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For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary Contact: 202-282-8010 May 16, 2006
Press Briefing by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar, ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul McHale, and Chief of the National Guard Bureau Lt. General Steven Blum on the President's Immigration Reform Plan.
Ms. Healy: I just wanted to thank you all for being here. I'm Erin Healy with the White House Press Office. I just want to introduce everyone very quickly. We have Secretary Chertoff from Homeland Security who is here with us today. We also have Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale who is also with us. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar is with us. Chief for the National Guard General Blum is with us. And also, the ICE Assistant Secretary, Julie Myers, is with us who will take your questions, kind of give you the role of the National Guard and Customs.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, you all heard the President's speech last night. I know you got a briefing yesterday. But we're here to give you some additional information from the perspective of the operators themselves about what we envision, going forward, based on what the President said yesterday.
You've already heard who is with me. I'm going to keep my comments short so you can get an opportunity to ask questions. I know you'd rather drone on at great length, but I'll put some of the burden back on you.
Let me just summarize a couple of points, and then I'm going to ask the others just to talk for a couple moments. First, this President has had, since he took office, a strong commitment to securing the border and dealing with this problem of illegal immigration. And of course, he has experience with this issue going back to his days as governor of Texas. Since the President took office, we've caught and turned back, returned to their country some 6 million people, including about 400,000 with criminal records. The number of Border Patrol agents has increased from about 9,000 to 12,000, and we've increased border security funding by over 60 percent.
When I took the job, one of the things that the President made clear to me was that, although we had made some significant progress in terms of dealing with this challenge at the borders, he was not satisfied with where we were. And so we began the process of looking at this issue in a comprehensive fashion, basically trying to understand the whole system of what fuels the illegal migration business model so we could figure out what our best approach would be to deter it and to really dismantle it.
After we analyzed it, after we spent a lot of time talking to some of the front-line operators like Chief Aguilar, we realized we need to approach it on a number of different fronts. First of all, we needed to add more people. And by the end of 2008, the President has proposed that we more than double the number of Border Patrol as compared with the number that was on duty when he came into office. That would take us to slightly above 18,000 agents.
But boots on the ground is not really enough. You've got to leverage those boots; you've got to make them as effective as possible. And the way to do that is more tactical infrastructure -- things like fences, vehicle barriers and roads -- and as important, next generation technology, the kind of things we use to great effect overseas when we conduct operations, for example, in Asia.
Just this year, the department has had its first unmanned aerial vehicle, which accounted for 23 drug seizures, totaling more than four tons of marijuana, and also resulted in the apprehension of 2,300 illegal migrants. So more of this kind of high-tech is really critical. And that means our SBInet program, which we've issued for bid this past April and which we're expecting to begin to award and start to deploy toward the end of this fiscal year.
But it's not just enough to arrest a million people a year. We have to actually remove them. The goal here is not to arrest and release, it's to arrest and remove, and ultimately, to achieve deterrence because people understand when they're caught they're going to go back home again. And so we've been focused on moving from this old catch and release system to a catch and remove system, and we've made a considerable amount of progress.
But we have more progress we can achieve to get this problem completely turned around.
But, ultimately, if we look at the business model for the illegal migrant, we have to consider the tremendous economic pressure that is driving people into this country. And it is not an economic pressure that can be addressed simply by dealing with more boots on the ground and more technology at the border, itself. We have to look at what's going on in the interior.
One way to think about it is, it's like trying to dam a river. If you build a dam and you don't have a spillway to drain off some of the excess water in a way that's productive, you will eventually have to either keep building the dam higher and higher or the dam will break. We have to have a spillway for some of this economic pressure, and that's a temporary worker program, which allows us to take economic migrants and channel them in a regulated and visible way so we know who they are, so we can track them, and so we can bleed some of that pressure that the Border Patrol is facing at the border.
And in order to make that work we also have to have a stick, and that's tough interior enforcement. And as you know, we've begun a process of applying criminal penalties to employers who are flagrantly violating the immigration laws by systematically using illegal migrants to make up their labor force.
All of these pieces we tie together in what we call the Secure Border Initiative, which we announced in November. And since then we've begun to see some of the results of this comprehensive program. ICE has detained and removed more than 17,500 non-Mexicans apprehended at the Southwest border under our expanded use of expedited removal. And with respect to the -- many of the populations of non-Mexicans we catch we have now totally moved from catch and release to catch and return, and we've seen some results in deterrence. We're actually seeing for the first time a seasonal decrease in the number of people from these countries that we're apprehending at the border.
We have one big step left in order to complete this job, and that is to get rid of a 20-year-old court order that is hampering our ability to use expedited removal with respect to people from El Salvador. And we have legislation that members of Congress have introduced that would help us achieve that.
We're acting against the financial infrastructure of human smuggling and trafficking organizations, and ICE is also using fugitive operations teams to arrest more than 44,000 illegal aliens, including 33,343 fugitives and over 10,000 non-fugitives. More than 20,000 of these people arrested by these ICE teams have criminal records. And as I said, we anticipate at the end of this year beginning the process of putting online this next generation of technology.
What the President did last night is put on the turbo chargers in dealing with this focused, anti-illegal migrant effort that we've got, on a comprehensive basis. And if we take advantage of this, and if we move comprehensively in Congress to build the entirety of the program, we can be -- we can have a transformative effect on an immigration problem and an illegal migration problem that has plagued this country for over 20 years.
Now I'd like to turn it to Paul McHale.
Assistant Secretary McHale: Good morning. The task of maintaining the integrity of U.S. international borders is assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. The deployment of military forces along the Southwest border will be in support of the Department of Homeland Security. The military forces, I think as you know, will be drawn largely from the National Guard -- I'm joined today by Lieutenant General Blum, who is the Chief of the Guard Bureau -- and all National Guard forces will be under the command and control of the governor in whose state the forces are operating.
