Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives

Release Date: June 14, 2007

Washington, D.C.
National Council of Farmer Cooperatives

Secretary Chertoff: Thanks for that kind introduction, and thank you for welcoming me and introducing me to the head table.

I really appreciate the opportunity to talk this morning before this group. I know the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives has been a very vigorous and valued supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. And I appreciate your efforts in the Senate.

As you know, this is a very, very important bill, and I would venture to say, the last chance and the best chance we have to fix a problem which is getting increasingly difficult for all sectors of the economy, and is also posing a real challenge to our social fabric. We have an opportunity to get it right, but this is an area where your personal and vigorous engagement is very important, because there are lots of forces who are working very vigorously and actively to prevent there being comprehensive immigration reform.

As you probably have read, the President did meet a couple of days ago with congressional leaders to make sure that we restart the debate on this immigration measure, and I'm optimistic we will get this measure restarted in the very near future. He's raised the issue of comprehensive immigration reform almost from the very beginning of his presidency, and has put it on the table, front and center, with the hope that we would get to the point we are now, poised to make this a reality and to begin to address what I think is probably the largest domestic social problem we've had in this past decade, and maybe longer.

I know Secretary Gutierrez is also dedicated, as am I, to working very hard with members of Congress. We've been up there probably more than in our own offices over the last couple months, trying to make sure that members understand that comprehensive reform, while not perfect, offers the best chance to get all the sectors of the economy what they need in terms of work, offers the opportunity to deal humanely with what is a continuing social problem, and from my standpoint, offers us the best opportunity to maximize our efforts on national security, because, as I have said time and again, when I have agents out hunting illegal lettuce pickers, waiters and housekeepers, they're not chasing drug dealers, criminals and terrorists. I, frankly, think the drug dealers, criminals and terrorists are the biggest threat to this country.

But we need to find a way to address the economic demand that is drawing workers in, and we need to find a way to deal with the workers already here, a way that respects the rule of law, but that also understands and appreciates the practical reality that we are not going to deport 12 million people, and that simply to ignore the problem is to grant a silent amnesty, which will continue what is an uncomfortable circumstance.

I know in this particular sector, the economy has felt this issue perhaps more than most. We are vigorously enforcing the laws at the border. And I'll be honest with you, I have no choice. It is my obligation and my oath to enforce the laws of the United States as they are passed. And even as I am arguing that we need to make some changes in the law, I am still committed to enforcing the laws that we have on the books until they're changed.

And there's a couple reasons I do that. First, of course, that's my obligation; but second, because I do think it's important for the public to have faith that we will, in fact, obey the law. In my mind, what is at the heart of a lot of this stress that people feel about illegal immigration is the sense that our side has been hypocritical, that we've passed laws in 1986, but we never enforced them, so that it looked like we had the best of both worlds—or the worst of both worlds—which was to talk tough and do very little. And I think that has explained a lot of the anger that underlies this issue. And unless we deal with it forthrightly and transparently, we're not going to solve this in a way that's intelligent and that lets everybody get about their business in a way that will promote our national prosperity.

I've made the following argument publicly, and I will continue to make it to those who oppose immigration reform: I have said that without reform that brings workers in legitimately, that makes it efficient for businesses, including agricultural businesses, to hire those workers efficiently, and without some kind of a mechanism to promote agriculture and to deal with the current illegal work force, we're going to put people like you and those you represent in a terrible bind: they're either going to have to break the law, which is a bad thing to do, or they're going to have to shut down their farms, which is a bad thing to do, or what's going to wind up happening is those farms are going to Mexico and Canada.

And for all of those people who are out there saying, we don't need to have immigration reform, let's just enforce the border, let's not bring temporary workers in, Americans will do those jobs—I'll be honest, I don't believe Americans in large numbers are going to go pick lettuce. And I don't—I need to challenge people who make that argument to say, when your son or daughter graduates from high school, and they say, Mom, or Dad, what should I do next, are you going to say, skip college, get out in that field and pick that lettuce? You're not going to do that. Americans—we're getting bettered educated, we're trying to promote social mobility among our own kids—that's a wonderful thing, but we still have to eat.

