Posted on 04/14/2007 11:58:11 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
SAN YSIDRO -- As planning begins to reduce the number of National Guard troops along the border with Mexico, less than 1,000 of 6,000 new U.S. Border Patrol agents that the Bush administration wants in place by the end of next year have been hired.
As of March 17, the Border Patrol has only been able to hire and train 593 new agents or 9 percent of the administration's goal, according to Javier Rios, a Border Patrol spokesman in Washington.
Screening new agents and a lengthy training process have resulted in the relatively small number of new hires. By the end of 2008, the administration wants a Border Patrol force of about 18,000 agents, up from the 12,000 in place when the president ordered the troops to the border last June.
Guard commanders in California and other states assigned to the border duty are starting to put together plans to reduce the troop presence.
There were 1,389 members of the California Guard's air and ground units on the border last week, a number that probably will fall to between 1,000 and 1,100 by the fall, said Lt. Col. Jon Siepmann, a Guard spokesman in Sacramento.
"This has always been a temporary mission," he said, adding that the assignment officially ends in December 2008. "Our end strength (later this year) will be based on what the Border Patrol says it needs."
Governors across the nation, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, initially resisted the Guard assignment, saying it came at a time when Guard units and their families were stressed by frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the border mission has gone on, those assignments haven't waned, and the Defense Department last week said that up to 12,000 Guard troops from four states other than California could be headed to Iraq early in 2008.
The border assignment has been a success, according to the administration and the Border Patrol, which say the number of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally has fallen dramatically.
Along the 60-mile San Diego border sector, apprehensions fell by more than 6,500 people in a 12-month period ending April 1 with 67,926 arrests compared with 74,463 in the previous 12-month period, according to Border Patrol statistics.
Cat and mouse
Attempted illegal crossings into the U.S. are still a daily part of life along the border.
As an example: A few yards from where a California National Guard crew last week bulldozed a hillside just over the line that separates Tijuana from the U.S., a half-dozen homeless people were gathered in a drainage spillway, seemingly oblivious to the noise and work going on around them.
The group was actually several feet inside the U.S., living in a makeshift encampment. A member of the group who identified himself as Jesus Gonzales said he had been there for several weeks, weighing whether to try to make his way farther into San Diego County.
The Border Patrol says that kind of cat-and-mouse game is a regular occurrence near the San Ysidro crossing on Interstate 5, the nation's busiest land crossing.
"There are always people who will play that game," James Jacques, a supervisory Border Patrol agent in San Diego, said of the group. "It becomes a question of how much time and resource do you want to spend running back and forth chasing people who can move a few feet and be back in Mexico?"
It was another example of the oddities encountered along the border, where Guard troops have been serving as extra eyes and ears, as well as on construction and support crews.
Instead of trying to arrest the homeless group, the Border Patrol relies on cameras, sensors and spotters to make sure the squatters stay put.
Working as members of what the Guard calls "entry identification teams" is one of the primary jobs for the Guard along the 1,983-mile border with Mexico. Only a very few carry arms under guidelines that the administration established.
The spotting task goes on day and night at places in this region that the Border Patrol has given nicknames such as Tin Can, Arnie's Point, Washer Woman and Smuggler's Gulch, the latter a large, rugged expanse where attempted crossings are commonplace.
Guard drawdown
As the patrol struggles to find and qualify recruits to send to its academy in Artesia, N.M., Guard officials are beginning work on identifying who in its ranks to pull off the border mission, dubbed by the Bush administration as Operation Jump Start.
Just how many troops will remain by year's end and by this time next year is uncertain, the Guard's Liepmann said.
California's border is divided into two primary enforcement sectors, San Diego, where 455 Guard troops were assigned last week, and El Centro.
The far eastern portion of the state is covered by Border Patrol agents based in Yuma, where Bush appeared last Monday to push his immigration reform legislation and praise the Guard for its efforts.
"Fewer are trying to come across; we're deterring people from attempting illegal border crossings in the first place," Bush said.
Capt. Kim Holman, a public affairs officer assigned to the San Diego sector, said the Guard troops are using the border assignment as a "real world" training opportunity.
"We think we have done a lot to improve the situation," she said last week. "We're very proud of the reduction in apprehensions because we think that shows our help is working."
Agents and their Guard assistants assigned to the San Diego sector work out of six stations along the border and from two inland sites, covering 7,000 square miles overall.
The sector is anticipating getting at least 22 more agents soon from the pool of the newly hired, said agent Adan Cortez, who was working the San Ysidro area last week along with several Guard troops.
Cortez said he believes the Guard's presence has helped reduce attempted illegal crossings because smugglers and people acting on their own know the border is being much more closely monitored.
Besides acting as spotters, Guard troops have filled desk jobs and are helping to build a secondary fence to augment an existing paneled barricade that is easily scaled. The California Guard also has a fleet of eight helicopters based at San Diego's North Island Naval Air Station that are used to conduct patrols and ferry agents in and out of remote areas.
Chris Bauder, president of the Border Patrol union that represents the approximately 1,650 agents that make up the rank and file of San Diego sector, said the National Guard has helped. But the union official said the various attempts to curb illegal immigration over the years haven't succeeded.
"There's no question that there are more resources down on the border, but from our perspective, U.S. border strategies remain a failure," he said.
'Helping out'
Back where the homeless Mexicans were making camp last week, Guard engineering crews are working to reduce the slope of an area where the secondary fence is under construction.
It's the same kind of work that Guard troops have been helping with in this region since the Clinton administration launched a program called Operation Gatekeeper in 1995. Guard troops also have aided in drug interdiction efforts for years.
