Beto O'Rourke

I would submit, sir, that the real metric that the United States needs to be measuring is not how much we are seizing, but what is the impact to organized crime of that that we do seize?

If you somehow through this system, HealthCare.gov, learn that the parent is here illegally, would you act on that information, and how would you act on that information?

I want to make sure that this law works. I think its goals and intentions are noble.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act, thus far, has been deeply disappointing.

I want to make sure that we make this law work. It is, after all, the law of the land.

I want to work to make sure that we fix those problems that we have identified.

I think about the 200,000 El Pasoans that I represent who are currently uninsured.

The existence of threats does not increase the vulnerability that the systems might be.

In El Paso, there are bound to be many mixed-status families amongst those 200,000 uninsured people that I represent in our community.

You know, on one end of the spectrum, you could pat down every single person who enters a Federal facility; search every square inch of their cars they are driving into a Federal garage.

I would like to follow the line of questioning initiated by Mr. Stivers.

Nobody wants to kneel on gravel when they are visiting a gravesite at Fort Bliss.

I want to know what we can do on an interim basis to beautify it, to make it a little bit more hospitable for visitors to the cemetery.

A deeply unpopular decision that the NCA made was to xeriscape that cemetery, remove all of the grass, put in gravel, rock, and dirt.

The family made an application for him to be interred and memorialized at Fort Bliss National Cemetery. That was denied.

We still think--believe that it has served us well.

When you have an event like the Navy Yard's shooting, how does that change your assessment?

I wanted to add to a comment you made about the VA and veterans being dependent on other Federal departments and agencies.

For Ms. Gambler, one of the memories that I think looms large for this committee and certainly for me in making any decision on a biometric exit system was our failure with SBInet, where we spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a border…

The cost can be measured in a number of ways; certainly what it costs to purchase that and maintain it and operate it

For every minute of additional wait time at a port of entry it costs the U.S. economy $166 million

It saves you money, the VA, in processing those claims, and it saves the veteran hundreds upon hundreds of days in getting a more timely response.

It is a way to encourage, at no cost to the VA or the Federal Government, veterans to file fully developed claims online.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for holding this hearing today.

The SBInet program, also known as the virtual fence, which was billions of dollars' worth of surveillance and communications equipment, that was ultimately canceled in 2011, because it was costly, it was proven to be ineffective.