Chief Aguilar, Secretary Chertoff and Director Torres respond to reporters' questions during a Press Conference on the Secure Border Initiative (DHS Photo/Bahler)
For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary Contact: 202-282-8010 Washington, D.C. December 1, 2005
Secretary Chertoff: Well, good morning, everybody. I'm here with the Chief of the Border Patrol, David Aguilar, and with John Torres, who is the Acting Director of Detention and Removal Operations at the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Bureau. As you know, I recently returned from a trip earlier this week with the President down to the Southwest border. And of course, I know you all heard the President speak about what our strategy is moving forward to get control of the border in a reasonable period of time. One of the things we had the opportunity to do at the border was to talk to and see some of the hard work that's being done by our Border Patrol agents and our ICE agents who are working on the ground every day to secure our borders and to make this country safe. The President reiterated his commitment at the border to securing our borders, and his commitment to developing solutions to the problems we face regarding immigration. Since taking office, the President has directed an increase in border security funding of 60 percent, and has added resources to hire an additional 1,900 Border Patrol agents. And just a month or so ago, the President signed an appropriations bill that will provide an additional thousand agents, and 2,000 additional beds, which we can use to detain people that we apprehend. I thought what I would do here is give you a little bit of an overview of what our strategy is and then introduce the Chief and the Director to talk about some of the operational accomplishments and some of our operational milestones. And what we're going to do periodically is come out and talk to you about what we've accomplished, where we're headed, what our measurements are of success, where we still have distance to cover, because I think that the public is interested in seeing that we are taking a very disciplined and measured approach to making sure we get control of the border in real time. As you know, there are a lot of dimensions to the border. The problem of immigration is one that's been with this country for 20 years. So we are digging ourselves out of a hole which it took 20 years to dig ourselves into. And it's not going to happen overnight, but what will make it work and what makes it achievable is a strategy that blends all of the elements of our power to control our border, and looks at the border as an entire system. So we begin with the border itself, those that we apprehend coming into the country. There, the critical element is to apprehend and intercept, detain and then remove people so that we have such a high percentage rate of interception and removal that we actually begin to deter people from coming across the border. And we do that using a mix of Border Patrol agents, enhanced boots on the ground, using some low-tech infrastructure like vehicle barriers or fencing like we're putting out east of the San Diego—city of San Diego along the border, and also using some high-tech tools, things like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground sensors, remote-controlled cameras, and even the possible use of satellites as the kinds of tools that will give us a picture on the ground. And as the Chief will explain to you, we change that mix of people, infrastructure and technology, depending on the particular terrain that we have to face. We have to use a common strategy, but the application of the strategy depends upon the particular landscape which is the operational environment. And again, this is part of a disciplined commonsense approach. Second element of this is interior enforcement. We've got to change the dynamic which brings people into this country to work on an illegal basis. One key to that is to change the dynamic that gets employers to hire those illegal aliens, and that means more vigorous interior enforcement. But a third piece of it is giving these employers and these employees some legal regulated channel for temporary work that would take some of the pressure off of our Border Patrol and our enforcement agents. It's a simple matter of logic. If you're trying to dam a river, what you don't do is simply build a high dam, because the water keeps rising and the pressure keeps building. You try to build a channel for the water that's productive and that's regulated, so you can take some of the pressure off the dam. Well, it's that philosophy that we're going to place in application in our Secure Border Initiative. We're going to try to work with Congress to find a way to channel some of that economic pressure so that we can be more effective in our use of enforcement tools and our border tools. Let me talk a little bit about one particular feature of what we're unrolling in our Secure Border Initiative strategy. As you know, when we apprehend Mexicans who come across in the Southwest border, we return them essentially immediately into Mexico, so there's no issue of detention, they just get caught and they get sent back. But when we deal with the aliens who come from other countries, the matter is a little bit more complicated, because they can't immediately be returned to their home countries. And so the question is, what do we do until we can return them? Up until now there's been a policy down at the border called "catch-and-release." And that meant we caught people—people who were special-interest aliens or criminals were detained, but there simply weren't enough beds to detain everybody. And so when we ran out of beds, we basically put people out on bail. And not surprisingly, the majority of those people never showed up back to make their court appearances. That's bad from a couple standpoints. First of all, it's demoralizing for people who make arrests. Secondly, it sends exactly the wrong message out to people from the home countries. What it says to them is, hey, if you're not from Mexico and you can sneak into the United States and you get caught at the border, all that's going to happen, most likely, is you're going to get released into the community. That is the opposite of deterrence. So we are now in the process this year of changing that dynamic 180 degrees. What we're going to do is we're going to move from "catch-and-release" to "catch-and-remove," meaning that people who we catch at the border are not going to be released on bail; they are going to be held until they are removed back to their home countries. And there are three elements to that strategy. One is more capacity, more beds to detain people. The second is faster turnover—the quicker we can get people back to their home countries, the quicker we clear a bed for somebody else. Look at it this way: If we can cut the time to return people to their home countries in half, it is the equivalent of doubling the beds. So that's a second element of the strategy. And the third element is deterrence. As we go to 100 percent catch-and-return, the word is going to get back to these originating countries that when you get caught, it doesn't mean you're going to be released, but you're going to have to make that trip all the way back to your originating country, you're going to lose all the money you spent, and you're going to be back at square one. And that kind of deterrence will ultimately, in fact, be a positive factor in helping us maintain a catch-and-return policy. It is a kind of a variation of a well-known law enforcement technique which we used in narcotics