Dianne Feinstein: “last evening, I had a brief opportunity to indicate to the majority leader my view of the importance of the illegal…”

“last evening, I had a brief opportunity to indicate to the majority leader my view of the importance of the illegal immigration bill and my hope that it would be restored to the floor very shortly. Yesterday, the Justice Department made a series of arrests on the west coast which I believe underscore the need for this bill to be rapidly considered by this Senate and hopefully passed. Arrests were made yesterday in San Francisco of persons involved in large-scale alien smuggling. They capped a 3-year investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. attorney in the northern district of California. This operation was known as Operation Sea Dragon, and the investigation resulted in a sealed four-count indictment of 23 people, all of whom were members of organized and violent gangs. The investigation revealed that a number of powerful New York-based gangs, including the White Tigers, the Fuk Ching, and the Broom Street Boys, joined forces with two Bay Area gangs to smuggle several hundred aliens from China into the United States in 1993.”