Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to bring to the attention of the body another group of people that I would like to bring into what we are now calling the homeland heroes. These are folks whose daily…
Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to bring to the attention of the body another group of people that I would like to bring into what we are now calling the homeland heroes. These are folks whose daily lives confront them with incredible stresses and challenges far different than what their business had provided them with to begin with.
They started out ranching, and that is a difficult task in and of itself. But after generations in that particular industry and living in the same area on the border of Mexico, living in Arizona, many of the people who reside there are now living in what we can, I think, accurately describe as a war zone. Every week I have been bringing to the House the names and pictures of those people that I want to induct into this homeland heroes hall of fame, I guess is the way we will describe it.
Tonight I want to talk about Rob and Sue Krentz, who own and operate a ranch located on the far southeastern corner of Arizona, about 12 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border and 25 miles northeast of the city of Douglas. They are third-generation ranchers. This ranch has been in their family since 1907.
Rob and Susie Krentz have three children they raised on that ranch. Their two sons, Andrew and Frank, attend New Mexico State University, and their daughter, Kyle, is a high school senior.
The Krentz family story is similar in many ways to the experiences of hundreds of other ranchers in this border region. Yet to them and their children it is unique and it is personal and dreadful in the impact it has had on their lives and the future viability of their way of life as ranchers.
Just one tiny statistic that begins to tell the story of what these folks face every single day. In the month of November, 2002, in the Tucson Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, which includes Cochise County, where this the Krentz ranch is located, the Border Patrol apprehended 23,000 border crossers.
That was in the month of November. It is anybody's guess as to how many people actually come across, but many, many people would suggest that the ratio is just about maybe one in five, and that is a very conservative estimate, that for every one person we apprehend on the border, at least five get through. Again, I think it is closer to one in ten, but I will accept even this
very, very conservative estimate, that for every one we get at the border apprehended, five go by them.
This means that in just the month of November near this ranch and over their property, when we had 23,000 apprehended, using the conservative estimate of one to five, it meant that 115,000 people cross the border illegally, that same area. We are just talking about one little chunk of the border, the Tucson Sector.
That means if we project that out over the course of a year that 1,300,000 people come across that border in that sector. I guarantee that is a conservative estimate, but let us use it. One million three hundred thousand people coming across that border and coming across the lands of the people that live there, including the Krentz family.
I had the opportunity to spend some time down there just a few weeks ago, and I can attest to the fact that on any given evening one can watch dozens and dozens of illegal aliens trespassing across the land. The Krentz family will call the Border Patrol to come and intercept them. Sometimes the Border Patrol will come; sometimes they will not.
Mr. Krentz estimates that over the past 5 years his family has suffered a loss of at least $300,000 a year due to cut fences, stolen and damaged vehicles and farm equipment and damage to the rangeland itself. This is very, very delicate land. It is desert land. It is something that has to be conserved and protected; and when we have got 1,300,000 coming across there every year, believe me, it is not being conserved and protected. It is being destroyed.
The Krentz ranch has 1,000 head of cattle. The continual movement of people across that domain constantly disturbs the livestock, impacting their own value, and sometimes somethings happen that are even worse. In February of last year, for instance, a calf was butchered by illegal alien trespassers. Two men responsible were caught. They were tried. They were found guilty. They served a total of 51 days in jail. They were also ordered to pay $200 in restitution to the Krentz ranch. The Krentz ranch has not seen a cent of that money; and, of course, our best guess is they will not because these people have been released. They came back into the population either up here or have returned to Mexico.
These losses that are estimated in the neighborhood of $300,000 include damage and disease that comes into the water tanks and the waterlines on their ranch. The family and their employees cannot drink out of the water tanks any longer because of the disease that happens to be in the water on the land brought in by illegal alien trespassers and the damage done by purposeful, deliberate vandalism.
