HOUSTON -- Democratic candidate for governor Bill White laid out his plan to secure the U.S.-Mexico border Thursday, a job he said his opponent, Gov. Rick Perry, has failed to do in 10 years in office.
White said he would use federal grants, state money and forfeiture dollars from drug seizures to hire 1,000 new local law enforcement officers and 250 state troopers.
White also promised to use state money more effectively, establish formal partnerships with local and federal law agencies and "revamp" the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The former Houston mayor added that he would help local law enforcement adopt a federal program called Secure Communities, which he said he used in Houston to identify criminal illegal immigrants and get them turned over to federal authorities.
"Texas needs to do better a job than what it's done," White said. "We can do it only if we have more resources on the ground.
"Rick Perry's failed to get that... We will get this done. We're tired of the inaction."
Perry, in Austin Thursday picking up an endorsement from the Texas Medical Association's political action committee, defended his record of using state resources to beef up law enforcement along the Texas-Mexico border. He seemed irritated at White's attack.
"Welcome to the debate," Perry said. "His campaign is very high on criticism and very light on any new ideas."
Perry said White's plan relied too heavily on restrictive federal dollars and questioned whether White could get help from Uncle Sam anyway. The longtime Republican governor, who has routinely said that securing the border was the federal government's job, called Washington's border approach an "abject failure" even as he expressed his own hope to "retrieve dollars" from the federal government to fight border-related crime.
"The idea that [White] somehow is going to magically make these dollars appear is a bit humorous, frankly," Perry said. The Legislature has spent about $230 million to beef up state law enforcement along the border since 2007.
"A thousand police officers, a thousand National Guard troops. We've been calling for that for years now," Perry said.
White was critical of Perry's decision to send special teams of Texas Rangers to the border beginning last year, saying local law enforcement would be more effective because they're more familiar with the terrain and residents.
"They know when there's suspicious activity, they know who to ask," White said. "It involves plainclothes [officers], informants. And that requires sustained commitment."
White said his boost in the Department of Public Safety staffing would not displace local law enforcement but emphasize areas such as forensics, regional intelligence and patrolling some of the larger corridors that drug and human traffickers use.
"We need people operating off-road who know the owners of the land, know local residents," he said, "and use DPS where we can get most leverage where DPS can operate across jurisdictions.'
He also called federal grants underutilized and pointed to what he said were successes in obtaining law enforcement grants during his six years as Houston mayor.
White estimated his plan would cost between $75 million and $95 million, "about one-tenth of 1 percent or less of the overall state budget."
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