Speech #1090132085

But I disagree with President Bush about how we ought to get there and how fast we can get there. Yes. we need more strength and more personnel at the border. We need better enforcement of our immigration laws. But. particularly in a post9/li world. when you look at the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. we need to do a better job of preventing the flood of immigrants who are crossing the borders every day. But the bottom line is. what you need to do that job is not a makeshift force of already overextended National Guardsmen to militarize the border but rather specialized agents who are trained to do the police work. to track down individuals who make an illegal crossing. and to ensure that the borders are not easy avenues for those crossings. I remind my colleagues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s. when our cities and our communities were facing a crime epidemic. we didnt send the National Guard in to do the job. We hired more police officers and invested in community policing. The COPS Program put 100.000 skilled and trained law enforcement officers on the streets of the communities of our country and crime dropped. After 9/11. the mission of the Border Patrol changed. No longer are they charged with simply securing the border. They are now patrolling one of the greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror. As their mission changed. their numbers increased. but they have never increased enough to do the job. Each year for the past 10 years between 700.000 and 800.000 illegal immigrants arrived in this country. Despite more than doubling the number of Border Patrol agents between 1995 and 2005. Federal enforcement of our immigration laws has decreased significantly. The number of border apprehensions has declined by 31 percent. from an average of 1.5 million apprehensions a year between 1996 and 2000. to an average of 1.05 million between 2001 and 2004. At the same time. the number of illegal immigrants apprehended within the interior of the country has plummeted by 36 percent. from an average of 40.193 between 1996 and 2000. to an average of 25.901 between 2001 and 2004. As much as the strength of the Border Patrol has grown in the last years actual performance demonstrates that we have to close a gap by almost twice or three times as much. The current Border Patrol agents protect more than 8.000 miles of international border and they detect and prevent smuggling. unlawful entry. undocumented immigrants. they apprehend persons violating the immigration laws. and they interdict contraband such as narcotics. They work under difficult circumstances for long periods and in all kinds of weather. Currently. we have fewer than 12.000 Border Patrol agents. Those agents are responsible for patrolling 8.000 miles of land and seacoast. and because of the need to provide continuous coverage. no more than 25 percent of those agents are securing our borders at any given moment. That means there are only 4.000 agents patrolling 8.000 miles of land and our borders. So. if instead of spreading them out as we do today you put them all along the border. with just Texas alone. you would then have roughly two Border Patrol agents per mile. It is physically impossible to protect the borders of the United States under those circumstances. There are additional numbers put into this legislation. but I have heard that. in fact. by joining the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center together with the National Training Center in Artesia.