Janet Napolitano Quotes

I fear the carnival of crime is beginning on our border.

The consequences of Fast and Furious are higher crime and more deaths. I remain committed to seeing justice brought for Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the hundreds of Mexicans who have lost their lives.

Fifty thousand people in Mexico have been murdered. Puerto Penasco, 60 miles south of our border, just had five people and a police officer killed. That is like part of Arizona, and it is spilling over into our state.

And you know, it's not just illegal immigration. Terrorists can come across. They're devastating our ranchers down in southern Arizona - drop houses, kidnapping, automobile accidents, extortion, drugs, the spill-over with the drug cartels. We're facing all of it.

No border controls anywhere in the world are able to prevent determined criminals from crossing borders.

I made reference continuously to the killings, the death, the life taken by all of these narcotrafficking gangs and human smugglers. I spoke of this problem as one of the wounds that Mexico suffers. It's a great pain that I'm taking, because this nation [Mexicans] doesn't deserve a drama like this one.

There are a few Chinese smuggled in over the borders of British Columbia on the north and Mexico on the south.

We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels. We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life.

And the people who live in the southern part of my state do not have a secure environment. To wit, there are signs that the government put up that say, 'Warning. You are in a drug smuggling area and a human smuggling area.'

The murder of Robert Krentz - whose family had been ranching in Arizona since 1907 - by illegal alien drug dealers was the final straw for many Arizonans. But there are dozens and dozens of other citizens of our state who had been murdered by illegal aliens. Currently 95 illegal aliens are in Maricopa County jail for murder.

Larado and Neuvo Larado are not separated but are joined by a common border. 12 thousand trucks cross the border at Larado every day. People shop on both sides of the border. Families are on both sides. Putting up a fence will not work. Illegal aliens will tunnel under it and climb over it. I am going to go into the ladder business. You don’t turn your back on and separate yourself from your friends.

Illegal immigrants all too often swell the ranks of organized crime.

There is no doubt that cross border crime and illicit trade harm individuals and communities and pose challenges to governments, including the United States. But the panicked discourse and frenzied law enforcement policies that define Washington’s current approach are an alarmist reaction.

We know gang members are pouring across the border and filling up our prisons. We have a huge drug problem in this country now in places that never had an opiate problem. Why is that? Because this is brought in - because we do not have a border.

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.

By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will end the cycle of human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down. We will stop it. It won't be happening very much anymore. Believe me.

Terrorism fuels itself from all kinds of illicit trafficking: drugs, weapons, human beings.

Drug smugglers often use juveniles to carry their shipments into the U.S. because they know the juveniles will not be prosecuted if caught.

Thousands of Americans die at the hands of illegal aliens every year. Every murder, every rape, every violent gang crime committed against Americans by illegal aliens is an utterly preventable crime.

We do not control our borders. We don’t know who is coming across and we don’t know what is coming across.

Today’s fear mongering about international crime frequently relies on dire warnings about “broken borders”. But those who claim that U. S. borders are out of control now forget that those borders were never effectively controlled in the first place. In fact, the United States has always had highly permeable borders. Border smuggling has defined the U. S. Mexican economic relationship from the start; the same is true of the U. S. Canadian relationship.

Drug money, such as booze money during Prohibition, has corrupted countless police, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, border patrol agents, prosecutors and judges... Because illegal drugs are unregulated, their purity is unknowable -- accounting for thousands of overdose deaths and injuries... Let's stipulate that some unknown number of Americans will become addicts after legalization, who otherwise would not have. We must ask whether the terrible price we are now paying -- in police costs, international drug control efforts, border security, foregone tax revenue, overdose deaths, corruption and violence -- is worth it.

We have two borders--one with Mexico and the other with Canada, I've done a lot of looking, but I have never seen an illegal Canadian .... Canada has a sound, stable economy, and that's what you need to solve the border problem. That that's why a wall by itself will never work.

One of the chapters outlined in my book talks about the Iranian influence with Venezuela, these terror flights that go back and forth that we don't manifests on, and then nuclear material smuggled across our unsecure southwest border from Mexico into the United States.

As a border prosecutor, I've put criminals behind bars who worked for some of the most violent cartels in the world.