The estimated value of the water that has been lost on their property to date is $4 million. In June of 2002, the Krentz brothers discovered two separate instances of damaged waterlines. Illegal aliens had broken the two-inch PBC waterline in order to get drinking water. The Krentz ranch waterline runs for 40 miles and is one of the best gravity-flow waterlines in the State of Arizona. Because of these two breaks in the long pipeline, several hundred thousand gallons of precious water were wasted.
The Krentz family continually has to deal with threats, physical threats, from illegal border crossers. Recently, a family member came upon a group of 39 trespassers and was threatened by them when he asked them to turn around and get off his land. He returned home, called the Border Patrol, and they did come and apprehend them. But we both know what happens is they put them into a revolving door near the border and in a few days or in a few hours many times they are coming right back across the border.
The Krentz family members are not vigilantes. They do not try to apprehend illegal aliens by force. They do not carry arms for their own protection. They will always call the Border Patrol when they observe trespassers. They and the other ranchers are trying to follow the law and work with the Border Patrol, and all they want from their own government is to enforce the law as well as to protect them and their property, and that is what we owe them. I mean, they are only asking the minimum, protect their lives and property from people coming across that border, from this invasion.
And there are no two ways about it. That is an appropriate word to use to describe what is happening on our southern border especially. It is an invasion, and they are asking their government to protect them from that invasion.
I want to salute Rob and Susie Krentz, Phil and Carrie Krentz as homeland heroes who are bearing the brunt of an invasion of over a million illegal aliens crossing our southern border. We need to understand their plight. We have a moral obligation to do something about it.
Now for the rest of my time I would like to talk about another aspect of the issue of illegal immigration, and we are going to be doing this for the next several weeks, going to be taking this issue and breaking it down into, I think, more understandable parts. We are going to be explaining its various aspects because I will assure the Members this is one of the most complex, this is one of the most challenging aspects of domestic policy. It has ramifications that go on and on and on. They will affect every aspect of our life.
Massive immigration into this country, as I have said on many occasions, combined with a pernicious multiculturalist attitude and philosophy in this country is a cocktail mix of dangerous components. The one component we are going to talk about tonight, the one part of this picture that we are going to focus on this evening is the issue of our national security, the threat that exists to the United States of America as a result of the fact that our borders are porous and that people can and do cross them at will.
There was a time that the United States of America could be seen as somewhat naive, and because we were protected by two oceans we felt that the world was a place of general safety for us and that we really did not have to be too concerned about borders. There was always illegal immigration into the United States. That has certainly been the case, but it never reached a level that posed a threat to the Nation's existence.
It now has reached that level, not just, as I say, because of the fact that we have far more people coming across these borders than ever before in the Nation's history and into our ports and into our airports, people who come here legally but then overstay their visas, which comprise about 40 percent of the maybe 13 to 20 million people in this country here who are here illegally, but the southern border alone, as I mentioned earlier, is a place of enormous illegal immigration. The numbers are just staggering.
What is very, very worrisome is that in the last several years there has not just been an increase in the number of Mexican nationals coming across the border, but there has been an alarming number of people who are classified as OTM. This is ``other than Mexican'' coming across our border, coming from all over the world. This phenomenon has been observed and has been noted by the Border Patrol, and they have talked about it. They have indicated that there is a change going on and that this is a strange situation because, all of a sudden, through that southern border and our northern border with Canada, we are seeing people come from many Middle Eastern countries, from Asian countries, many from South America, specifically from a place called the tri- border region.
Let me tell the Members about this. The tri-border region is an area that is really the borders of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, and there is a very large group of Muslims in that area, a very large Muslim population in that area.
Over the last decade or so, without much attention being paid to it, there has been an enormous increase in the number of Muslims living in South America, and even in Canada. Many of them, in the millions, live in this tri-border area. It has become a place through which now we are seeing a great number of people transiting from Middle Eastern countries into Brazil, getting Brazilian documents, then coming north into the United States through Mexico.
