National Guardsmen stand watch atop a hillside along the Mexican border just east of Nogales. Guardsmen are helping the undermanned Border Patrol at the international line.
Posted on 10/28/2006 3:05:35 PM PDT by SandRat
The U.S. government has set aside $1.123 billion to keep the National Guard on the border through September 2007, according to a Guard official.
Since President Bush announced the guard's deployment in support of the Border Patrol, at least $225 million has been spent. The National Guard has helped build roads, extend and improve fencing and vehicle barriers, and even man lookout posts, but it does not have the authority to stop and detain illegal entrants.
The cost is likely to continue beyond the current fiscal year as the Border Patrol encounters difficulty in finding, training and keeping agents, making it unlikely it will meet Bush's goal of hiring 6,000 additional agents by the end of calendar year 2008. In his May 15 speech, the president said the Guard would be reduced after one year as the new Border Patrol agents and technology become available.
The funds allocated include $708 million from the 2006 fiscal year global war on terrorism supplemental fund, and $415 million from unobligated hurricane funds, said Lt. Col. Mike Milord, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in Virginia. That amount is equal to nearly half of the $2.27 billion budget for the Border Patrol in the current fiscal year.
Funding has been approved for 1,500 agents in the 2007 Department of Homeland Security budget, which would leave the Border Patrol 4,500 short of the president's goal. As of Oct. 1, 751 trainees were at the agency's academy in Artesia, N.M., with 1,500 scheduled to be there by next June, said Border Patrol spokesman Todd Fraser.
It took the Border Patrol 14 years to increase its ranks by about 8,000 from 4,100 in 1992 to more than 12,000 in 2006. During that time, the agency's total number of agents increased by an average of 568 per year. At that rate, it would take the agency more than 10 years to add 6,000 agents.
"It certainly depends on whether there is continued emphasis on this and continued strong funding," Julia Gelatt, research assistant at the Migration Policy Institute. "I know that it's fairly hard to keep and retain Border Patrol agents."
Border Patrol attrition rates doubled from 5 percent to 10 percent between the early and late 1990s, and then spiked to 18 percent in 2002 before declining, according to 2003 Senate committee testimony from Robert Bonner, then director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. A 1999 study by the Government Accountability Office, then known as the General Accounting Office, found it takes 30 applicants to field one new Border Patrol agent.
About 15 percent of recruits drop out before graduating from the 20-week academy, Fraser said. The attrition rate drops to 4 percent to 6 percent once agents get through their two-year probationary period, he said. Retention is a sizable hurdle in this effort, says the National Border Patrol Council, the agency union. "We always say they shouldn't be allowed to recruit until they learn to retain," said Shawn Moran, vice president of the agents' union, the National Border Patrol Council in San Diego.
The Border Patrol admits that it will be a challenge to meet the president's request by the end of calendar 2008 but said the amount of funding will help accelerate a historically slow hiring process, said spokesman Mario Martinez. The agency has stepped up its recruiting efforts across the country, including focusing on men and women whose armed- services commitments have finished and with TV ads in major cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and St. Louis.
"We have the funding in place, the will in place. Congress and the president are behind us in the growth," he said. "And I think the Border Patrol will come through as we have in the past."
The agency is currently expanding its training facilities in Artesia to meet the demand. The agency used to have three training facilities before consolidating them into one in 2004, Martinez said. "The facilities in Artesia were not designed to accommodate the numbers it would take to reach the goals the president set forth, so there is a level of infrastructure that needs to be achieved," he said. In the meantime, the presence and support of the National Guard appears to be helping the undermanned agency.
The 1,950 National Guard troops in Arizona have built four miles of fencing and 15 miles of vehicle barriers, and regraded at least 150 miles of access roads. Four-member entrance-identification teams set up on hilltops along the border have helped agents spot illegal entrants trying to cross. They have also assisted with vehicle and helicopter maintenance and in camera-control rooms. There are about 5,200 National Guard troops along the entire southern border.
Whether the National Guard's work justifies the money is in the eye of the beholder.
If their work results in less human and drug smuggling, then it's worth it, but if they are just performing administrative duties in offices, it's not, said Rick Oltman, western field director with the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
"The money would be worth it if they were deployed in a fashion that actually represented a deterrent," he said.
The costs seem reasonable as far as enforcement spending goes, but the question is whether the strategy makes sense, Gelatt said. The 2006 Border Patrol budget was $2.3 billion, and appropriations for fiscal 2007 are about $2.27 billion, she said.
"It was a way to get support on the border quickly," she said. "But it seems like if there is that amount of support needed it would be better to bring in Border Patrol agents."
*Contact Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com
National Guardsmen stand watch atop a hillside along the Mexican border just east of Nogales. Guardsmen are helping the undermanned Border Patrol at the international line.
National Guard on the Border.
Good stuff.
"but it does not have the authority to stop and detain illegal entrants. "
Wonderful.......send them home. They are useless!
Hire illegal aliens... doing a job Americans won't do.
I was down in New Mexico for the Minuteman CDC...the National Guard was there...it seemed to me the National guard and the Border patrol were working together....infrared scopes..etc...get this..the border patrol does not have them....now working with us is a different matter..we were ignored..concerned US citizens volunteering our time ..we were ignored....and we are cheap..very cheap..and motivated..but thats another story......it seemed there were more Border patrol..but they looked 16 years old....time will tell if they are corrupt..lots of money on the border to be...
ping
They are NOT useless, it has made one heck of a difference. I live near the border and the illegal traffic has slowed a lot and that's from personal observation. There aren't 20 sets of tracks across our farms every morning. The only backpacks you find out in the desert anymore are rotted by exposure to the sun instead of 10 or 15 a week and it's the same with the water bottles. Where it was 1000s coming over it has slowed to 100s.
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