trafficking enforcement and all kinds of other law enforcement techniques in cities, which is to really send a message about deterrence by being very tough and rigorous in how we track down all across the board. So by using these three components—additional beds, streamlined removal, and reliance on deterrence -- we are moving from catch-and-release to catch-and-return this fiscal year. And we expect to see, as we continue to measure the flow of illegal migrants that we apprehend, some real indications of how well we're succeeding in this strategy. Let me tell you about one tool that we recently put into place that's going to help, in terms of catch-and-remove, and that is what we call "expedited removal." As you know, under the typical system of removing people from this country when they're here illegally, they go before an immigration judge. That can take 90 days or more. Expedited removal allows us, in certain circumstances, when we're at the border, to cut that by a half or even two-thirds, because we don't have to go through a judicial process. We can find illegal migrants without documents or false documents, and make an immediate determination that they're here in violation of the law and send them right back. And that's part of what lets us cut down on that time that we have to hold people in detention. So we are moving systematically—nationality by nationality—to apply expedited removal and catch-and-return across the border. With respect to Hondurans and Brazilians and Nicaraguan nationals apprehended across the entire Southwest border, they're all now in expedited removal, and that's allowed us to decrease the processing time from an average of 90 days to approximately 32 days. This week we added Guatemalans as another category to the expedited removal process. Just to give you some sense, Guatemalans totaled over 22,600 apprehensions in fiscal year '05, and for the first month-and-a-half of '06, we've already had 3,200 apprehensions. So this is a significant number of people. People from these countries of origination are now going to be in expedited removal. They will be detained until they're returned, and they will be returned home. And of course, a big piece of this is pressing foreign governments to work with us to speed that process of returning people back home. I'm pleased to say, for example, that we worked out an agreement with El Salvador a couple weeks ago that removes the cap that had previously been placed on the number of flights of non-criminal returning aliens we could send to El Salvador. So now we are not limited to 70 a week, but we can return as many non-criminal migrants as we possibly can get on airplanes. So that's a positive step forward. We've already, since we started the Secure Border Initiative, removed more than 3,000 non-Mexican illegal aliens using expedited removal, including approximately 300 Honduran nationals every week, which accounts for the highest number of non-Mexican illegal aliens that were removed over the past few years. So the bottom line is, this is a comprehensive strategy; there's no one single magic bullet that's going to take care of the problem, but a disciplined approach, a systems approach, a carefully measured approach, and an approach that uses all our tools. Interception, detention, removal -- all those things taken together is the recipe for getting us to control the border, which, of course, is the goal the President has set forth and the mission that we will carry out. Now to give you some more specifics about what that strategy is and how we're proceeding, I'm going to turn first to Chief Aguilar. Chief Aguilar: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Good morning. Basically, what I'm going to try and take you through is where we began the fiscal year for '05, where we went at the end of year '05, and where we're going to be progressing to. Last year, over in the Tucson and Yuma area of operations is where we had the greatest number of illegal alien apprehensions and narcotics apprehensions. For the entire fiscal year, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended over 1.1 million total illegal incursions between the ports of entry for fiscal year '05. Within that year, we also apprehended 1.2 million pounds of narcotics also coming in between the ports of entry. Within that group of 1.1 million, we had over 165,000 of the other than Mexicans that the Secretary spoke to a few minutes ago. That is the criticality of our ability to put these es of aliens into expedited removal. We also had a total of about 139,000 criminal aliens that were apprehended along our nation's border illegally coming back into the country. Now, when we approached the beginning of the fiscal year, we initiated the Arizona Border Control Initiative. What we added was resources, the enhancements, part of what the Secretary just spoke to. One very critical part is going to be the resourcing of the border enforcement equipment, personnel, technology that we're going to apply. What was added in Arizona last year was a total of 200 officers that were detailed into that specific area of operation. We doubled the size of our air force in Arizona, took it to over 40 aircraft that were operating within that given area of operation. Prior to this, we were operating with about 18 aircraft in that area. We also brought in an additional 300 agents into Tucson Sector. We added another 200 agents to the Yuma Sector, all in Arizona, for a total of over 500 additions to the state of Arizona. There was a resultant impact in that in that we did see a displacement into New Mexico, but we preempted that displacement by also moving very quickly with the Secretary's authority to move over 105 Border Patrol agents into the Deming Corridor area of operation. Now, what did we get as a result of this resourcing that we did? We reduced the Tucson numbers of apprehensions by over 11 percent for the fiscal year. Now, most of you will remember that when we started the Arizona Border Control Initiative, the point of the sphere, the area of focus was in the very dangerous area that we all know as the West Desert area of operation, the Sonoran Desert, where so many people were falling into distress and smugglers were concentrating their efforts. Within that specific area of operation, the apprehensions actually dropped by over 19 percent. Now, we constantly measure apprehensions, but we also measure other metrics that tell us and to help us gauge our successes—what we refer to as third party indicators: the number of police calls from other agencies that we get relative to illegal alien incursions; the number of crimes associated with a typical elevated level of illegal immigration coming into the country; the number of stolen vehicles associated with illegal immigration and narcotics trafficking—all of those dropped dramatically during fiscal year '05. The displacement that happened into the Deming Corridor area of operation was addressed through the 105 agents and the addition of aerial platforms into that Deming Corridor also. As we speak today, we still have 150 temporary agents detailed into Tucson; we have 105 detailed into the Deming Corridor area of operation—over 255 agents in that very critical area. Now, in addition to that, you will be hearing quickly, in the next week or so, the Secretary make the announcement on the fiscal year '06 number of agents that are going to be added through the rest of the fiscal year in those areas of operations, and in fact, along the whole Southwest border of operations. Now, in addition to what I just covered, we have actually now implem
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