children appear for their immigration court proceedings. i'm afraid we are failing on both counts )-right-paren that is unacceptable. let me explain by name. what i mean. i first got involved in this issue back in 2015 a few years ago when reportst came out that there were eight unaccompanied

minors from guatemala who come up to our southern border, crossed over, human traffickers lured them to the united states by the way they've actually gone toad guatemala, talked to the ks parents and told them they would provide them an education in america, got them mortgages for some of the homes as payments to pay for the trafficking and smuggling that they also retained not just th to the mortgages for these homes, but they said when they got the kids in their control they were not going to let them go until the bats were totally paid off. so they were not interested in giving them an education they were just interested in trafficking them. anyway when they cross the border they were not preempted. their status as defined by immigration laws that of an unaccompanied child they were

considered and this means the department of homeland security picks them up, customs and border protection from the linked article transfers to the department of human services. so when federal department picks them up, they take them to another vertical department called the department of health and human services and hhs, health andse human services supposed to do and keep these kids for a short period of time until they can be placed with sponsors. that is how the system works. the sponsors then are supposed to ensure they stay safe and k t them to their appropriate immigration proceedings. unfortunately based on the investigation, often that does not happen. what happened in this case is our investigation was able to reveal these kids, brought over from guatemala from these traffickers taken into custody, they've gone to hhs for short-term detention facility then sent out to sponsors and

guess who the sponsors were that they were given to? the traffickers. they were given to the traffickers, not to family members or friends with someone who could be trusted. you think of a surrogate family or foster family. they were put in the custody of the human traffickers. they did not get these people and as a result they took these kids north, took them to my state of ohio which is again how i got involved in this. they took them to a farm in marion ohio where they lived in squalor conditions required to work 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week, their paychecks would often confiscated by the traffickers are basically just sitting roome and board. they threatened them and their families with physical harm if they didn't perform these long hours and work under these difficult conditions. fortunately, this ring was discovered and the kids were

rescued and they've now been prosecuted. what the investigation found out when we tried to figure out how this could possibly have happened is that hhs did and do thens background checks on the sponsors or respond to red flags that should have alerted to problems. for example a group for neglecting multiple kids. that should have been a red flag right there not just one child with multiple. they missed a flag when a social worker working with hhs showed up to help the kids into the wie sponsor turned the social worker of a this is somebody on contract with hhs and that didn't raise a flag. we had a hearing in january 2016 and hhs committed they were going to do better, they were going to take care of these kids. this is a federal agency. they give kids to traffickers

and has a tragic situation asunfold it is unacceptable. that was during the obama administration by theso way so remember this is not a partisan issue during previous administrations and this, the system has not worked. after that hearing, hhs and the department of homeland security under which we have the border patrolor protection service that connects to clarifying responsibilities to protect these kids and here's one thing we found is nobody was accountable, so kids were pointing fingers at each other and the kids were falling through the cracks. hhs and tur entered into a memof theag agreement but said they recognized they should ensure a they are not abused or agtrafficked and also said the agencies ran into the joint concept of operations spelling out the specific responsibilities within a years time that would be done by february of 2017. that is of course what i was looking for and with the committee was looking for how

are you going to handle them, who is responsible of them. what is the handoff? who is accountable. that is supposed to be due in february of 2017. today is june 2018. the operations agreement between the agency is still not completed. they missed their deadline by about a year an year into year y promised by th the way based ona hearing we recently had with hhs to complete this agreement and to get it to us this joint concept of operations by july 30. so, we are expecting that within four or five weeks and we very much look forward to that. this was based on the hearing in april of this year we called them back again to explain what's going on and why we haven't seen s an agreement despite virtually every couple of weeks telling us it is comi

coming. unccompanied minor with a sponsor. h.h.s. testified at our april hearing that from october to december of last year, they had the data now on the calls that they had made. these are the 30-day calls they're making after kids go out with their sponsors. those calls revealed that about

1,500 children were unaccounted for. in other words, they placed a call, talked to the sponsor, said, you know, how is is this child doing? and the sponsor wasn't responsive. either said we don't know how the child is doing. they couldn't find the sponsor. they couldn't find the child. in some cases, the child had actually run away. so 1,500 kids unaccounted for. doesn't mean they're not with a family somewhere, doesn't mean they're not even going to their court case. but they couldn't find these kids. that's unacceptable. and we're now working on a bipartisan basis, republicans and democrats alike, with new legislation that will be informed by this concept of operations we hope to have in the next several weeks here but will lay out how we ought to treat unaccompanied minors and hold someone accountable, particularly h.h.s. that has these children in their custody, and prior to that d.h.s., the department of homeland security,

to ensure that these instances will not happen again and to ensure that we know where these kids are. think the about your home state and the foster care system which is probably overburdened right now because of the opioid crisis. but you have a foster care system where foster parents are actually screened. part of the our legislation, by the way, is to he will it the states where the kids are so the states can play a role in this as well. what this all highlights is that the federal government is not doing nearly enough to protect unaccompanied minors from trafficking and other forms of abuse and not doing enough to enshould you are that they get to their court date. right? so we've got a system, we've got these kids in the system. i don't care what your views are on immigration policy. it doesn't matter whether you believe that we should have a much more secure border and a wall or whether you believe that there ought to be more of an open border and a catch-and-release system. nobody should want to have these kids treated like this.

