Dan Quayle: “I thank the gentleman for yielding. I really want to thank him for his leadership on this issue and for working with me…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. I really want to thank him for his leadership on this issue and for working with me to put in similar provisions within the Homeland Security Reauthorization, which we hope will come to the floor in August because it's a serious issue. As the gentleman from Utah was talking about, the amount of destruction, both on the environmental side and just on the human side, from these drug smugglers and human smugglers in very environmentally sensitive areas in the Sonoran Desert is devastating. If you think about the amount of carnage that has happened just south of the border--you have over 30,000 people that have been killed by drug cartel violence in the last 5 years. Last year, I was with other members of our Arizona delegation. We were going down to the border and seeing what was going on, and we were at the Douglas point of entry. And the night before they had videos of this, which was about 70 yards from the border, where a fake police cruiser that was disguised by the drug cartels stopped just south of the port of entry, entered into an establishment, unloaded hundreds of rounds of ammunition in there, killing a handful and wounding dozens of people. Now these are the same types of people who are taking advantage of the weak spots within our border. If you look at Arizona specifically, the Arizona border, there are about 305 miles of Federal lands in Arizona. About 83 percent of the 370-mile Arizona-Mexico border is Federal lands.…”