Speaking at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Thursday, Senator Coons urged colleagues to support the President’s emergency funding request and focus additional resources on addressing the root cause of the crisis on the border.
“I think the evidence is clear that the children who we are seeing and who are being interdicted at our southern border at record numbers are fleeing dramatically increased levels of violence in three Central American countries — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras,” Senator Coons said. “And if this increase in refugees coming to the United States was caused by some change in policy, we would see a comparable flood of refugees from other countries throughout Central America, but we don’t. It’s just these three countries, and it’s because of the conditions in these three countries, as your testimony suggested. And so, it’s my hope that a significant share of the investment and the action that will be taken as a result of this emergency supplemental will focus on those countries.”
Senator Coons also praised the emergency funding bill for directing resources to guarantee due process protections – required under the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Act – for children detained by border security.
“I’m pleased this requests additional badly needed resources for immigration judges, for an expansion of the legal orientation program, and for counsel for minors, because while we know we have a significant backlog, we have significant unmet detention costs and humanitarian costs,” Senator Coons said. “I think we need to act now to fix our most urgent problems rather than removing the basic due process protections embedded in the [Trafficking Victims Protection Act], a law that was adopted unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President Bush.”
Senator Coons spoke on the Senate floor yesterday to call on Congress to responsibly confront the crisis at the border. Watch and read his remarks here: http://1.usa.gov/1lV0pLw