[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3520-3525]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              2003 BUDGET RESOLUTION AND NATIONAL SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Madam Speaker, several of our colleagues on the other 
side of the aisle have risen tonight to decry the budget that has been 
proposed by the majority party and that we will be voting on tomorrow, 
the budget resolution, that is to say, and they have each identified 
specific parts of it that they find unattractive, unappealing, or in 
some way something that they can complain about.
  The real issue, of course, that is perhaps annoying to them, I think, 
or at least discomforting to them, and the one that was never 
referenced, but is the one accurate representation of the budget 
resolution that the majority party will offer tomorrow, is that it is 
balanced. That is to say, this budget resolution will set out for the 
Congress of the United States and for the American people a budget that 
will spend no more money than we will take in.
  Now, this is something that is not very comfortable to the minority 
party. They have really not operated under that kind of restriction for 
as long as they held control of this House. For 40 years, of course, 
profligate spending of the minority party Members, when they were in 
control of this House, put us into a situation that we in fact had 
robbed the Social Security trust fund every single year. There were 
IOUs in that trust fund that approximated $800 billion by the time that 
we took over.
  In the last 4 years, something again that the minority party does not 
discuss when they talk about the budget or our control during that 
period of time, in the last 4 years we have paid down almost $450 
billion of the national debt. That is an unheard of, unprecedented 
phenomenon that came as

[[Page 3521]]

a result, of course, of the fact that we had an economy that was 
expanding and government revenues were increasing.
  But does anyone listening to the debate tonight on this floor think 
for a second that if the Democratic Party had been in charge during 
that particular period of time that we would have taken the dollars 
coming in to the government and not spent them on new programs and 
expanding the Federal Government?

