Congress Debates What a Secure Border Looks Like

By David Martin Davies, Texas Public Radio News for Fronteras

SAN ANTONIO – As Washington D.C. prepares to tackle comprehensive immigration reform, a critical part of that deal is securing the southern border.  But at a congressional hearing Tuesday, it was clear there’s disagreement over what a secure border looks like.

Since 9/11 on the U.S. Southern Border the number of border agents doubled.  700 miles of fence was built and new technologies were deployed like surveillance cameras and unmanned drones.  And with all that Congressman Candice Miller, a Michigan Republican wants to know – is the border secure?

CANDICE MILLER:  “Instead of discussing entirely how we’ve just grown the Border Patrol, the CPB, the Coast Guard, or the different types of technologies that we’ve put on the border.  I want to examine what the American people have gotten for the investment that we have made.”

Miller chaired the Homeland Security border and maritime subcommittee hearing and dismissed Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s pronouncement that the border is more secure than ever.

MILLER:  “That is not a substitute for hard verifiable facts.”

Miller and other committee members like Mississippi Democrat, Congressman Bennie Thompson are pushing for a new metric to measure border security – called Border Condition Index.  But he says the nation needs to face facts that the border can never be 100 percent secure.

BENNIE THOMPSON:  “What is an acceptable level of risk at our borders while accepting that risk will never be zero.”

Congressman Jeff Duncan, a Republican from South Carolina, urged the committee to move away from statistics about the border and focus on the safety of people who live on Southern U.S. border.

JEFF DUNCAN:  “Until ranchers in Arizona who live along the border until they feel safe enough for them to leave their home and leave their children to go into town and buy a gallon of milk or whatever they need and come back –  the border isn’t secure.”

But Democrat El Paso congressman Beto O’rourke quoted a new Government Accountability Office report that said not only is the Southern border secure – it’s the safest segment of the nation.

BETO O’ROURKE:  “If you look at the border on whole from Brownsville to Laredo all the way to San Diego and you compare it to the rest of the U.S.  We are safer than the country on whole and I would argue that the rancher going to get his milk in Arizona is far safer than the single mom leaving her apartment in Washington D.C., Detroit or New Orleans.”

O’rouke pushed forward the facts that with record deportations, record low apprehensions, the record money spent and the doubling of the Border Patrol force – the border is the most secure that it’s ever been.  But it may still not be secure enough to satisfy the majority in Congress.