Making Appropriations for Science, the Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce, and Related Agencies for Fiscal Year 2006--Continued
Floor Speech
MAKING APPROPRIATIONS FOR SCIENCE, THE DEPARTMENTS OF STATE, JUSTICE, AND COMMERCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006--Continued -- (Senate - September 08, 2005)
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Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise to engage in a colloquy with the chairman and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science on funding for SCAAP, the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program. I also understand my colleague from Texas, Senator Hutchison, would also like to discuss the importance of this program to her State.
I begin by thanking the chairman, Chairman Shelby, and the ranking member, Senator Mikulski, for including $200 million in funding for this program, with a carve-out of $30 million for the Southwest Border Prosecution Program. That is good. The problem is, it is not enough. With the rising costs associated with criminal alien incarceration, I had hoped the Senate would see fit to increase the funding for this program over last year's allocation of $305 million. Instead, it is down to $200 million, with $30 million reserved for the prosecutor's program.
Immigration policy and control of our borders is an exclusively Federal responsibility. We all know this. Yet in our State prisons and our county jails, there is an incurrence of very heavy costs in incarcerating undocumented criminal aliens. Taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for incarcerating illegal aliens convicted of criminal offenses who are in State and local jails.
There is a growing belief among many in this country that the immigration situation is out of control. This year, the Pew Hispanic Center released a study which shows that between 2000 and 2004, approximately 3.1 million individuals entered the country without proper authorization. That is approximately 700,000 a year. Compare that to the fact that in 2003, Border Patrol agents apprehended somewhat over 1 million individuals seeking to enter the country illegally. It is said that for every one individual caught, three more enter illegally. If that is the case, nearly 3 million seek to enter the country illegally in a given year.
These costs are borne by our local educators, our hospitals, and our law enforcement officials. Let me use California as an example. This is based on a comprehensive study conducted by the Department of Finance. They estimate--and this goes back to costs in 1994-1995--$400 million for corrections for 23,000 individuals; $400 million for 390,000 patients; and $1.7 billion for K-12 education. That is a total of $2.5 billion.
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Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader and the Democratic leader.
To give a couple of recent statistics, the General Accountability Office conducted a study of those criminal aliens incarcerated in Federal, State, and local prisons. They found the following regarding State jails: In fiscal year 2003, 47 States received reimbursement for incarcerating 74,000 criminal aliens. Four States alone spent a total of $1.6 billion in fiscal years 2002 and 2003 to incarcerate criminal aliens. Yet they were only reimbursed $233 million through this program. That is only 15 percent of the total spent by these States. So the Federal Government is only reimbursing States 15 percent of what they actually spend on incarceration costs. That is local costs, that is State costs.
I can go on, but I want my colleagues to understand that the diversion of dollars from agencies such as the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to house criminal aliens has real operational impact on their law enforcement activities--fighting
drugs, street gangs, and other pressing law enforcement operations.
On March 17 of this year, the Senate agreed to a sense-of-the-Senate amendment to the budget resolution that SCAAP should be appropriated at a level of $750 million. While I recognize we cannot reach that number, the House bill does provide $405 million for this program. As this bill moves forward, I hope we will agree to the House funding level in conference. I ask the chairman and the ranking member to work with us on this issue.
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