                              {time}  2015

  Madam Speaker, I hasten to add that I think even Members of the other 
party would recognize that is the history that they give us. So to come 
tonight, and I am sure as will happen tomorrow to the floor of the 
House of Representatives, and talk about the need to be more concerned 
or more focused on the budget issue begs the question.
  What happened when they had the reins of control here? What did they 
do? The fact is that they spent not only every dollar that came in, but 
hundreds of billions of dollars that did not come in, hundreds of 
billions of dollars that we had to borrow from the taxpayers.
  We have tried to change that direction in the last 4 years; and we 
are going to offer a balanced budget, a frightening concept perhaps to 
the other side, but it is one with which they will have to deal.
  The primary issue that I raise tonight is not, however, the one 
dealing with the budget. There will be plenty of discussion dealing 
with that tomorrow; but it is the issue of our national security, 
because of course that is the most important thing with which this 
Congress can ever deal. Whether we are talking about budget or anything 
else, the reality is we have relatively few true responsibilities given 
to us by the Constitution of this Nation. They are delineated in the 
Constitution, and the Constitution is added to by the Bill of Rights.
  The last of the 10 amendments to the Constitution is very specific, 
and it says in case there is something you are confused about in the 
list of things that are the responsibility for the Federal Government, 
we are going to make it even more clear, that is, if it is not clear, 
it is not your responsibility, it is the responsibility of the States 
and the people therein.
  But there is something that is uniquely our responsibility, and that 
is the defense of the Nation. We cannot rely upon States individually 
to raise the budget to defend the country through any other process. 
That, of course, is our responsibility. There are several ways to do 
that. One is to make sure that our military is quality funded, make 
sure that the men and women serving in the military of the United 
States have every possible weapon at their disposal and in our arsenal 
that would first protect them; and, secondly, get the job done wherever 
we send them.
  Time and again when we are watching television or reading reports in 
the Congress about the marvelous and incredible undertakings with which 
the military is involved, we recognize that the valor of the men and 
women who serve really and truly is the bottom line. We can give them 
all of the equipment in the world, but it boils down to the individual 
that is there on the field of battle and what is in his or her heart at 
the time. We can be proud and we are proud of the people that serve in 
our military, and we work hard to make sure that they have what is 
necessary to get the job done and to protect them because they are, in 
turn, protecting the Nation.
  We recognize that the fight for the Nation, that the battle goes on 
in a variety of different venues. It is not like any other war. This 
has been said many times. The war we are in is not like any other war 
we have ever been in, or likely to be in, in that it will not be marked 
by a confrontation between two huge armies until one capitulates and 
the state that they represent or are fighting for has fallen. That is 
certainly not going to be the conflicts of the 21st century. The 
conflict arises in Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, the 
Philippines, and Indonesia. All over the world, we find we have to 
stamp out the tentacles of fundamentalist Islam as represented by al 
Qaeda specifically, and the terrorists who have as their end-desire the 
destruction of this Nation.
  We know that is the case, and we know we are doing a good job there. 
I commend the President of the United States for his leadership and my 
colleagues for their support of all of the appropriations that have 
been passed and made available so that all of the people out there are 
fully equipped.
  But there is another thing, there is another side to this battle that 
we pay little attention to, unfortunately. Far too little attention. It 
is the battle that goes on to defend our own borders.
  The one thing that is typical in this battle, in this war, typical to 
other kinds of wars we have been in, is the fact of invasion where 
large numbers of people come across the border of one country 
undetected without permission of the country they are entering; and 
some of them, certainly not all, thank God at this point in time, but 
some of them have ill-intent. Some of them choose and come here with 
the very purpose of doing us harm.
  Many others, unfortunately, who come across the border, do not choose 
to do us any physical harm, but are not really connected to the United 
States in any way similar to the immigrants who have come to the United 
States in the heyday of immigration, in the past 100 years or so. For 
the most part, people coming into the United States during that period 
of time, during the 1800s, early 1900s, came with the distinct purpose 
to separate themselves from the land from which they came, and to 
attach themselves to a new land and a new idea and new set of 
principles. They wanted to break the political and even linguistic ties 
they had with their country of origin and start something new. They 
committed to America. Of course they wanted a better life and of course 
they looked forward to giving their children a better life, just like 
the immigrants of today do.
  But there is a significant difference. Millions of people are looking 
for that better life, but they are not disassociating themselves from 
the country of their origin, not linguistically, not culturally and 
sometimes not even politically.
  Today, as I speak, we find that there is something happening in the 
United States which has never happened before, and that is a dramatic 
rise in the number of people who are here in this country, relatively 
recent immigrants to the United States, who claim dual citizenship. 
That is to say they claim to be both Americans and citizens of the 
country of their origin. They choose not to break those ties. Now that 
I would suggest, Madam Speaker, has never happened before. That is a 
new phenomenon. Something is peculiar about that, and something is 
dangerous about that when we talk about what is going to be necessary 
in order for us to survive this clash we are in with international 
terrorism, which can be characterized as a clash of civilizations.
  Samuel Huntington in a book I reference often called ``Clash of 
Civilizations'' talks about the fact that the United States will be 
significantly hobbled in its ability to lead the West if we ourselves 
are a cleft Nation, a Nation divided in half. That is exactly what is 
happening to us, and one of the reasons why I have raised the concern 
about massive immigration, legal and illegal, into the United States, 
over the past couple of decades.
  The agency to which we entrust the responsibility for protecting our 
borders and for helping us maintain some sense or even a tiny bit of 
hope that we can actually control the process of who comes in, for how 
long, for what purpose and knowing when they leave, the agency to which 
we entrust that responsibility is the INS, the Immigration and 
Naturalization Service.
  This agency has 35,000 employees. It has a budget of about $7.5 
billion. In the budget resolution we are going to pass tomorrow, it 
will call for about a billion dollar increase. It is an increase of 250 
percent over the last 10 years. I bring that up because we are going to

[[Page 3522]]

