[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 78 (Thursday, June 13, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H3555-H3560]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             COLORADO FIRES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Keller). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, as we stand here tonight on the floor of 
the House, fires are raging in my State of Colorado, fires so 
devastating, fires so great in proportion. Historically, they are great 
in proportion, and they are so big that they can be seen, as we are 
told now, from the Space Shuttle. The smoke and ash from the fires in 
Colorado can be seen by the people on the Space Shuttle.
  These are in every sense of the word catastrophic fires. The one 
burning closest to my home, the Hayman fire, is over 100,000 acres, I 
understand, and will probably be burning all summer long. Hard for 
people to understand that, hard for anybody to get a handle on that 
concept; but it will probably be burning all summer long we are told, 
and that is just one fire. There are several others going. There are 
several starting also, and this one started last Friday. Many of these 
are being started by arsonists. It is incredible, but that is what is 
happening in and around Colorado. Of course, in other States they are 
experiencing similar types of situations.
  Now, every ounce of our effort at the present time should be and is 
directed to trying to fight these fires, and that is certainly 
appropriate. There will be plenty of time for recriminations as to how 
and what would be the best way to deal with these things, what would be 
some of the things we can do to make sure that fires of this nature do 
not start again, at least to the extent we are able to prevent them.
  This was started by a careless camper. He had a fire, illegally. We 
were at a time that there were no fires allowed in the national forest, 
no campfires whatsoever. But the law was disregarded by some selfish 
and unenlightened soul. The fire got out of control, and within just 
really a very short period of time it had already consumed a good part 
of the forest around it, and is now, of course, as I say, approaching 
100,000 acres, if it is not over that already, 100,000 acres.
  Putting that in perspective, we are probably reaching the point when 
it would be about three times the size of the District of Columbia, 
just for people to understand what a 100,000 acre fire is. Combined, of 
course, with all of the other fires going on right now in Colorado, I 
am sure we are approaching that total.
  Now, as I say, this fire was started by an illegal campfire that got 
away, that was left essentially unattended and got away from its 
confined area. There will always be fires in the forest. That is part 
of the natural order of things. There is no two ways about that. We 
cannot and should not prevent all fires.
  So the issue here is not the extent to which the fire that we are 
witnessing right now could have been prevented. Of course, it could 
have been prevented, if someone had not carelessly ignited a fire at a 
campground. But, beyond that, it could not have been prevented even if 
we had done a lot of work in that forest, because right now, of course, 
we are in the midst of a horrendous drought. It goes all the way, 
frankly, from the Canadian to the Mexican border.
  The middle part of the United States is facing a drought, is facing 
drought conditions that are unprecedented in recent history. Certainly 
in the last 100 years we have not seen anything like this. The snow 
pack is very low. I was amazed on Monday when I had the opportunity to 
fly into the fire area and observe the fire, to observe the damage, I 
was amazed as I looked at Pike's Peak, which is not too far from the 
site of this fire, and saw just a few ribbons of snow still there. 
Usually, you can see snow on Pike's Peak in July, sometimes August.
  I have lived in Colorado all of my life, and I can remember many, 
many summer days getting up in the morning, going out to get the paper, 
looking up at the mountains, and seeing a snow-capped mountain range in 
front of me in June or July. There is nothing. There was nothing last 
Monday when I went through this area. There was no snow. There has been 
no rain, and there are no prospects for rain that we can see on the 
horizon. So that is why we are going to have massive forest fires, 
drought, hot weather and densely forested areas.
  Now, here is where we can do something about it, and this is what is 
important for us to try and tackle, because we do have some ability to 
deal with this situation. We cannot, as I say, nor should we even try, 
to stop natural fires from occurring. We simply should make sure, to 
the extent possible, that they occur in areas that have been managed, 
that is to say, thinned; where the undergrowth of the past 100 years of 
fire suppression efforts, the result of fire suppression efforts, has 
accumulated to the extent that we have now this tinderbox called the 
national forest.
  It really has been man's ineptness, man's inability to manage the 
forest properly over the last 100 years, that has helped cause this 
situation, our fire suppression efforts, which has been the main thing 
everybody has been focused on for 100 years.
  This is as seen from the space shuttle. This is the fire in Colorado. 
You can see the smoke plume and the fire down here.
  The fact is that there are fires all over the United States, of 
course. There are fires burning down there. There are fires in several 
other locations. But this is the one that is incredible. Here is the 
Glenwood Springs fire. This is the one I was referring to as the Hayman 
fire. This is my home right here. Down by Durango we have another fire, 
near Trinidad, Glenwood Springs, and over here by the Utah border, just 
inside the Utah border. These are the fires in Colorado at the present 
time.
  Mr. Speaker, the fact that for 100 years we have attempted to follow 
a policy to suppress all fires has created a devastating situation, a 
very, very dangerous situation in our forests. Suppression has meant 
that we have allowed old timber to fall, to fall to the ground, to 
decay and to dry out, and that becomes part, of course, of the fuel. We 
have allowed a tremendous amount of small saplings to grow, and that 
has become part of the fuel, because they stay relatively small. The 
forest canopy does not allow for them to grow quickly. It becomes part 
of the undergrowth.
  When it gets like this, when it gets as dry as it is now, that is 
what we could certainly call a tinderbox, and it takes very little to 
set it off. Of course, lightning will do it. Time and time again, that 
is the natural way of fires to start in the forests.
  However, when a forest has been thinned by our efforts, by the 
efforts of

