[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2574-S2575]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Border Wall

  Mr. President, that is not why I came to the floor. There is a lot of 
talk about a wall. I heard a song by Pink Floyd the other day: ``All in 
all it was just a brick in the wall.''
  The President wants us to build a wall on our southern border with 
Mexico. It is about 2,000 miles between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf 
Coast. I have been down there any number of times as the chairman of 
the Homeland Security Committee and still as the senior Democrat on the 
Homeland Security Committee. The ranking member is Claire McCaskill of 
Missouri.
  I have not been on every square mile of the border with Mexico, but I 
can tell you that there are some places on the border where a wall 
makes some sense, and there are frankly a lot of places where it 
doesn't, including where you have hundreds of miles of river where it 
doesn't make any sense.
  Also, I have heard from folks from Yuma down there, where the Border 
Patrol told me--where they had an area where they had some wall. I 
think the wall was maybe 15 feet high, and they kept finding like 18-, 
19-foot ladders on the other side of the wall, where people would come 
up with a ladder to the wall and go over and above the wall. So you can 
go over a wall. You can even go over a high wall with a ladder that is 
high enough. A lot of that has been done.
  You can go under a wall, tunnel under. A lot of people tried to get 
out of Mexico into the United States by tunneling under the wall.
  As it turns out, walls in some places make sense. Fences in some 
places make sense. Boats in some places, like on the river that happens 
to be our border, the Rio Grande border with Mexico--boats make sense. 
Sometimes fast boats, really fast boats make sense. Sometimes it makes 
sense to build a ramp so you can get boats into the water in different 
places. Sometimes it makes sense to build a road on our side of the 
border to give us mobility. Sometimes it makes sense to put 
surveillance equipment in drones. Sometimes it makes sense to put 
surveillance equipment in helicopters. Sometimes it makes sense to put 
surveillance equipment in fixed-wing aircraft and also not just 
binoculars to try to find people.
  There is something called VADER. It is an acronym for Vehicle and 
Dismount Exploitation Radar, to find people. It is very highly 
sophisticated surveillance equipment to go on our drones, go on our 
helicopters, and go on our fixed-wing aircraft.
  What is so special about this? It can see at night. It allows us to 
see dozens of miles into Mexico at night--through fog, through rain. We 
have a system and if we need to, rather than just send out aircraft or 
drones or whatever without that kind of surveillance equipment, let's 
put the surveillance equipment on it. That makes far more sense than 
building a 2,000-mile wall.
  Other things that make sense are surveillance towers. We have to go 
100 feet up in the air, 200, 300 feet. Some of them are mobile. Some of 
them are stationary. We have motion detectors. In some places, that 
makes a lot of sense.
  There is no shortage of ideas that make sense. What I like to do to 
try to figure out what to do is I ask people like the Border Patrol: 
What do you think makes sense? And what they pretty much say is an 
``all of the above'' approach.
  We have an ``all of the above'' approach in energy. If we are smart 
about securing our border with Mexico, I think we have gotten smarter 
as we

[[Page S2575]]

have gone on. We certainly have a lot more people down there than we 
had before that. We have 20,000 people, our men and women in the Border 
Patrol. They work hard and do a good job.
  It is an ``all of the above'' approach. So I wanted to get that off 
my chest.
  Does it make sense to spend $25 billion to build a wall that we may 
need less than 100 miles? Probably not. Absolutely not.
  The people who are coming across our border with Mexico are not 
Mexicans. They used to be. There are more Mexicans going back into 
Mexico from the United States than are coming into the United States 
from Mexico. The places where a lot of illegal immigration is coming 
from are three countries: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. 
Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
  Here is why they come. It is because they live lives of desperation. 
They live lives without economic hope, economic opportunity, murder, 
mayhem, some of the highest murder rates in the world. I think El 
Salvador--I don't know if we have the numbers here. They have a number 
of different routes they take from the three countries of Honduras, 
Guatemala, and El Salvador, mostly coming into the United States right 
here. They don't so much go over to El Paso. They certainly don't head 
over here on land to get in on the western side of our border. Some try 
to come by air, but mostly they come by--it used to be by train, now 
mostly it is by land, and they are dangerous missions. The reason they 
come is because there is not much hope there.

  Frankly, the reason there is not much hope there, in part, is because 
of us. There used to be a comic strip called ``Pogo.'' The Presiding 
Officer remembers ``Pogo.'' One of the lines from ``Pogo'' is, ``I 
found the enemy, and it is me.''
  We are the enemy. The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee 
said many times, the root cause of what is going on down there is our 
addiction to drugs in this country. The drugs are trafficked through 
here, they come into the United States, are sold, and the money from 
the drugs goes back there along with guns. When we deport the bad guys, 
what do we do? We take the bad guys who were selling the drugs, and we 
put them right back down here. It is a toxic mix of guns, weapons, and 
bad guys. They make life down here miserable for people.
  As it turns out, Colombia, a few years ago, was a miserable place to 
live too. One time, about 20 years ago, a bunch of gunmen in Colombia 
rounded up the supreme court justices of the Colombian supreme court, 
took them into a room and shot them to death--shot them to death.
  There was a time when the FARC, the rebel groups, the leftist groups, 
and the drug gangs were trying to take down the Government of Colombia, 
and it looked like they could. And some great people in Colombia stood 
up and said: Not on my watch. This is not going to happen on my watch. 
They came up with Plan Colombia in order to make sure this didn't 
happen. President Clinton and a guy named Joe Biden, who was chairman 
of the Foreign Relations Committee, led an effort to--not for us to 
fully fund Plan Colombia, but they basically said: This is on you. You 
can do it like at Home Depot. You can do it. We can help. They did the 
heavy lifting. They did most of the raising of revenues, and we played 
our role. We continued to play our role for 20 years and Colombia is a 
different place today.
  The same thing can happen to these three countries down here. Joe 
Biden was playing a significant role as Vice President. I was helpful, 
as was Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security, and others 
as well. These folks, along with these three countries, came up with 
something they called the Alliance for Prosperity. It is really like 
Plan Colombia--find out what works, do more of that. Plan Colombia 
worked, and they are trying an approach like this down here. The idea 
is to restore the rule of law, to focus on infrastructure, to focus on 
making good government work and be effective, to really tamp down on 
the corruption they have there, the obstruction that goes on with small 
businesses. The idea is to create a safer, better place. Most people 
don't want to leave here. I talked to plenty of them. They want to stay 
there. Some of them want to come up here and work but then go home. 
This is their country, and they love their country, like we love ours.
  Finally, as we have been joined on the floor by one of my colleagues, 
I ask him to allow me just maybe another minute or two.