[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 23318-23319]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          SECURING OUR BORDERS

  Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise to speak briefly to highlight again 
the Homeland Security bill, which this body passed and the House passed 
and the President signed this week. I think it is important when we do 
something that is substantive and addresses what I see--and I think 
most people see--as a very significant issue for our Nation, which is 
controlling our borders, we should talk about it a little bit so the 
people understand what we did because in the activities that so 
dominate the daily news--whether it is a hurricane or the issues in 
relation to a Supreme Court nominee--things that are moving in the 
right direction tend to get lost. But what is moving in the right 
direction right now is our attempts as a nation, with the President's 
leadership and this Congress's aggressiveness, in the area of trying to 
control our borders.
  The Homeland Security appropriations bill--and I have the good 
fortune to chair the Homeland Security Subcommittee and the ranking 
member is Senator Byrd--I do not think of him as the ranking member; 
quite honestly, I think of him as the senior member--is a bill that is 
structured around the theory that we should address threat.
  It was a unique approach to an appropriations bill because it is a 
unique issue. Most appropriations bills take on a variety of different 
questions and the management of the Government and how the Government 
is functioning. But we decided to do the bill based on a theme, to be 
quite honest. The theme we tried to address was: What is the threat? 
And how can we best address it?
  We concluded that the prime threats are, No. 1, the use of a weapon 
of mass destruction against our Nation. I intend to talk about that 
issue later on as we move into the new BioShield bill, which has been 
put together by Senator Burr from North Carolina. He has done such an 
extraordinary job. This bill did make major initiatives in the area of 
trying to fight the use of a weapon of mass destruction and getting 
prepared to deal with that type of a threat.
  The second major threat we determined was the porousness of our 
borders. The simple fact is too many people are coming into this 
country today whom we don't know, and they are coming in illegally. Not 
only that, but we don't know, when people come across the border 
legally, who they are and what their purposes are and whether they may 
be wanting to cause us harm.
  We have two major problems. We have the problem relative to people. 
In addition, we have the problem relative to cargo. The fact is, our 
ports of entry are basically open to allowing in cargo that may be a 
threat to us, cargo which might have in it a weapon which might be used 
against us.
  So this bill reallocated resources, and we made some very difficult 
decisions. We took significant resources from other accounts, where it 
could arguably be claimed they were needed, but we decided, in the 
elements of priority, it was more important to move the funds into the 
border issues and move those dollars to the border.
  We expanded--working in the context of a continuum because we had 
done a supplemental earlier which attempted to address the same issues 
as part of a package--working as a theme, the issue of protecting our 
borders and making them more secure. We did this by significantly 
expanding the number of feet on the ground because when you come right 
down to it, it is how many people you have on the borders looking for 
people who are trying to come across the borders illegally which 
determines whether you are going to be successful in stopping those 
people.
  So we expanded by 15 percent, approximately, the number of Border 
Patrol agents. Now, this is only a step in the right direction, but it 
is a fairly significant step. Some would say: Why didn't you put even 
more Border Patrol agents into the system? Well, quite honestly, the 
system cannot handle it. We do not have the training capacity to train 
more than about 1,500 Border Patrol agents every year. Unfortunately, 
it is very hard to find people to do this job who meet the 
qualifications we have because the qualifications are very high and the 
people who do this job of serving in our Border Patrol agency are 
individuals who are highly sought after by other agencies and they are 
people who have other opportunities. To attract them into the Border 
Patrol agency is a challenge. Finding people is a challenge. But we 
have put in the pipeline now the dollars necessary to add 1,500 new 
agents.
  In addition, we are expanding the training facilities so that as we 
move into the later years, we will be able to train more than 1,500 
agents a year. My goal--and I believe the goal of other members of the 
committee, some of whom are in the Chamber today--is to be training 
approximately 2,000 new agents every year, until we get to 10,000 new 
agents from the baseline of about 10,000. So we will have essentially a 
force we have doubled.
  But as you double the force of agents, you also have to double the 
infrastructure that supports them, or dramatically increase it, anyway. 
So this bill also addresses that. It builds new facilities. And 
especially it addresses the issue of detention, which is a critical 
issue for us because we simply know today that as we catch people who 
come into our country who are not Mexican and whose purposes we don't 
know but who we know are here illegally, we are not able to detain 
them.
  We are not able to send them back to their country of origin because 
we do not have the capacity to do so. This bill, again, tries to 
address that issue and does so in a fairly aggressive way, adding, when 
coupled with the supplemental, approximately 2,000 new beds to 
detention capability, getting us over 20,000 beds in detention 
capability. Our goal--and we are on this path now--is to be sure that 
we can detain everybody who comes into this country illegally and we 
catch who is not Mexican and be able to send those people back to where 
they came from because those people may be a significant threat to us 
as a nation.
  We are making progress. The Congress and the President have made a 
commitment to significantly increase our capacity to protect our 
borders. We recognize that there is a porousness among our borders, and 
we have stepped up, in an attempt to try to address that, by 
dramatically expanding the resources we are putting on the borders and 
dramatically expanding the support facilities for those border agents 
who are there.
  There are other issues that we still need to address: Specifically, 
our computer capability as to how we track legal people who come into 
the country and our capacity to have the various computer systems which 
are able to track people--the FBI system at IAFIS and the US-VISIT 
system set up by Customs and Immigration--be able to communicate in a 
way which makes it possible for us to identify somebody coming into 
this country who might have a criminal record or for purposes which we 
believe could harm our Nation or individuals in our Nation.
  There is a long way to go in that area. We intend to continue to 
focus a great deal of energy and resources on that also. I intend to 
hold hearings specifically on that point because I am very concerned 
about it. This bill,

[[Page 23319]]

which passed the Senate and passed the House and was signed by the 
President this week, called the Homeland Security appropriations bill, 
was a significant step in the right direction toward making our borders 
more secure. It is a step which should be acknowledged and, therefore, 
I wanted to come to the floor to note it again.
  I thank the Chair and the Senator from Michigan for her courtesy.

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