When we intercept them, we chalk them down as Brazilian. But we are
finding that they are not really Brazilian. For the most part, they are Middle Easterners coming from places throughout the Middle East. Brazil is a very eclectic country. It is a place where it is difficult to look at someone and say, you are from Brazil. It is not that easy. So people who are Middle Eastern can easily be characterized as Brazilian, especially if they are carrying Brazilian passports and Brazilian papers.
But we have had this enormous increase in the last couple of years, it goes off the charts, of Brazilians intercepted at the boarders. It is up in the thousands.
Our Border Patrol people are saying, what is this all about? How come we are seeing so many people from this area? It is because that is the area that actually provides the funnel from the Middle East through South America up into the United States across the Mexican border.
As a matter of fact, there is a statement that I think is certainly worthy of us spending a few minutes on here. Here is the quote. It comes from the National Commission on Terrorism established in the year 2000: ``The massive flows of people across the U.S. borders makes exclusion of all foreign terrorists impossible.''
Now, this is not an amazing quote, not a very profound quote, but something we should pay attention to. This was a commission established to look into the issue of terrorism. What they are essentially saying is, because so many millions of people are coming across our borders illegally, that we cannot possibly hope to defend ourselves from terrorists coming into the United States.
Is that not an incredible statement, when you think of it? On the one hand, it is completely logical. It is certainly truthful, we all know that is true, because the ``massive flows of people across the U.S. borders,'' this makes the exclusion of all foreign terrorists impossible. ``Duh,'' as the kids say, sure that is the case.
What are we going to do about it? What kind of a challenge does this pose to us? This is 2000. This is before 9/11, remember. So, this particular statement, along with the entire commission report, as far as I know, was tossed into File 13, because no one wants to hear this. No one wants to deal with this.
No one in this body, no one in the administration, really wants to tackle this issue, because, you see, they know that if you try to stop people from coming across that border, if we actually try to defend our borders with our military, which is absolutely necessary, which any country on the face of this Earth would do in these circumstances, any sane policy would tell us that if you are going to be fighting wars halfway around the world and you are doing it today with the new kind of threat we face, that it is not just the war on the battlefields of Iraq that we have to be worried about; it is also the United States of America, the homeland; and just creating a Department of Homeland Defense does not in fact create a defense of the homeland.
It may create the illusion of a defense by the name, but that is it. Because there is no way that that department, funded at the levels that are anticipated, could possibly deal with this one statement, ``the massive flows across the United States border makes it impossible to exclude terrorists.''
They could not deal with it. They need technology. We need the military. We need the military on the border. Maybe at some time in the future we will have a homeland defense agency that is so competent, so technically advanced, using the best kind of monitoring devices and cameras, and even the low-tech stuff of things called walls and fences; yes, fences. You know, we actually can employ that low-tech type of device to stop a lot of what is happening here.
But we will not even do that, and the reason is because we do not want to stop illegal immigration. That is the dirtiest little secret that passes around this place periodically: We do not wish to stop illegal immigration. That is this government's policy. It is to allow that flow, for a variety of reasons.
On one side we have a political party, the Democratic Party, that sees that flow as a source of support for their political party, that eventually those people will turn into supporters of the Democratic Party, as tradition has certainly proven, that immigrants into the United States, at least for a generation maybe or so, tend to vote Democratic. So the Democratic Party sees that as a source of support.
They also, of course, have to cater to a very strong minority group within their own party who wants open borders, who wants illegal immigration.
On our side, unfortunately, we have a problem also, because there are a lot of people who look at illegal immigration as a source of cheap labor. I certainly hear from a lot of folks who tell me all the time that they would not be able to open their business, their dry cleaning establishment, their restaurant, their hotel, unless they had illegal aliens working for them.
This is amazing. Today, in the Denver paper I was reading, flying out here from home, it talked about a job fair, a job fair held in Denver over the weekend. Something like 6,000 people attended. There were maybe 400 jobs available. Six thousand people attended, maybe 400 jobs available.