[[Page H3556]]

the Forest Service or anyone else, when the forest has been thinned, it 
is simply a logical situation where you will have less opportunity for 
these catastrophic fires to burn as quickly as they do and as hot as 
they do.
  These fires that are burning now are so hot that they scorch the 
Earth below them. Three or four inches down there will be nothing. When 
this fire passes, there will be nothing there but what we cannot really 
call Earth, because there is no organic material in it. It has been 
scorched to 3 or 4, sometimes 6 inches deep. Nature lays down a 
hyperbolic blanket below that through which nothing can permeate, so 
regardless of how much rain you get, it does not let it go farther 
down, because nature is trying to actually save the soil below that 
layer of impermeable matter.
  But what happens above that, of course, is the next time it does 
rain, all of that will wash away. It will wash down the sides of the 
slopes into the tributaries; and, in this case, it will run into the 
Denver water supply, the reservoirs that form the water supply for the 
Denver metropolitan area.
  So once this fire is put out, whether it is in 90 days from now or 
not, whether it is all summer long, whenever it is put out, that is 
only the beginning of the problem. Erosion then begins to occur, and 
the next time it does rain or snow all of this will move, all of the 
material will move, the ground cover will slide down and end up as silt 
in these reservoirs.

                              {time}  1615

  It will cost millions of dollars. We have already spent, I think, 
approaching $40 million for this fire. It was $20 million the last I 
looked; it is probably double that now because it has been twice as 
long since I heard that figure; $40 million for the fire, but that will 
be dwarfed by the amount of money that we have to spend in order to try 
to repair, to the extent we can, the ground itself, and also to filter 
out the Denver water supply.
  Now, there are ways in which man can positively affect the forest 
environment. There are ways that we can now deal with the land that can 
reduce the severity of the fires. We are never going to, as I say, nor 
should we try, to stop all fires. That is really what has gotten us 
into the situation we have now. We know that is wrong. But we also know 
that to the extent that we do go in and thin out a forest area, we 
actually accomplish some very positive goals. Fire will not burn as 
quickly, it will not burn as hot, it will not burn through the forest 
if, in fact, it comes to an area that has been treated.
  Now, this is very difficult to see and probably impossible, but I 
will try, nonetheless, to explain what we have here, a couple of 
pictures of where there was treated area and where there was not. The 
fire burned right up to it, burned every single thing in its path in 
the area that was untreated. This is called the Bucktail fire in 
Colorado. It came up to and stopped, essentially stopped at the treated 
areas. The fire comes down out of the trees, goes on to the ground and 
eventually burns itself out in these treated areas.
  It is amazing to see. I have seen it with my own eyes. I saw it 2 
weeks ago when we were in Colorado and went back to the district and 
were looking at the effects of other fires, earlier fires, High Meadows 
and the Snaking fire, they were called. And we could stand on a line 
and look straight down that line and on the right-hand side where the 
area had been treated, the fire had stopped. All the way on the left-
hand side for as far as one could see, everything was destroyed; just 
these black spindles sticking up out of a lunar landscape. Everything 
was destroyed and, as I say, even the ground was seared. We got to that 
line, and it dropped down out of the trees just like it is supposed to 
and burned some cover on the ground and burned itself out.
  Now, this fire, I do not know how much less severe it would have been 
had we been able to get in there and do some of the things that the 
Forest Service had planned on. There was only one area, a roadless 
area, that was in the middle of this Hayman fire area which had been 
identified by the Forest Service as the place in which they were going 
to do thinning. About a year and a half ago when they were ready to 
start the job of thinning that area, a group of environmental 