hear from that agency when we talk about the problems within it that 
they do not have enough money, they do not have the resources. They 
will talk about not having enough people, but in fact we have actually 
increased the number of people serving in the INS by 83 percent over 
the last decade. A 250 percent budget increase, 83 percent personnel 
increase, and what do we have to show for it? We have an agency that is 
incapable of managing the responsibility that is given to it. They are 
both incapable and undesiring of doing so, and that is the real crux of 
the matter here.
  Madam Speaker, if we had an agency made up of people from the top to 
the bottom who had the intent, the desire internally to patrol the 
borders of the United States and make sure that our Nation is secure 
against people who are coming in illegally, making sure that the people 
who do get by them there are found in the United States and deported, 
making sure that the people who are here even legally but then commit 
some crime, taken to court and ordered deported, making sure that those 
people leave the country, if we had an agency like that, we could be 
somewhat sympathetic to their needs and desires and to their 
protestations of wanting to do a better job.
  Today, the Subcommittee on Immigration of the Committee on the 
Judiciary held hearings; and called in front of them, among others, 
were the commissioner, the head of the INS, Mr. Ziglar. I want to 
preference my remarks by saying that Mr. Ziglar seems to be a very nice 
man, a very pleasant individual. I have no doubt of that. Certainly 
that is my observation.
  But I am going to make another observation here; and that is from 
everything I have been able to see, read and hear about Mr. Ziglar and 
the situation in the INS, I will say that he is in water way over his 
head; that he is not really capable to do what we have asked him to do. 
Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the fact that we brought him 
from a position that had absolutely nothing to do with immigration, 
perhaps the fact that he has absolutely no background in the area of 
immigration or immigration control, perhaps that is the problem; that 
no one with a similar background could possibly be expected to begin to 
wield control in an agency of 35,000 people, all bureaucrats for the 
most part, or I should say they are mostly bureaucrats. I think there 
are 5 or 6 political appointees in that entire agency.
  And it is difficult, certainly, I know. I ran the Department of 
Education's regional office for 12 years, and I am aware of the 
difficulty of trying to manage an enterprise that is peopled by 
employees who have civil service protection, and in my case had the 
protection of the public employees union. It is difficult to fire 
somebody from doing a bad job.
  Indeed, Mr. Ziglar said in a recent television interview which I 
watched, when he was questioned about the problems in the INS, 
specifically what was going to happen to the people who had approved 
the visas for Mohammed Atta and his colleague Marwan al-Shehhi, the 
visas that arrived on March 11, 2002, 6 months to the day after they 
were killed in their attack on America, visas arriving at the school 
that they were attending to learn to fly, that has made the news. That 
has made a lot of people begin to say, What is going wrong? That is a 
peculiar thing.

                              {time}  2030

  When Mr. Ziglar was questioned about this, he said, I can fire no 
one, absolutely no one that was responsible for this. I have control 
over five or six people, but that is it.
  We remember that the President said he was furious, he was mad, 
hopping mad or some words to that effect, but no one was fired. Furious 
is another way I think you could describe the President of the United 
States about this incident. But no one was fired. Four or five people 
had their job titles changed. That was it. That was the response to the 
visa flap.
  It is almost incredible, Madam Speaker, but it is indicative of the 
problem we are having with this agency and our need to do something 
about it.
  As I say, Mr. Ziglar came from a situation that did not give him any 
sort of real background. He came to this position after having served 
as the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper for the Senate. That was his 
job. That is his background. Again, I want to reiterate, I am sure he 
is a very pleasant fellow. That is not the issue. The issue is, we are 
in a world of hurt here.
  There is another aspect to his philosophy that needs to be brought 
up. He has stated on more than one occasion that he is a lifelong 
Libertarian. Fine. There are certain aspects of Libertarian philosophy 
that I think are intriguing, but the fact is, there is one part of it 
that is quite peculiar when you consider that to then place him as the 
head of the INS, the agency designed to help us control the border 
because, of course, Libertarians believe that we should have no 
borders, that borders are sort of artificial and sort of anachronistic 
barriers to the flow of goods, trade, ideas and people, therefore, we 
should abolish them and have these open borders.
  Not only does he feel that way, but the one political appointment he 
was able to bring in as his second in command is a gentleman who shares 
those feelings exactly, coming from the Cato Institute. The Cato 
Institute is again an organization of, I think, great allure for some 
people, I use some of their stuff myself, but the Cato Institute is a 
Libertarian think tank. Their position on these issues of immigration 
is quite clear, open borders.
  They have every right to espouse that position at the Cato Institute. 
Mr. Ziglar, when he was the Doorkeeper for the Senate, had every right 
to feel that way, to espouse that point of view. He is now the 
Commissioner of the INS. I would suggest that that is akin to the old 
fox in the henhouse. There are a million analogies you can come up 
with, but it is a wrong place to be for him. He is the wrong person to 
put there.
  Now he is forced to try to defend the actions of this agency which 
heretofore have been allowed to essentially begin an open border or 
continue the process of developing open borders, because it is not 
unique to this administration, of course; but now, because of 9/11, 
because of all these embarrassing things that have happened, he is 
forced to try to defend this situation and to say, we really are 
trying. Because he is not going to stand up and say, I am still 
committed to open borders, I do not think, so he is going to have to 
suggest that there is a way he is going to deal with this.
  But in reality, Madam Speaker, there is nothing that is going to 
change in that agency, and there are bills, I know, that are being 
proposed to do that, to actually split the agency in two so that it has 
as its one responsibility the complete, what I call social work side of 
immigration, the benefits side, helping people get their green card, 
helping people become legalized; that is one thing. And then the other 
side is enforcement. Today they are sort of a mixed bag, and they do 
neither one, not just they do not do it very well, they are a complete 
disaster in both cases.
  So just splitting that agency, keeping all the people there, the same 
people who internally, in their minds, are not on the right side of the 
issue, they are not intent on trying to defend our borders, Mr. Ziglar 
actually said that himself at some point in time in a more candid 
interview, I think it was, with, I think it was the New York Times. He 
said, ``I don't like the policeman part of my job. I don't want to be a 
policeman. I don't like that.'' Of course, the reality is, most of the 
people who are there in that agency do not like it and do not want to 
be that.
  I am going to try to narrow it down, because I am not talking about 
the men and women who serve on the border, the Border Patrol people, 
the agents whose job it is to try to find people in the United States 
who are here illegally. For the most part, I should tell you that 
almost every single one of them I have met, and I have met many, are 
dedicated to doing exactly what that job says. They are dedicated to 
trying to stop people from coming here illegally and find them

