On the recordJuly 26, 2011
I thank the gentleman. It is my understanding that this joint agreement, as we saw the acceleration of park rangers, and you're right, quite honestly, I don't think anywhere on the southern border people want illegal activity to be going on on our recreational areas, wherever they might be located. And nobody is trying to warehouse prisoners in a national park. It is hard to envision this facility, but it would be a facility, I would assume, sort of like some of the facilities you see in other locations where people are operating out of it, but they have a temporary detention holding cell. This would be strictly--and maybe I can explain it by pointing out one of the problems we have on the border with the transportation of our prisoners. And, in fact, one of the things that we used our National Guard for when we did have to transfer prisoners when they were working on the border, there always has to be someone having this prisoner in custody. Whatever the accused crime is, they have to be in custody. When we had limited resources, we bumped them up. But they take a trained border patrolman whose duty it is to protect our border, if he's the only person available, and he has to transport that prisoner because there's no facility to temporarily hold him in. And when I say ``temporarily,'' it could be hours or maybe even minutes until someone can come along to help transport. If he's alone, then he has to transport him 150 miles.…