Some people say, well, just pay more. And I'm sure there is a wage at which even I'd go pick lettuce. I mean, if you start paying $1,000 an hour, I'm out there. But there's not going to be a lot of lettuce in the store because I don't intend to buy lettuce at $10,000 a head. So, I mean, these are the laws of economics and the reality. And it is really important to make sure that people understand this.

We are fighting a very heavy headwind. Talk radio, a lot of people who take the view—and I respect where they're coming from—I don't want to demean this, but they take the view that it's all about enforcement, let's enforce for several years and then we can talk about a temporary worker program, and then we can talk about the people who are here illegally. You've got to tell them that in those years, what you will see is a major shift of our businesses, certainly the agriculture business, out of the country, and that that is going to be a very, very bad thing.

And I don't know that our legislators, particularly those who get a lot of heat from some of their constituents, are hearing that other side. It is very important that they hear that other side, that they understand what it will mean if we don't address this problem in a way that will continue to allow us to harvest our fruits and vegetables, and produce our crops, and milk our cows, and get this agriculture to market in a way that will be priced so that people can actually afford to buy it.

So I think your role in this becomes critical, particularly now as we are getting into what I think is the climactic period of seeing whether we can find—get this bill, or not.

Let me talk a little bit about what the bill does, because I do think that, while not perfect, it addresses a lot of the issues that we all care about. I know you care about national security as much as I do. The bill does essentially incorporate the ag jobs proposal as part of the overall program, which I know will be an important feature to you.

We begin, of course, as we should begin, with recognizing there is a security element. The bill requires that we complete 370 miles of fencing at our southern border; that we recruit and train 18,000 Border Patrol; we continue the practice of detaining those that we catch at the border until such time as they can be removed; that we have an electronic system of employee verification that is reasonable and convenient for employers to use—because you can use it on your laptop—it gives employers a safe harbor if they follow the rules, but it also guarantees us that we actually do have legal people working in jobs that require to have some kind of validation.

And this bill, very importantly, has a temporary guest worker program. We're, frankly, a little disappointed that the version currently before the Senate has cut that. I'm hopeful that that cut will be reversed or mitigated. I think it's very short-sighted to view people coming into work hard here as the enemy. The enemy are drug dealers and criminals. People who come to work hard need to be regulated, they need to be visible, they need to pay their taxes, but they are not the enemy. And if we don't have them harvesting here, they're going to be harvesting over there, and that means our farms are going to be over there.

There are elements of this bill that I know are a little bit controversial: How do we make sure temporary is temporary? We have put some time limits, but I think, again, that's designed to get credibility with the American people that we mean what we say and we're going to enforce the rules.

And then with respect to those who are here illegally already, this creates a mechanism through which workers who are doing illegal work and who have not otherwise committed crimes—obviously, people who sell drugs and commit acts of violence have to be kicked out of the country—but those whose only offense is an immigration offense do have the opportunity to step forward, have a background check, get right with the law, and continue to work. And the bill has some specific features that encourage those who are working in agriculture to continue that work, which is very important for our economy.

When we pass this bill, what it's going to allow us to do is, first of all, relieve the stress on the economy caused by the current tension between our enforcing the law and the economic needs of the country. My experience enforcing the law and being involved in law enforcement over decades is, when you're struggling against a very strong human need—feeding your family and satisfying the economy—it is very hard to interfere with that using brute force. You have to use the market system and the incentive system to drive people on their own to obey the law, which means you've got to create a pathway through which people can obey the law and still satisfy their reasonable economic needs, and then you have to make it clear that if they don't take that path, there's going to be a sanction.

That's what that bill does. It allows you to satisfy your economic needs; it allows the workers to work hard and satisfy their economic interests; it creates a pathway to get that done legally and visibly; and then it says if you don't take that path, we will enforce.

So this plan is something which I strongly urge you to get out and support. I also have to always observe what happens if it doesn't pass, because the question I always ask is—to the critics—is, what's your alternative? I have not heard an alternative to this bill that I think is going to be a happy alternative. I've heard some people say, just do the enforcement piece. And as I've already told you—and I don't think I need to convince you—that's going to have a devastating impact on certain parts of our economy.