[[Page 3523]]

when they are here, but they know that there is absolutely no support 
they get from anyone up the ladder in their administration. They are, 
most of them, afraid to talk openly about this.
  Mr. Cutler today did testify in the hearing that I mentioned, the 
Subcommittee on Immigration from the Committee on the Judiciary, Mr. 
Cutler felt a little freer to talk today because, frankly, he was fired 
last week. Although the INS will suggest it was not because he is a 
whistleblower, I think that it is hard to make that case. I think he 
was fired because he is a whistleblower. That sends, of course, shock 
waves throughout the INS. People become less and less willing to say 
what they know to be the case.
  I had a similar situation, someone, not a patrol agent but a judge, 
an immigration law judge several months ago called my office because he 
knows that I have been a critic of the INS. He said, ``I've got to tell 
you something. I've been a law judge for X number of years,'' I will 
not say, because that could help identify him and he wants to be sure 
we do not do that. He says, ``I have been an immigration law judge for 
several years. I am frustrated to the point that I just don't know what 
to do, because every single day I try my best to make sure that the 
people who are brought in front of me, that the adjudication process is 
fair; and when I know there is someone who should be sent back, who 
should be deported because they have robbed somebody, murdered 
somebody, raped somebody,'' because frankly, Madam Speaker, you do not 
come in front of an immigration court just because you have overstayed 
your visa. That is not it. Usually you have gotten caught doing 
something and then they find out, by the way, you are here as an alien 
or an illegal, and they bring you to immigration law court.
  He said, ``Every single day, I bring the gavel down and order someone 
to be deported and some of these people have made threats against the 
United States. Every day they walk out of my courtroom and they walk 
right back into American society.''
  I said, ``How can that be? What happens?''
  He said, ``The problem is at that point in time, the INS is in charge 
of incarcerating, taking them away. And they just don't do it. They 
just don't do it. Oftentimes the INS comes into the courtroom and they 
are supposed to be the prosecutor in the case, but they act as the 
defense attorney. I know that there are thousands,'' he says, ``I think 
hundreds of thousands of people who have been allowed to essentially 
walk, people that I know I and my colleagues have ordered to be 
deported for various reasons who are still simply out there.''
  I said, ``How many do you think?''
  He said, ``I've done some preliminary checking here, and I think 
there are at least 200,000.''
  I said, ``That's incredible. I'll check with the INS.''
  Of course we called them. I often say on the floor of the House here 
that the logo for the INS, something that should be on all of their 
documents, on the top of everything they send out, the logo on their 
Web site for the INS should simply be a person shrugging their 
shoulders. That is it. INS, that guy going, ``I don't know, I'm not 
sure.'' Because that is all you get from them, whenever you call them, 
``I don't know, I'm not sure. Could be.''
  We said, ``Do you realize there are a couple of hundred thousand 
people, that someone has alleged that there are a couple of hundred 
thousand people here?''
  They say, ``We don't know.'' We kept, of course, pushing the issue. 
Finally, we got the INS to say that yes, they looked into it and maybe 
there were 200,000 people, 250,000 people.
  Shortly thereafter, I cannot remember the exact time line, but I 
happened to be at a meeting with Mr. Ziglar, the head of the INS. He 
was here in the House, he was meeting Members of the House. I went up 
to him at the conclusion of his speech. I said, ``Mr. Ziglar, do you 
know about these people who have been ordered to be deported but they 
