Did you know Rep. Culberson is working on border security?
Last week Rep. John Culberson was on with Chris Baker, and while I didn't get to hear all of the interview, I did hear Rep. Culberson mention something about his work in getting $100 million for border sheriffs.
That piqued my curiosity, so I did a brief search of Chron.com. Nothing immediately jumped out at me. So I emailed Rep. Culberson's office and was directed to this on his website:
The legislation also includes a section that I authored based on my work with the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition. This section provides the sheriffs with $100 million in grant funding to hire, train, and equip deputies, and build detention space to house illegal aliens for deportation. Border county Sheriffs can have additional deputies on the ground within 90 days of this bill becoming law, while it takes up to two years to train and deploy additional Border Patrol agents.
That was part of the big immigration reform bill the House passed last December. So I went back to Chron.com and searched again, and this is all I could find:
For instance, Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, supports Operation Linebacker, a project of the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition that intends to use local law enforcement authorities to support U.S. border officers.
A border-security bill passed by the House includes $100 million for county law enforcement agencies to work with federal authorities. Texas sheriffs alone would need about $34 million, according to budgets they submitted to Culberson, for anti-riot shotguns, radios, computers, utility costs, night-vision goggles and salaries.
The project has already received about $10 million from the Texas state government.
That's it. And it's from February. Two months after the legislation passed the House! Why didn't Samantha Levine mention that Rep. Culberson authored that particular section?
Isn't this an important topic, worthy of more column-space than it was given? A local congressman is taking serious action to help protect our border, yet it earns barely a whisper out of our local paper.
(This is the same local paper that can devote four reporters and a reader representative to covering the one-week-old story of an accidental shooting.)
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 02/20/06 07:03 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Sphere | Comments (6)
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