Cornyn to introduce bill addressing surge of unaccompanied minors at the border
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said Tuesday he is preparing a bill to deal with unaccompanied minors arriving at the southwest border with Mexico.
The legislation will be introduced in the Senate in two weeks, according to his office.
In Houston Tuesday, the senator announced what he said will be a bipartisan bill during a press conference after he visited a shelter for unaccompanied minors run by Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.
“We need to find a way to humanely and legally allow immigration to occur,” said Cornyn. “But we can’t just put the welcome mat out for anybody and everybody in the world who wants to come to the United States, because we’ll be overwhelmed, and that’s what we’re seeing happening right now (at the border).”
The senator said his new bill is built from another one called “The Humane Act” that he proposed in 2017 with Democratic U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, also from Texas. That bill failed to pass.
Solutions should take two aspects into account, he said. One is tackling the root cause of those
unregulated migrations with what he called the “the push factor,” referring to the violence and poverty migrants are fleeing and the incentive of smugglers to make money with their human cargo.
President Joe Biden sent an immigration proposal to Congress recently that would allocate $4 billion for a four-year plan to assist the Central American region—where the majority of minors come from— in reducing corruption, violence and poverty.
Fixing uncontrolled illegal immigration and particularly of minors, would involve creating a system where judges could hear the minors’ cases swiftly while they are retained at an immigration facility, Cornyn said.
He said it would eliminate the traditional policy that some politicians call “catch and release,” where children, as well as adults, are taken into custody and released to their families in the United States while following their immigration processes in court.
“The senator really cares about kids,” said Bob Sanborn, president & CEO of the nonprofit Children at Risk who was part of a closed-door round-table discussion with Cornyn at Catholic Charities Tuesday. “Unfortunately, we have this group of politicians in Washington, D.C., that are using this as a circus.”
Cornyn said his bill will address several rules that interfere with an orderly process for children looking for asylum at the border. He mentioned a lawsuit settlement in Reno v. Flores, commonly called the Flores case, which requires Border Patrol to release from custody children up to 17 years old within 72 hours.
A proposal for judges to hear their cases before being released from custody to U.S. communities would require a longer time frame at this time than what Flores allows. Immigration courts have a current backlog of 1.3 million cases, and Texas has more than 200,000 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse that tracks immigration data.
“I’m working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to come up with policies that will give people an opportunity to have their hearing in front of an immigration judge while they’re still being processed” by immigration authorities, said Cornyn, rather than release them with a notice to appear as it is now.
At the end of February, 29,010 unaccompanied minors arrived at the southwest border since the beginning of the current fiscal year on Oct. 1, according to Border Patrol statistics. That represents an increase of 92 percent compared to the same month the previous year when the total was 15,122
The highest increases of unaccompanied minors in that period are coming from Honduras and Guatemala. The flow from El Salvador remains stable while border patrol encounters with Mexican children have decrease significantly.
There were 5,767 children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody in March 28, according to a daily tracking, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This month, the border patrol apprehended and took custody of an average of 486 children, 17 years old and younger, per day.
The Biden administration has avoided calling the situation at the border a crisis but rather a surge that is not new to immigration authorities that happens regularly going into the spring and early summer months.
Experts and advocates said the border surge can be better explained when accounting for the fact that the immigration flow was naturally reduced last year by the coronavirus pandemic. But with COVID receding and after two hurricanes in Central America at the end of 2020 that displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the pressure on the migratory floodgates has yielded to a new increase.
“I’m not here to criticize any of the people who are trying to help,” said Cornyn. “It’s almost like everybody is working together in the neighborhood to put out a fire, but the fire is overwhelming the capacity of the neighborhood to put it out.”
Cornyn, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that handles immigration and border security issues, visited a detention facility for unauthorized immigrant children in Carrizo Springs and the Laredo border March 12. He also toured areas of the Rio Grande and a facility for minors in Donna last Friday.
His office said the senator is optimistic that the bill he will introduce after the end of the congressional Spring recess ending on April 11 will have enough support to be passed. They said Cornyn is not inclined to fight for comprehensive immigration reform at this time due to continuous past failures and that he prefers to address the issues by independent pieces of legislation.
Sanborn said the country saw surges of children and caravans coming to the border in 2019 and to a lesser extent in 2018.
The bottom line, Sanborn said, is “We need to get these kids to their families as soon as possible, most of them have families in the U.S. already.”