Rep. Duncan Hunter on Border Security

This is a partial transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," November 8, 2005, that has been edited for clarity.

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BILL O'REILLY, HOST: In the "Impact" segment tonight, a new FOX News Opinion Dynamics poll says 78 percent of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to secure the borders. And 51 percent want a wall built on the Mexican border.

So last week, legislation was introduced that would build such a barrier. It's called True Enforcement and Border Security Act.

And joining us now from Washington is California Congressman Duncan Hunter, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Now in your district, you fought against, I guess, environmental interests and other special interest groups to complete a fence. And then, that fence is almost completed south of San Diego, correct?

REP. DUNCAN HUNTER (R), CALIFORNIA: That's right. And in 1994, when the Republicans took control of the House, the land between Tijuana and San Diego was the most prolific smuggler's corridor in America.

That's the smuggling corridor through which most of the cocaine and most of the people were smuggled from Mexico into the United States.

So we designed and built, Bill, a triple fence. That's three layers of fencing. And we did all of it, except for the one piece in what is known as Smuggler's Gulch.

And we had trouble with the environmentalists. They hung us up for six years. And last year, we got a full vote in the House and the Senate, signed by the president. And we're now going to complete that gap.

But the point is we took an area, a no man's land where you had gangs who were robbing, raping, and murdering with automatic weapons, where you had 300 drug trucks a month steaming across the border from Mexico loaded with cocaine, coming into the U.S. and massive smuggling of illegal aliens. That's where they made the old bonsai attacks where literally, according to the border patrol and the old footage you can see thousands of people would come across the border at the same time, overwhelming the two or three dozen border agents who are on our side.

Against that, we built when the Republicans took over in `94 a triple fence. And we found out it was so effective, we never had to do the third layer.

So we have now a double fence with a border patrol road in between. And Bill, that works. Unless you can pole vault 30 feet, unless all the border patrol is out at the Dairy Queen, and you climb over and you cut a hole in the second fence on U.S. soil with nobody watching, you can't get across that fence.

O'REILLY: All right. So you're envisioning from Brownsville to Chula Vista, a double or triple fence the way you have it in San Diego County?

HUNTER: Precisely. You simply take the San Diego fence, which is proven, which works, which incidentally has made the communities in northern Tijuana happy because they don't have the border gangs there anymore, and you simply move that to the east. And you first fence off these other 11 smugglers' corridors.

O'REILLY: OK, now The Sacramento Bee today editorialized against this. A number of other papers - primarily left wing papers say, number one, it insults Mexico. And number two, it sends the wrong message to the world, that we, you know, we're not the Statue of Liberty people anymore. How do you respond to that?

HUNTER: Well, first question on insulting Mexico. Before we built our fence in San Diego, we had an average of ten murders a year because these border gangs would apprehend a bunch of illegal aliens. They would rape the women. They would rob them. And often, they would murder them.

So we had an average of about ten murders a year right there. Nobody in the consulates or the embassies on the Mexican side seemed to be too concerned about that.

When we built the fence, we totally eliminated those murders. And if you talk to people in the communities in northern Tijuana that comes right up to the fence, they're happy that there is now law and order on that part of the border, because those gangs, which if pursued from the north would go south, and if pursued from the south would go north, needed their mobility. They needed to be able to move back and forth across the international lines.

O'REILLY: Yes, no, listen I get it. We stopped them. But the image of the U.S. as a kind of armed camp is what they're objecting to.

HUNTER: Here's the answer, Bill. This border enforcement is no longer just an immigration issue. It's a national security issue.

O'REILLY: Absolutely.

HUNTER: Last year, North Koreans were caught coming into this country, Communist Chinese, folks from Yemen, folks from Iran. You have to know who's coming in and what they're bringing.

O'REILLY: All right. What are the odds of this passing here?

HUNTER: Well, you had a full vote in the House and Senate on this piece of the fence. And I think you're going to see the same votes following additional segments as we move...

O'REILLY: All right, well, let us know how it goes. We'd like to trace it all the way through, Congressman.

HUNTER: Will do.

O'REILLY: And we appreciate you taking the time.

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