It's never been 30 seconds.
Thank you, sir. One of the big national stories is the flash flooding conditions in Texas. I know your focus is on border security, but can you just walk us through sort of the federal response [Inaudible] that lie ahead with that?
Look, I think Secretary Noem and President Trump responded quickly. I know even the Border Patrol [Inaudible] star unit was deployed and they're helping the recovery effort. I know Border Patrol air assets are involved. I think Secretary Noem reacted quickly. I mean, thank God President Biden's not president, or we'd still be waiting for a response.
Tom, can you talk about the big, beautiful bill and what sort of money you're going to see for the border, when? What do you think you can use it for?
Well, it's going to be used a lot of things. As far as the border, it's going to continue the border barriers, border walls, border walls work. Every place they build a wall, illegal immigration has decreased, illegal drug flow has decreased. And not just border wall, it's going to buy more river buoys. River buoys are very effective.
And it's also going to give the technology we need on the southern border. And the existing wall and the new wall, when President Biden came in office, not only did he stop building the wall, he stopped putting the technology in the existing wall, that does a lot of good things. It gave Border Patrol agents the ability to talk with one another because a lot of dead zones on the border.
That's an officer safety issue. I don't want to get into specifics of law enforcement sensitive, but the technology that wall helps us to realize when someone's approaching the wall, someone climbs the wall. So we need that technology there. It's a border wall system. We're going to continue the wall building.
We're going to continue the technology within that wall and the technology also for port of entries. You know, we want fair -- we want legal traffic, legal trade to come through the ports as quickly as possible, but we want to, of course, seize as much contraband as we can, so more technology will make that happen.
As far as ICE, it's a huge plus up, 10,000 more officers. Look, I've been doing this since 1984, Border patrol has been plussed up many times and I appreciate that and I'm supportive of that. But when Border Patrol arrests somebody, they go in detention. Then they go into immigration hearings, then if they get ordered to be removed, they get removed.
That's all ICE's job. So our Border Patrol got plussed up over decades, ICE didn't. So now ICE finally is getting the resources they need. And it's going to put more boots on the ground which we need right now. I just did an interview. There's over 600,000 illegal aliens in this nation with criminal histories walking the streets.
We need to find them quickly. And for those that say 3,000 a day is too much, I want to remind them, do the math. We'd have to arrest 7,000 every single day for the remainder of this administration just to catch the ones Biden released into the nation. Right? We talk about 12 million illegal aliens. We've been talking about 12 million for two decades.
We know at least eight million were released in this country with Joe Biden. So we're well over 20 million. I'm being conservative. So more boots on the ground means we arrest more bad people, means this country is safe.
Mr. Homan, Zoran Mamdani, the likely next mayor of New York City has promised not to cooperate with you or with ICE or with deportations or any kind. Do you have a plan? Is there a plan to work around that? How are you going to handle it?
[Inaudible] going to be in New York City. And President Trump said it two weeks ago, we're going to double down and triple down on sanctuary cities. Why, not because they're a blue city or a blue state, because we know that's where the problem is. We know they're releasing public safety threats and national security threats to the streets every day because they don't honor our detainers.
We know that. We don't have that problem like in Florida, where every sheriff in the state is working with us. So where we're going to send our assets, we want to send them where the problem is, sanctuary cities. So I've said it before, we'll flood the zone of sanctuary cities. If they don't let us arrest a bad guy [Inaudible] jail, they're going to arrest them in the community.
We're going to arrest them at a work site. So we're going to increase our community operation. We're going to increase work site enforcement operations. We're going to get the bad guys. So if they don't want to help, get out of the way, we're coming to do it.
Do you have a priority list, so what things you'd like to do first or are you going to do it all at the same time?
Same as day one, national security threats, public safety threats are always the priority. Well, if you're in the country legally, you're not off the table. I mean, I see people you know saying we're arresting non-criminals. Well, they're in the country legally. That's our job. And we told ICE agents in the process going out looking for the bad guy -- and this is the problem with sanctuary cities, when we go to the community to go find the criminal, many times they're with others, others that may not be a criminal target, but they're in the United States illegally.
They're coming too. We're going to enforce immigration law, unlike the last administration where Secretary Mayorkas instructed ICE, you can't arrest an illegal alien for simply being here illegally. They got to be arrested, being convicted of a serious criminal offense. He rewrote the law. That's not what the law says.
We're going to force law. That's what the people put President Trump in office to do and that's what we're doing.
Mr. Homan, it's a little out of your area, but Secretary Noem has rejected the idea that staff shortages had anything to do with the problems in Texas [Inaudible] getting warnings out. Are you interested in a serious investigation to find out whether staff shortages [Inaudible]
I'll leave that up -- you're right, it's out of my lane. Secretary Noem, I'm sure she's all over this. Of course, the first thing the left wants to do is when there's a tragedy like this is blame somebody in the Trump administration or Trump administration. Bottom line is, I looked at the response that occurred, it's a far better, quicker, appropriate response than you would have seen in the Biden administration.
[Inaudible] Nation has reported on concerns of Iranian nationals working with Mexican drug cartels [Inaudible]
Pardon me?
Concerns of Iranian nationals working with Mexican drug cartels right across the border, is that something you're tracking? How serious of a concern is that?
I can't comment on that, but we're well aware of it and we're all over it. Thanks, all.
Thank you. Thanks.