[Jeanfromfillmore]

Aware of their inability to perform even basic tasks of law and order, the center-right [coalition of] Senor Calderón has deployed almost 50,000 army troops to win the nation’s streets back from organized crime, and also to try to tell our governor, Jan Brewer, how to do her business in Arizona. That perception is increasingly reinforced by the numbers we see, the growing amounts of intensive conflicts along the border. Seventy-five hundred people have been murdered just in Mexico, according to the Reforma newspaper.
They say I have one minute left, so let me get into now Operation Checkmate. This is a notional strategy. If the federal government will not execute this operational plan to secure our borders, then the people must insist that we do it for our own protection and protecting our economy. The executable — this is what we call it in national security — a notional plan. It’s not connected to the government; it’s a notional plan that we propose in case we have to go to more aggressive action along our border.
The problems on and across our southern borders of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas are on the news every day. You’d have to live in a perpetual cave not to know the situation. We are facing a war of gigantic proportions.
Now, the plan I’m talking about is basic. And having been in Special Operations, it’s what I would do as a war planner now because I see the seriousness of the area south of our border. This combines the best use of all of our forces that will encompass intelligence, targeting structural organization of forces to accomplish their mission, base operations, offensive and defensive operations. We can’t sit behind the fence and the border and think this is going to go away and throw billions of dollars for something that is not working.
[Operation] Checkmate organizes three border task force groups and puts them in three operational bases — one in Texas, one in Arizona, one in Southern California. I don’t have to tell you the bases that we already have there that could be utilized for this. There’s no requirement to create any new bases. I will not name these because of security. But these basic border task force groups would be organized with Special Ops, Army, Air Force and Navy, and Special Operations.
We have to plan for a 20-kilometer no-go zone on the other side of the border, just like we did in Iraq — no-fly zones. We have to coordinate in some way many things with the Mexican government. We know they’re so corrupted. But if we know those drug cartels are there, we know that the Zetas and Hezbollahs are coming up, ladies and gentlemen, we have to take offensive action across our southern border if we’re going to protect America.
And as General Schumacher stated last night, each of these border task force groups would have 5,000 helicopters, everything — Black Operation’s what we call it. And we’ll find them, fix them; and we’ll take care of them before they can come to our border. That’s Operation Checkmate.
Thank you very much.
Moderator: Thayer Verschoor is a state senator from Arizona. He has served on the Appropriations, Commerce, and Economic Development and Transportation Committees. He’s also served as the Senate Majority Leader and President Pro Temp. Thayer?
Thayer Verschoor: Well, thank you. I want to bring to you a couple of perspectives [from Arizona]. One is that the laws that we have passed regarding immigration are actually humanitarian. And I’ll explain that in a little bit. And the second thing I want to do is affirm what Paul [Vallely] has just said here.
So here’s our perspective on illegal migration — and that’s what I’m going to call it because immigration is a term of legitimacy.
I was talking to my friend, Frank Gaffney, yesterday — a new friend, I should say — talking to him a little bit. And he wants to call it invasion. Because quite frankly, there’s a lot of people who call it an invasion. But it is not immigration; it’s an illegal migration that is occurring.
In Arizona, illegal migrants cost us $3 billion every year. That’s in — and it’s a billion. When I first got elected, it was $1 billion eight years ago. Now it’s up to $3 billion. And that’s in three areas. That’s in incarceration, education, and in healthcare. Those are the three areas. We have emergency rooms that can’t even stay open because they’re just jam-packed full of citizens from Mexico coming in. So that’s one Arizona perspective.
Now the humanitarian. Folks, Senate Bill 1070 — quite frankly, all it does is it allows Arizona law enforcement officers to enforce federal law. It’s already the law. The problem is that for 30 years, Arizonans and many other people, in Texas and California, have been asking the federal government, Enforce your damn laws! And thy won’t do it! They’ve refused to do it! And until they start doing it, we’re going to continue to see this escalation that we’re seeing.
How many of you have seen the movie “Amazing Grace?” In one scene in the movie, William Wilberforce is taken to see these slave ships, where these slaves are hauled from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. Okay? Folks, this is very similar to what is occurring in this illegal migration smuggling that’s going on.
They will pile 20, 30 people into a truck or a van that’s only made to seat eight or nine people, and just cram them in there. They bring them across the desert in 120-degree weather. If someone gets sick and can’t keep up, they just leave them there to die.
They bring them to Phoenix, to Mesa, to Chandler. They put them in these drop houses, where there’s not even room to lie down or sit down. And if they try to get away, they execute them. They beat them. The women are raped. A lot of the women and young girls and boys are sold into the sex trade.
This is a disaster that’s going on here, a humanitarian disaster. So we have to stop this.
Arizona passed employer sanctions. Employer sanction just simple says, you know what, employers, you can’t hire illegal aliens. Stop hiring them. And all we’ve asked them to do is just check federal government’s E-Verify.
So these things that we’re doing in Arizona are to try and curb the incentives for people to come here illegally. We’re trying to allow our law enforcement to enforce what is already the law. These are not new laws. And yet we’re called racists in Arizona, we’re called fascists in Arizona.
Folks, what’s going on here is horrifying. The environmental impact is disastrous. If you’ve ever seen these areas where they bring these illegal aliens, smuggle them into, it’s just total disaster — the garbage and the trash that’s left behind that is almost impossible for people to clean up.
Arizona is second in the world in kidnappings. These coyotes will kidnap these human cargos and then resell them. This just goes on and on again. Folks, there’s nothing, there’s nothing redeeming about what is happening.
