Senate reverses itself, denies funds for new border fence

July 14, 2006

Just a couple of months after they voted overwhelmingly to to build 370 miles of fencing along the border with Mexico, the U.S. Senate has now voted against providing funds to build it.

Senator Jeff Sessions is an Alabama Republican who proposed an amendment to fund the fence. The amendment was killed on a 71-29 vote. Sessions offered his amendment to authorize $1.8 billion to pay for the fencing that the Senate had voted 83-16 on May 17 to build along high-traffic areas of the border with Mexico. In the same May 17 vote, the Senate directed that 500 miles of vehicle barrier be built along the border.

The authorization vote still stands, but now there is now money to pay for the fence and barrier.

'If we never appropriate the money needed to construct these miles of fencing and vehicle barriers, those miles of fencing and vehicle barriers will never actually be constructed,' Sessions told his colleagues before the vote.

Just about all the Democrats were joined by the chamber's lone independent and 28 Republicans in killing Session's amendment to the Homeland Security Appropriations Act. Two Democrats, however, Senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, supported funding the fence.

Thirty-four senators, including most of the Republican leadership. voted in May to build the fence but in July opposed funding it.

The overall bill, which appropriates more than $32 billion to the Homeland Security Department, including $2.2 billion for border security and control, passed on a 100-0 vote last night.

Sen. Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who historically has fought to increase border security and enforcement of federal immigration laws, was among those who opposed Session's amendment.

Session's amendment would have required across-the-board cuts to the rest of the Homeland Security appropriations bill, Gregg said, which would mean cutting 750 new border-patrol agents and 1,200 new detention beds for illegal aliens that he included in the bill.

'We've attempted very hard to increase Border Patrol agents in this bill, increase detention beds,' he said. 'And, yes, we haven't funded the wall specifically as a result of our efforts to do these increases.'

Sessions said that if his colleagues were serious about building the fence that they promised, they would find the funding.

'We will rightly be accused of not being serious about the commitments we've made to the American people with regard to actually enforcing the laws of immigration in America, which many Americans already believe we're not serious about,' he said. 'They don't respect what we've done in the past, and they should not. We have failed, and it's time for us to try to fix it and do better.'

To prove his point, Sessions offered another amendment, which appropriated another $85.7 million to enable Homeland Security to hire 800 more full-time investigators to probe immigration-law violations. The vote against that amendment was 66-34.