I also want to thank Ed Royce,
chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, for his sustained focus on
this tragedy and his leadership in quickly bringing this measure to the
floor. Mr. Speaker, we continue to see reports of Rohingya refugees fleeing
to Bangladesh and widespread hunger and malnutrition for those left
behind. The Burmese military and security forces are waging a brutal campaign
of violence against unarmed civilians, including women and children,
killing, raping, and destroying lives and livelihoods. The Rohingya people have been marginalized for decades, but the
unthinkable violence and human suffering since August is ethnic
cleansing, pure and simple--a description the Trump administration now
agrees with, although they were far too slow to say so--and possibly
even genocide. Over the past 4 months, more than 600,000 men, women, and children
have fled to neighboring Bangladesh to find refuge in a country with
tremendous needs of its own. This is more than 10 times the number of
refugees the administration will allow into the United States this
year, the same administration that ended America's participation in the
U.N. effort to develop a global compact on migration, all this right in
the middle of the world's most serious refugee crisis in history. I say
shame on us. We should be doing more.
Keywords matched
refugee refugees