 My name again is Jonathan Ryan. I'm an immigration attorney and I'm the Executive Director of RISIS, which is the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. We are headquartered here in San Antonio, not far from the campus, and we've been providing free legal services to underserved refugee children, families, and refugees since 1986. And since that time, we have been providing legal services to what we now know as unaccompanied children from across the world, around the world, who come seeking protection and assistance in the United States. Before the current regime, we worked with these children when they were in, still being kept in adult detention centers, with adult immigrants who were being processed for deportation. For many years now, they've been in a separate system under the care of U.S. Health and Human Services. And that is a result of litigation during the 90s and an eventual settlement that took the children out of the custody of their prosecuting entity, which was then the INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service, now the Department of Homeland Security. So since 2008, RISIS has been contracted to provide legal access services to children in HHS custody, unaccompanied children who are being processed for removal here in San Antonio, as well as in Corpus Christi, Texas. Now, when we first started this work in 2008, we were requested to provide services to just this, as they told me on the phone, just this little shelter over on the west side. It's got 28 beds. It'll be easy. That's what they said. At the peak of our work this summer, we were providing services to more than 2,300 children here in this area. In 2008, when we began this work, there were 28 beds, roughly 30 beds. In 2009, there were roughly 60. In 2010, there were about 120. In 2011, there were 250. In 2012, there were 500. Last year, there were 1,000. And then this year, we screamed up above the 2,300 mark over the summer. It's been an increasing problem, an increasing issue here in our community for the last decade. I wonder who here, maybe just by a show of hands was aware, prior to the coverage this summer, that this was such an issue, that this was a singular issue here in our community. That's good. You've been even paying close attention. So what we saw this summer then was an influx, like we've seen, year over year. It's somewhat seasonal. Following the cold temperatures of the winter and prior to the hurricane season and the heat is an opportune moment for migrants to depart safely and have enough time to begin and complete their journey. So that's why we see these rising numbers in the spring as we did this year. It's been increasing every year, but this year it was so much that it overwhelmed the HHS system of national shelters. At the beginning of this year, there were roughly 4,000 beds, as they say, beds for unaccompanied minors around the United States. Now a vast majority of these beds are located here in Texas. We have probably one half to two thirds of the beds nationally for unaccompanied minors. In San Antonio and Corpus, we currently have approximately 1100 beds here in San Antonio. Just under 600 in the rest are out in the Corpus Christi area. So by mid-May of this year, this shelter system nationally was overwhelmed. All 4,000 beds were occupied, and there were continuing to have up to 350 children every day presenting themselves at the border. Now I say presenting themselves at the border because that is what the children were doing. They were walking up to the border, to the river. They were presenting themselves to immigration officials who were effectively standing on the other side. So this was not a flight or an invasion, as some have spoken of, of children coming to our country. This was a relatively orderly process of children, child refugees who were requesting asylum at our front door. So when the capacity was immediate, was exceeded in mid-May, Health and Human Services attempted to locate new shelters and open up new shelters around the country and here in Texas. They must be certified or licensed by our Department, our State Department of Child Protective Services. Even though they are federally funded and funded, anyone who is a custodian of a child in a state must demean themselves to state law. So these shelters operate within the context of state law, very similarly to our child protective service houses. The one critical difference being that these children are the ones being prosecuted, not their parents. So when the capacity was exceeded and they were unable to open more shelters, more appropriate shelters, home-like shelters that are provided by agencies like St. PJ's and BCFS, they resorted to opening up three what they call emergency reception sites on U.S. Military Department of Defense bases. The first to open up in mid-May was here at Lackland Air Force Base. It held up to 1200 children at one time. It effectively doubled the capacity of San Antonio in terms of the detention of children. After that, they opened up Fort Sill in Oklahoma. And following that, they opened up a naval base in Ventura, California. Neither of those facilities held as many children as Lackland did. Ultimately, it created a capacity of approximately 3,000 children, additional to the beds that were in the national network. Over the summer, we began on June 9th at RISIS to provide services at Lackland. We received no additional funding, no direct federal support, no additional grant monies. We merely are an agency that is located here that has done this work for many years and chose to not stand by as these children were being ramped through this system and very quickly processed