From The Press Room

• Fact Sheet: Homeland Security FY 2008 Budget Request

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Remarks by Secretary Michael Chertoff at a Press Conference Announcing the DHS Fiscal Year 2008 Budget Request

Release Date: February 5, 2007

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: (202) 282-8010

Secretary Chertoff: Well, good afternoon, everybody. Earlier today, as you know, the President announced his fiscal year 2008 budget, which of course, includes the budget for the Department of Homeland Security. And so today what I'd like to do is provide an overview of the President's budget and discuss the key areas of funding for the department in 2008. I'll then take a few questions. We're going to have people from the various components here to answer the very specific questions, so out of courtesy to your fellow reporters, if you're really deeply in the weeds on something, my suggestion is you hold that for the component -- a representative, as opposed to asking me to talk about it. I'll try to address the more general questions.

As in the past years, the President, in his budget, reflects his unwavering commitment to protecting our nation and protecting the American people. This year the President requests from Congress a total of $46.4 billion in funding for fiscal year 2008. That represents an 8 percent increase over the fiscal year 2007 level. It also represents nearly a 50 percent increase in funding for DHS since fiscal year 2003, which was, of course, our first year of operation. This budget will ensure that the department has the tools and resources we need to protect the country, and to do it in a way that focuses on the greatest risks, is fiscally responsible, and balances our freedoms and our prosperity.

The President's budget builds on our past successes and accomplishments, reflects our most urgent priorities, and supports our goals for the future. The President's budget also reflects some new initiatives -- high-tech initiatives like deployment of SBInet and the 10-print US-VISIT entry system -- and more boots on the ground initiatives, including hiring 3,000 additional Border Patrol agents and money for TSA document screeners.

What are our priority areas for fiscal year 2008?  Well, the first place we have to start is keeping dangerous people and dangerous things from entering the country and harming Americans. That's where security starts, it starts at the border. And if we keep bad people and bad things out of the country, we've substantially reduced our risk and taken a large percentage of the threat off the table.

So let me start by talking about what we are doing to protect the country against dangerous people, which means, of course, securing our borders. Of course, not everybody who enters the country to visit here or do business here or to work here is a dangerous person or someone who is going to harm us. In fact, most individuals who come to this country do it for economic reasons. But in a post-9/11 world, we have to make sure that bad people and dangerous people do not get in.

Over the last year, we've achieved some major progress toward the goal. We've ended catch and release at the border. We've added hundreds of new Border Patrol agents and significant new infrastructure at the border. We awarded our SBInet contract to build a virtual fence across the border, and we also worked with the National Guard so that they could be deployed at the border through Operation Jump Start.

At the interior, there have been dramatic increases in work site enforcement, which attacks the economic engine that draws most illegal migration into the United States. And we are beginning to see results. For the first time, because of these extraordinary measures, we're seeing repeated significant declines in apprehensions all along our southwest border.

So, with fiscal year 2008, we're going to substantially expand these efforts. First, we will devote $1 billion for the SBInet program to support the deployment of integrated infrastructure and technology solutions across our land borders. And you're going to see part of that is fencing along the border. Construction is now under way to build traditional fencing along parts of the border where it makes sense to build that kind of fencing, including high traffic areas. And what you're seeing on the screen behind me now is the beginning of the construction of fencing along the Barry Goldwater Range in Arizona. This is the kind of fencing which is going to represent a significant increase in our tactical infrastructure on the southwest border.

Under SBInet, we're also going to continue installing vehicle barriers -- lights, cameras and other kinds of infrastructure, and we'll increase sensors and surveillance equipment to build that virtual fence and give us full coverage across the border. We're anticipating several hundred miles of this kind of buildout in fiscal year 2008.

But of course, technology and fencing are only part of the equation. We also need to have more boots on the ground. Since 2001, we've grown the Border Patrol from about 9,000 agents to about 14,800 by the end of this fiscal year. In fiscal year 2008, we'll provide $778 million for 3,000 additional Border Patrol agents and other required support. That puts us on track, by the end of the President's term, or the end of the calendar 2008, to get the 18,319 agents, which the President talked about last year, when he spoke to the nation.

Now, is this having an effect?  Well, we look at the apprehensions at the border in order to measure whether we are actually having a deterrent effect, because we recognize that the best way to achieve control at the border is to make people stop before they actually get to the border, and make them think about whether they want to take the chance of crossing the border.

If you look at the chart that's displayed behind me, what you will see is, in the third quarter of 2006, which was the first full quarter after the President announced Operation Jump Start, we saw a reversal of a trend that had existed in the prior quarters. In each of the two prior quarters there was a significant increase in apprehensions along the southwest border. But in the third quarter there was a decrease in apprehensions, and that was even more dramatically reflected in the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this fiscal year 2007. And since we're looking quarter to quarter, we're taking account of any season fluctuation in the flow. This, coupled with some additional information we have, based on what we see south of the border, demonstrates that we have achieved some real deterrent effects through the use of additional technology, additional fencing, and boots on the ground on the southwest border.