are still here?'' He said, ``Well, no, I don't.''
  I said, ``Do you know how many we're talking about?'' He said, ``No, 
I really don't.''
  I said, ``There are at least a couple of hundred thousand.'' He said, 
``That have been ordered deported?''
  I said, ``Yes.'' He said, ``I don't know. I don't know anything about 
that.''
  It was shortly thereafter that we got the information from the INS 
and it was, they said, a couple of hundred thousand. It turns out, 
because we pressed the issue and because the media kept hounding them 
about exactly how many are there, how many have been actually ordered 
deported, they put out some sort of directive, whatever, they sent 
something to Congress.
  In fact, after that, Mr. Ziglar testified under oath in Congress to a 
specific number. He said there were 314,000 that they had identified. 
Remember, he told me first he had no idea, he had no idea what I was 
talking about, he did not know that there was anything like that 
happening, he certainly did not know how many. But several months after 
that he testified in front of the Congress, 314,000.
  Recently, a reporter for ``Human Events,'' Mr. Joseph D'Agostino, has 
been doing his own work and looking at the records. According to his 
analysis, it looks to him like there were 425,000 in just the last 5 
years, from 1996 to 2000. We do not know because there is no record of 
anything that happened before 1996, people who walked away who are 
still here.
  So he went back to the INS. He said, ``Could this be? I have come up 
with at least 425,000. We don't know. That is just from 1996. We don't 
know. It could be a lot more than that. It could be double that 
amount.''
  They said, ``Well, you're right, we're not sure ourselves. We're not 
sure ourselves.''
  Then today I am told, in response to this, they said, ``We don't 
think he is right, either.'' But, Madam Speaker, this was evidently 
something that Mr. Ziglar said in response to a question, that he does 
not think these numbers that Mr. D'Agostino has pointed out are right. 
He does not know.
  But this is the guy that told me he did not know it even existed. So 
why would we feel comfortable in listening to him tell us what the real 
numbers are when he did not know that they even had a problem? This is 
the head of the agency. We do not know how many. Let us say it is 
between 300,000 and 1 million. I think from everything I can read, that 
is a pretty good guess. Between 300,000 and 1 million people have 
simply walked out of immigration law courts and back into society.
  This is a national security issue.
  I started out my comments this evening by explaining that we are in a 
war. We are fighting it overseas, but we are not doing a very good job 
fighting it here at home. The borders are undefended and unprotected 
for the most part. Good men and women, working hard, but frankly all we 
do is we hand them a sieve to hold back the flood.
  They know that they are working really almost against their own 
agency. They will tell me that and they would tell you that if you went 
down on the border today, Madam Speaker, and you talked to them, they 
know that their agency does not support their efforts.
  That has got to be the most frustrating feeling, to be putting your 
life on the line, and I assure you they do. There have been seven 
killed in the recent past, seven Border Patrol people, by people who 
are simply waiting. By the way, not waiting just to cross the border 
and waiting for this Border Patrol agent to get by, but waiting to 
ambush them, waiting in the bushes to ambush them, just to kill them, 
because they hate America, for whatever reason, I do not know, but 
there have been seven killed in the line of duty. I was made aware of 
that when I went down there, and that is in the recent past. It is 
getting worse. It is getting more dangerous all the time.
  I have tried to portray the picture, an accurate picture of the INS, 
of the organization to which we have entrusted the responsibility of 
protecting the border.

