That Is our idea. Lets take credit for this idea. So they held a press conference and said: What a wonderful idea you had to increase the number of border agents by 1.500 people and the number of beds by a couple thousand. and we would actually be taking the money and putting it toward border security. That was a year ago. Now the new budget came up again. and this time the administration sent up a budget which was oriented toward border security in that they represented that they were going to increase the number of agents by another 1.500 and the number of beds by another 6.000. and they were going to begin to put more money into the Coast Guard initiative called deepwater. But it is not really deepwater. it would be better called protecting our coastline from threat. "Deepwater" makes people think it is somewhere out in the middle of the ocean. It may occur in the ocean. but actually this is threat protection along our coast. So they made these commitments within the budget they sent up. What they failed to do. however. was fund those commitments because they sent up really a hollow budget in that they put in that budget a system for paying for these new Border Patrol agents and these new beds by increasing the fees on people who are traveling on airplanes by about $1.2 billion. Of course. that fee proposal had been rejected the year before. The Chairman of the committee that has jurisdiction over that proposal had rejected it out of hand this year when that budget was sent up. and everybody knows that it is not going anywhere. so it is what is called a plug.
Keywords matched
border security Border Patrol