Speech #1090123162

But in the post9/1l worldand especially in light of the dramatic number of people who have been coming into our country illegallywe can no longer tolerate that approach. unfortunately. We need to put more aggressive effort into making sure that we know who is coming over the borders and limiting those folks coming over our borders to people who want to come in here legally and who do not want to do us harm. As a result of that. we have undertaken for the last couple of years an aggressive effort to significantly increase the number and the effort of our Border Patrol agenciesCustoms. Border Patrol. Coast Guard. and ICE. In fact. over the last 11/2 years we have dramatically increased funding for all of these different agencies. This chart lists those types of increases in those prior supplementals and in the last appropriations bill relative to border security. We increased Border Patrol agents by 1.500. That is a lot. That is an increase of over 10 percent in agents. an increase in detention officers by 650 officers. investigators. and detention beds--again. by almost 10 percent. This Is a significant ramping up of the number of. for lack of a better word. boots on the ground on our borderespecially on our southern border. That is exactly what we needed to do. In fact. as we move into the outyears. the administrationthe President specificallyhas made a strong commitment to try to continue this increase in our border security. This chart reflects how many agents we intend to add every year so that we can make sure we have the necessary personnel on the border in order to make sure that we can limit dramaticallyin fact. basically stopillegal immigration into this country. especially along the southern border. The reason we have added 1.500 agents so farand we intend to add another 1.500 or 2.000and the reason we are not adding more every year is because the infrastructure cant handle any more. to be honest with you. We cant train more. and we actually cant find more agents. In many instances. people who qualifyI have forgotten the numbers. I think it is something like 30.000 or 40.000 applications that we have to go through in order to get down to 1.500 agents. It is actually hard to become a Border Patrol agent from a percentage standpoint of the number of people applying for the job versus the number of people who actually end up getting the job. It is harder to become a Border Patrol agent than it is to get into Harvard. That is because Border Patrol agents require special skills. They are talented people. And the type of folks we want to draw into this responsibility are people who have to have a tremendous amount of ability and expertise. and they are very hard to find. But they are good people. and we are adding to them dramatically. We intend to get the Border Patrol up to 20.000 agents and an increase of detention beds of another 10.000. We will be literally able to control the southern border. We will no longer have this issue of people coming cross the southern border in waves illegally.