But I think there's even going to be a bigger problem with it. I think that if we don't get this done at the federal level, you're going to start to see a patchwork of state and local ordinances and laws that go out there to try to address the issue in each individual locality. And they're all going to be different. Some of them are going to say we want sanctuary; everybody who's illegal, no questions asked. Others are going to say, if you sell a bottle of milk to an illegal, it's a felony and you go to jail.

Those of you who have businesses that are engaged in activities in multiple localities are going to find you're subjected to multiple different laws. It is going to simply create a nightmare of inconsistency, hardship and fighting economic reality. So I think when you take a clear-eyed view of what's presented, and, as important, what the alternative will be if we don't pass this, I think it's clear we have to get this done.

I also want to conclude in talking about this by saying that this is really a test of our ability to govern. I have read over the last 10, 15 years that the public is increasingly skeptical that in Washington we can ever solve problems, we can only complain about problems.

Solving problems means compromising. It means that I get what I want, but in order for me to get that, you have to get what you want. It has to be a win-win, or at least a partial win-win. Getting compromise and getting solutions rarely means that one side sweeps the table and the other side walks away as a clear loser. It's not my experience you ever get that kind of an outcome unless one side completely wins a hands-down victory. And in our government, we have a very evenly balanced government. This country is very much clustered around the middle.

So, can we get things done? Can we solve problems, or do we simply want to continue to complain about them? I think this bill is a very important test about whether we can solve those problems, and I think if we get it done here, then I am hopeful that in others areas as well we'll have created a template for beginning to address some of the big issues that we have in this country.

Let me talk about a couple of other issues besides the bill. A very important element of my job as the Secretary of Homeland Security is agriculture and food defense. We've seen historically, and most recently with respect to the issue with pet food, that an enormous amount of economic and human damage can be undertaken if there is a pollution or taint in our food supply. We rely upon the safety of our food and our food system as a foundation for the most basic activity that we undertake, which is eating. And one of the earliest government efforts to regulate in the interest of health and safety was food regulation. If you go back to—I think it was Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle. I mean, that spurred a delivery of a system to safeguard our food. And I know you're all committed to that food safeguard.

There's $1.3 trillion of this economy that's focused in agriculture, about one-fifth of our economic activity. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that that creates a vulnerability for those who want to do us harm—whether they're Islamic extremists, or fanatics who have some other kind of political agenda that they want to advance through acts of terrorism.

So how do we protect this system without damaging the prosperity and the techniques which actually make it a vibrant part of the economy? Well, we begin with the recognition that the assets of the agricultural sector are in your hands. The government does not own agriculture. So anything that we do has to be done in partnership with farmers, producers and cooperatives so that we and you together can help to analyze and understand the risks, and then work on a protection plan that makes sure we promote commerce, rather than impede commerce. This is not an area where government ought to be telling you how to do your business. It's an area where we ought to be working with you to facilitate how you protect your businesses.

Now, last month, as one of the elements of our plan to help you protect your businesses and to help us protect the consumers of this country, we worked with you to release the sector-specific plan for agriculture and food. That gives us an overarching planning framework for a shared understanding of the vulnerabilities in the agricultural sector, and for an understanding of what kinds of techniques and practices can help us protect agriculture in growing, processing and transportation.

A large part of this effort involves working with the USDA and the FDA to conduct threat assessments for food commodities, identifying protective measures that can be put into place, conducting exercises so that we can respond quickly when there is a taint problem, isolate the issue, and cauterize the wound, because I think you all know that the biggest threat you have in your sector is a crisis of confidence, where a problem in one area begins to cause people to question the safety of food all over the place. So a swift and confidence-building response is a critical element of any plan to mitigate damage to our economy, and that can only be done through exercising.

And of course, a critical element is also training. And so we are working to develop online training tools for regulators, inspectors, farmers, food producers and food cooperatives.

