Mark Souder: “Ever since we created the Department of Homeland Security, we have had a problem of what to do with our air assets. This…”

“Ever since we created the Department of Homeland Security, we have had a problem of what to do with our air assets. This amendment would hold $100 million from the Customs and Border Protection, CBP, Air and Marine interdiction, operations, maintenance, and procurement account until a report is received detailing the number of requests CBP receives from the use of assets and the number of those requests that are denied. One of the problems we had when we, in effect, set up ICE and CBP was to do with the division called Air and Marine. Air and Marine Division did not stay parked right along the border. The Air and Marine Division has assets down in Colombia. They have assets in the Caribbean, assets in the Eastern Pacific, assets at various points, because the whole point of the Air and Marine Division was both with boats and air to be able to follow in particular drug traffickers, other traffickers of contraband in high value or mass targets in the sense of illegal immigration or of terrorism. But when we put the air assets underneath CBP and they put them under Border Patrol, the nature of what we were doing with our Air and Marine assets have fundamentally changed.”