Napolitano has No Operational Control on Border
WASHINGTON
& SANTA FE, NM (By Alan Gomez, USA Today) April 4, 2011 ― As the battle over undocumented immigration has intensified in recent years, the federal government has responded by flooding the nation's southwest border with Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops.Some, such as an interest group on the border and some members of Congress, are questioning whether those efforts to stop undocumented immigrants from entering the country have come at the expense of the U.S.'s ability to stop the drugs, guns and cash that also flow across the border.
Up to 90% of the cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and heroin that cross from Mexico to the U.S. goes through the dozens of land ports of entry along the border, according to the Texas Border Coalition, a group of mayors, judges and city officials from the border region.
From 2006 to 2010, the number of Customs and Border Protection officers who inspect people and cargo crossing through the ports of entry along the southwest border increased by 15%, while the number of CBP Border Patrol agents who patrol the rugged terrain between those ports increased by 59%, according to CBP figures.
Some believe that focus on the regions between the ports — where human smuggling is the biggest concern — has been a knee-jerk reaction to the loud calls in recent years to stem the tide of undocumented immigration.
"The emphasis has been because it's kind of sexy," says Nelson Balido, president of the Border Trade Alliance, which represents companies and government agencies all along the U.S.-Mexico border. "It's sexy to say you're the crime fighter, that you're going to go out there and secure the border and we're going to get them."
That disparity will now be reviewed by Congress.
Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., will use her House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security on Tuesday to study the distribution of manpower along the border. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, sent a letter Friday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee asking for a hearing on the issue.
Miller says she wants to determine whether there is a shortage of funding and manpower at the ports of entry.
"It is a concern that we've all recognized," Miller says. "We'll focus on some issues that perhaps the agencies are not reacting to appropriately."
Customs officials refused requests to comment for this story.
The increase in the number of agents who patrol the mountain ranges, rivers and deserts — combined with a weakened economy that has dried up many jobs — has helped reduce the number of undocumented immigrants crossing into the country. After reaching a high of 12 million in 2007, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States in 2010 was 11.2 million, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
At the land ports of entry, understaffing makes proper screening of incoming cars and trucks difficult.
"We are so understaffed that our inspectors routinely put in 16-hour days, several times a week," says William Moore, a consultant for the Texas Border Coalition.
He says drug runners in Mexico closely monitor U.S. ports of entry and understand the weaknesses. He says they rush drug shipments through during shift changes. Or they'll send a car with a small amount of drugs to get captured and then, once Customs officials pull that car out of line for further inspection, the drug runners push through several cars with larger shipments.
Some also worry about the delays that the understaffed ports of entry are having on legitimate commerce trying to get through the ports. "We have heard from southern border officials and advocates about the negative impact on border economies when delays occur at U.S. ports of entry," Cornyn wrote in his letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
Janice Kephart, director of national security policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that wants to restrict immigration, says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has done a better job than her predecessors to balance the number of agents and officers working along the border. Kephart says more bodies alone won't solve the problems of human or drug smuggling.
Napolitano "is putting more bodies out there because Congress has told her to, but it is without an overall operational strategy for the border," Kephart says.
2,000 Guns go across the Border Daily
BROWNSVILLE, Texas & SANTA FE, NM
(By
Will Weissert, The Associated Press)
April 4,
2011
— Federal
agents are barely able to slow the
river of American guns flowing into
Mexico.
In two years, a new effort to
increase inspections of travelers
crossing the border has netted just
386 guns — an almost infinitesimal
amount given that an estimated 2,000
slip across each day.
The problem came into sharp focus
again last month when a U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agent was killed on a northern
Mexican highway with a gun that was
purchased in a town outside Fort
Worth, Texas.
Stopping the flow of American guns,
bullets and cash has long bedeviled
authorities on both sides of the
border.
At a White House news conference in
March 2009, Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano joined
President Obama in announcing plans
to better help Mexico cope with a
brutal drug war that has now killed
more than 34,000 people since 2006.
“You’ve got to interdict the arms.
You’ve got to stop them from going
into Mexico,” Napolitano said at the
time.
