Judd Gregg: “first I congratulate the Senator from West Virginia for bringing forward a thoughtful amendment, as always, and…”

“first I congratulate the Senator from West Virginia for bringing forward a thoughtful amendment, as always, and especially for the fact that it actually, I believe, adds to the savings, if I am not correct. So I cannot argue with that. To be honest, I am not engaged in this issue. The bill was reported out of the Judiciary Committee. We have heard from Senator Sessions, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee. I understand Senator Specter is not going to have the opportunity to come over and debate this because he is involved in a variety of other issues today. I am sure he has thoughts and opinions on this because it was part of the package they reported. I would like to speak briefly about the topic which the Senator from West Virginia has raised because I think it is such a critical one, which is the issue of our borders and how we deal with it. I do have the good fortune, along with the Senator from West Virginia, to have a responsibility for the Homeland Security Agency, he being the ranking member and I being the chairman of that appropriations subcommittee. We know that we simply have borders which are too porous. This year, with the significant assistance of the Senator from West Virginia, we were able to increase the funding relative to the number of Border Patrol agents to add another 1,500 agents when we count the supplemental, and we were able to increase the number of detention beds taking it up to about 20,000.…”