But I hear from people all the time that tell me they simply cannot hire any ``American willing to do the work.'' I have a neighbor who has been unemployed for over a year. He was at first employed in the high- tech industry, very, very competent individual, very significant job with a very good salary. He has been unemployed. That industry, everybody knows what is happening to it. He is right now doing data entry work and driving a limo to try to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. I hear all the time that we do not have Americans who will do these jobs, these other jobs.
There was another article in the paper not too long ago in Denver that talked about the fact that one restaurant, the Luna Restaurant, a Mexican restaurant on 38th and about Lowell, put an ad in the paper for a $3-an-hour waiter position. They had 600 applicants the first day for that one job. Six hundred applicants for one job at $3 an hour. Are all 600 of those applicants illegal aliens? I do not think so.
I think there are a lot of American citizens who want those jobs. I think right now American citizens are in competition with those people coming in across the border, but in fact employers want to pay people less. That is natural. Unfortunately, many employers want to exploit their employees. We see accounts of this happening all the time. So, they want illegal immigration, they want porous borders. They do not want anybody stopping their flow, even if this means that it is something that could pose a danger to this country, and it does pose a danger to the Nation.
It is a very immediate danger, because, you see, when you cannot distinguish at the border, which no one can do, nobody has shown me a way today to distinguish between that illegal immigrant coming in who is just coming to do the job no one else wants to do, who wants to be a restaurant worker or whatever, noone can distinguish just looking at these people, of course, what they are coming for. You can't say, ``that one looks like he is just looking for a job, but that one over there, they look like they might be coming to do something bad.''
You cannot tell. You have to secure the borders and have everybody coming into this country legally through a process that allows us to identify them, find out what they are coming in for, how long they are going to be here and for what purpose, and find out when they leave. You need internal enforcement in the United States of our immigration laws to make this thing work.
So it is not just the border where we need to have the military, but we have to have the INS using its resources inside the country to identify people who are here illegally and remove them.
I absolutely do not want us, I am not asking for, we never have proposed, using the military for interior enforcement of law. There is a law against that. It is sometimes referred to as the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. That is not what I am talking about.
I am talking about using the military to augment our homeland defense forces on our borders, at our ports of entry, at our coasts, until that Homeland Defense Agency is ready to take on that job itself.
We can do it. We do not have to have people strung out arm-in-arm across
5,000 miles of border. That is not what we are talking about. It would take relatively few people but people who are trained and have the technology. That is what the military offers us, training and technology, which can be employed for that purpose.
Yes, people say to me all the time, we have got this war going on in Iraq, and are you saying you would use troops on the border? I say, yes. Yes, I would use troops on the border. Because, of course, we only make life more dangerous for everybody. There is not a soul who does not think life is more dangerous for the average American as a result of us going to war in Iraq, at least at the outset of this thing.
I pray to God that our efforts in Iraq will be successful. I hope they are successful immediately. I do not want to see another person hurt or injured. I certainly do not want to see an American soldier in that situation. I want them home as quickly as possible. They are fighting a just war. We have to win it. I hope we win it soon. Then I do believe the world will be safer.
But I know this: That the threat of terrorism will increase as a result of our efforts in Iraq. Even our own government admits that. We went to a heightened state of the alert status immediately upon going to war. Everybody knows that is the case. Everybody knows it is more dangerous right now.
So, yes, I would say use troops on our border, because in fact that is our first line of defense. That is exactly where we should be employing some of our military assets.
We do not need many. We do not need hundreds of thousands of troops. I was on the border, the northern border, observing an operation that used 100 Marines to control 100 miles. That was the test, 100 Marines, 100 miles. And do you know what? When you combine their efforts with the Border Patrol and the Forest Service personnel on that border, it worked.
I saw them interdict people coming across that border on ATVs, all terrain vehicles, and people flying small planes across the border. Believe me, they would have gone unnoticed. It is the most rugged terrain you have seen up on the northern border, in this case just a few miles north of Bonners Ferry, Idaho.