This is a national security issue. As of November, in this year alone in Mexico, the cartels have killed over 10,000 people now — 10,035 people as of November. Ten thousand thirty-five. Over 300 decapitations. Okay? This is al-Qaeda stuff. And this is coming over, like you said, from the Middle East. Now they’re using car bombs down there.
Now, people say, Well, you know what, we can say that’s a Mexico problem. Well, I live in Arizona. And I can attest to you, it is no longer a Mexico problem. A couple years ago, we had a running gun battle between cartels, trying to snatch the other’s human cargo, right along Interstate 10. Right there, just south of Phoenix.
We just recently, in Chandler — which is also in the Phoenix area — had a decapitation. Now, they called it a stabbing, in which the man was beheaded. At first, they tried to make it sound like some partygoers gone wild. That wasn’t the case. Now they’re starting to find out that it looks like this man had ripped off one of the cartels. And now, they came and they decapitated him as a warning.
Folks, we had, just a month ago, a cartel member living in this town of Casa Grande, which is between Phoenix and Tucson. This person was executed in his car, in broad daylight, in a middle-class neighborhood like you’d see anywhere, even here in Palm Beach. This person was — his job was to be in charge of these spotters. They believed him to have been turned to become a snitch. They executed him in this neighborhood, in front of his house, in broad daylight. They shot him to death in his car.
They have these spotters — this is military type stuff — they now have spotters in the mountains in the Arizona desert with communications abilities. They live in caves in the mountains, and they radio communication to the drug smugglers where the police are, where the Border Patrol is at, to try and help them avoid the smuggling.
This is the type of stuff that we’re seeing in Arizona. It’s bad stuff. We need not only to defund NPR, we not only need to defund Obamacare, but we need to secure our borders.
Moderator: We’re lucky to have two congressmen on this panel to talk about the opportunity GOP has to help rectify the situation — what should be done, and hopefully what can be done.
First is Steven King. He was elected to Congress in 2002 to represent Iowa’s new Fifth Congressional District. He’s a member of the House Judiciary Committee, where he sits on the Constitution Subcommittee, and is the top Republican on the Immigration Subcommittee.
Steven King: Well, thank you very much.
The previous witnesses here on this panel have covered a lot of the territory that I anticipated I might. But I’ll try to speak on this from general terms.
And just think of [illegal immigration] as, yes, a national security problem that we have. And it also is a domestic security problem we have, to the extent that 90 percent of the illegal drugs that are consumed in the United States come from or through Mexico. And when I talk to DEA personnel, and I ask them with the door closed what would happen if magically everyone who woke up in this country tomorrow morning was here legally — what would happen to the illegal drug distribution chain in America? And their answer is, it will sever at least one link in every distribution chain in America and at least temporarily shut off illegal drug distribution. So that’s a component I’d ask you to think about.
But from the broader perspective, it’s long been my belief that any country’s immigration policy should be designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural wellbeing of the United States of America. And to that end, we should be thinking about how we increase the average annual productivity of Americans. That’s the overlying philosophy.
We heard Mark Krikorian talk about the competing forces in this society, the Left versus Right, statism. I look at it this way — the Left in this country, the progressives, the leftists of all stripes — whether they’re directly Marxist, socialist, however you want to define them — they are about expanding the dependency class in America.
And when we saw this immigration debate come at us in about 2004 and early 2005, what we saw was an effort, I believe, on the part of the Bush Administration to bring over into the Republican side a large percentage of Hispanics. And I’ve had this debate with Karl Rove, and we’ve gone at it fairly intensively.
But my position on it is this — that newly arriving immigrants assimilate into the politics of the locale where they arrive, whether it be Los Angeles County — you know how that goes, a lot of you in this room, if you’ve been there for an hour, you know the answer to that.
But if anybody is thinking about rebutting that comment, I’d ask you then, go to Boston, find me an Irish-Catholic Republican. After all these generations, for all of this incentive that’s there, still the Irish produce more and more generations of Democrats. And the Teddy Kennedy clan continues to grow and prosper. They haven’t stopped and taken a good look. And it isn’t about whether they go to church or whether they are productive, good, family people. It’s about [the fact that] they got assimilated into the politics of the locale where they arrived, just like we have fourth- and fifth-generation FDR Democrats that are still a problem for us today.
So what happened was, back then, Bush’s immigration speech began to split the Republican Party. And then we got confused on what we believed in. We got away from this idea that we are rule-of-law Republicans, and that when you want to list the pillars of American exceptionalism, you cannot build this edifice of this great country without one of those essential pillars being the rule of law.
And the effort to disregard the rule of law, the — I’ll say the commitment that’s there to ignore it because it’s inconvenient economically or it does something to somebody’s labor supply — we should know that there are people out there every day that are taking a jackhammer to those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism. And the rule of law is essential pillar.
So here’s how I lay out the mission that we have ahead for us. One is we have to stop the bleeding at the border. A nation has to have a border if it’s going to be a nation. You have to protect that border if you’re going to remain sovereign. Phil Gingrey, a congressman from Georgia, laid it out best. He’d been an emergency room doctor. He said, when somebody wheels a patient into the emergency room, and they’re bleeding off of the gurney and it’s all over the floor, you don’t go grab a mop and a bucket and clean up the floor; you stop the bleeding.
And so I suggest we do stop the bleeding at the border. And I’m one, and maybe the only one, who’s actually looked at the business model down there — $12 billion spent on 2,000 miles. That’s $6 million a mile. Now, I know what a mile of road looks like. There’s an uninhabited mile west of my house. And if Janet Napolitano came to me and said, I’ll pay you $6 million to protect this mile — in fact, I’ll give you a 10-year contract. So you’ve got a $60 million contract to protect this mile. And if you can slow down 25 or maybe 20 percent of the traffic going across — let the rest through — I’ll still