Napolitano, shown here during Wednesday’s speech. (Photo by Heath Haussamen)
Security and enforcement efforts are ‘zooming along,’ but immigration reform is on the back burner for now, homeland security secretary says during speech at NMSU
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano reiterated the president’s stated commitment to immigration reform during a speech at New Mexico State University on Wednesday, but said she could not say when such a proposal will come to the forefront.
She also did not promise that such reform would happen at all, but pointed out that President Barack Obama has said immigration reform will be a top priority once the debate over health care reform concludes.
In the meantime, the groundwork is already being laid behind the scenes for an immigration reform bill. Napolitano said it would include a proposal similar to the DREAM Act — which would grant certain undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children and graduate from high school the opportunity to earn permanent residency.
Any reform bill, she said, must address the fact that “we are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants and opportunity.”
“Our hope is that a bill will come out,” she said about immigration reform. “I’m not going to give you a timetable.”
‘A historic moment’
In the meantime, Napolitano told hundreds of people during her keynote address at the Domenici Public Policy Conference, efforts to step up border enforcement and interrupt the flow of drugs from Mexico and the flow of weapons and cash into Mexico are “zooming along.”
Napolitano spent much of her time listing all of the programs related to border enforcement and security that have received increased funding — including the tripling of the number of intelligence agents and the inspection, for the first time, of vehicles and trains heading south into Mexico.
She said the Mexican government is more willing to cooperate and involved in the fight against the cartels than ever before, which presents a unique opportunity to break up the cartels. The Mexican government has started inspecting vehicles going into Mexico for the first time, she said, and has sent federal agents — and in the case of Ciudad Juárez, the military — to help quell violence.
In addition, the two governments are working more closely together. Napolitano noted an attempt to develop a system that would allow the sharing of information between local, state and federal law enforcement agents on both sides of the border nearly instantaneously.
“We really stand at a historic moment,” Napolitano said. “This is a time that we just have not seen before, and may not see again, so it’s very important.”
‘It needs to be done’
Napolitano said she could cite all the statistics to show that the situation is improving, but those numbers don’t tell the real story. And when a University of Texas-El Paso student talked about the severity of the violence in Juárez during a question-and-answer period, the secretary’s tone turned somber.
“It’s not easy, and it does not fit into an organizational box, and it’s not quick,” she said of efforts to break up the cartels. “But it needs to be done.”
Acknowledging that it’s going to be a long fight, Napolitano said her message is that “the United States is going to be there.”