organizations filed an appeal to stop them, stop the Forest Service. 
This is modus operandi; it happens all the time. The Forest Service 
goes into negotiation with the environmental groups to try and solve 
the problems that are presented to them, try to meet the needs of the 
environmental community in their plan to remove these trees, in the 
Forest Service plan to remove these trees and underbrush. It goes on 
negotiating for about a year and a half. We come to the end of that 
period of time when we think there is an agreement with the 
environmental community on exactly how the efforts to thin that area of 
the forest should go on, and the next thing we know, they file another 
appeal, stopping the whole thing.
  We were unable to get in there, therefore. The Forest Service was 
unable to do any thinning in this particular part of the forest, and I 
am referring to this roadless area.
  Well, there is nothing to really worry about now. There is no reason 
for the environmental groups to file any other appeals, because the 
forest that they were concerned about is gone. It is all ash. And as I 
say, it looks like a lunar landscape. It is devastating beyond 
anybody's ability to describe it accurately, I guess; but one has to 
see it to believe it. Twenty-one homes so far, probably more than that, 
but that is what we know so far that are gone; at least 5,000 people 
evacuated, 40,000 people getting ready to evacuate.
  The impact, as I say, on the environment as a result of the fire will 
be enormous. It will be much greater than we can possibly imagine, 
because this is a bigger fire than we can possibly imagine. So all of 
the things that happen as a result of a catastrophic fire like this are 
just waiting for us to try and deal with as time goes by. There are 
hundreds and hundreds of firefighters on the line, but there is little 
that they can do. The breadth of the fire is so wide, the intensity so 
great that there is really little they can do. They are dropping, of 
course, retardant, they are dropping water; but a lot of the water I am 
told that is dropping out of the buckets that are being carried in 
there is actually evaporating before it hits the fire, it is so hot, 
the air is so dry. This is a horrendous fire.
  I want to emphasize that I do not blame environmental groups for 
starting this fire. Of course not. They had nothing to do with the 
cause of the fire. It is just that we could have had perhaps a much 
less severe fire had we been able to get in there and thin this land.
  Now, I am proposing a piece of legislation that we started on 2 or 3 
weeks ago; it was before this most recent fire started. It was after we 
went up and looked at the results of the Buffalo Creek and High Meadows 
and Snaking fires in Colorado. There were two things that I was 
confronted with when I got up there and when we were talking about it. 
One was that the fine for people starting illegal fires in the forest, 
illegal camp fires in a Federal area, anyway, is ridiculously small. It 
was like $25 in that part of the forest where I visited, the Pike 
National Forest that I visited a couple of weeks ago; and I think it is 
about $50 in the part of the forest that is presently on fire. A $50 
fine or a $25 fine for starting something that could lead to this kind 
of enormous devastation. That has to be dealt with. That cannot be 
allowed to continue.
  We actually had instances. I was told by the fire people, by the fire 
rangers up there 2 weeks ago that we had people who would chip in. When 
a fire ranger got there and told them they had started a fire illegally 
and the fine was $25, the people just reached into their pockets and 
everybody chipped in 5 bucks and they handed him the money. So what? 
For 25 bucks. The other day when I was up there, when I was up there on 
Monday at the new fire, a forest ranger told me that she had talked to 
somebody on the phone, I do not remember if it was a day or so before, 
who wanted to know if they could pay the fine in advance, like a fee, 
for instance. In this case it was 50 bucks, and they wanted to just 
send them the ``fee'' or the fine to pay in advance to go up and start 
a fire in the national forest when it is in the middle of the most 
horrible drought we have had in 100 years. No one is ever going to lose 
money in trying to underestimate the stupidity of people like this. It 
is amazing.