We're also trying to do our part at DHS to advance scientific research and analysis through several national facilities and frontline resources. We currently have the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, where we work with USDA to study, diagnose and prevent the spread of foreign animal diseases, and we're working now to build the next-generation laboratory that would allow us to do advanced experimentation in those pathogens which would pose a threat, not only to humans directly, but to the human food supply, to animals, and to our crops as well.

We've sponsored two university Centers of Excellence to study emerging issues related to food and agro defense—one at the University of Minnesota, which I had the opportunity to visit a couple years ago, which conducts research on food defense and actually has a tool that allows us to analyze very quickly where there is a tainted food element what the supply chain and the distribution chain was so we can isolate it and prevent that crisis of confidence that I talked about. And the other is a Center of Excellence at Texas A&M University that researches potential threats to animal agriculture.

But we're going further than that. We've created an Office of Health Affairs with a chief medical officer with the rank of assistant secretary. And this individual's responsibility—and he's a very experienced doctor who's got a veterinarian as his number two, deals quite specifically with threats to human health, and with threats to the food supply and to animals, including the threat of avian flu, which of course could be a significant issue for our domestic poultry flocks.

And part of this element is intelligence. What we are doing is fusing, under the leadership of this official, not only the typical kinds of information that we get through our agricultural network about potential problems with respect to food or with respect to animals. But we're adding to that information we get from the health establishment, through hospitals and the medical network that CDC relies upon, and regular intelligence community information—in other words, the kinds of spies and satellites that we use in all kinds of areas to defend the country, we have those available with respect to protecting our agriculture as well.

That doesn't just mean we're protecting against the possibility of a deliberate attack. We need to know, for example, if there's an avian flu outbreak somewhere else in the world that could pose a threat to our domestic poultry flock, and that might be concealed by a host government. We've got to be able to know about that so we can put measures into place at our borders to protect our domestic animals, our domestic crops from those kinds of foreign pests.

And that's something I really want to emphasize. You know, some people ask the question, why does DHS play a role at all in agriculture? Why isn't this just about USDA and FDA? The reason is because we're trying to take the protection of your businesses, your crops, and your animals to the next level. We're trying to bring to that protection not only the traditional tools of the regulators and the agricultural establishment of government, but intelligence collection. The kinds of capabilities we deploy at the border, including the high-tech capabilities, we want to be able to integrate all of those to defend this country against deliberate or non-deliberate infestation by foreign pathogens or foreign diseases that could affect the viability of our crops or animals.

So agriculture is a very big part of Homeland Security. And by having Homeland Security involved in this process, we can bring a set of tools to protect your businesses that simply isn't available to USDA or to the FDA.

Now one key part of our border defense includes our agricultural specialists, which are currently part of Customs and Border Protection. We have kept this set of inspectors separately trained and capable of focusing specifically on reducing the risk that imported foods, plants, or animals could present to the health of our people or to our crops and livestock. I know there's been some controversy about whether these inspectors ought to be part of Customs and Border Protection.

I'll tell you why I think it's in your interest to keep them there. Keeping them there means that the planning for facilities and for resources and for business processes at the border fully takes account of the need to keep out pests and disease that affect agriculture, as well as dangerous humans that are terrorists or criminals or drug dealers. It makes sure that your concerns are very much baked into the planning, the building, and the systems development of our border. It makes sure that when we set intelligence collection requirements, and say, we want to have our intelligence agencies collect information about threats to the border, that we are incorporating into those collection requirements your needs and the protection of your industry.

And I would make the case that if we separated it out and isolated all of that into agriculture, what would inevitably happen is the intelligence collection function, the infrastructure-building function, and the high-tech deployment function at the border, would become increasingly focused on the human threats and the terrorists. And, actually, at the end of the day, you would wind up—be much more step children than under a system where you are fully integrated into our planning and execution.

So we want to continue to make sure that you are part of, and the resource that you represent is very much a part of our thinking and our planning, and the integration of all our activities at the border.

I want to just say, in terms of talking about the very fine work that our agricultural specialists have been doing is that in the last fiscal year they intercepted more than 4,000 prohibited meat, plant, and animal products every day at our ports of entry. And we've actually worked to expand this program by increasing the staffing of agricultural specialists by over 30 percent—over 2,000 people since the department's creation.

