Capitol Hill Hearing - Transcript

SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE
 
SUBJECT: NOMINATION OF EDUARDO AGUIRRE TO BE DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU OF CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
 
CHAIRED BY: SENATOR SAXBY CHAMBLISS (R-GA)

(THIS IS A PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT)

BODY:
SEN. CHAMBLISS: Our hearing will come to order. We're pleased to have Eduardo Aguirre before this committee as the nominee to be director of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security. I'd like to welcome his daughter, Tessie (sp), who is with him this morning.

Mr. Aguirre's nomination is significant because he brings extensive management experience to a brand new bureau. He has held top-level positions in the banking industry for over 30 years, and most recently served as vice chairman and chief operating officer of the Export-Import Bank. Mr. Aguirre will bring much needed management skills and qualifications to the bureau.

We all know the problems of the old INS, some which were institutional as a product of an agency with competing demands. For years, members of Congress declared the INS was broken and must be reformed. Now that opportunity is at hand, and I am confident that Mr. Aguirre is up to the task.

As a young immigrant from Cuba, Mr. Aguirre has experienced the American dream through hard work in both his business success and his community service, and he will surely work with Congress and the various agencies to make that dream a reality for others seeking opportunities in the United States. I commend the president for his nomination. I look forward to Mr. Aguirre's statement and responses to our questions.

....

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Thank you, sir.

Mr. Aguirre, we'll ask that you come forward to be sworn. (Pause.) I'll ask that you stand, raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear the testimony you're about to give before this committee shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

MR. AGUIRRE: I do.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: All right. If you, for the record, will state your name, please.

MR. AGUIRRE: (With the microphone off.) Senator, my name is Eduardo Aguirre Jr.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: All right. You're going to need to mash that button there on the -- there we go.

MR. AGUIRRE: Senator, my name is still Eduardo Aguirre Jr. (Laughter.)

SEN. CHAMBLISS: (Laughs.) Well, we're pleased to have you here this morning. And Senator Leahy's right; it's not always this free- flowing and complimentary in this room. And that says a lot about you. And we certainly appreciate the great work you've done for our country to this point. We look forward to hearing from you this morning, and we'll accept any opening statement. And if you'd like to tell us about any family or friends you have with us, that's always our pleasure -- to hear about that, too.

MR. AGUIRRE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senators. I'm very pleased to come before you today as you consider my nomination to be the first ever director of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services in the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

At the outset, I would like to thank my wife of 35 years, Maria Teresa Aguirre, for her continued support in my quest to serve my country through public life.

Representing our family and with me today is my daughter, Tessie Aguirre, who is a senior at Texas A&M University and is studying in Washington, D.C., this summer. And my daughter is right behind me.

Should the Senate act favorably on my nomination, this would mark my second Senate-confirmed presidential appointment service to my adopted country.

Almost 42 years ago I came to this land of freedom and opportunity as a 15-year-old Cuban refugee, without my family or money or working knowledge of the English language. Along the way, I was sheltered and taught by Catholic Charities, cared for by United Way and helped by many, many, many others.

Later a very affordable U.S. government student loan program allowed me to attend college and eventually earn a degree from Louisiana State University.

I have overcome real and imagined obstacles on my journey to realize my version of the American dream -- (pause) -- and I'm grateful beyond words. I'm extremely proud to be -- and humbled -- to have been selected by President George W. Bush to serve the United States in his administration.

The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services is responsible for providing the right immigration benefits in the right amount of time to the right applicants and to prevent the wrong ones from accessing our benefits. The United States always has and continues to be a nation of immigrants.

On a personal level, I share President Bush's vision of welcoming immigrants with open arms, not with endless lines. If confirmed, I look forward to working with Secretary Ridge, Deputy Secretary England and the rest of the Homeland Security leadership and staff, in addition to others in President Bush's administration, to advance our country's immigration agenda, including a serious focus for the scrutiny and security responsibilities within our scope.

