Mr. Speaker. let me tell him what has happened with the Clinton administrations policy on stopping cocaine that is coming across the international border. A border patrolman. and as you may know. I represent a great deal of the California Mexican border. kind of the southern slice of the State. I know the gentleman represents a great deal of Arizona just to the east of my district. A border patrolman came to us one day and gave us an internal memorandum from Doris Meissner. who is the head of INS for the Clinton administration. It concerned the border fence. because we have been building a border fence made out of landing mats. steel planks like those that you used in Desert Storm to build runways. except we turn them vertical instead of horizontal. and when we weld them to posts. we are making a steel fence 10 feet high and now some 14 miles long. from the Pacific Ocean to the coastal hills. When we built that fence. my staff went out and searched the inventories of every military base from Guam from Guantanamo and found 179.000 surplus steel planks to build this fence with. But when we built the fence. we increased cocaine interdiction by 1.000 percent because the drug runners. who were just driving their cars and trucks across the border. not at the regular crossings but just right across the sagebrush landscape. now could not get across because of the steel fence. so they had to go through very channelized areas and we were catching them.
Keywords matched
border patrol border fence