mr. chairman , i thank the gentleman for yielding me the time .  we started this fence about 20 years ago .  we started it by building the first steel fence across that 14-mile segment between the coastal hills of san diego county and the pacific ocean .  we did that because drug trucks were running that border at the rate of about 300 per month .  we had about 10 people being murdered each year , along with numerous robberies and rapes , to such a high degree that the best-selling book , `` lines and shadows '' by joseph wambaugh , was written depicting this `` no man 's land , '' where nobody wanted to be after dark .  so we built that first line , which was the steel fence right on the border .  we then built the second fence , that is , the second tier of the so-called triple fence , after we passed a law signed by president bill clinton in 1996 .  and it was president clinton who signed the bill waiving the endangered species act and waiving nepa because he thought it was so important that we have security at this , the most porous smugglers ' corridor in the united states of america .  now , i can just tell you , as a guy who has worked on this thing from the start , my staff went out and found those 79 , 000 steel landing mats to build this fence .  if the extremists had discovered this fence before we got the first 12 miles built , that would not be built .  we stopped those 300 drug trucks a month , stopped them dead .  we eliminated the 10 murders a year , mostly of undocumented workers .  we eliminated the hundreds of rapes of the people who were coming through there because we built that fence .  if the extremists had had their way , they would have gone to a sympathetic federal court , tied us up in lawsuits and we would not have had the fence .  the secretary of the navy has written us a letter saying that completion of this project will enhance the security of our naval installations by reducing the potential threat environment created by an unsecured border .  a few miles north of this gap in the fence is the biggest naval installation on the west coast .  through this gap have come and been apprehended people from nations that sponsor terrorists , nations like north korea , nations like syria .  this is a security issue .  and for people to say this is an environmental issue , this is the state of play right now , all these trails you see have been hammered into that ecosystem by the smugglers .  none of my colleagues have been out there trying to stop them .  they have hammered these trails by the hundreds into the ecosystem , hammered it into the marshlands and the estuary lands .  good biologists say it will take hundreds of years for these areas to be restored , not by actions of the border patrol or by our security apparatus , but by the smugglers who come across this particular gap in the fence .  we need to secure this gap .  the secretary of the navy recognizes that , president clinton recognized that and gave an unprecedented waiver .  we need to complete the border fence .  