Also, as demonstrated in my position as vice chairman and chief operating officer of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, I welcome the opportunity to work with the Senate and the House of Representatives. I'm confident that one and a half years in a leadership role at the Ex-Im Bank, 34 years in commercial banking and a number of hands-on civic leadership roles have prepared me to accept this considerable challenge.

Beyond my inherent sensitivity to immigrant issues, I hope to bring to the job my proven management and leadership skills: my customer service background, my broad risk-analysis experience, a respectful awe for the trust placed in me, an open mind and some measure of common sense. These skills should be particularly important to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services as we face the unique challenges of the 21st century. My vision is to lead a world-class bureau that will excel in customer service and effective risk management. During my tenure, integrity, respect and ingenuity will be our core values.

In closing, I want to acknowledge my family as the bedrock of my values system. We are hardworking, God-fearing people who recognize and treasure our immigrant roots as we strive to give back some of the many blessings that have come our way.

Mr. Chairman, Senators, I respectfully ask for your favorable consideration of my nomination, and stand ready to respond to your questions as you may have them. Thank you very much for your attention.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Well, thank you very much. And you sure bring a great story and a great background, personally as well as professionally, to this position. And we appreciate your willingness to serve in a public capacity. And I've been to Tiger Stadium on Saturday night, and y'all are not always very kind to my Bulldogs down there. But I promise you we're not going to hold that against you this morning.

MR. AGUIRRE: Well, thank you, Senator. Bipartisanship includes our schools. (Laughter.)

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Let me start off with a question regarding our visa system. One problem that has certainly been publicized following September 11, but all of us as members of Congress knew that this problem existed well in advance of that, is the way we track individuals in this country once a lawful visa has been issued to them, particularly when those visas expire, whether a student visa or just a normal visa for somebody seeking to come in the country for a particular valid reason. How do you envision that you're going to be able to improve the system of tracking these individuals who are here legally? And how are we going to make sure that when their visa expires, that they do what's correct: either extend it or go back to where they came from?

MR. AGUIRRE: Yeah, thank you, Senator Chambliss.

The issue of people that visit our country can be broadly described as immigrants and nonimmigrants. And perhaps you're referring to the nonimmigrant capacity of many of the people that come to this country with either a visitor's visa, or tourist visa, if you will, or student visas, which comprises, really, the majority of the 500 million visitors that we receive in this country. The other side of the equation is the immigrant population, which comes here either on a permanent or semi-permanent capacity.

The reason I make that distinction is because our bureau actually makes that distinction. Our responsibility in the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services is to deal with the immigrant population, and the other parts of our government has to deal with the nonimmigrant population. And I just want to make sure I'm responsive to your question.

Many of the nonimmigrants that come to this country are channeled through or handled by either our State Department or the Bureau of Transportation -- the Border and Transportation Security that Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson handles. Below him, of course, we have the Bureau of Customs and Immigration -- BTPS (sic), I'm not sure -- Border Protection, as well as Immigration Enforcement. And they are more the ones that are going to be tracking the immigrants that perhaps you're referring to. We, of course, will do our part to cooperate and communicate with them, and make sure that we're adding our value to the immigrant community; that would be mostly those who have either permanent residency or asylum status or some of the work permits that also we handle.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: But is there going to be interfacing between your department and those departments, particularly with respect to computerized information that might be available on these individuals?

MR. AGUIRRE: Yes, sir. We will coordinate with them to the extent that is practical and necessary. It's, I think, proper to note that post-9/11, many strides have been made to make different computer databases to interface with each other and communicate with each other. And we have not reached the end of the line; I think we have a long ways to go to improve our background checks and things of that nature.

On our side, sir, as we consider the extension of benefits to those who apply for (sic) us, we work with a number of databases to do the background check to ensure that we're dealing with the individual as they should and to check on their background, check to make sure there's no security risk there. So we do interface with other parts of the government.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: There's some backlog, of about 5 million cases, I believe, that's built up over the years at the former INS. The president said he wants to reduce that time lag down to six months. Can you tell us sort of where we are with respect to reduction of that backlog?

