Mandatory Operational Control Reporting and Performance Measures Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MILLER of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I might consume.

Among the enumerated powers of the Constitution, providing for the common defense is, in my mind, the most important responsibility of this Congress. A key part of the common defense is ensuring that we secure our Nation's borders, and in the coming months, determining how to measure progress along the thousands of miles--north, south, and coastal--will be absolutely crucial.

H.R. 6025, the Mandatory Operational Control Reporting and Performance Measures Act of 2012, requires that the Department of Homeland Security resume reporting miles of the border under operational control and provide an estimate of the number of unlawful entries between ports of entry.

For years, we relied on operational control as a proxy for border security. It really became sort of the de facto term of art that indicated how much or how little of the border the Border Patrol could effectively control. But at last count, only 44 percent of the southwest border was under operational control, and less than 2 percent of the northern border was adequately secured.

I'm not quite sure how we can go from having less than half of the border under operational control to get to the current thinking that the border is more secure than ever, as the Secretary of Homeland Security has said, without having a legitimate way to measure border security.

In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security stopped reporting the number of miles of border under operational control with the promise of a new, more holistic measure of border security called the Border Condition Index. Nearly 3 years later, we're still waiting for the introduction of that measure without any idea if it will ever be used.

It's time for the Department to provide a suitable measure that adequately captures the security situation on the border, whether that is the Border Condition Index or something else. Until then, the Department should resume reporting miles under operational control.

To ensure that the numbers DHS gives us are sound, this bill, Mr. Speaker, requires that the Department give the Government Accountability Office access to the operational control numbers for third-party verification.

I fully understand that the leadership of the Department believes operational control, as it is currently configured, is not the right measure to describe security at the border. So I think we are all really open to new, more robust standards if it supplements operational control and better describes the level of security at our borders. But we can't just take this administration's word for it that the border is more secure than ever without some agreed upon standard.

To that point, I'm not sure that we should automatically assume that any new measure stacks up against operational control. With an issue this important, we can't just change the rules if we don't like the results.

Under this bill, the use of anything other than operational control to describe the security along the border must be vetted by a national laboratory with prior expertise in border security. Validation by a third party to ensure it accurately measures security along the border boils down to this: trust, but verify.

In testimony, the Government Accountability Office has been clear that the use of apprehensions of aliens at or near the border as a proxy for border security is, at best, incomplete. It tells us that we are catching lots of people, but it doesn't answer the most important question: How effective are we at keeping the drug cartels, human traffickers, and others from crossing our borders at will?

H.R. 6025 asks the Department to address this issue with an estimate of the number of unlawful entries between ports of entry so that the American people can put the apprehension numbers in the proper context and can stack apprehensions against the number of people who successfully cross the border illegally.

Mr. Speaker, the men and women of the U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection have a very difficult job, and I certainly want to thank them, as I'm sure we all do, for the very hard work that they do in some very demanding conditions to keep secure our Nation.

How we determine or measure what a secure border looks like has been the subject of a lot of debate, but the fact remains that the Congress and the American people should have a verifiable way to determine if we are making progress along the border.

I ask my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mrs. MILLER of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, I would just ask my colleagues to support this legislation that moves us toward a more full understanding of the security situation along the border.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

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