M. President, on December 12, 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement staged raids on Swift & Company meatpacking plants in six states-Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, and my home state of Minnesota.

Over fifteen hundred unauthorized immigrants were arrested in these raids. They also left countless children-most of them citizens and legal residents-without their parents and with no way of finding them. One second-grader in Worthington, Minnesota-a United States citizen-came home that Tuesday night to find his two-year-old brother alone and his mother and father missing.

For the next week, this boy stayed at home caring for his two-year-old brother while his grandmother traveled to Worthington to care for her grandchildren.

On June 22, 2007, ICE agents staged another raid, this one in the Jackson Heights Manufactured Home Park in Shakopee, Minnesota. Early that Friday morning, around 6 am, federal agents seized a husband and his wife for suspected immigration violations. Somehow, they didn't even notice their daughter, who was sleeping. So later that morning, that seven-year-old girl was found wandering the park, looking for her parents.

M. President, stories like these happen every day. And they're happening to innocent children, most of them United States citizens. Children who have committed no crime, who have hurt no one, but who have had their lives torn apart because of the sins of their parents.

According to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service, over 100,000 parents of U.S. citizen children were deported in the past 10 years. Four million U.S. citizen children in our country have at least one undocumented immigrant parent. Forty thousand of those children live in Minnesota.

M. President, our country is not doing enough to protect these innocent kids. That's why Senator Kohl and I have crafted a bill to fix that.

And so, M. President, I am proud to stand today with Senators Kohl, Menendez, Klobuchar, Feingold, Durbin and Feinstein to introduce the Humane Enforcement and Legal Protections for Separated Children Act, or the HELP Separated Children Act. This is a simple but strong bill to protect our nation's kids from unnecessary harm from immigration enforcement actions.

I want to take a few moments to talk about what this bill does-the problems it solves, and how it solves them.

But before I do that, I want to take a second to talk about what this bill does not do. This bill is strictly about protecting children. It doesn't change our laws on immigrant admission, exclusion, or removal. No one is going to get in or stay in this country because of this bill. It has nothing to do with so-called amnesty or any decisions about deportation.

So what does this bill actually do?

This bill fixes four problems in our immigration enforcement system.

The first problem is notice to state authorities. Invariably, in almost all immigration enforcement actions, it is our local communities that have to clean up after the government's dirty work.
It's state and child welfare services that take in kids who have lost their mom or dad in a raid. It's local shelters and churches that feed those kids-again, most of whom are citizens-when their family breadwinner is taken away. And it's local schools that have take care of kids when no one picks them up after soccer practice.

After the Swift raids, the Bush administration finally understood this. And so in 2007, it put in place humanitarian guidelines that call upon ICE to reach out to state authorities and child welfare services before major enforcement actions. Again, that's the Bush administration. President Obama expanded these guidelines in 2009 so that they would cover more worksite actions.

But it still isn't enough. Local authorities still don't find out about actions until way too late-and when they are notified, they aren't given enough time to help. In 2008, after these guidelines were put into place, the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department testified before the House of Representatives that they still did not receive notice of enforcement actions before they happened.

State authorities in Massachusetts were notified months ahead of a raid in New Bedford. But almost immediately after it happened, the detainees were transferred to Texas, leaving state agencies unable to help. Governor Deval Patrick called it a "race to the airport."

Our bill makes sure that whenever possible, the Governor, local and state law enforcement, and child welfare agencies find out about raids ahead of time. It also makes sure that schools and community centers are notified after these actions so that they too can help.

That brings me to the second problem. If they want to help, state child welfare agencies and community organizations must be allowed to help identify detainees who have children at home. Mothers and fathers detained in enforcement actions often don't tell ICE agents that they have children at home-because they're afraid that ICE will go detain them, too.

As Troy Tucker, the sheriff of Clark County, Arkansas said after an action there, ICE is "not doing their job by simply questioning [people] and asking them whether they have children and not contacting anyone locally."

Even though the Bush administration guidelines allow state authorities and local non-profits to help screen detainees, this is not happening often enough. So our bill requires ICE and state agencies enforcing immigration laws to allow these groups to confidentially screen detainees and identify those who have kids at home.

Our bill makes another critical fix our immigration enforcement system. The Bush and ICE detention guidelines require authorities to give detainees free emergency phone calls. But again, it isn't being done enough, and it isn't being done right.

In the Swift raid in Worthington, one mother told ICE agents that she had kids at home, but still wasn't allowed to call them or let anyone know what had happened until later the next day. In Iowa, after a raid in Postville, some children went 72 hours without seeing their parents or knowing what happened to them.

Any parent knows how scared kids get just when you come home late. Can you imagine how scared they'd get if you went missing for a whole day? For three days? Can you imagine what would happen if they didn't know who to call? Can you imagine what would happen if they didn't have anything to eat?

Our bill requires federal and state authorities to allow parents, legal guardians, or primary caregivers to make free phone calls to their family, to lawyers, and to child welfare agencies to make sure that their kids aren't abandoned.

Finally, our bill averts one other major problem.

When a parent is detained, even if their kids know where they are, it is still extremely difficult for kids and parents to stay in contact. And it is extremely difficult for parents to participate in legal proceedings that affect their kids.

This means that parents can't tell a family court judge about a brother or sister or neighbor that could take care of their child. Children have actually been adopted by well-meaning families or put into foster care because their parents were unable to participate in custody proceedings.

Our bill makes sure that after they're detained, parents can continue to have access to phones to call their kids, their lawyers, and family courts. Our bill also requires ICE to consider the best interests of children in decisions to transfer detainees between facilities, or put them into reliable and cost-effective supervised release programs.

Our immigration system isn't broken. It's in shambles. And while our bill doesn't fix 99.9 percent of those problems, it takes a small but important step to make sure our kids don't suffer any more than they have to already.

I'm proud to say that because this is such a critical, albeit narrowly targeted measure, our bill has gained the support of the top faith, child welfare, and immigrant advocacy organizations in the country.

I'm also proud to say that it has won the support of faith leaders across Minnesota, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, Chief Tom Smith of the St. Paul Police Department, and countless immigrant advocacy groups in the state. I ask unanimous consent to add to the record the full list of supporting organizations and community leaders.

While immigration may be complicated, protecting our kids isn't. It's something we can all agree on.

Thank you, M. President, and I ask unanimous consent that the full text of my bill be included in the record.