MR. AGUIRRE: Yes, sir. I can tell you that I am dismayed, as I'm sure our president is and most everyone should be, on the backlog that we are experiencing right now. The president's goal as stated brings us to a six-month turnaround time sometime in 2006. I am confident that we will reach and, hopefully, improve on that particular goal.

We were making great strides a couple years ago or so, and then 9/11 came about. And I would say that instead of having a steady growth in terms of completing the cases, we've had a dip because we had to -- "we" meaning the INS -- had to rechannel some of the resources that they were using towards the backlog to deal with the issue of background checks and other things that we were doing.

I can tell you that we've created a group that will return to me within the next 90 days with a recommendation with specific time lines and action items that will establish a more orderly decision on the backlog. And that is definitely one of the three priorities that I have in the big overall sense.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Okay.

...

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Thank you, Senator Leahy. Just enclosing too two things, Mr. Aguirre. First of all, I appreciate your response to both my questions, whether Senator Kennedy's question regarding the issue of making sure that we do follow people here and follow them in the right way. But there's one other aspect of that. You talked about information sharing within the agency and the constant dialogue that's going on. And I appreciate that. And very honestly that's one problem that we saw following 9-1-1 -- there was not the kind of information sharing, either vertically within our federal agencies, but more significantly horizontally across the agencies. And as Secretary Ridge knows, I have harped on this for two and a half years now, and we are going to continue to do it. I there's a plan in place out there to make sure that we're sharing this information with other critical federal agencies, and there's no more important information to be shared than the information that you gather, because it's the -- not just keeping the bad guys out that's important, but once they get here, anybody who has a suspicious background once they get here, we need to make sure that everybody is on the same wave length with respect to sharing of that information on individuals -- in the right way, and I emphasize that. And you know exactly what I mean by that.

Secondly, my office -- as I am sure Senator Leahy's office -- gets overwhelmed at time with immigration cases. In my congressional office Social Security was our number one issue. Now without question in my senatorial office immigration is the number one caseload that we have. And in the past at the INS trying to get a status report on individual cases of constituents has been very, very difficult and very time consuming. And the response coming back from INS frankly was delayed in every instance. And I would hope you'd give some concentration to that to make sure that your people at the lower level out there can be very responsive to members of Congress who do make inquiries that are obviously -- you've been there, you know how important it is to these individuals, and we just need to make sure that they are able to keep up with the status of their cases.

MR. AGUIRRE: Yes, sir. Clearly our relationship with Congress will be one of the pillars of our administration. We'll make sure that we are as responsible as we possibly can be to all congressional inquiries. I don't have necessarily a rear-view mirror into the old INS as to why or how things happened, but I do know that some of our systems are tired and need to be refurbished and need to be improved, and perhaps that accounts for some of the -- what appears to be inattention on my colleagues' part -- certainly not intentional. We will work very hard at being responsive, and hopefully as we improve customer service and reduce backlog there will be less people coming to you, sir, looking for resolution of problems, that they would all get resolved under the normal course of business.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: I am sure that will be the case. And I promise you my staff looks forward to you improving that turnaround time for these folks.

Senator Leahy, do you have anything else?

I want to introduce Senator Hatch, Chairman Hatch's statement for the record, and without objection it will be included.

And we are going to leave the record open for seven days. Any other member of the committee wishing to submit any statement or information will have the opportunity to do so. And again, Mr. Aguirre, we appreciate your being here this morning. We appreciate your great service to our country to this point. And Senator Leahy and all other members of this committee, as well as all other members of the Senate, look forward to continuing the dialogue and working with you to make America a better country in which to live and give hope and opportunity to other folks the same way that we have all had it, particularly people like you. Thank you very much. (Sounds gavel.)

MR. AGUIRRE: Thank you, senator.