All of the California National Guard troops working on the Bush border initiative volunteered for the task, including Sgt. Nick Diaz, a medic from Los Angeles who spent most of 2005 as an Army ambulance driver in Tikrit, Iraq.
Diaz has been on the border assignment for the last nine months but has yet to have been called on to treat anyone. It's boring compared with his experiences in Iraq, he said.
"But I also know that we're helping out down here," he said, adding that he can go home and see his family when not on duty.
If guardsmen spot an attempted border crossing or some other illegal activity, they report it and the Border Patrol dispatches its agents to make the arrest.
"Our mission is not to stop or apprehend illegal aliens," said Guard Master Sgt. Michael Drake. "It's to help the Border Patrol stop the number of attempted entries, reduce the flow of drugs and erect new barriers."
A wall. A simple concrete wall could eliminate the entire hassle and expense of this mess.
PATHETIC
This is exactly why we need our military on the border. 30,000 would do nicely and send the right message to our awful “neighbor” to the south.
FENCE— This also shows why we need a fence. With a fence you need less border agents. And not some bullshit virtual fence. The treacherous bastards in DC have tried to change the 700 of mandated fence into a virtual fence
1- The background investigations that have to be done to hire a federal employee take over a year.
2- You’d get more candidates if you stop arresting the officers when they do their jobs.
700 MILES of mandated fence into a virtual fence
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AG
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1994 (202) 514-2008
TDD (202) 514-1888
PRESIDENT CLINTON ANNOUNCES NEW CRIME BILL GRANTS
TO PUT POLICE OFFICERS ON THE BEAT
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Just a dozen days after money became
available, President Clinton today announced the first round of
police hiring grants under the new crime bill, an important step
toward his goal of putting 100,000 police on America’s streets.
More than $200 million in grants were awarded to communities in
all 50 states and Puerto Rico, including 332 police departments,
46 sheriffs’ departments, six Indian tribal groups, and several
other law enforcement agencies. The crime bill authorizes money
to increase the number of police in America by twenty percent....
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/Pre_96/October94/590.txt.html
All talk and no action, nothing has changed, nothing will change, until such time as nowhere is unaffected.
Geeeeeee .. thanks for alerting the drug smugglers!
regarding a fence, it appears that livestock use the rio grande for water and a fence would make that difficult.
from here
http://coloradoriparian.org/GreenLine/V09-4/RioGrande.html
The river is the primary source of water for livestock on both banks. In this desert country, cattle are attracted to the succulent vegetation of the riparian area, where they remain until moved or the forage is used up.
On the BLM lands, livestock access to the river is restricted by a fence between the riparian area and the uplands. Small fenced water gaps allow livestock access to the river to drink.
Good fences make good neighbors. And a bigger, longer, stronger, higher fence will make us even better neighbors. It’s the neighborly thing to do,
Pure BS, all across the country the department of agriculture has been/and are paying farmers to fence their cattle off from water and to put in pumping systems with water tanks.
Did they ever fully attain the 6,000 number? Every report that I read indicated that there never was 6,000. And the excuse was due to the 2-week rotations.
Also, there is no surprise that less than 20% of the promised new Border Guards have been hired.
The Bush speech in Yuma a few days ago was nothing but hypocrisy. He talks about securing the border while doing everything he can to erase it.
Nice bit of overused dogma. It would be more helpful to make original or even unoriginal arguments for a fence that is not pablum.
Next time a super max prison is to be built, I will recomend your neighborhood for the contruction site. Oh and the israelis and palis are such good neighbors and so were the east and west germans before the wall came down as were the chinese and mongols.
And if fence building makes good neighbors, we have a good neighbor to the north in canada, but I guess if we built a wall there, we could be even better neighbors.
Do you have a fenced yard, staytrue?
When the Canuks start gathering on street corners babbling obsenities at your daughters or marching in the streets DEMANDING special rights or coming across their border at thousands a day attacking our border guards, let us know.
“If guardsmen spot an attempted border crossing or some other illegal activity, they report it and the Border Patrol dispatches its agents to make the arrest.”
And by the time the Border Patrol get there the illegal aliens are in TN.....
“Our mission is not to stop or apprehend illegal aliens,”
Why not?
Boy Scouts could do otherwise....
“We’re very proud of the reduction in apprehensions because we think that shows our help is working.”
Well think again...
I THINK that a reduction in apprehensions just shows MORE illegal aliens ARE NOT being stopped....
It doesnt show the number who get by because the Nation Guard ARE NOT ARMED and therefore as helpless as kittens, and it doesnt show the number of illegal aliens who just move to spots where there are no Border Patrols and no Nation Guard....
(This kind of dumb comment has bugged me for weeks)
“The NG on the border was a shellgame anyway.”
Remember the TN National Guard that “ran away” when the large group of masked heavily armed gunmen approached them?
They were local guys who had just returned from a long deployment in Iraq where they had performed heroically...
Hardly the sort to be cowards, but they were UNARMED on the border...
I'm ashamed to admit that I voted for that man. Twice! Just in case I forget, please, someone remind me that the lesser of two evils is still evil so that I don't vote for Rudy or any of the other RINOS!!! Bush has proved that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Especially when elPresidente Jorge Booosh appointed his good buddy as the Attorney General, and that buddy has ties to MEChA and other groups who want to take America back from us. Remember, we saw their signs in the march when they were DEMANDING MORE RIGHTS. They called us "pilgrims" and told us to go back to Europe. Forget that. I'm moving to Mexico. It's the only place I know I can get away from them. LOL!
“A wall. A simple concrete wall could eliminate the entire hassle and expense of this mess.”
___________________________________________
We don’t even need a wall, just a 1 foot barrier in the sand. The first 10 that step over it are shot dead in their tracks, word gets out, pooof....no more problemo!
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