Now, of course, part of what we do at the border is not only catch people, but we have to detain them and send them back again. And an important part of that is our movement from the old, discredited program of catch and release to the new program of catch, detain and return. A key element of that is having the bed space so that when we catch someone at the border, if we cannot immediately return them to Mexico, we have to be able to house them until such time as we can remove them to their home countries.

Over the past year, we've substantially increased our bed space, therefore, from 20,800 beds in fiscal year 2006 to 27,500 beds in fiscal year 2007. And in fiscal year 2008, we're going to add almost 1,000 additional beds, to get to a total level of 28,450 beds. This will be a total increase over those two years of 46 percent.

What that has done is it has given us the resources we need to stop catch and release. In August of '06, ahead of schedule, we got from what was a majority release rate for non-Mexicans apprehended at the border to a zero release rate for people who were caught at the border, subject only to humanitarian and legal limitations. And since August of '06, we have been at a zero catch and release rate going forward. That has had some dramatic impact, in terms of deterrence, as well.

In the third quarter of 2006, as we started to move from catch and release to catch and return, we saw a 48 percent drop in apprehensions of non-Mexicans. In the fourth quarter of 2006, we saw a decrease of 68 percent. And this past quarter, the first quarter of '07, there has been a decrease of 58 percent.

Again, what this tells us is, particularly as we compare the decreases in non-Mexicans with the overall decrease in apprehensions, that our deterrence has had a particular impact on those people coming from countries other than Mexico who now understand that when they are caught at the border, they are not going to be released into the community, but they're going to be held until they are sent back to where they came from.

As we move away from the border and look to the interior, we see another important ingredient in what we are doing strategically to deal with the issue of illegal migration. When we launched the Secure Border Initiative, I said we were going to have to make worksite enforcement a priority and start to bring high-impact criminal cases against those employers who willfully and systematically violate the immigration laws. And we have done exactly that. Last year, we set a new record, in terms of worksite enforcement cases -- 716 criminal arrests, and more than 3,600 administrative apprehensions. This is a seven-fold increase, a 700 percent increase over what the INS was doing in its final year of operation in fiscal year 2002.

And of course, we've had some very notable high-impact cases in certain industries. You saw the Swift round of arrests that took place late last year, and earlier in the year against the -- we had arrests for IFCO, the pallet manufacturer, again in multiple places in the country.

So a combination of worksite enforcement and more vigorous enforcement at the border is our comprehensive strategic approach to reversing the momentum of illegal immigration, which has bedeviled this country for two to three decades.

Now, immigration enforcement is, at the end of the day, a federal responsibility. But we do work in partnership with state and local law enforcement. So to support this partnership we have been providing training in several states, under our so-called 287g authority. In fiscal year 2008, we will expand the partnership by devoting $78 million to support state and local law enforcement in their training to help us detect, detain, and remove illegal migrants. This is more than a 50 percent increase over fiscal year 2007, and a response to a significant outpouring of requests for this kind of assistance.

Of course, securing the border is not merely a question of what occurs between the ports of entry. We have to make sure our ports of entry are secure, as well. And therefore, we're going to continue to strengthen our security at the ports of entry. We now have in place a very effective system at the ports of entry that include US-VISIT's biometric capabilities, new travel and identity document requirements under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and advanced information and automated targeting of international air travelers.

To strengthen these efforts, we're going to add $146 million in fiscal year 2008 for the Unique Identity Initiative, to collect 10 fingerprints from foreign visitors, and to achieve further database interoperability between US-VISIT's fingerprint program and the FBI's fingerprint program.

Let me be clear about the importance of this. Taking all 10 fingerprints from foreign visitors allows us to search entering visitors against latent fingerprints of known and unknown terrorists collected from all over the world. This is taking the kind of CSI forensic techniques you see on television and adapting them to our borders, so we can have that kind of technological advantage against the enemy that wants to come in and do us harm.

If we have their fingerprints in our system we can stop them cold at our ports of entry. And by further integrating our US-VISIT database with the FBI, we'll be able to conduct more expansive watch list checks for terrorists, criminals and immigration violators.

Let me turn now from people to things, because a second major priority for our department is keeping bad cargo and dangerous things from entering the country. Over the past year we've expanded screening of overseas cargo at foreign ports, boosted radiation screening of containers here at home, and invested in next-generation, forward-looking technology. We've also broadened our partnerships with private sector shippers and operators.

