For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary Contact 202-282-8010 Washington, D.C.

Secretary Chertoff: Good morning everybody, I want to thank the Attorney General for graciously allowing us to use his wonderful, high-tech facility for the press conference. I know those of you who worried about the snow are happy to be here rather than up at Nebraska Avenue.

So, and on a more serious note, I am happy that the Attorney General has joined me in hosting today’s security, immigration and border briefing, because so much of what we do depends upon the cooperation of the Department of Justice and the very the fine work that the prosecutors at DOJ do in collaborating with us on enforcing the laws here.

You will remember that last August we announced a series of over two dozen reforms aimed at strengthening border security and immigration enforcement. And we indicated that we were going to come forward and report on a periodic basis on how we are doing. This was of course a response to Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which involves, of course, border security, immigration enforcement, but also finding a way to get what the need for workers that some sectors of the economy strongly feel. And also a way to address the issue of undocumented workers in the country in a way that brings them into compliance with the law and has them pay their debt to society.

Congress didn’t give us comprehensive immigration reform, so we are going to do what we can with the tools that we have, and frankly we have made progress in doing quite a bit, and that is what I am here to update you on.

Let me begin at the border, telling you where we are with respect to the various metrics that we use to chart our progress, including the building of additional fencing, hiring of border patrol agents, deployment of new technology, tightening your document requirements for admission to the country by land or by sea.

First, let’s start with fencing. I am delighted to say we have now exceeded 300 miles of fence on our southern border. As of yesterday, we have had a total of 302.4 miles of pedestrian fence and vehicle fence, which continues us on pace to hit our total of 670 miles of combined pedestrian and vehicle fencing in place by the end of this calendar year.

Now in building this fence we always seek the cooperation of landowners, state and local leaders and members of the border communities. We do interact. We are willing to listen to concerns. We are willing to have suggestions. On the other hand, as I’ve made clear, we are not willing to have endless debate, we are not willing to kick the can down the road indefinitely. We have made a commitment to the American people to get the job done, and we are going to live up to that.

A waving example of a win-win, where consultation has led to something that is both good for the local community and good for border enforcement.

Earlier this year I traveled to Hidalgo County, Texas to meet with community leaders who were concerned about the fence, but also knew that they had a need to build a levee at the river for flood control purposes. We were able to reach an agreement with local leaders to design our fence plans in a way that meshed with the local flood control needs, so that we are now going to produce basically a 16-foot wall at the border that will serve both to protect against possible floods from the river in that area of Texas, but will also serve as a very powerful barrier against drug smuggling and human smuggling in Texas. This is a great example of how those who are willing to engage with us will find our receptive ears and a willingness to have creative solutions.

We will continue to try to accommodate landowners, and continue to try to find ways to kill two birds with one stone. But I have to say this, this is not an invitation to endless amounts of discussion about it, or endless amounts of complaining, that will not deter us from completing the job that we had promised the American people we will complete this year. We have also continued to expand the border patrol. We currently have other 15,400 agents on board, and we are on track to have over 18,000 by the end of this year. This again, will be the largest expansion in the history of the border patrol, doubling the number of agents as compared to what we had on hand when the President took office in 2001.

As you know, we have been carefully evaluating our P-28 technology prototype in a portion of the Tucson sector of the border in Arizona, and we have now fully accepted that P28 technology deployment.

I have personally witnessed the value of this system, and I have spoken directly to the border patrol agents who are involved in operating that system over the last few months and who have seen it produce actual results in terms of entifying and allowing the apprehension of people who were illegally smuggling across the border.

Now, this is merely the first step in a more comprehensive program, and it’s a program that uses a wide variety of tools. We anticipate going from about six to 40 ground-based mobile surveillance systems throughout the border this coming calendar year, and that is to say 2008.

We are bringing on board a fourth unmanned aerial system, and we have plans to bring two more on board. All of this is part of an integrated, high-tech approach to the border. No one fix fits all, and we are going to adapt to a precise mix of technology and infrastructure to what is required at each part of the border.