We can do it. Let us extrapolate here tonight and say 100 Marines, 100 miles. You have 5,000 miles, you employ 5,000 troops. It would be more difficult than that, I recognize, but it would not be that much more difficult, and it would not take that many more troops.
If nothing else, we can train them there. Our troops have to be trained somewhere. The Marines told me that that was the best training experience they have ever had. I was told that by the Marine commander of the unit that that was the best training they had ever had, because it was real time, they were trying to stop real bad guys coming across that border, and it was the most rugged terrain you could possibly imagine. So, if nothing else, we should be training on the border.
It could serve two purposes: The training of our troops and also the interdiction of people coming across this border illegally.
Let us go to some of the specific instances that we have witnessed here in the recent past. Here is an interesting one. Wadih El Hage, he was arrested in the Saguaro National Park for possession of an automatic weapon, an AK-47 rifle. He was using this AK-47 for target practice. On September 15, 1998, Wadih testified before a Federal grand jury which was investigating the bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam. Several days later, he was charged with perjury. On October 7, he was indicted in connection with the embassy bombings. He was subsequently convicted for both offenses and is now serving a life sentence.
Now, what happened? How they got him is that he was observed and arrested after he had just come across the border; he was observed in the national park by a park ranger. He was testifying, Wadih was testifying at this trial in September and he was saying that he has never fired a weapon, he has no arms, he does not know why he was being harassed. A Border Patrol agent came across this guy's picture and he said, you know what? I remember that guy. I remember arresting him not too long ago in the Saguaro National Park. And you know what? He was practicing with an AK-47. So that testimony ended up, the testimony and evidence provided by the Border Patrol ended up with this conviction for perjury in September; and later they were able to connect this gentleman to the embassy bombings.
Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a 23-year-old Palestinian, 1996 arrested twice within 6 days for crossing over the Canadian border illegally. Both times turned over to the INS who released him back across the border and, of course, the revolving door, he came right back down. In 1997 he was arrested a third time coming across the border illegally, and later arrested in New York in a plot to blow up the New York subways.
This guy, talk about a lucky catch, my colleagues may remember something about him. Ahmed Rassem, December 1999, Ahmed Rassem was arrested with 1,000 pounds of explosives and four timers, the timers are right here in the picture at the bottom. He was arrested at the Olympic National Park, Washington. He chose Port Angeles because of the lack of technology and the manpower there. He was convicted of participating in a plot to blow up Los Angeles Airport on New Year's Eve, 1999. Now, these are three we got.
Remember what I said earlier that for everybody we actually find, actually interdict at the border, for every one of them, at least five people get across. Now, let me tell my colleagues, those are folks who get across and they are the most unsophisticated and perhaps unskilled in the manners and mechanisms that could be employed to come across the border. These are folks, many of them, that are just simply looking for the jobs that are available. They get by on a ratio of 5 to 1. Can we imagine how much more, what the ratio is, I should say, for people who are a little more sophisticated in the smuggling business? How many more Ahmed Rassems got through?
We know that the Center for Immigration Studies has indicated that we have 115,000 illegal immigrants from various Middle Eastern nations who are currently residing in the United States, as many as 115,000 from Middle Eastern nations. Day after day after day we are confronted by news stories of very scary folks coming across the border, sometimes doing very scary things.
This is an interesting article. This was in the Tucson paper not too long ago. An Arizona couple has discovered a diary written in Arabic in a backpack apparently dropped on their property by an illegal alien entering the United States, reports the Sierra Vista Herald Review. According to the report, Walter Kolbe, he owns a ranch down there, was chasing some wild animals away from his home last week when he stumbled upon the backpack. Not an unusual occurrence on his property, since it is a path used routinely by illegal aliens coming from Mexico. He brought it home, but did not immediately open the backpack. After going away for a weekend, Kolbe's wife, May, looked into the backpack and discovered the diary. He says, I found it about a hundred yards from the house near a barbed wire fence. I was just going to throw it in the trash. According to Mr. Kolbe and, by the way, his brother serves in the House of Representatives here from Arizona, most of the writing was in Arabic, though there was some Spanish writing as well.