We've also cross-trained all of our other inspectors—or most of our other inspectors, to work with these agricultural specialists to help them search for agricultural threats at our nation's ports of entry. So we're actually leveraging our resources to support agricultural specialists as part of our integrated plan of agricultural defense. We will continue to make sure we give our agricultural specialists the tools they need: training, equipment, and increased canine detection teams. And of course, in this respect, we're very much partners with USDA to make sure that we're properly spotting trends and targeting our initiatives to the most serious emerging threats.

One of the things we've actually done recently, and I've talked to Secretary Johanns about that, is set about to form a task force with the Department of Agriculture to make sure that we have an open pipeline to address the concerns of you, our agricultural stakeholders, and to make sure we're addressing any complaints or gaps in the inspection process. So we want to work with you to make sure that we are meeting your concerns. But the point I want to really emphasize is that Homeland Security is very much about food and agriculture, which is what you are very much about, so that we need to make sure your perspectives are incorporated into our strategy and planning. You need to make sure that when you see a problem, it's not just a USDA issue to you, but you are also thinking about notifying us.

In the end, you know what our best defense is against someone who comes in and tries to tamper with the food supply? It is prompt notification and integration of all of the departments that have to do with agriculture—Homeland Security, USDA, and FDA—so that we can respond very quickly.

Again, I recognize that the best —you know, we can't stop someone from walking into this country with a pathogen in their pocket. I mean, this country is just too big for me to tell you that no one is going to walk in with a little vial of some kind of bovine virus—you know, BSE—or, God forbid, some hoof and mouth disease or something like that. You can't strip search everybody.

But what we can do is train to spot the best we possibly can, train to deter, and then train to respond, so as to mitigate and make sure we never lose the most precious thing you have in your field of endeavor, which is the public confidence that the food supply in this country is the safest in the world.

Finally, let me conclude with a couple of words about chemical security. I know that chemicals are obviously important to your work, and that includes ammonium nitrate, which is a great fertilizer, but also happens to be very good at bomb making. We want to make sure that you can get access to those chemicals, we also want to make sure we're not getting blown up by those chemicals.

And so we're working very hard as we exercise the regulatory authority that we've recently been given to make sure that our chemical site security regulation is intelligence, it's not micro management, but it is performance based, and it does not crimp the very important economic value the chemical industry brings to this country.

Our objective is not to lay the heavy hand of government on our industry, but to make sure that our industry doesn't become exploited by those who want to do us harm in a way that would be very adverse.

So in the coming weeks, we're going to be working closely with our nation's chemical industry to talk about what kind of facilities and chemicals are the highest risk. We're going to require the high-risk plants to assess their vulnerabilities. We're not going to tell them how to fix the vulnerabilities, but we're going to tell them that we have performance standards they're going to have to meet, and then we're going to say to them, you come up with the best way to meet those standards. As long as you meet the standards, we're going to say, that's okay, because there a lot of different ways to skin a cat, and you ought to be able to decide how to skin the cat. But we do have to require at the end of the day the cat gets skinned. I know for people in the food business, that's not a very appealing image.

But, anyway, as you've probably seen from the tour of the horizon I've given you, you're industry and your sector of the economy is very much at the heart of what we're spending a lot of time on, both in terms of immigration, and in terms of border protection, but also with respect to things like intelligence gathering and focusing on terrorism as a threat to homeland security.

I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. I look forward to your work. Once again, I exhort you to recognize the future of this bill is in the balance. People who—and I respect their viewpoint, even if I disagree with it—are dead set to prevent comprehensive immigration reform, who believe you can never legalize or find any way to regulate or make visible the legal migrants—they'd rather kick them out of the country—and those who have never wanted to have a temporary worker program, those people are working with enormous energy and some effect leverage and pressure the legislators who are considering this bill.

If you don't make your voices heard and reach out, you won't be in the game on this. And I think whatever the outcome it's got to be an outcome that is driven by a healthy debate in which all sides of the issue are fully aired and pressed forward with vigor.

