At the Bottom of this Article, a question and answer section.

PRESS CONFERENCE WITH HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY MICHAEL CHERTOFF, CHIEF OF THE BORDER PATROL DAVID AGUILAR AND ACTING DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF DETENTION AND REMOVAL JOHN TORRES ON THE SECURE BORDER INITIATIVE


SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, good morning, everybody. I'm here with the Chief of the Border Patrol, David Aguilar, and with John Torres, who is the Acting Director of Detention and Removal Operations at the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Bureau.

As you know, I recently returned from a trip earlier this week with the President down to the Southwest border. And of course, I know you all heard the President speak about what our strategy is moving forward to get control of the border in a reasonable period of time.

One of the things we had the opportunity to do at the border was to talk to and see some of the hard work that's being done by our Border Patrol agents and our ICE agents who are working on the ground every day to secure our borders and to make this country safe.

The President reiterated his commitment at the border to securing our borders, and his commitment to developing solutions to the problems we face regarding immigration. Since taking office, the President has directed an increase in border security funding of 60 percent, and has added resources to hire an additional 1,900 Border Patrol agents. And just a month or so ago, the President signed an appropriations bill that will provide an additional thousand agents, and 2,000 additional beds, which we can use to detain people that we apprehend.

I thought what I would do here is give you a little bit of an overview of what our strategy is and then introduce the Chief and the Director to talk about some of the operational accomplishments and some of our operational milestones. And what we're going to do periodically is come out and talk to you about what we've accomplished, where we're headed, what our measurements are of success, where we still have distance to cover, because I think that the public is interested in seeing that we are taking a very disciplined and measured approach to making sure we get control of the border in real time.

As you know, there are a lot of dimensions to the border. The problem of immigration is one that's been with this country for 20 years. So we are digging ourselves out of a hole which it took 20 years to dig ourselves into. And it's not going to happen overnight, but what will make it work and what makes it achievable is a strategy that blends all of the elements of our power to control our border, and looks at the border as an entire system.

So we begin with the border itself, those that we apprehend coming into the country. There, the critical element is to apprehend and intercept, detain and then remove people so that we have such a high percentage rate of interception and removal that we actually begin to deter people from coming across the border. And we do that using a mix of Border Patrol agents, enhanced boots on the ground, using some low-tech infrastructure like vehicle barriers or fencing like we're putting out east of the San Diegoâ€â€