[[Page 3524]]



                              {time}  2045

  I have indicated that they have two roles: one is in enforcement and 
one is in the social work side of things, the benefit side of things.
  Let me tell you about a GAO report that came out just a month ago, 
released February 15. By the way, this is one of a series of GAO 
reports on this particular agency. This report focuses on the benefit 
side, the social work side of INS, the thing they tell us they like to 
do and that they are good at.
  The GAO says the INS allows the fraud to flourish by stressing that 
applications must be processed quickly. In some districts, adjudicators 
who decide whether a benefit will be granted are ordered to spend no 
more than 15 minutes on an application. This effectively discourages 
checking for fraud, the study says.
  The GAO found that 90 percent of 5,000 petitions for workers sought 
by foreign companies, particularly in the Los Angeles area, were 
fraudulent, a 90 percent fraud rate. An official in the INS operations 
branch said that a follow-up analysis of about 1,500 petitions found 
1,499 fraudulent.
  This is the same agency and, by the way, these are the things that we 
just a few nights ago on this floor, we actually passed something 
called 245(i), and it provides amnesty for people who are here 
illegally. If they come in, all they have to do now, they can be here 
illegally, but we have said to them, that, okay, come on in and give us 
your application to determine if you are here under certain guidelines, 
whether you have had a job for a long time, whether you are married.
  We know the last time we did this, by the way, fraud was rampant. 
Sham marriages occurred in the hundreds of thousands. Bogus documents 
for work histories were drawn up. We know that. We know what happens. 
And we are going to entrust to the INS the responsibility to look at 
another 1 million.
  By the way, Madam Speaker, the 1 million or so that will apply as a 
result of the 245(i) extension that we passed will be added to the 4.5 
million backlogged applications that the INS has right now, so there 
will be 5.5 million backlogged. What do you think the INS will do when 
they are told they have 15 minutes for every one of these things? Does 
anybody think anybody is going to get really checked here to determine 
whether the background is appropriate for coming into this country?
  Now, I am told the 245(i) extension is going to be held up in the 
Senate, partly because Mr. Daschle does not want to give this win to 
the President, partly because a particular Member of the Senate, of the 
other body, I should say, has decided to put a ``hold'' on it.
  I hope the hold works. I hope they hold it forever. I hope they 
never, ever, let it go in the Senate, for whatever reason. I do not 
care. If they want to do some political shenanigans, whatever it is, I 
hope they hold it and do not pass 245(i), because it is the wrong thing 
to do.


                Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Jo Ann Davis of Virginia). The Chair 
would remind the Member to refrain from improper references to the 
Senate.
  Mr. TANCREDO. I thank the Speaker for that reminder.
  The issue is, of course, this particular agency and the security of 
the Nation is dependent upon having an organization like the INS do its 
job, do it effectively and efficiently. I hope that I have indicated to 
you and to the Members and our colleagues the difficulty we would have 
if we were to just give this agency the responsibility to actually 
increase border security. It has to be abolished.
  We have to start with something new. It has to be something we 
create. The President today, as I understand, has called for something 
far more dramatic, far more significant than the original proposal to 
just split the agency into two parts. He has called for the complete 
elimination of this part of the agency, the enforcement side, creating 
a brand new one that would combine various other offices, various other 
functions of other agencies, including Customs and Agriculture, perhaps 
DEA, putting them into one agency, with the clear purpose, the clear 
line of authority, with people who are not philosophically inclined to 
open borders, but actually have a belief that they have a 
responsibility to help defend our borders. He has called for that 
today, and I applaud his call for a new agency, brand new, new people, 
and I would suggest we take it out of Justice and perhaps put it into 
Governor Ridge's Homeland Security Agency. That would be appropriate.
  Now, we have to do something like that, and it will be dramatic. It 
is a big test of our will in this body and in the other body as to 
whether or not we can actually accomplish this, because, of course, 
there is a lot of turf we are going to be treading on, and in this town 
turf is very important and people do not give up their turf, even a 
tiny little bit of it, without a big fight.
  What we are saying here is we have to take some things away from you, 
and some things away from you, and we have to put it into another 
agency. It is going to be tough.
  It has to be done, and I will tell you why. People will often say, 
hey, who are we really afraid of? Are we afraid of the people coming 
across the borders? They are just coming for jobs. They are not really 
coming here to do us any harm and that sort of thing.
  Madam Speaker, I am going to be quoting from something here, an 
article that was put out on WorldNetDaily, written by J. Zane Walley. A 
lot of the references I will be making will be to this particular 
article. It is called ``Arab Terrorists Crossing the Border.''
  This was a very elucidative analysis, I think, of the problem, and 
something that every American should be aware of, especially when we 
talk about the need to make sure that we are fighting the war on 
terrorism both here and abroad, because if we do not have a two-front 
war, we will certainly lose.
  The article says that to date, the U.S. Border Patrol has 
apprehended, and this is up to this time of the year, 158,722 illegals, 
just in the year 2001. By the Border Patrol's own admission, it catches 
one alien in five, and admits that about 800,000 have slipped across 
this year. Others contend that this is inaccurate. These are the 
ranchers down there, and they contend the agency only nets one in ten. 
An estimate is that over 1.5 million unlawful aliens have crossed into 
America in what the Border Patrol calls the Tucson Sector. By the way, 
that is just one part of our border, of course.
  Many border ranch owners are validly apprehensive of speaking about 
their desperate situation because of likely retribution by narco-
militarists, the drug runners, and coyotes, the smuggling of human 
beings. Unsolved murders and arsons are alarmingly ordinary in Cochise 
County, so pure fear keeps locals from speaking on the record.
  The foot traffic is so heavy that the back country has an ambience of 
a garbage dump and smells like an outdoor privy. In places, the land is 
littered a foot deep with bottles, cans, soiled disposable diapers, 
sanitary napkins, panties, clothes, backpacks, human feces, used toilet 
paper, pharmacy bottles, syringes, et cetera.
  U.S. Border Patrol agents are doing the best they can, considering 
their sparse numbers and the impossible terrain they patrol in four-
wheel drive vehicles, quad-runners and on foot. Agents of the Border 
Patrol have their other fears besides being ambushed by rock-chucking 
illegals and confrontations with assault rifle-armed narcos. They are 
not allowed to speak about what they cope with each day.
  This is what I mentioned, Madam Speaker, as being endemic in this 
agent. They have intimidated their employees so that they are afraid to 
speak out in what they see to be as clear violations of the regulations 
they are asked to uphold.
  One agent who spoke anonymously said, Look, I can tell you a lot of 
stories, but I have to be unnamed or I will be blackballed and might 
lose my job. He worriedly added, I have a family depending on me.
  Another agent of supervisory rank stated that smuggling traffic of 
Mexicans has really slowed. We are experiencing a tremendous increase 
in what he calls OTMs. That is border lingo for

[[Page 3525]]