So with that, I'll be happy to take some questions.

Question: (Off-mic.)

Secretary Chertoff: Well, I think that's very much the philosophy we're taking. There was a lot of comment from the propane people. And we have taken account of that, in terms of setting thresholds. And just so you understand, there are going to be several slices at this process. First we have to define what chemicals we are concerned about and what threshold levels there are. Then it doesn't mean that, as you quite rightly pointed out, that everybody who has a propane tank above that level is going to be regulated in the same way. They'll have to complete a vulnerability assessment. And what that means in plain English is they're going to ask the very question you asked: Is my propane tank sitting next to a school in the middle of New Jersey so that it can blow up and kill a hundred or a thousand school children, or is it sitting in the middle of Montana? And if it's sitting in the middle of Montana, chances are the vulnerability and the consequence is going to be very low and there's not going to be anything required of it. If it's sitting next to a schoolhouse in New Jersey, chances are there's going to have to be something done.

So that's exactly the approach we're taking. It's to set thresholds, then to say, even within that threshold or above that threshold, assess your vulnerability, ask precisely the kind of question you asked, and let's be common-sense about it. And we're going to come to the common-sensed result that you've pointed out, which is to treat things like location and vulnerability as the critical determinations of what you have to do. That's why I say these are performance based. It's not cookie-cutter, once-size-fits-all regulation, which I think actually is exactly the kind of way to respond to the very legitimate concern you've raised.

Question: The buzz word from the opposition on immigration reform is "amnesty." How do you answer – respond to that?

Secretary Chertoff: Well, I answer it in two ways. It's not amnesty because there is a penalty that's imposed, a fine that has to be paid, $1,000 for a head of household. You are then on probation, and you have to comply with the law in all respects; while you're here on a temporary visa, you have to work, and then after your first four-year temporary visa is up, you have to establish those things, and then it gets renewed. And if you consider the fact that illegal entry into this country by itself is a misdemeanor, it's never been made a felony, that punishment is about what we typically give for misdemeanors.

Now, some people don't think that's enough punishment, and I can't argue with that. If you feel there should be a heavier punishment, that's your privilege. But my second argument is a very practical argument: I want to know what the alternative is. I don't think anybody seriously argues we ought to deport 12 million people anymore.

So now I've heard the people who take the other side say, well, just let them sit, benign neglect; attrition will take care of it. I'm going to tell you—and I think you know this, you can make the argument better than I can from your own experience—attrition is not going to work. First of all, you've got—let's assume 7 million of the 12 million are working. That's 7 million jobs. Those people aren't going to just up and leave, and if they did up and leave, I don't want to even imagine what your fields would look like or what the hotels would look like or what the restaurants would look like. So the employers are going to be jammed. They're going to feel they've got to keep their employees to stay in business, and unless we're going to bring 7 million temporary workers in simultaneously, there's not going to be attrition.

So what I think attrition really is, is silent amnesty. It's a way of granting an amnesty but saying we're not going to—we're just going to be—we're going to kind of conceal it, we're not going to be candid about it. We're going to pretend that we're not giving an amnesty and keep a blind eye to it.

My own view is that's the worst of all worlds. It's not honest; it continues to put the people who are working illegally in a very stressful circumstance where they can be exploited. And then what winds up happening is we enforce the law, but because we can't enforce it against everybody, it's kind of where lightning strikes. And some people feel they wind up unfairly, through bad luck, they wind up getting whacked, and the guy down the road didn't get whacked. And it's not because we're deliberately unfair. It's the nature of, we can't do everybody, and we have to rely upon the information that we have.

So the system we have now, which is what I think some people now want to continue, is, to me, the worst of all worlds, because it's not candid, it's not forthright, it tends to play out in arbitrariness, and it frankly makes a lot of people lawbreakers.

I also make that case that, you know, this whole country is complicit in this problem. This has been around for 30 years. And everybody who stays in a hotel room that was cleaned by an illegal, or eats a head of lettuce that was picked by an illegal, is benefitting in some way from that. I mean, if this was a hot and heavy deal 20 years ago, we would have heard 20 years ago about this.