When I was down on that border in that same area, I came across a lot of material in what are called pickup sites. What these are are places where a large number of people will gather after walking into the United States illegally, they will gather, and it is near a road always, sometimes a dirt road, sometimes a paved road, and they will await transportation northward. It is all arranged, it is taken care of, because now this has turned into a very big business. And the people who used to be selective and only were involved with the importation of drugs are now importing people because it has become very lucrative. And in these pickup sites, as I say, there will be thousands of people gathered and there is trash strewn everywhere, lots and lots of backpacks, as is evidenced here, and lots of materials laying all over the ground.
Not too long ago in this same area we found a prayer rug, a rug that is used
by Muslims to conduct prayer ceremonies. It was found, by the way, at one of these pickup sites. There are all kinds of instances where we have found Arabic materials, Arabic passports, Arabic papers, accoutrements in these pickup sites.
Now, there is a road not too far from Douglas, Arizona, that is referred to by the locals in the area as the Arab Road. And when you ask them, what do you mean by that, they say, well, because the Arabs are willing to pay so much more to come into the United States, up to $30,000 per person, that they are sometimes transported separately. They will not come in through the same pipeline as the Mexican nationals. Some of these, the high-paying folks, they will be brought across a different area, brought in a little nicer, like going first class. They pay a little more so that they can come in with a little less possibility of heat exhaustion or dropping dead in the desert from exposure because they will pay, as I say, a lot more money. But they are coming into the United States with purposes that we know are the most diabolical, to do something here that threatens our safety. They are coming across the border because it is the easiest way to get into the United States if you want to do something bad, because our borders are undefended. They are unprotected. It is incredible. Certainly it is something to go down in future history books. I just hope that those chapters will not be titled something like ``The Last Days of the American Experience.''
I see I am joined tonight on the floor by a friend, a member of our caucus who has been a champion, is the best way I can describe it, ever since I came to the Congress of the United States and have been pushing this issue. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) preceded me here and certainly was laboring in this vineyard before I ever got here and continues to offer his observations, which I invite him to share with us this evening.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. He brings up an incident I recall well, and I am glad he did bring it to our attention. It was a very emotional time when the father of some young man that was lost in the
World Trade Center did in fact say exactly that, that those people were allowed to be in the United States because they were able to swim in this sea of illegal immigration and they were undetectable.
This is why when people talk to us about immigration, and we often have people respond when we start talking about the national security issues. I have been in Mexico and have had Members of the Mexican Government say, you know, none of those people were Mexican that committed those crimes. Of course not. It is the fact that we are only as strong as our weakest link. If we cannot control our borders because we are trying to let illegal immigrants come across from Mexico who are not trying to do anything really bad to us, we cannot possibly hope to protect ourselves from those who are trying to do something bad. That is the point here. That is why we are talking about this as a national security issue.
My friend, the gentleman from Virginia, mentioned this Newsweek article. He has learned that 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed told interrogators that he discussed bringing operatives through the Mexican border. They worry about these people coming across, suicide bombings at soft targets like malls, public transportation.
Another worry, of course, is that a terrorist could acquire shoulder- fired missiles and shoot them at passenger planes. Of course, any number of horrendous things could happen. Our minds could run wild on all the things that could happen in this country because we are an open and free society. We do not want to change that.
The best way to avoid having an overreaction in the United States and trying to pass laws that we worry about in terms of what we will do to civil liberties, as Members know, we get lots of mail on the PATRIOT Act, and whatever kind of legislation that may be being formulated here as an addition to the PATRIOT Act. There are concerns, and concerns I share, about overreaching government activity. But one way to avoid that, Mr. Speaker, is to protect our borders. It is to stop, to the extent humanly possible, them from getting here to begin with.
Maybe we will not be able to make it absolutely secure. No, in fact, I know we cannot. Even if we do all the things I and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goode) and other Members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus are suggesting, we cannot make it perfect; but it is our best effort we are supposed to exert here in this Congress. That is the best we can do.