But what we are doing is using all of the tools at our disposal to get the maximum leverage for our border patrol agents who have a very tough and important job to do.

Obviously, a critical element when you apprehend people is what to do with them. And here I want to pay special tribute to the fine work that the Department of Justice has done in supporting us through a program called Operation Streamline, which brings people who cross the border illegally into the criminal justice system to prosecute them either for misdemeanors when they are making a first illegal entry, or for felonies if they enter again after deportation.

Under this program, individuals who are caught at certain designated high-traffic, high-risk zones are prosecuted and if convicted are jailed. This has an unbelievable return effect. In Yuma sector, over the last -- of the first quarter of 2008 fiscal year, which is to say October through December of last calendar year the Department of Justice prosecuted over 1,200 cases. And as a consequence, apprehension rates dropped nearly 70 percent.

What we see, both statistically and anecdotally, is that when people who cross the border illegally are brought to face the reality that they are committing a crime, even if it is just a misdemeanor, that has a huge impact on their willingness to try again and on the willingness of others to break the law coming across the border.

Just in Laredo, in the first 45 days of our Operation Streamline activity there, we saw a reduction in apprehensions of 33 percent. This program works, and the fact that we move it around and focus in on high-tech areas magnifies its deterrent impact. Overall, if we look back at fiscal year 2007 as I previously indicated, we experienced a 20 percent reduction in apprehensions for the entire southern border. This trend has continued into the first quarter of fiscal year 2008, when southwest border apprehensions were down 16 percent and nationwide down 18 percent from the first quarter of the prior year. In other words, the trend is continuing in a positive direction.

There is one last metric that shows success, and it’s an unfortunate metric: an increase in violence against the border patrol up 31 percent last year. As I have reluctantly, but consistently predicted, as we strike at criminal businesses they are going to strike back. They are going to fight with us to preserve their illegal activities, and they are going to fight with each other in order to carve up a shrinking pie of ill-gotten gains.

Just this month, the border patrol discovered a piece of wire that had been stretched across a road between a double fencing, so that it could be pulled and literally decapitate an agent if the agent was riding in an open vehicle like an ATV or something of that sort. We take these threats very seriously, and I am going to be down in Mexico next weekend and I look forward to continuing our cooperation with Mexican authorities as we jointly attack violence at the border and in the areas around the border.

Finally, as long as we are talking about the borders, let’s talk about the ports of entry. You know it doesn’t make a lot of sense to really build barriers between ports of entry if we then open the ports of entry to all comers on what I have called an honor system for entering the country. An honor system is wonderful in school, but it is naïve and dangerous at the border when there are many people who want to get into this country for dangerous and criminal purposes. As a consequence, and consistent with recommendation of the 9-11 commission, in January we ended the process of accepting oral declarations alone at land and sea ports of entry. And we began the process of tightening up strictly on the kinds of documents that can be presented at the land ports of entry.

Now this has a very positive result, it reduces the number of false claims of U.S. citizenship and makes it easier for the border patrol to evaluate documents to see if they are fraudulent or not, because they have got a smaller pool of documents to look at.

Just in the last couple of weeks, we picked up a person wanted on a homicide warrant when they presented their passport at a port of entry in the southwest. And the reason that person had to present a passport was because we were contracting the number of kinds of documents that were going to be acceptable. That is the exact, predictable and very salutatory result strengthening our security at the border.

Now I know there was a lot of heartburn about whether this would cause tremendous amounts of stress at the ports of entry. And we implemented this change over the last month in a deliberate way with a lot of messaging, and with the cooperation of local communities as well as our border patrol. Earlier this month, I visited the San Luis port of entry in Arizona and saw these new procedures firsthand. The truth is, the real news here is there was no news. There were not significant changes in wait times, as we measured them compared to wait times in prior periods. We have gotten close to 95 percent compliance on average with the new requirements. People get it and they want to get it. And so we are going to continue moving forward as part of a comprehensive program to strengthen security at the border.