So I think what the President has done—which is greatly to his credit—is he said, I'm not going to just try to close my eyes and hold my nose when a big problem is around and hope someone else fixes it. I'm going to look at the problem, and I'm going to suggest a solution. And it's like any other problem—sometimes it's ugly to clean out, but if you don't clean it out, it doesn't go away by itself.

Question: First we want to thank the President and Secretary Gutierrez and yourself for all your work on this issue. And perhaps could you share with us perhaps a little guidance on the timing to work on this.

Secretary Chertoff: I think that this—contrary to the predictions of death that you probably read over the weekend, I believe this bill will be up within the—will be back up within the next two weeks. I'm very optimistic it will pass the Senate and that we'll have the votes we need to get the bill concluded.

But I also will say I know there's a tremendous effort being pushed to get senators to vote against the bill. And I think there's a recognition from people who are against this that if it comes out of the Senate and it comes out with a pretty good tailwind, it's going to give it a lot of momentum in the House.

So I think now is the time. I don't think this is something I would wait a week to do. I think I would get out there—I saw an interesting—I generally don't like to look at polls, but since I'm always having quoted at me people saying, Americans hate this—I saw a poll yesterday that said 86 percent of Americans believe you can't deport everybody and 76 percent believe there's not going to be attrition. People need to hear your voices. I didn't realize until I came to Washington, because I'm not a politician, how important it is not just to get a sense from the polls, but to see that people are concerned enough and feel intensely enough to pick up the phone. And that's—I wouldn't wait a moment to get rolling with that.

Question: Can you comment on your current enforcement policy? I know back in the Reagan administration there was a moratorium on enforcement. Some would argue that there's been some lapses in enforcement in the past. Obviously recently there's been stepped-up enforcement. What's your current enforcement policy, and –

Secretary Chertoff: I will continue to enforce the law as vigorously and as energetically as I can until the law changes. Some people say, well, that's probably a political thing. It's not. I have a very simple—I spent most of my professional career as a prosecutor, and you just enforce the law; there's no ifs, ands or buts. And I do think there's a credibility problem we have for the reasons you say.

The way the bill is written, if the bill were to pass, we would then immediately move into a period of transition that would allow us to start to enroll people and begin the process of checking them so that—at that point, there would obviously be a change in enforcement posture so that we could begin to incorporate people into this process of regularization. But until the bill is passed, and unless the bill is passed, we will continue to enforce the way we are.

Question: Mr. Secretary, you mentioned during your talk the Center for Excellence in Minnesota, as far as tracing outbreaks (inaudible). In the last six years (inaudible) had developed a system to trace back for animals all over the country, with varying successes. Does your department see this as a high-threat area and something that should be (inaudible)?

Secretary Chertoff: Yes, for a couple reasons. And I don't mean to suggest I have some specific information that terrorists are targeting the food supply, but because it is a vulnerability, because it's such an open supply network, and because the public confidence issue is so critical, the best way in my observation and experience to assure the public is to be able to react quickly if there is a problem and trace it. That's why I come back to something that may not have been intuitively obvious to people when we stood up as a department.

Our ability to fuse not only the traditional tools of tracing the food supply, enhanced by the Center of Excellence, which is really taking it to the next level, but to fuse that with spies and satellites, the stuff that you normally don't think applies to food, that fusion gives us an ability that we've never had before. And I don't think people thought about the idea of using traditional overseas espionage and collection intelligence methods as a way of giving us early warning, or helping us characterize whether a threat is a natural outbreak or a deliberate outbreak, all of which would drive the decision-making process.

We also spend time exercising and training on how to manage the crisis of an attack, including an attack on our agriculture. So one of the reasons when I set up the Health Affairs Office as a separate, focused office, I said to them, I don't want you just to do human health and disease and biological attacks directed at humans initially. I want you to broaden yourselves and consider animals and food, and that's why we put a veterinarian in as number two, precisely because I do think this is part of a single system where there is a real vulnerability and a huge consequence. So you are very much at the top of our list of national assets that we are interested in protecting.

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This page was last modified on June 14, 2007