Speech #970192100

For the Drug Enforcement Agency. the freeze would mean a layoff of 195 agents. onetenth of the DEAs authorized strength. I do not know of anyone who thinks we are so far ahead in the war on drugs that we can cut back onetenth of our agents. For the Immigration and Naturalization Service. whose burdens of border patrol and processing are increasing every day. a freeze would mean cutting 1.511 people in 1983. cutting another 707 people in 1984. then still another 707 people in 1985. The total loss would be 2.925 staff. Mr. President. we are getting ready to take up an immigration bill on the floor. The committees have been working long and hard on that. Part of that bill is going to call for further additional enforcement agents for immigrationmore border patrol. more agents. Here. we are talking in this resolution about cutting 2.925 staff men of IRS. I do not know how the rest of the States are situated in regard to immigration. I thought we had a national problem. a hemorrhage of aliens coming into this country. I can tell you we have a hemorrhage in my State. and I can tell you that there are nowhere near the number of Immigration and Naturalization Service agents right now to deal with that problem. to even begin to deal with that problem And what about the Mexican border with Texas and the States that border on the Rio Grande? Do we seriously think that there are sufficient Immigration and Naturalization Service agents today that we can cut approximately 3.000 agents in the next 3 years? My goodness. I just cannot believe that we are taking actions like that to freeze these particular agencies. What kind of signal do we send to our law enforcement people. do we send to FBI agents. do we sent to customs agents. do we send to DEA agents. to Immigration and Naturalization agents. when we say. "We are cutting back on Government. boys. so we are going to have a little freeze"? As we know. last year. we actually had DEA agents who had to put their cars on the blocks toward the end of the year because they did not have gasoline to go out and patrol. Their wives tried to have a cake sale in one particular area to try to raise gasoline money.