Political Quotes

“We are where we are as a nation. We have a porous border. Every time a supplemental bill comes through on Iraq, it gets the votes from this body that it needs to become law, because all of us understand, whether we disagree with the policies in Iraq, that once the soldiers and warfighters are there, our troops are there, there are certain things that have to flow from their presence, and we designate a lot of money for the Iraqi operation as emergency spending; I believe rightfully so. Well, I would argue to anybody, Republican or Democrat, that one of the big chinks in our national security armor is a porous border between the United States and Mexico, and this $3 billion will really help in a serious way. It is serious money to deal with a serious problem that is truly an emergency. It will add more boots on the ground. It will add agents for there to be a total of 23,000 border security agents on the border, which is a tremendous increase over what we have now. I think it is like 13,000 or 14,000. But the technology in this bill will be a force multiplier. The technology we spend money to secure will allow the force in place to be multiplied by a factor of many because the technology literally leverages the boots on the ground in a tremendous way. The 45,000 additional bedspaces will stop a program that is really the wrong message to send--catch and release: We catch you. We release you back. You come again.”