[[Page H3557]]

  So I have proposed legislation to increase that to a $1,000 fine and 
the possibility of a year in jail if you end up doing something like 
this fire, or causing something like this fire. That is for starters.
  Then we tried to deal with the issue of, again, what were the 
reasons, what were the problems that prevented the Forest Service from 
being able to get in there and clear the land. They really revolved 
around two things: internal inertia within the Forest Service, internal 
bureaucratic problems, process problems; it is called analysis 
paralysis. That is the phrase they use to describe it. Because they 
spend days, months, years in the analysis of minutia because there 
might possibly be a challenge, there might possibly be a court 
challenge, there might possibly be an appeal, so everybody spends 40 or 
50 percent of the time they have, instead of actually managing the 
forest, writing reports that are designed as sort of CYAs, if you will, 
in case somebody has an objection to what you want to do, and nothing 
ever happens. That is internally.
  Externally, we have groups, organizations that are dedicated to 
stopping any sort of activity in the forest carried on by mankind. 
There are the extremists on the one side that say there is absolutely 
no forest that really man should be in. Forests are nature's preserves 
and man does not have a place there. And they want to stop any activity 
whatsoever: no road building, no logging, no recreation. Just stay out. 
Forests are not for people. That is their motto. Forests are for 
animals and other forest denizens. And their continued legal battle 
with the Forest Service always spills into courtrooms or through the 
bureaucratic process of appeals.
  So what we have is between the Forest Service's inability to act 
just, as I say, internally, and the lawsuits filed by groups like the 
Wilderness Society that filed the appeals on the thinning proposals for 
the Pike National Forest. The two things combined are deadly. They lead 
to this. This is the result. Again, not fires that they start, simply 
fires that grow faster and are more serious and more severe than they 
otherwise would have been.
  What we are hoping to do is actually return parts of the forest, as 
much as we can, to a more natural state by thinning. It is imperative 
that we do this and do it as quickly as possible, or this is going to 
be the way in which our forests will be consumed in the next year or 
so. We have already burned more acres in Colorado this summer, and it 
is not even mid June, than we did all of last year, and I am sure that 
we are at historical levels. I do not think we have ever had as much 
land on fire in Colorado. I believe that that is what is going to 
happen all over the West as this drought continues, and as we keep 
putting obstacles in the path of the Forest Service to try and deal 
with this.
  There is another bill, therefore, that we introduced that tries to 
accommodate the needs of everyone involved here. It is called the 
charter forest idea, the charter forest plan. It was originally 
proposed by the President. The concept was proposed by the President. 
We have taken it, I guess this is the first such attempt in the Nation 
to actually write a Forest Service plan placed on a charter forest. The 
idea is this: that the local community and the Forest Service will get 
together on a management plan. Everybody will be at the table during 
the discussion: environmental groups, business groups, local 
authorities, county, State, and municipal officials, and, of course, 
the Forest Service. Everyone will have the opportunity to develop a 
forest plan, and it will be managed at the local level, for the most 
part; and it will be freed of many of the bureaucratic obstacles that 
presently stop other forest management plans from being implemented. 
And we will be able to then accomplish some of our goals in terms of 
positive, healthy forest management.
  I stress that everybody will have a role to play; everyone will have 
the ability to discuss the concerns they have about the forest plan; 
but once it is adopted, then that is the way in which that forest will 
be operated for at least 10 years. Then we will review it, we will 
review it actually midpoint at 5 years and again in 10 years to see how 
well that plan has worked and whether or not the whole concept of 
charter forest is viable.

  It is built really on the charter school concept. That is where it 
gets its name. Because we have seen for years and years and years that 
public schools are unable to actually accomplish their tasks many times 
because of the bureaucratic problems they confront, that people taking 
the responsibility into their own hands for their children's education 
will start charter schools. They write a charter and they say, here is 
the kind of curriculum we want, here is the kind of teachers we want, 
here is the length of school day we are going to have, here is the 
number of school days, here is where the setting is going to be; and 
they write their own school charter and run it themselves at the local 
level, and we free up and take away many of the regulations and give 
them a much broader hand in actually running this school.
  Well, that is exactly what we are talking about with a charter 
forest. We are going to reduce the regulatory burden, and we are going 
to add responsibility to the people at the local level to manage the 
forest.
  So I hope that these concepts will move forward. And I hope that we 
will be able to quickly get into the forests all around this Nation. If 
we started tomorrow, of course, it would take us many years to really 
reduce the fuel loads throughout the forest. But we have to start 
somewhere. We cannot let fires like this do it for us because, of 
course, it will be 100 years before this forest will return to anything 
that looks like a forest. We will all be long gone, and our children 
will have very little opportunity to enjoy the wonders of this 
magnificent natural wonderland. So I hope that we can do that quickly.
  Now, there is one other area, and this leads me to the next part of 
my discussion, which will surprise no one; it has to do a little bit 
with immigration reform. There is another forest that has suffered 
severe fire damage in the last several months. It is the Coronado 
Forest in Arizona. I had gone down there a little bit before I went to 
visit the forest in Colorado; actually, I am sorry, it was about a 
month before, and we went down there because I am a member of the 
Committee on Resources and we had heard about the incredible 
environmental damage that was being done in that area and to the 
Coronado Forest.