``other than Mexicans.'' When queried about the ethnic makeup of the 
OTMs, he answered Central and South Americans, Orientals and Middle 
Easterners.
  When he was questioned about that further, Middle Easterners, he said 
yeah, it varies, but about one in every ten that we catch is from a 
country like Yemen or Egypt.
  Border Patrol spokesperson Rene Noriega stated that the number of 
other than Mexican detentions has grown by 42 percent. Most of the non-
Mexican immigrants are from El Salvador or other parts of Central 
America, she said, but added that the agents have picked up people from 
all over the world, including the former Soviet Union, Asia, and the 
Middle East.
  Arabs have been reported crossing the Arizona border for an unknown 
period. Border rancher George Morgan encounters thousands of illegals 
crossing his ranch on a well-used trail. He relates a holiday event:
  ``It was Thanksgiving, 1998, and I stepped outside my house and there 
were over 100 crossers in my yard. Damnedest bunch of illegals I ever 
saw. All of them were wearing black pants, white shirts and string 
ties. Maybe they were hoping to blend in,'' he chuckled. ``They took 
off. I called the Border Patrol, and a while later Agent Dan Green let 
me know that they had been caught. He said all were Iranians.''
  According to Border Patrol spokesman Rob Daniels, 10 Egyptians were 
arrested recently near Douglas, Arizona. Each had paid $7,000 to be 
brought from Guatemala into Mexico and then across the border.
  According to the San Diego Union Tribune, hours after the 9-11 
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an anonymous caller 
led Mexican immigration officials to 41 undocumented Iraqis waiting to 
cross into the United States.
  The Associated Press reported that Mexican immigration police 
detained 13 citizens of Yemen on September 24, 2001, who reportedly 
were waiting to cross the border into Arizona. The Yemenis were 
arrested Sunday in Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas. Luis 
Teran Balaguer, in the northern state of Sonora, said the evidence 
indicates that they have nothing to do with terrorist activities.
  The Agua Prieta newspaper clearly did not agree with his assessment. 
The editor, Jose Noriega Durazo, claimed in a front page El Ciarin 
headline, ``Arab terrorists were here.'' He quoted Agua Prieta police 
officials as identifying the 13 Yemenis as terrorists.
  Reportedly the Mexican immigration police returned the Yemenis to a 
federal detention center near Mexico City, but the new information 
would indicate they were released and returned to Agua Prieta.
  Carlos Carrillo, assistant chief, U.S. Border Patrol, Tucson Sector, 
told WorldNetDaily in a telephone interview Monday that nine Yemenis 
were reportedly holed up in a hotel in the border town of Agua Prieta, 
Sonora. ``We have passed the tip on to the FBI,'' he said. When pressed 
for information, he said he could not confirm the number, because they 
were under OP/SEC, which is a counter-intelligence acronym for 
``operations security.''
  The Border Patrol field patrol agent, who spoke anonymously, 
confirmed the presence of nine Yemenis. The agent said they could not 
get a coyote to transport them, and they are offering $30,000 per 
person, with no takers.
  The article goes on. Some people are being offered $50,000, 
specifically of Arab descent. This is happening at the same time that 
we are debating whether or not we actually can control our own borders 
or whether we should.
  Today I had an interesting discussion with a member of the press, 
specifically a lady I think from USA Today, and it became apparent 
after a short time she was annoyed with the fact that I was pressing 
for border control. She put the pad away for a second and talked to me, 
you know, sort of ``off the record''; and she said you cannot really 
expect to do this. We are going to turn into a police state. Are you 
really going to try to keep these people out?
  So I said to her, Tell me the alternative to trying to defend the 
border. Just tell me what you think the alternative is? It is to 
abandon it. There is no other way.
  You have two options. You either defend the border as well as you 
possibly can, and it does not mean we will absolutely be sure that no 
one will ever be able to get into the country without our permission. 
Of course not.

                              {time}  2100

  But we do everything that we can do, just like the President has said 
that we are going to do outside the country. He said we are going to do 
everything we have to do.
  I ask the President to do everything that he can do, and I certainly 
will do everything I can do, and I will ask my colleagues in this body 
to do everything that we as a body can do to stop people from coming 
into the United States illegally, because it is dangerous.
  It is not just the person coming across to get a job in a factory or 
a field somewhere. We cannot discriminate. We do not know. It is not 
easy to determine which one is coming across illegally for some purpose 
that is benign and which one is coming across illegally for some 
purpose that is quite deadly. It is impossible for us to know that.
  We have only one ability, only one charge, only one responsibility. 
That is to defend the border against all people coming across 
illegally. It is our responsibility as a Congress, and although there 
are many people who shy away from it, who are frightened by that 
because they know that politically we will be attacked by the 
immigration support groups and various other organizations, and by 
people who in fact have as their purpose, even here in this body, there 
are many reasons that many people vote against tightening immigration 
laws. Some are directly political.
  Some people know that massive numbers of immigrants coming into the 
United States, legally and illegally, will end up supporting the 
Democratic Party, and therefore they say, we do not want to reduce 
immigration, whether we are talking legal or illegal.
  Many people on our side are split in that Libertarian camp that say, 
``I want open borders,'' or say, ``I want cheap labor.'' That is the 
problem we deal with here.
  But I ask all of my colleagues to overcome those very parochial, 
partisan interests in the hope of and in the desire to try and defend 
America as successfully as we are doing in Afghanistan. It is 
imperative that we do it here, also. Our very Nation's survival is at 
risk.
  We recognize that, and we respond to the call that the President 
makes when we appropriate money and in every other way indicate our 
support for the effort to fight terrorism overseas. But why, why, Madam 
Speaker, is it so hard for us to get the same job done here in the 
United States?
  It should be the first place we look, it should be the first thing we 
do, because the defense of this country begins at the defense of its 
borders.

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