As I've said repeatedly, one of our biggest concerns is the threat of a nuclear or radiological dirty weapon entering our country through a seaport or land port of entry. Now, back in 2003, our nation screened zero percent -- zero percent -- of incoming cargo for those threats. And we have completely turned that around. Today, we scan 90 percent of arriving containers for radiation at our ports of entry, which itself reflects a 30 percent increase over the previous year. Our goal is to screen almost 100 percent of arriving cargo at our seaports by the end of this year, and nearly 100 percent of all of our ports of entry, sea and land, by the end of fiscal year 2008. We will accomplish this by investing $178 million in 2008 for the procurement and deployment of additional radiation portal monitors, including the next generation of Advanced Spectroscopic Portal systems at our land and sea ports of entry.

Now, of course, the only -- weapons and explosives are not the only dangerous things we worry about entering the country. We also worry about illegal drugs. And a vital part of our DHS mission remains countering the importation of illegal narcotics into the United States. Last year, reflecting commitment as well as increased resources, the Coast Guard seized more than 93,000 pounds of drugs at sea. That is a new record. To further this important work, we will be investing $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2008 for the Coast Guard's continued drug interdiction mission.

Now, I've talked about the borders, but our third major priority focus is the interior of the country, protecting the infrastructure and systems that keep our nation and our economy running smoothly from an attack inside the United States. We recognize that the federal government does not own most of the nation's critical infrastructure -- the dams, the bridges, the transportation systems, the electrical and the nuclear facilities. As a consequence, we have to work in partnership with the private sector and with state and local government to evaluate vulnerabilities in these systems, increase protection, and build resiliency in the event of an attack or disruption.

Over the past year, we've protected critical infrastructure through new chemical site regulation authority and proposed regulations to protect high-risk rail shipments in transit. We've conducted site visits and vulnerability assessments at critical infrastructure sites and facilities across the country. And we released the National Infrastructure Protection Plan.

In 2008, we're going to build on this progress in a number of areas. First, we're going to continue our investment to protect the nation's transportation systems, including the aviation system which remains a very significant target for terrorism. This past August, working with British authorities, we thwarted a very serious plot aimed at blowing up international airliners traveling from London to the United States. This was the most sophisticated plot by the terrorists since September 11th, and had it been successful, it would have resulted in a tremendous loss of life.

Within hours, TSA was able to completely revamp its security measures, working in concert with our European partners, to address the liquid explosive threat, and TSA was able to do so without shutting down the airports or creating chaos. In fact, within two days, wait times at our security checkpoints were basically back to normal. And this Thanksgiving they were even lower than the previous year at some airports. This is very much a sign of the maturity of TSA as an organization, and its ability to adjust to a rapidly changing threat environment.

In fiscal year 2008 we're going to continue to refine and strengthen TSA's core screening capabilities by investing $4 billion -- that's billion -- for transportation security officers, document checkers, the career progression program and explosive detection systems. This includes a very important new initiative -- training our transportation security officers to take over the process of checking travel documents and boarding passes for passengers, training them to conduct behavioral observation to spot suspicious passengers for additional screening so that we will now build a level of defense at the point of which you enter the screening process, using the kinds of techniques which have been pioneered in Europe and in Israel to detect people who are behaving in a suspicious manner, and thereby building an additional layer of protection for our air travelers.

But of course, we have to worry not only about dangerous people getting on planes, we have to worry about cargo getting on planes. Next year we're going to build upon significant steps we've taken to protect air cargo on passenger aircrafts. Last year we issued a new air cargo regulation that now mandates 100 percent inspection of passenger parcels that are presented at airport counters. And we also put into place stricter inspection requirements for air cargo shippers and indirect carriers.

In the next fiscal year, we propose to do even more. We want to invest $56 million to fund 300 air cargo inspectors, K9 teams and technology, which will allow us to track carriers, shippers, and support, risk-based air cargo screening across the entire air cargo supply chain.

Moving from the air to the ground, we'll continue to enhance security for chemical sites and chemicals in transit. As I said, over the past year we've issued or proposed new regulations to create a risk-based regulatory program to protect the chemical sites all across our country, and to protect chemicals traveling by rail in and around our major urban areas.

This reflects a comprehensive approach. We want to protect not only the chemicals when they come to rest in a chemical plant, but we want to make sure that they are not the subject of an attack when they are in transit from one protected site to another. Therefore, in fiscal year 2008, we will invest an additional $15 million to establish a chemical site security office that will work, based on our regulations, to develop a risk-based program assisting chemical facilities with vulnerability assessments and allowing us to implement our regulations.

To provide an additional layer of protection against radiological or nuclear threats to our nation's major cities, we are building on the Securing the Cities Initiative, which I announced last year, which is designed to develop radiological detection systems around key entry points to major U.S. systems. This initiative will be funded in fiscal year 2008 with $30 million, which will enable us to begin the process of actually deploying a system in place around New York City.