                              {time}  1630

  Now, this damage was many-faceted. It was actually the result of 
literally hundreds of thousands of people coming through this 
illegally, coming from Mexico into the United States and using the 
rough terrain and the heavy brush to stay undetected while they came 
through, either individually seeking whatever they were seeking in 
America, most of them I am sure looking for jobs, and/or bringing in 
narcotics, illegal drugs.
  The area has now become the most heavily trafficked area along the 
border for people coming in illegally and bringing in illegal drugs. 
What we saw were the folks on the border doing yeoman's work, the 
Border Patrol, in trying to interdict this flow of both people and 
drugs.
  I think something like 90,000 pounds of marijuana and I have 
forgotten how much of cocaine and heroin have been confiscated already 
this year, but it still is coming; and it comes as a result of people 
carrying about 60 pounds of the narcotics on their backs in these 
homemade backpacks. They come through the forest.
  They come by so many numbers, in such large numbers, that of course 
they begin to wear footpaths throughout the forest. This is a very 
delicate ecosystem. It does not take much, it does not take many feet 
on the ground to actually wear a path into the ground in a very short 
time; and it does not go away for a long, long, long, long time. It is 
almost like the tundra in that respect.
  And just then, you will see that after they follow that path for a 
while, they will move off because they think that there are sensors 
that have been placed, and sometimes there are sensors that have been 
placed by our Border Patrol people to try to catch them, so they move 
over a little and create another path. When we fly over that forest, we 
look down and what we see is a spider web of paths, paths through the 
forest. They are also bringing both mules and horses through loaded 
with narcotics.

[[Page H3558]]

  Then they will get to a certain place in the forest sometimes 5, 10, 
15 miles up, and they will unload their goods. Another truck will come 
in on a road that is not a forest road, it will just be a road that was 
created by so many trucks coming in, pick-up trucks, Suburbans, large 
vans, SUVs, and they will come in and load the drugs on these trucks 
and take them out of there.
  Of course, all that activity causes damage. There are roads all over 
the Coronado which are not Forest Service roads. They are simply drug 
dealer roads, but there are more of them than there are Forest Service 
roads. There is more activity in that forest with drug dealers than 
there is of any other thing; more than the campers, more than the 
hikers, more than the bikers. There are far more people coming through 
that place with guns protecting drug loads than there are people coming 
through to enjoy the scenery of a national forest; one of the oldest 
national forests in the United States, I should add. It was created, I 
think, in 1903.
  That is not all that they have done to the forest. This packing 
material where they carry these backpacks made of this nylon fiber, 
where they unload, they just stack up these homemade backpacks that are 
nothing but, just like I say, these kinds of nylon rope things, but 
they will be coming in with huge stacks of them. The birds come and 
take it, build their nests out of it, and sometimes of course they get 
entangled in it. There are all kinds of environmental problems. The 
trash is incredible.
  As we ride through the forest, as I was able to do on horseback the 
first day, then we flew over by helicopter the next day, but the first 
day everywhere we looked along these paths were empty bottles from 
water, plastic water bottles everywhere, clothes everywhere, tin cans 
where they made campfires and just cooked something over a fire in tin 
cans, and they were strewn all over the place. This was not a national 
forest; it was a national dump.
  Now, the other thing that was happening, of course, was that these 
fires that they were setting at night, these campfires illegally set by 
people coming in illegally, were catching fire the next day. These 
people would walk away from it and not pay much attention to it; and of 
course it would catch fire. This area is also a place of incredible 
drought. It is a desert anyway, but right now it is even more dangerous 
in terms of fire.
  The day we left there a month ago Sunday, a fire broke out that by 
the time we got back here had already consumed 35,000 acres. There was 
another one just a couple of weeks ago that started the same way with 
people coming through there illegally, people coming into the United 
States illegally, carelessly starting these fires, walking on and 
destroying part of the forest.
  Now here is an intriguing aspect of it. We were told by the forest 
manager there that for many of the fires that they fight they cannot 
even use the typical firefighter methods. They cannot fly in slurry and 
drop it because there are so many people in the forest, so many 
illegals coming through the forest, that it actually would harm them. 
It would get on them. This retardant material might get on them, and we 
would get sued because we were trying to put out a fire; we dropped the 
fire retardant, but we have illegals coming through.