out of Lackland to families and potentially never getting the opportunity to speak with an attorney or some trained professional who could diagnose whether they have been a victim of trafficking, torture, persecution, other forms of abuse that may lend them eligible for a humanitarian visa. So when we spoke with children, we provided two critical services. The first is a know your rights presentation. We get up in front of the kids, much like I'm up here in front of you, and we provide them a class. We attempt to explain to them the nature and the purposes of the deportation proceedings that they're now subject to. We also try to explain to them that they've got rights and responsibilities in that process as well as in the detention shelters. As well, we have to explain to them most critically that this process continues. The court case continues even after they are released. Many of them are released within 14 to 30 days of being apprehended. They're spending very short amounts of time in government custody, and this is the only opportunity that we really have to provide them critical information that could really be the outcome determining information to both their legal cases and unfortunately their little lives. After speaking with more than 1,700 of these children individually where we provide them legal consultations, private confidential screenings, it's a multi-page intake that we provide to them that gives us information that we can then use to potentially diagnose or determine whether they may be eligible for asylum or other forms of humanitarian protection. Well, between June 9th and July 28th, we spoke with these 1,700 children, and after conducting a thorough peer review of the intakes, we have determined as an agency that more than 63% or 2 thirds of these children have strong claims for asylum or other forms of humanitarian protection. This is a determination that we've made based on 30 years of our own internal legal practice where we have developed many cases, many responses from the government that educate us that these are cases that are not just threshold eligibility cases, but in fact very strong cases that are more likely than not to be approved by an immigration judge if the children are provided access to an attorney who can assist them to prepare that case. So at the end, one other thing that we learned in our screenings was that even though these children were fleeing violence, fear of violence and persecution, even though they were taking their lives and their hands on the journey and facing mortal jeopardy each day of that of that journey, what was the number one thing that they reported that was traumatic or shocking to them? It was their treatment by the U.S. government post-apprehension as they were placed in cold, refrigerated, essentially boxes that are commonly referred to as las yeleras or the ice box because they are contained units in which people are kept, where they sleep, where they eat, where they use the restroom, where they clean or don't clean themselves for days. They are kept at about 55 to 60 degrees. Of sensibly, they are kept at this temperature to prevent the spread of disease, but I've been in a few, my dad's a doctor, I've been in a few hospitals, I've never been in a hospital that is that cold. And so many of the children, although the law requires that they are brought out of this detention within three days, the average reported length of stay in the ice boxes that we found was seven days, some children reported as many as 12 days. Currently, as of today, ORR or HHS has increased that capacity from 4,000 to roughly 5,600 beds of permanent shelter space. They've now brought the Department of Defense installations offline, so Lackland, Fort Sill, and Ventura currently do not house any unaccompanied minors. They have been reunified with family or they've been moved out to other shelters. However, they are maintaining those leases and are maintaining a 48-hour readiness to go back up to full capacity if necessary. So the question is why are they here? Why are these children coming here? By the way, the 64,000 children that arrived this year were projecting that next year, that year beginning in October, we will see roughly 96,000 children arrival. So what we saw this summer was just the appetizer. We will have more of this to come. And many of us are now spending the next few months batting down the hatches and getting ready. So why are they here? What we saw in Honduras in 2009, there was a coup. And this coup left most institutions in the country non-existent. They pretty much the only institutions that were left in Honduras after the coup were the church and the gangs. As well, the U.S. and Columbia have been engaged in intensive cooperations over the last five years to shut down the trade routes of international narcotics smuggling through the Caribbean. The result is that they've moved over land through the northern triangle of countries that we've been addressing all summer of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. We spoke this morning as well about differences in trade routes. Post 9-11, international trade routes for refugees from Africa, from Asia, shifted largely from being over air into LAX and JFK to individuals traveling to South America and then traveling up through South America and Central America to the United States, very similarly as South and Central American refugees do. This put an amazing amount of power and capital into the smugglers and traffickers who move people and goods through Central America. You had the alignment of smuggling routes and drug trafficking routes through these countries. The result is extremely