By Randal C. Archibold - The New York Times
Published: 06-16-08
NOGALES Ariz. — Swooping low over the Mexican border in her Blackhawk helicopter Chief Warrant Officer Christina Engh-Schappert of the Virginia National Guard spots ... nothing. No sign of the migrants who would congregate in the washes for the mad dash to the United States. No clusters of people hiding in the bushes. Nobody in the throes of dehydration and heat exhaustion.
“At first we were constantly catching clients” Ms. Engh-Schappert said later using the Border Patrol vernacular for illegal immigrants. “It’s gone from pretty busy to hardly anything in our sector.”
Soon she will be gone too along with 2600 other members of the National Guard in Arizona California New Mexico and Texas where they are helping to secure the border with Mexico as part of a two-year mission called Operation Jump Start.
Phased down from a peak of more than 6000 Guard members the mission is scheduled to end July 15 although a smattering of Guard personnel are expected to remain or return as part of longstanding cooperation with the Border Patrol.
Here they have built or shored up roads to give federal agents speedier access to the hilly and rocky terrain. They have fixed trucks and monitored cameras and sensors and stood guard in the wilderness facilitating thousands of arrests by directing agents to illegal border crossers.
But just as Guard members pack up and bid farewell to the desert an effort is intensifying to have them stay put. The Border Patrol has given the Guard credit for helping to deter and detect illegal crossings so much so that the governors of the four border states and federal lawmakers now wonder aloud Why stop now?
“This could be a new record for the federal government actually abiding by a deadline” said Dennis Burke the chief of staff for Gov. Janet Napolitano Democrat of Arizona who has twice written this year to Michael Chertoff the secretary of homeland security to plead for an extension of the mission. “The two-year deadline was arbitrary.”
Ms. Napolitano and the other governors say the Guard should stay while the Border Patrol continues a hiring frenzy toward meeting a goal of about 18000 agents by the end of the year double its size from 2001. It now stands at 16471 about 5000 more than two years ago and the governors as well as members of Congress have expressed doubt that the agency will put enough agents in the field to meet its target.
“It is not as easy as running some ads and thinking you are going to have well-qualified people apply and come into the Border Patrol” said Representative Gabrielle Giffords a Democrat whose southern Arizona district includes the border. “The risk is high conditions are not great the pay is average compared to other law enforcement positions. Having the Guard there for a period of time longer until they can ramp up the Border Patrol is necessary for border improvement.”
In addition the officials point out the much-anticipated virtual fence a suite of cameras radars and other technology intended to enhance around-the-clock surveillance of the border has been plagued with delays and glitches although domestic security officials say it is getting back on track.
Representative Harry E. Mitchell a Democrat from the Tucson area on Tuesday pressed the case for keeping the Guard in place by raising concerns that rising drug violence in Mexican border towns could spill into the United States.
The reaction from domestic security officials however has been thanks but no thanks.
Despite questions about the strains on the Guard and the military because of the Iraq war President Bush heeding the suggestion of lawmakers sent 6000 members of the Guard to the border with the condition that the number would drop to 3000 after one year and that assignments would end after two.
Domestic security and National Guard officials are not urging an extension although they gush over the success of the Guard’s deployment.
“It was an interim bridge so we would be able to build up agents and technology and that has been accomplished” David V. Aguilar chief of the Border Patrol said last week in a telephone interview from Washington.
But Mr. Aguilar said “I would not be unhappy” if the Guard stayed on in large numbers.
He ticked off a wealth of statistics attributed to having the Guard in play: 580 agents freed from non-law-enforcement tasks and returned to patrol more than 1000 smuggler vehicles seized a 39 percent drop in arrests for illegal border crossings.
But Mr. Aguilar said the impact of the Guard’s leaving “is going to be minimal” because the agency had long planned for the July 15 departure. Also he said the Guard as it has done for years will continue to perform limited missions and training at the border to help federal law enforcement.
Border economists and sociologists say that the Guard’s successes may be overemphasized that the drop in arrests for example might also indicate fewer people were trying to enter the United States because of the souring American economy while those here no longer risk going back and forth across the border.
The mission has not been trouble free. In the beginning the Guard and Border Patrol bureaucracies did not mesh some of those involved said which led to confusion over orders and assignments and which remains an occasional problem.
For the most part however the mission has been mutually beneficial Border Patrol and Guard members say.
Recently Capt. Tom Butler of the Ohio National Guard was helping to extend a graded dirt road along the border fence here. Earlier his team had helped to seal a tunnel that drug traffickers had burrowed under the fence. The projects have given him a sense of satisfaction.
“This will increase their response and make it safe” Captain Butler said of the projects. “And that does feel good.”