  I am sure Members are aware of the fact that not too long ago a 
family of 11 people who died coming into the United States, coming in 
illegally, they died of thirst and dehydration, or in some way of the 
elements coming across the desert; and we are being sued by $3.75 
million for each one of them, as if it was our fault; we have a burden, 
and this is our responsibility.
  Well, we cannot even fight the fires because there are so many 
people. We do not even put people up there at night to fight the fires 
because there are so many people coming through with guns protecting 
drug traffickers.
  And about a little over 3 weeks ago, we had an incident that was very 
peculiar, and unfortunately, not all that unusual. I thought it was, 
when I first heard about it; but come to find out it is not all that 
odd. Here is what happened.
  It is a Friday, as I say, maybe 3 weeks ago. Just south of Ajo, 
Arizona, on the Tohono O'odham Indian reservation, the Indian police 
came across a Mexican humvee with Mexican military markings on it, and 
Mexican military inside of it. This was inside the United States of 
America. This was on the Indian reservation, the Tohono O'odham Indian 
reservation.
  There was a confrontation, and finally the humvee turned around and 
went away and went back to Mexico. The Indian police called the Border 
Patrol and the INS, and we sent the cavalry and got down there, and the 
Mexican military vehicle had turned around. What in the world were they 
doing there? What is going on?
  A little bit later in the day it turns out we interdict a drug 
shipment. We seize it, it is 1,200 pounds of narcotics, probably 
marijuana, I am not sure, that were coming through in that same area. 
Hmmm. Coincidence? It could be. We have a Mexican military vehicle in 
the United States; we have this shipment of drugs coming through a 
little bit later that we interdict.
  Later on that night, the United States Border Patrol was going along 
the border, and it comes across that same or another humvee of a 
similar type, we do not know which because they all look alike, but 
there is Mexican military inside and Mexican military markings on it.
  They are ordered to turn around and go back. The Border Patrol agent 
is under orders to turn around and go back when he confronts this kind 
of situation. For one thing, they are outgunned.
  One of the peculiar things we have done in order to satisfy some of 
the concerns expressed by the Mexican Government is that we have taken 
many of the M-16s away from our Border Patrol people, taken them away 
and changed them into single-shot as opposed to automatic weapons, so 
we are outgunned at the border, quite frankly, and certainly outmanned.
  He turned around to leave, and a shot rings out and goes through the 
back window of his vehicle, this is the Border Patrol vehicle, goes 
through the back window, hits a wire cage that separates the front seat 
from the back and ricochets off and goes out the right rear window, 
certainly coming close to killing this agent, this Border Patrol agent 
and officer.
  Now, no one had heard about this. This had happened on a Friday. It 
was not until Tuesday that I got an e-mail message from a Border Patrol 
officer in the area telling us about this. I, of course, think that 
this is incredible. I think it is almost enormously challenging to the 
United States how this could happen, and how we do not say a thing 
about it in the United States.
  No news program covered this; no newspaper in Arizona covered this. I 
mean, do Members not think it is newsworthy, Mr. Speaker? I certainly 
do. I cannot imagine this happening. Let us turn everything around. Let 
us say armed military of the United States went into some other country 
and started shooting at their federal police. What do we think would 
happen? Do we think we would be hearing about that from the state 
department of the country where this incursion occurred? I think so.
  It turns out we have had 118 incursions of a similar nature. Luckily, 
most of them did not involve firearms, or they did not involve the 
discharge of firearms. About 90 percent of these incidents were with 
people carrying guns, but only a small percentage of these things 
actually ended up in firearms being discharged.
  However, 118 times since 1997 we have had incursions into the United 
States by Mexican military troops or members of the Mexican Federal 
police, 118 times. These are confirmed, by the way. I am told by the 
Border Patrol that there are far more times than that that this has 
happened, but the status of ``confirmed'' is difficult to get, so 118 
is what we have confirmed.
  I kept saying, what are you talking about, 118 times people have come 
into the United States from a foreign country? Why, I said? Were they 
lost? And, of course, there were chuckles around the table. Everybody 
thought that was pretty humorous that I would ask the question.
  But I said, I do not understand it. Were they lost? What were they 
doing in the United States? The answer given to me every single time by 
the people