powerful gangs. The gangs that travel, that transport these narcotics through this region, they move probably about 80 billion to 90 billion dollars in product from Colombia to America. That far exceeds the gross national product of any single country in Central America. These gangs are effectively another state in Central America, a state that as was discussed today is essentially funded by the drug users of America. This puts amazing pressure on institutions and families. And as we talk to children, they see the world through the lens of their families. They see and they suffer the abuse directly from their family members. But when you peel back the onion, what you see is that these family members, it could be a parent, it could be a sibling, it could be a step-parent, it could be a distant relative in the house who's exploiting or harming these children, is him or herself under the pressure somehow of these gangs. The way that this system work is that local gangs disrupt and displace children and families. And then these international cartels that move the product sweep them up in the trade route that is already almost a sucking power that brings them into that route. Because what they've realized basically it's been an epiphany. After selling drugs, there's been a realization by the cartels that you can only sell the drug one time. The human body is an infinitely saleable resource. You can sell the human body again and again and again. So they've now chosen to align their smuggling of goods with their smuggling of people. And on top of that, now you can not only smuggle the product of the person, but you can now employ or traffic that person to in fact carry out and be a tentacle of your criminal act. That's what we see stories of children potentially bringing drugs across the border. We call them gang members. We call them criminals. These are children who are being trafficked. They're being held at the butt of a gun. I've represented many children from the border towns of Acuña and Piedras Negras who have been tortured, who have suffered all sorts of exploitation, sexual exploitation against young boys in an attempt to shame them into not being able to tell people about what's happened to them so that they can use them to move drugs again and again and again. Also, people are being smuggled and we talk about large amounts of money being paid for their smuggling. A lot of this money is debt. When they talk about the money that's being spent to these smugglers, they're incurring large amounts of debt. And this is debt that must be paid off once they arrive. So these are children who are in many respects fleeing trafficking. They're trafficked along the way. And they're being now rendered into a position where upon arrival, they're extremely vulnerable to trafficking here in this country. The law framework that protects these children that I practice is refugee and asylum law. This is the law that was passed shortly, well, shortly after World War Two by a generation that we call the greatest generation. And it is a longstanding law that it really goes to the fundaments of what we see ourselves as a nation in terms of our character. This was law passed by a generation of people who understood I think a few things more freshly and more acutely than perhaps we do today. They understood based on their experiences in World War One and World War Two, the true horror and terror of genocide, of mass murder and persecution, they saw it and they understood it. And they drew a line in the international sand saying that we're not going to accept this. They also understood after having gone to a war where as we learned it, we were not there just to protect our border or our interests but to preserve our principles. And chief among them is that you do not return people back to countries or locations where they're going to be tortured and killed. They understood that this was going to be an expensive process. World War Two was very expensive. But they understood that it was expensive to be the beacon of hope and freedom in this world because it is very worth it. And we live for the last 70 years off the boon of that generation based on their commitments to these humanitarian principles that gave us the moral standing that gave us this position in the world to really dictate to other nations what their humanitarian laws should be. And we use that position today to intervene militarily. Most of our military interventions today are based on humanitarian interventions. If we erode our own humanitarian standing, we change laws to round these children up and summarily just send them home. We are not just harming these children. We are harming our character as a nation and we're harming our position the way that the rest of the world views us. And this really is a valuable, valuable, valuable asset. We use it to intervene with other nations and we also use it to hold their feet to the fire to follow international humanitarian norms. So these children, they're being processed in and out of the detention center very quickly. They are then spreading out across this country. So 96% of these children are going to be reunified with family members. And of those 96%, 86% are leaving the state of Texas. They're going to states such as Florida, California, New York. These are traditional states for them to travel to. But we're also seeing emerging states. Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina are receiving large numbers of these children. It's the same states that passed these SB 1070-like laws that caused their longstanding and existing undocumented populations to flee who are now apparently being replaced by these children. They need services in our community. They need services around the country. So what we are calling for are people and we have set up at Riasis, an email address which is helpkids at RiasisTexas.org. And I'll be in the back. I can give that information more clearly, helpkids at RiasisTexas.org. To accept volunteers, we're going to need volunteers now and through the rest of next year as the numbers of children increase month by month surely heading into next summer. I know that my time is coming very, very close. I've got a minute. Okay, great. And I might steal a couple of minutes of my. All right. So most of these children are moving out of this out of this state. And basically I just want to kind of put things in context in terms of this crisis. I'll just take an extra couple minutes, okay? Because we do now call this a humanitarian crisis and that's what it was referred to over the summer. And I'd like to address that so-called crisis for a few minutes. So basically we had 64,000 children come through. Each of them spent approximately 14 to 30 days in government custody before being reunified with a family designated sponsor. It's the responsibility of the sponsor to feed and house and close the child. They do not receive any federally funded benefits. So these children are on the dime of these sponsors. They're not being cared for by the federal government. Approximately 3,000 children were unable or will be unable to find a sponsor. They will be stuck in custody. Okay. First of all, these are exactly the children that we want to help. These are the children that are here literally alone with nobody. There are many, many children who flee, who leave. One of my clients, I was actually speaking in Austin with him this weekend. He came as a 17-year-old from Guatemala. He left with no plan, no money, never got to say goodbye to his mother. He suffered every injustice that we could imagine you've heard about on route and thank God he got to an attorney and got here and got representation. He's now a permanent resident and he's joining the Marines in October. But 3,000 roughly children will be stuck in the federal shelter system. Let's put this in context. In 2013, the state of Texas received over 10,000 refugees. Now, these are all people who are under the social welfare system of the United States and of Texas. They come principally from the nations of Burma, Iraq, and Cuba. Did you hear about that on the news? No. Because we are able to take care of them. At a time when our nation was perhaps a little bit more generous and a little bit more compassionate, in 1960, between 1960 and 1962, we received over 14,000 children from the nation of Cuba in Operation Peter Pan. It was one of the most successful relocations of unaccompanied minors in world history and it was done with very little public attention. Many people don't even know where all of those Cuban children are because there was very little public attention at the time. Between the years of 1983 and 2006, our border patrol reported roughly between 1 million and 2 million apprehensions each year. That peaked in the late 90s at roughly 2 million. In 2013, they reported roughly 400,000 apprehensions. You'd have to go back to 1973 to see such low numbers of border apprehensions along the Texas, along the US Mexico border. Yet we call it a crisis. Yet you would think that we have never faced a greater existential threat than this invasion of children and mothers and their children across our border. It's anything but. The crisis language that was employed by the President early in the summer was useful. I think it got our attention and it got us off the immigration topic and into the refugee conversation. But since then, this term of crisis has been exploited. It's been exploited by pundits and politicians who seek to use this event in the summer as a mechanism to push policies that have been wanted to be pushed for a long time to attempt to round up all these children and just send them home. I cannot stress enough how bad of a decision this would be. We are a nation that has a history of injustice. We have a history of torture and persecution and subjugation and slavery. Yes, that's been a part of our history and we have to own that. But the tendency of our nation has been surely and steadily to move in the direction of progress to expand human rights, access to justice, due process. If we make a decision based on this so-called crisis to change our law, to change our international commitments, laws and international commitments that we really drove, we drove the rest of the world to adopt these these principles. We grade the rest of the world. Every year we issue report cards to each nation on how they treat refugees, on how they treat children. Yet, because of this so-called crisis, we're considering changing our entire law. It would be the first time in our nation's history that we did such a thing, that we decided to move backwards purely to exclude a group of vulnerable children from access to our justice. So what must happen is we must stay aware of this issue. We cannot let the fact that it's left the headlines, let it leave our minds and our hearts, because it will we will present itself again and it's going to demand our attention, it's going to demand our community's reaction. We have to have funding for services, for legal services, for custodial services and residential, like what's provided by by St. PJ's. And we need some kind of a reform of the immigration law that can stop this the sick cycle and provide a lawful, organized way for families to reunite. So I'm going to cut myself short there and thank you very much for your attention.