María Elvira Salazar: “I join my colleagues, the floor managers of this bill, Senators Kennedy and Specter, in urging our colleagues to vote…”

“I join my colleagues, the floor managers of this bill, Senators Kennedy and Specter, in urging our colleagues to vote against the Gregg amendment. There is broad agreement among all Members who have been working on this reform package that we need to secure the border. Indeed, when you look at what Secretary Chertoff has said we need to do to secure the border, he has said we need to do a number of different things which we have incorporated in this legislation. We call for 18,000 Border Patrol agents. We call for 370 miles of fencing, 200 miles of vehicle barriers, 70 ground-based radar and camera towers, 4 unmanned aerial vehicles, new checkpoints and ports of entry, and a host of other things. Those numbers were not just picked out of the sky and put into this bill; those are the numbers the Secretary of Homeland Security said we need in order to secure the borders. He has been a constant presence in the fashioning of the immigration reform proposal that is before the Senate. The Gregg amendment essentially would derail the triggers that have been set up and is inconsistent with what we have heard from the Department of Homeland Security. I join Senator Kennedy and Senator Specter and my colleagues in urging a ``no'' vote on the Gregg amendment.”