[[Page H3559]]

down there was, it is drug related. It is the opinion of almost every 
single one, no, not almost, but of every single person that we asked on 
the border as to what was the nature of these incursions, why would we 
have Mexican military, Mexican federal police in the United States, and 
they said it is because they were either protecting or creating a 
diversion for, the same thing, protecting a large drug shipment that 
was going through.
  They are not there all the time because most of the drug shipments 
are relatively small. It is a few people carrying these 60-pound 
backpacks, and there maybe 20 of them. They are usually preceded by a 
guy with an M-16 and followed up by a guy with an M-16 as they go 
through.
  Imagine Mom and Dad camper at the forest there at the campsite, and 
all of a sudden going across the parking lot were 20 people, going 
across with narcotics in their backpacks, and followed by somebody with 
an M-16. It would be an interesting sight to behold, but I think a 
little more than they were bargaining for when they bought their parks 
pass.

                              {time}  1645

  But that is what is happening in the forest and it is actually being 
abetted by the Mexican government. This is incredible and yet we do 
nothing about it. The forest is ablaze down there just like ours, not 
to the same extent, but it is ablaze. But why will we not say anything 
about that forest?
  It is also, by the way, closed. They have closed the Coronado to 
anybody coming through. No more tourists coming through. But of course, 
they cannot close Coronado to the illegal traffic coming through. They 
can only close the Coronado to the people who want to just recreate 
there. But it is too dangerous. The fire danger is too great. The 
danger also of confronting somebody that is armed is too great.
  The forest manager of that area told me that his greatest nightmare 
is that one of these days there is going to be a shootout, there is 
going to be some sort of event that occurs that confronts tourists and/
or some of his own people with people taking narcotics through there 
and somebody is going to get killed. It almost happened, like I say, 
about 3 weeks ago on a Friday when the Federal border patrol agent was 
almost killed. But we hear nothing about it.
  The reason we hear nothing about it is because it is a very sensitive 
topic. When I called the State Department and asked them about it, they 
said, Congressman, we are taking this up at the highest levels of 
government. I said, How long have you been taking this up? This has 
been happening since 1997. When do you think we are going to get an 
answer?
  I wrote a letter to the Mexican President Vicente Fox and said, I 
would like to know what you know about these events. I would like to 
know what you are doing to stop these events. He did not write me back. 
I got a letter back from the ambassador from Mexico that said we do not 
like the tone of your letter and these incidents are being dealt with.
  I am amazed that I have to sort of talk about this on the floor of 
the House to let people know what has happened. It should be a matter 
that is on every single news program in the United States. It should be 
something we talk about in the newspaper, something we talk about in 
our committees, in the Committee on Armed Services, in the Committee on 
International Relations. We should be discussing these things. We are 
not because we know that this is a very dangerous situation, very 
touchy situation, very sensitive.
  Why is it sensitive? It is sensitive because if the American public 
knew about these things, the extent to which they exist, combined with 
what the American public already knows about the porous nature of our 
borders and the ability for people to come across them at will and 
maybe to do us great harm, that the American public would rise up and 
demand from their representatives that they do something to secure this 
border, our borders. And I do not mean just the border between the 
United States and Mexico. I am talking about the border all the way 
around this country, north, south, east and west.
  We have to do far more than we have done to secure those borders. We 
have sent troops thousands of miles away to defend the borders of other 
countries, but we refuse to put troops on our own border to defend our 
own country. Does this make sense to anyone? The defense of this 
Nation, as I said a hundred times, begins at the defense of border. And 
if you do not think that we have a problem just because people are 
coming here illegally and they are just benign, they are just looking 
for jobs and why try to stop them, well, you are right. Most people 
coming into the country illegally are just looking for jobs and why try 
to stop them? But a lot of people are coming in with dangerous stuff on 
their backs, in this case, dangerous narcotics on their back.
  What is to say the next person who wants to do something to the 
United States like a terrorist attack will not bring in something a 
heck of a lot worse on their back? And what is to stop them?
  I guarantee you if you look at the border you will find there is 
nothing to stop them. It is 5,500 miles, some delineated or demarcated 
by barbed wire fence and periodic ports of entry. As if anybody coming 
into the United States illegally is going to go through the ports of 
entry and say can I come in. I just do not have a pass right now. Of 
course not.
  Why do you not walk a mile down the road and walk across the line 
into the United States? You can do it. There is no problem. Why? 
Because we cannot possibly defend our borders, can we? We cannot 
possibly defend 5,500 miles of border. You know what? We can. We choose 
not to. Can we make so it is impossible for anybody coming into the 
United States and do us harm? No. I know we cannot seal the border. It 
is impossible. It is impossible. We would not want to. There are trade 
issues and all the rest of that stuff. But can we do more than we are 
today to protect our borders? Yes, we can.
  The President made a good first step when he announced last week when 
he is asking for the Congress to take action and create the Homeland 
Defense Agency that includes all of the disparate parts of border 
security. I am all for it. I commend him for doing that. I will do 
everything I can to support that effort. I hope that the Congress of 
the United States will act quickly to implement it. That will not be 
easy.
  We all know here that one of the major obstacles to surrendering a 
little part of your turf is there are egos involved, and God forbid 
that anybody think that there are people around here with big egos. But 
let us face it, turf battles here are the deadliest and nastiest thing 
you will ever see.
  This will be a massive turf battle because we will take agencies away 
from a committee of reference and put them over here, and every 
chairman will be very upset about the fact that they are losing their 
little bit of power. It will not happen easily, but it is our 
responsibility to do it. We are not at the end of the road there. There 
are other things that can be done.
  Certainly the military can be implemented in a much better way than 
we have used them so far in the protection of borders. We will have 
more to say about this issue next week. But for the time being, it 
behooves us, it seems to me, to do everything we can to protect and 
defend these borders. And although there are plenty of people who do 
not like it, plenty of people here in this body, even in the 
administration, plenty of people in Mexico, maybe in Canada, who want 
to see open borders, the elimination of borders, it is such a nice 
idealistic concept, no borders, it is kumbaya time, everybody grabs 
hands and sings, and why can't we all just get along, as the old saying 
was.
  Well, you know what, there are reasons for borders. There are 
reasons. And the idealism of libertarian concept of open borders just 
does not fit with the real world. September 11 of last year should 
teach us the importance of borders and well-defended borders. It should 
teach us the importance of trying to identify who comes into the United 
States and why and for how long and what are they doing here once they 
get here, and do they leave when they are supposed to?
  Other countries are able to handle that. You would think a country 
the size of the United States with the resources of the United States 
would figure out a way to actually identify the

