Speech #1090054613

I appreciate the commitment of Senator ENSIGN and Senator MCCAIN on the issue of border security. They have been aggressive in their commitment and have done a lot of constructive work. 1 will leave it to the Senate to decide how to handle this amendment. I make these points for the purpose of fair disclosure. First off. the amendment takes about $360 million out of the first responder program and moves it over to the Border Patrol for the purpose of hiring 1.000 new border agents. That means first responder money would go from $1.9 billion to $1.4 billion. In addition. the money that will be moved would be money that would go out under threat. In other words. there are two pools of first responder money. There is the money that is distributed on the basis of threat. and there is the money that is distributed on the basis of formula. Now. the language of the amendment says "may." I respect the decision of the authors of this amendment to use the term "may" because that will leave it up to the Homeland Security agency to make the decision as to where the money should go. whether it should stay in the area of first responders or whether it should be moved over to the Border Patrol. That is probably good policy in many ways. The second thing I think that needs to be noted. however. is the reason we arrived at the number 1.000 that we fundedmyself and Senator BYRD--in this bill for new Border Patrol is because when you combine that number with the supplemental. where there were 500 new Border Patrol agents added. you are up to 1.500 Border Patrol agents. and we know. through efforts of our staff and requests of the Department. that because of the facilities restrictions--we moved most of the training from South Carolina over to New Mexicowe can only train probably about 1.300 agents a year right now. Now. this bill has money in it to get those facilities up to a position where they can do a much more robust effort in the area of training. In fact. my hope is next year we can train upwards of 2.500 when we expand these facilities. But right now they have. basically. limits on the number of people they can train. So it is not clear these additional Border Patrol agents would be able to be trained should we want to bring them on line. We do want to bring them on line. it is just a question when we can bring them on line. So that is a concern I think Members should know about. In addition. the physical effort of hiring Border Patrol agents has become a problem for the Border Patrol. One of the reasons they were not able to hire up to the 2.000. which was originally requested a few years ago. was because they could not find qualified people to meet the enlistment rolls. We are not sure whether they are going to be able to find 1.500 new Border Patrol people. We hope they will. It will put a lot of pressure on them to try to find 2.500 new people. which is what this number will be if this amendment is adopted.