When is last time you heard about BORTAC responding to Agents being shot at. I guess what I should have wrtitten was that BORTAC has been useless. With all the problems we have been having, BORTAC has been nowhere around. Right now, BORTAC is helping the Canadians provide security for the G-8 summit in Canada. Meanwhile our line agents are being shot at and assaulted by Mexican military and smugglers down on the Border. It would be nice to actually have BORTAC help us out on the line for a change.
Almost every Border Patrol Agent, at least in California has access to M-4's . Agents in San Diego and El Centro Sector are restricted from taking their M-4's out in residential areas. Supposedly, the INS under Meissener wanted to do away with the full auto on the M-4's and started the ball rolling to do so. Fortunately, this stupidity has yet to come to fruition. For the most part Agents can take their M-4's to the field, most elect not to.
If you noticed this thread has a lot of cross fire about whether or not to have the military on the border. Some of it is ludicrous, in that the debate is posed as being one of either having no military on the border or invading Mexico. I think that's a false choice, but it does bring up the question: does the Border Patrol have the capacity to stop the escalating number and intensity of the "incidents", if we assume that the military is inappropriate?
So I did a little search with the key words "special operations" and "border patrol" based on my own experience that I've never seen a federal agency that didn't want to have just as many goodies as the rest of them. And bingo, I get BORTAC.
It seems like just the ticket: an SO outfit that, after a few altercations with Mexican Army units and other lower life forms ("smugglers"), would probably deter pretty much any sort of attacks on the BP. But I hadn't heard of any response like that in any of the recent attacks. So, where are these guys? AWOL? That's what prompted the question initially. It seems that's exactly what's going on: they aren't around. In addition to being a small group.
As far as the fire power, it keeps coming up in these attacks that the BP agent "only had a handgun". In reading about BORTAC and other descriptions of BP armament it seemed that the BP has all the armament it needed on paper, but that both Clinton administration ideologues like Meissner and Bill Lan Lee, as well as Ziglar, had restricted their use so much that it was essentially window dressing. It sounds like with full auto M-4's still available that you have what you need (at least in uncongested areas), but don't use because...? I suppose because in general the attacks are isolated. But they are happening....
The conclusion I get from this is that BORTAC could be used a lot more effectively as a real paramilitary response team, and that line agents don't want that role for themselves. But misuse of assets by INS (or higher up?) is preventing that...why am I not shocked...
Thanks for the reply. Cleared up a lot. There's not a lot that gets resolved on a web forum with the same people honking back and forth at each other, but occasionally I get info like this that I can put into letters and calls to Congress types. Who knows, maybe one of them will listen...