Political Quotes

“We started this fence about 20 years ago. We started it by building the first steel fence across that 14-mile segment between the coastal hills of San Diego County and the Pacific Ocean. We did that because drug trucks were running that border at the rate of about 300 per month. We had about 10 people being murdered each year, along with numerous robberies and rapes, to such a high degree that the best-selling book, ``Lines and Shadows'' by Joseph Wambaugh, was written depicting this ``no man's land,'' where nobody wanted to be after dark. So we built that first line, which was the steel fence right on the border. We then built the second fence, that is, the second tier of the so-called triple fence, after we passed a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. And it was President Clinton who signed the bill waiving the Endangered Species Act and waiving NEPA because he thought it was so important that we have security at this, the most porous smugglers' corridor in the United States of America. Now, I can just tell you, as a guy who has worked on this thing from the start, my staff went out and found those 79,000 steel landing mats to build this fence. If the extremists had discovered this fence before we got the first 12 miles built, that would not be built. We stopped those 300 drug trucks a month, stopped them dead. We eliminated the 10 murders a year, mostly of undocumented workers.”