The second element of this of course is what is the economic magnet that is bringing people into the country to work illegally? The answer is jobs. And therefore, work site enforcement and interior enforcement are critical elements of a strategy to deal with this issue of illegal migration.

In fiscal year 2007, ICE made 863 criminal arrests including 92 individuals who were in the employer/supervisory chain. We also made over 4,000 administrative arrests. Most of these arrests are forentity theft. And entity theft is not only a crime with respect to immigration laws, but it is a crime that hurts real people.

Let me give you some examples, some specific real-life examples of what we have done in the last year with respect to employer and employee work site enforcement actions. On February 7 of this year, 57 illegal aliens were arrested during a work site enforcement operation conducted at Universal Industrial Sales in Lindon, Utah. ICE forwarded roughly 30 cases to the Utah County Attorneys Office for criminal prosecution for offenses such asentity theft, forgery and document fraud. And the U.S. Attorney also unsealed two indictments charging a company and its human resources director with harboring illegal aliens and inducing or encouraging them to stay in the U.S. illegally.

In January of this year, a federal jury convicted a former human resources director at a poultry plant in Butterfield, Missouri of harboring an illegal alien and inducing an illegal alien to enter or reside in the U.S. Under federal statues this person faces up to 10 years in prison without parole. Another formal employer recently plead guilty to aggravatedentity theft. A total of 136 illegal aliens were arrested as part of this investigation intoentity theft, social security fraud and immigration-related violations at the plant.

In March of last year, 2007, a textile product company in New Bedford, Massachusetts was raided, and the owner and three other managers were arrested and charged with conspiring to encourage or induce illegal aliens to reside in the U.S. and to hire illegal aliens. Another person was charged in a separate complaint with knowing transfer of fraud humanentification documents. Approximately 320 illegal workers were arrested on administrative charges as well.

And also in March of 2007, the owner of an Indiana business that performed construction services in seven Midwest states plead guilty to violation relating to the harboring of illegal aliens and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He also forfeited $1.4 million. These are the kinds of cases that have high impact on those who would hire and employ undocumented and illegal aliens often facilitated throughentity theft and document fraud.

I am delighted to say as part of our effort to continue to make it less appealing for people to break the law, we will soon publish a regulation with the Department of Justice to increase civil fines on employers as we announced last August. This is again, a way to keep that pressure up to make sure people are compliant with the law.

A couple of other brief things before I turn it over to the Attorney General. As important as it is to punish law breaking, we have got to make it easy to follow the law. There has got to be a path to legality as well as punishment for illegality. And so we want to continue to move forward, to get our no-match regulation out there. We are very close to publishing our new no-match rule, which we think will address the issues raised by the court as a consequence of an ACLU lawsuit last year, which was designed to make it impossible for us to tell employers a very simple, common sense principle that when you get information that someone may have something questionable about their social security number/identity, you should inquire further, and that you cannot hire illegal aliens. And we are looking forward to getting this issue resolved in the very near future.

Likewise, we are continuing to promote the use of E-Verify. The state of Arizona, I think, in the last couple of days had its new rule requiring E-Verify use sustained by the federal courts, and we are beginning to see that illegal workers are picking up and leaving, because they recognize this system is an impediment to their continued illegal activities and illegal employment in this country.

Nationally, we are adding 1800 new E-Verify users every week, that is the marketplace speaking. That is employers saying they want to get on board with this. We have over 53,000 employers now using E-Verify, which is more than double what we had fiscal year 2007. And more than 1.7 million new hires have been queried this fiscal year under the system. This is a good news story.

Now the federal government needs to lead by example, and in the coming weeks we are going to issue a proposed rule requiring federal contractors to use E-Verify. This will significantly expand the use of E-Verify, and continue to build capabilities that will help peopl