everyone should want to ensure that these kids are cared for properly and get to their court date. ensure that we don't have the kinds of tragic instances we had in my home state of the ohio. but i also think it is important not to conflate these two issues together, the unaccompanied kids and the 1,500 who are unaccounted for and what has happened in the last several weeks with separating families from children. unfortunately, a lot of people have conflated the two. there were a "new york times" story that 1,500 kids were missing and somehow that got conflated with a lot of folks online and even some folks in this chamber with this nokes that this is about the separation policy and the zero tolerance policy. it is not. it is something different. but what it says to me is, let's not add more children to a system that's not working. in other words, as i said earlier at the start, we don't have the infrastructure in place

to deal with it. its one reason i felt strongly that separating kids from their families was not only the right -- the wrong thing to do in terms of a moral policy but also in terms of our government's ability to handle it. even if there was a situation where it was important to get this kid away from a family where maybe there was a sign of abuse or maybe the kid was being trafficked. we've got to have a better system in place to deal with these children who are unaccompanied or others who end up in the system. so what was happening under the zero tolerance policy, so-called zero tolerance policy over the last six weeks was that adults illegally crossing the border were arrested and put in detention facilities. under the flores decision, if adults were traveling with children, those children had to be placed in what the court says is the least restrictive

settling possible. that's one of the arguments the trump administration has been making. that's one reason with the zero tolerance policy and the parents going into the criminal justice system, going into that kind of detention, the kids couldn't go with them because of this court decision. it's an issue. there's no question about it. it's the primary reason why they are saying they put about 2,000 children into the care of h.h.s. and d.h.s. essentially turning them into unaccompanied minors putting them into a system that in my view is not working. what we've seen over the past two years is d.h.s. and h.h.s. are not adequately prepared to take care of these kids and make sure they're placed in safe environments and get to their court hearings. so again, as soon as i understood what was going on with separating families i spoke out and said this is bad. we cannot allow this to happen for both reasons. not the moral thing to do but

also we don't have the infrastructure. and on tuesday i signed a letter to attorney general jeff sessions calling on him to stop this practice of separating kids from their families, giving it a pause so that we can have the opportunity to look at this issue, develop the right legislation that we've now introduced. this letter, by the way, was led by my colleague senator orrin hatch and was signed by 11 of 0 you are colleagues. i commend the administration for the executive order yesterday that keeps families together. that's a positive first step but we've got to go further. because of the flores decision we talked about earlier which is again a settlement made back in 1997, congress is stkpw-g to have to -- going to have to step in as well. i think it's likely that the executive order will be in litigation immediately because of the flores decision. the legislative solution that congress enacts needs to address the flores settlement agreement

as it applies to children who arrive with their parents. in those cases the settlement agreement currently requires these children be separated from their families and keep in the least restrictive setting possible instead of staying with their families if their families are in detention. this legislation we introduced yesterday called keep families together and enforce the law act, again, has almost a third of the senate signing on. it will provide thatting long-term solution to keep families together and expedite these immigration cases. unlike other proposals which would incentivize more illegal immigration, in my view, by essentially codifying past practice where people were apprehended but then released into the community, this legislation actually solves the problem by keeping families together while ensuring the integrity of our immigration laws. again, it among other things overrides the flores settlement agreement ensuring that families are kept together during their

immigration enforcement proceedings. but importantly to me, it also expedites these proceedings. and this is one of the problems i've sao*ep in -- seen in the immigration system. we have so many cases, such a backlog, so much time required to get to a decision that it creates a lot more problems in terms of what do you do with folks who come across the border. so this would expedite and prioritize these cases and families, provide lots more immigration judges which you've got to get a decision on these people. you need to have more immigration judges and a better process. more money, frankly, is going to be needed, interest resources to be sure that infrastructure is in place to deal with this issue as quickly as possible, to get a decision, an appropriate decision as to whether the person stays or leaves. i hope more of my colleagues will sign on to this legislation. i hope they'll do it on a bipartisan basis. i think the keep families together and enforce the law act is the right position that finds that common ground between all of us here on the floor who

believe we ought to uphold our immigration law. but i also think that families need to stay together. we need to have a compassionate approach to this. there is a consensus now on not separating families. that's good. but there's also a consensus we need an immigration system that works. so let's come together in both chambers. let's do the hard work. let's get this done. of course we need to do broader immigration reform as well. but this issue is staring us in the face. let's keep families together. let's provide for an immigration system that works over the long term, that provides compassionate care for those kids, that's in line with our country's values and enforces the laws of our country. thank you, mr. president. i yield back my