If we have something happen even after we have done it all, we can at least say we have tried everything. That is our responsibility. We cannot continue to ignore the existence of this threat to our very existence.
Other recent news, the Nation's biggest commercial nuclear power facility faces a possible terrorist threat. It just came out. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Thursday, he told the Senate Committee on Armed Services that terrorists may have targeted the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant in Arizona. He said he would not go into details about intelligence reports concerning the plans that may include an attack on the plant.
The Washington Times reported Thursday that terrorists have targeted the Arizona plant, and security officials are looking for Iraqi government sleeper cells that might carry out the attack. The threat to the facility came from sensitive information indicating the plant was targeted by Middle Eastern terrorists who were not further identified.
Earlier this week on our Florida coast, a Cuban Coast Guard vessel slipped in, it was a military vessel, got into Key West without ever being detected. These things go on and on.
In Miami, U.S. authorities made a fresh and urgent call for public help yesterday to find a Saudi-born man who could pose what they termed a very, very serious threat as part of an al Qaeda plot against the United States. Stepping up their search with an appeal to the U.S. Muslim community for information, the FBI said Adnan El Shukrijumah was a friend of a man now serving prison time for plotting to blow up a Florida power plant. The agency said that this individual is not charged with a crime but is being sought for questioning, involved with al Qaeda activities.
Just a couple of days ago as Baghdad was being bombed, it was reported on Fox News and Sky News as well as Worldnet Daily that there was a search going on for six Iraqis in either northern Mexico or the U.S. Southwest. They were said to be carrying toxic materials requiring temperature control. That means they are either biological or radiological. Either way, they are ominous and dangerous. According to tips by undercover investigators, the search had been going on for 2 to 3 days on the Mexican side, and now it is starting on the United States side.
We could go on through stories like this all night long. Long after I have run out of time to deliver those stories they could be available, because they are there. When we talk about immigration and immigration reform, we have to understand the importance of this concept.
It is not just an issue of jobs; it is not just an issue of acculturation, of integration into the society, of balkanization of America. All of those things are disconcerting. It is not just an issue of American citizens who are out of work and being displaced by people coming here from foreign countries. All those things are serious issues.
It is not just the issue of the amount of drugs coming across both borders and into our ports every single day. We talk about harmful substances and dangerous substances. Certainly the tons and tons and tons of drugs that are being brought in by illegal smugglers, by illegal aliens carrying things on their shoulders and backpacks, in those backpacks it could be 60 pounds of marijuana, sarin gas; it could be all kinds of very, very ugly things.
All of those things are serious consequences, serious threats, I should say, serious issues. But we decided to start this series of discussions tonight with this one specific one of the danger to the country posed by porous borders because of the threat of terrorism that is so real.
I hope and pray that we never have to stand on this floor and say, I told you so, I told you, unless we secure those borders, something horrible is going to happen. Somebody is going to waltz across them and do something very, very bad. Do Members know what is going to happen? Not only are we going to be rushing to the borders to try and do something, but we are going to be overreacting, probably, internally. There are going to be threats to civil liberties that will develop as a result of some incident that occurs in this country.
I hate to think about this, and I hope and pray I am absolutely wrong in this prediction, but it is certainly not out of the question to suggest that this could happen. We are told by Homeland Security Director Ridge and everybody else in positions of authority to expect such a thing, to expect an event. Well, at least if this event occurs, let us at least be able to turn to our constituents and say, we have tried everything we can do. We have committed to you, when we have asked you for a vote and you have asked us to adhere to the Constitution and uphold that Constitution, we have tried to do that. The part of the Constitution that specifically refers to the protection of life and property, we have tried to do it. That is what I want to be able to say. We cannot ensure perfect security and safety, but we can try our best. That is the least we can do is the best that we can do, and we are not anywhere near it, I am sorry to say.
Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. (R-VA)