The initial commitment will be for up to 6,000 military forces on a rotational basis for a period of up to 12 months. Military support will not exceed 3,000 personnel during a possible second year of deployments. The Department of Defense will pay the costs on a reimbursement basis.
The missions will include, for example, surveillance and reconnaissance, engineering support, transportation support, logistics support, vehicle dismantling, medical support, as noted by Secretary Chertoff, barrier and infrastructure construction, road building, and linguistic support.
DOD -- I want to emphasize this -- will play no role in the direct apprehension, custodial care, or security associated with those who are detained by civilian law enforcement authorities. Law enforcement along the border will remain a civilian function. The National Guard missions will be substantially similar to the annual training missions executed as part of our counter-drug program along the Southwest border during the past two decades. The difference is that the size of the force and the commitment of resources will be far greater than anything we have done in the past.
The missions assigned to our soldiers and airmen will be directly related to their military skills normally associated with their war fighting and disaster response missions. In addition, DoD and DHS will use civilian contractors when appropriate.
The National Guard deployments along the Southwest border, in support of DHS, is an important but temporary bridge to improve civilian security capabilities. We will draw down our forces consistent with ongoing mission requirements. The men and women in the Department of Defense will work diligently and professionally to support the Department of Homeland Security thereby improving our border security, while providing excellent training to our soldiers and airmen.
As I indicated, I'm joined this morning by Lieutenant General Blum. He really is the operator. He can bring you a much more focused perspective on the kinds of activities and missions likely to be assigned to our men and women in uniform.
Let me turn to him at this point for some brief comments.
General Blum: Thank you, Secretary McHale. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As you know, the National Guard is superbly suited for this mission. We've been doing it for over three decades, just at a much smaller scale. The President and the Department of Homeland Security have asked for military support to a federal law enforcement effort along our border. And the Secretary of Defense -- as Secretary McHale has outlined, has authorized this. We're trained, we're ready to do this, and we're able to do this.
I think what you also need to know, that your National Guard will not do this at the expense of its global mission, that we're performing on a global war on terrorism around the world as part of the Army and the Air Force that we provide the combatant commanders abroad. And we will certainly not do this in any manner that does not make us at least as prepared as we were for Hurricane Katrina last year. In fact, we have more troops available and more equipment and more experience this year than we did last year.
So we are watching that very carefully. There are three glass balls we have to manage or juggle. One is the war on terrorism; one is response to natural disasters and terrorist events here at home. And we can certainly do what is being asked by our Commander-in-Chief with about 2 percent of my force structure.
I think I'll end my comments there and await questions.
Secretary Chertoff: Chief?
Chief Aguilar: Good morning. As the Secretary stated, what this amounts to is, based on the announcement made by the President last night, this is going to be a tremendous enforcement support partnership. This is a partnership that we have had for over 20 years with the National Guard, counter-drug. We have done a tremendous job jointly in those past 20 years. We are now moving toward national security, border security.
One of the most critical pieces that the National Guard will be bringing to border enforcement is the engineering support. As the Secretary stated, we have a need for personnel. We will be doubling by the end of calendar year '08 the number of Border Patrol agents pre-9/11; technology, which the Secretary spoke about, through SBInet that will be commencing very quickly; and then the need for tactical infrastructure. That is where the expertise of the National Guard will bring some tremendous force multipliers.
I brought with us some static displays that actually shows some of the bollard fencing that is in place that has been built by the actual National Guard tactical infrastructure, and where it is needed.
One of the things that you will notice is that the Border Patrol is operating in very rural areas of our nation right now. Those rural areas have a need for tactical infrastructure and technology. And again, I want to reiterate that the support partnership is critical here. Personnel enforcement will be done by Border Patrol. But the support for tactical infrastructure engineering and technology will be a tremendous force multiplier.
Now, as we all know border enforcement is but one piece of the comprehensive approach. The other piece relates to ICE and interior enforcement for that. I'll pass it on to Assistant Secretary Myers.
Assistant Secretary Myers: Thank you. As the President's speech and Secretary Chertoff's comments make clear, robust interior enforcement, as well as additional detention capacity are critical parts of a comprehensive immigration strategy. The additional 4,000 beds that we're proposing to use through the end of fiscal year '06 will greatly aid us in our efforts to end catch and release along the Southwest border. But beds alone are not enough. The President has called upon us to use them more creatively and to be more careful with our resources, and we will continue to do so.
In addition, as Secretary Chertoff noted, we will work to direct our work site enforcement efforts by targeting our efforts on unscrupulous employers. We've learned too well from the old INS days that simple administrative sanctions are not enough.
Finally, we will seek to build relationships and enhance relationships with state and locals by allowing them into our task forces and working with them on targeted enforcement actions.
Thank you.
Secretary Chertoff: All right, we'll take questions. If you willentify yourself and tell us who you are directing a question to.
Question: I have a question for General Blum, please. General, as this plan was being put together, what argued against having the National Guard do this on a federal status? And, also, why are you doing the two-week rotations, such a short rotation? Isn't that a pretty inefficient way of doing it?
General Blum: Let me address this in turn. First of all, we are doing in a federal status. We are going to be performing these missions in U.S. Code Title 32; that is a federal status. That's when your National Guard is federally funded, has all the rights and entitlements -- the Army National Guard soldiers and airmen have all the rights and entitlements of any other federal uniformed person. The only different in Title 32 -- and it was selected for that code -- is that the National Guard would remain under the control of the governors of the affected states, which everyone came to a conclusion was the best way to do it.
The second part of your question is a little bit complex, but I think it bears examination. We routinely, every year, require each and every member to train