Replies

Please post a link to corroborate your initial claim (now greatly changed to include other things) that employer fines/arrests have decreased BECAUSE funding for Border Enforcement has increased.

You've posted full facts? Hardly.

Documentation required from me but not by you, though repeatedly asked? Fine. Here's some more (and I'd appreciate the courtesy if you would finally do the same, as asked for repeatedly regarding my first paragraph).

Bush budget scraps 9,790 border patrol agents
President uses law's escape clause to drop funding for new homeland security force

Michael Hedges, Houston Chronicle
Wednesday, February 9, 2005

....Officially approved by Bush on Dec. 17 after extensive bickering in Congress, the National Intelligence Reform Act included the requirement to add 10,000 border patrol agents in the five years beginning with 2006....
But Bush's proposed 2006 budget, revealed Monday, funds only 210 new border agents.
The shrunken increase reflects the lack of money for an army of border guards and the capacity to train them, officials said.

Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
March 16, 2005

We are seeing an increase of 137 percent in immigrants who are from countries other than Mexico. These immigrants, which are called OTMs, "other than Mexicans," are coming into our country in the largest numbers we have ever seen. But due to a lack of resources, they are often caught and released, or they are not caught at all.
Recognizing our serious border vulnerability, Congress passed the intelligence reform bill last year and authorized an increase of 10,000 Border Patrol agents over 5 years. It included provisions to add 8,000 detention beds and 800 additional interior investigators. Unfortunately, the [President's] budget before us only allocated enough to cover 210 agents, 143 investigators, and 1,920 beds for detention.
The Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently said:
We do not have enough agents; we don't have enough technology to give us the security we need.
Let me give you some examples of recent happenings.

In Detroit, Mahmoud Youssef Kourani was indicted in the Eastern District of Michigan on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to Hezbollah. Kourani was already in custody for entering the country illegally through Mexico and was involved in fundraising activities on behalf of Hezbollah.
The two groups of Arab males were discovered by patrol guards from Willcox, AZ. One field agent said:
These guys didn't speak Spanish, and they were speaking to each other in Arabic. It's ridiculous that we don't take this more seriously. We're told not to say a thing to the media.

This is a field agent for the Border Patrol.

* * * When I first came to Congress, we doubled our Border Patrol agents from 3,000 to 6,000. We were a country that was porous, both on the borders of Canada and Mexico. But, clearly, we have had more and more influx of illegal aliens that have become a burden in many parts of our country, and now we have a security threat from people who do not live on our borders but are using our borders as a conduit to come into our country. The examples that Senator Ensign and I have just mentioned, where we are finding Muslim prayer rugs and instructions in Arabic on how to cross the border of the Rio Grande River, are just wake-up calls that we cannot avoid. So we are, hopefully, going to have the support of Congress to add a full 2,000 Border Patrol agents.
But as important as it is to catch these people, we also need to be able to detain them. Today, many times, because we have no detention facilities, we will say to the people: You must promise to come back in 60 days for your hearing on illegally entering this country.
Well, guess how many come back. Ten percent come back for their hearing. What happened to the other 90 percent? We are finding them in places such as Vermont, New York, and Detroit, MI. That is what happened to them.