Napolitano tells Rick Perry to ask Congress for money to house illegal immigrants

From: Rick Perry

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said today that Texas Gov. Rick Perry should ask Congress — and not the Obama administration — for money to cover the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, Napolitano, a former federal prosecutor and Arizona governor, said she sympathizes with border state governors who are seeking to offset some of the costs of illegal immigration. But she added that Congress must supply the funding to transfer money to the states — and the GOP-controlled House and Democratic-controlled Senate have declined to make such aid available.

“This is not something Congress has been willing to appropriate for,” she said.

Napolitano said she made a similar reimbursement request of the George W. Bush administration when she, too, was running a border state a few years ago.

“I think he copied our letter when I was governor of Arizona,” he said.

In an Aug. 10 letter to Napolitano, Perry blamed the federal government for failing to secure the border and burdening county jails and state prisons with the costs associated with housing illegal immigrants.

“Therefore, on behalf of all the taxpaying citizens of Texas, I am respectfully submitting a reimbursement request in the amount of $349,283,453 for state and local costs of incarcerating illegal immigrants who are in the United States as a result of the federal government’s failure to properly secure our international borders,” Perry wrote.

Napolitano, who failed to get her requested assistance from the Bush administration, said she has sympathy for border governors who bear the costs of federal immigration policy.

“I get it,” she said.

But she said Perry made a mistake to send the reimbursement request to the Department of Homeland Security.

“It is a program out of the Department of Justice,” she said. “He kind of sent the letter to the wrong thing.”

Napolitano acknowledged that the administration has been criticized from the left for being too aggressive in its deportation practices — at the same time conservatives say it has been too lax.

“You get yanked from all sides,” she said.