[[Page H3560]]

people coming in, determine how long they are going to be able to stay 
here, and determine when they leave. And if they do not leave, find 
them, deport them.
  You would think we would be able to do that. It is a big country. It 
would be hard, but it is not impossible. We can do it, Mr. Speaker, and 
we must do it. That is the thing. We have no options, really, because 
frankly our responsibility as a Congress and as a Federal Government is 
primarily to defend the lives and properties of the people in this 
country. That is number one. All of the other stuff we do around here 
is not as important. The hundreds of millions of dollars, the hundreds 
of billions of dollars we have appropriated to the Department of Health 
and Human Services and the Department of Education and the Department 
of Transportation, all of that money, really and truly, although some 
of it may be well spent, the fact is it has nothing to do with the 
primary goal of this country and the Federal government, I should say, 
the responsibility of the Federal Government. Nothing to do with that. 
But it has everything to do with our responsibility to establish border 
security.
  I have talked on this issue many times and at great length, and I can 
only hope that we have moved the process along a little bit and that we 
are going to take steps soon to actually do something to secure those 
borders. And as I say, I am very happy with the President's proposal 
for consolidation of activities inside the Homeland Defense Agency.
  These are difficult times and we are challenged as perhaps we have 
never been challenged before. Because even in wars of the past we have 
been able to know exactly where the enemy was, confront them wherever 
they are, have the battle. We know who wins. We know who loses, and at 
the end of a period of time, thank God, the enemy surrendered and we 
know victory has been achieved and we can come home and begin our lives 
anew. But this is a different kind of war. We will never know perhaps 
when the battle is over with. We are challenged in a way we have never 
been challenged before as Americans.
  It now behooves all of us in this body to take the important steps 
that have to be taken to secure those borders. Even then, as I have 
said a hundred times, it will not assure us that someone does not get 
through; but you can do at least this. You can say to yourself, I did 
everything I could as a Member of this Congress, as the President of 
the United States, I have done everything I could possibly do to secure 
our borders and to make sure something like this never happens again. 
It could; but on the other hand, we need to do everything that we can 
do.

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