Finally, we're going to continue to strengthen our nation's port security. To date, since this department was stood up, we have invested nearly $10 billion to secure our nation's ports through our port security grants, investments in radiation detection equipment, and the activities of the Coast Guard. In fiscal year 2008, we'll invest a further $1.9 billion to support the Coast Guard's ports, waterways, and coastal security efforts, to reduce terrorism risk in the maritime domain.

We will also invest $26.5 million for the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, to enhance worker identification and security at our nation's ports and critical transportation facilities.

All of these investments build on a very significant set of infrastructure protection grants to state and local partners, covering ports, railway systems, and highway systems. In addition to the $10 billion we've spent for port security to date, during the same period of time we have awarded more than $1.5 billion in grants specifically to protect critical infrastructure such as mass transit, inter-city bus, and rail security. And in this coming fiscal year 2008, we will continue to support high-level infrastructure protection grants at about the same level of funding as last year.

Now, these grants not only protect critical infrastructure, but they help increase preparedness and resiliency if, in fact, we should face an attack or disruption. Preparedness is one of our core functions at DHS, and it is an area which we will continue to fund significantly in fiscal year 2008.

Now, we've made tremendous progress over the past year to boost preparedness and integrate the lessons of Hurricane Katrina and Rita, and to realign and retool our federal response capabilities. We have strengthened FEMA's tracking and communications, leadership and customer service. We have worked with state and local partners to assess emergency plans and communications interoperability, and we have promoted individual business preparedness.

To date, we have provided over the last several years nearly $20 billion in grants for state and local preparedness efforts. In addition, I think it bears reminding that since Katrina, this administration has authorized more than $110 billion to support recovery efforts in our nation's Gulf Coast as a consequence of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The President remains strongly committed to furthering the recovery of this very important part of our country and of our country's history, and the home to millions of our fellow citizens. In fact, to date Congress has appropriated nearly $70 billion in funds for Louisiana and Mississippi alone, with over 70 percent of those funds designated specifically for efforts in Louisiana itself.

At DHS, we will also continue to make substantial investments through our grant programs to boost preparedness and response across the country. In fiscal year 2008, a total of $3.2 billion will be available for state and local preparedness expenditures, as well as assistance to firefighters. Of this amount, $2.2 billion is requested for DHS to fund grant, training, and exercise programs under FEMA. In addition, in coordination with our state preparedness grant program, we will be co-administering the $1 billion Public Safety Interoperable Communications grant program, in partnership with the Department of Commerce. And for those who need help with the math, if you add the $2.2 billion and the $1 billion that comes up to $3.2 billion in money that will be available for first responders for critical elements of preparedness and response.

The funds that are provided through these programs will support resources available to other federal assistance programs that center on first responder, terrorism preparedness activities, and will deliver ample support to all state and local first responder organizations to equip and train to be prepared to protect the public in the case or in the event of a terrorist attack.

And of course, FEMA itself is very much the subject of attention in our budget. To increase emergency preparedness under FEMA, we will request $100 million increase for FEMA's Vision Initiatives, including staffing increases, new technologies, and targeted investment in equipment and supplies.

As part of our effort to professionalize FEMA, we will be requesting $48 million to convert FEMA's cadre of on-call response employee temporary positions, which have four-year terms, with permanent, full-time employees. This is the kind of professionalization of FEMA that is an element of a long-term rebuilding effort that will benefit the country for years to come. And these investments align with the reorganization of FEMA that Congress mandated under the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, and it will continue to support FEMA's maturation and integration.

Finally, we will continue to support the Coast Guard's search and rescue efforts with a $1.7 billion budget request.

Finally, we continue the very important work of building and integrating the department's key management, information technology, and personnel functions, to build a unified and streamlined department. Our fiscal year 2008 budget will build on that progress -- $120 million increase to strengthen and unify DHS operations and management by joining DHS headquarters facilities on a single campus beginning in 2010; $139 million in fees to transform, improve and modernize United States Citizens and Immigrations Services business processes, and to upgrade outdated information technology systems, so we can truly build a 21st century immigration system; a $9.6 million increase for the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer, to take the very important step of improving our acquisition operations, including staffing increases.

Bottom line, it's a strong budget, a budget that will allow us to continue our mission to protect the American people while balancing trade, travel, and our way of life. And it is a fiscally responsible budget that strikes the right balance in terms of our security and our prosperity. This budget will allow us to continue to protect our borders and implement comprehensive immigration reform. It will continue to increase our protection against all types of attack on our transportation systems. It will help protect our nation against all threats and hazards, natural or manmade. It will focus on high-risk threats, like chemical, radiological, biological and nuclear threats. And it will ensure a stronger federal response when we have an emergency.

We look forward to working with a new Congress to fund these programs over the next year. I welcome Congress' input and feedback as we continue to build and improve this department to meet our very important responsibility to the American people.

 

This page was last modified on February 5, 2007