Since then, Customs and Border
Protection officers — who usually
spend their days checking people and
cars coming into the U.S. — have
teamed up with Border Patrol agents
and, sometimes, sheriff’s deputies
in border communities to scrutinize
travelers leaving American soil.
Short on progress
In fiscal year 2009, Customs and
Border Protection agents at all
border crossings separating the
2,000-mile border, from Brownsville
on Texas’ Gulf Coast to San Diego,
seized 107 guns.
The next fiscal year, ending Sept.
30, they seized 279. Those are the
most-recent, border-wide figures
available.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives reported
seizing 2,633 guns in 2009 at its
offices in the four southwestern
border states, the most recent
figures available, but those were
captured before making it into
border traffic — and even if they
had, they would have amounted to a
little more than a day’s worth that
get through.
A November 2008 study by The
Brookings Institution, a
Washington-based think tank, stated
that 2,000 American guns are
smuggled into Mexico each day.
Compiled by a commission including
ex-Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo
and Thomas Pickering, a former
ambassador to Russia and a senior
State Department official during the
administration of President Bill
Clinton, the report was the last
comprehensive estimate on the
subject, though it did not include
information on how that figure was
reached.
Efforts to halt ammunition have been
more successful. Outbound border
inspections seized 93,141 rounds in
the last fiscal year, more than four
times the amount seized during the
previous year.
Seizures of cash headed into Mexico
fell from more than $37 million in
fiscal year 2009 to about $27.4
million last year.
The ATF is now facing criticism
after both CBS News and the
nonprofit Center for Public
Integrity reported that federal
agents investigating gun-running by
drug cartels allowed hundreds of
guns purchased in the U.S. to go
into Mexico.
The agency and prosecutors let the
guns cross the border as they were
building cases against traffickers,
the center reported.
The ATF’s work on the border
highlights the tension between
short-term operations aimed at
arresting low-level straw buyers —
legal U.S. residents with clean
records who buy weapons — and
long-term ones designed to identify
who is directing the gun buys.
From September 2009 to July 31 of
last year alone, the Mexican
government seized more than 32,000
illegal weapons, even though
purchasing guns in Mexico requires
permission from the country’s
defense department, and even then
buyers are limited to pistols of
.38-caliber or less.
Where they’re from
Not all those guns came from the
United States — Mexican authorities
have investigated reports that some
were supplied by arms dealers in
Israel and Belgium.
Many guns used to kill in Mexico
never have their origins traced.
Still, ATF has long estimated that
of the weapons discovered at Mexican
crime scenes which authorities do
choose to trace, nearly 90 percent
are eventually found to have been
purchased in the U.S.
That was the case with the handgun
found at the scene of the Feb. 15
drug cartel ambush that killed ICE
Special Agent Jaime Zapata on a
highway in Mexico’s San Luis Potosi
state. His partner was shot twice in
the leg.
Authorities say the 7.62 mm pistol
was purchased in Joshua, Texas.
Three Dallas-area men — one accused
of buying the gun, his brother and
their neighbor — are facing federal
weapons charges, although none
related to Zapata’s death.
Investigators believe the trio on
another occasion tried to sell
dozens of weapons to the violent
Zetas drug cartel, which recently
saw one of its alleged bosses
arrested in connection with Zapata’s
death.
“When a U.S. agent is killed by an
illegally obtained U.S. gun, it
really underscores the irony of our
current policy,” said David Shirk,
director of the University of San
Diego’s Trans-Border Institute.
“We’re not trying hard enough to
stop the bad guys from using our
weapons against us,” he said.
Cost of control
Just how much money and manpower has
been spent to detect so few
southbound guns, bullets and bundles
of U.S. dollars is difficult to
pinpoint since the Department of
Homeland Security doesn’t comment on
the number, location and frequency
of its efforts.
However, Customs and Border
Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin
promised last April that at least
$72.6 million would be allocated in
fiscal year 2010 to hire 115
additional Customs officers and 144
new Border Patrol agents to bolster
outbound operations.
The money would also have gone to
improving southbound license
plate-reading equipment and
inspection technology.
Agency spokeswoman Kelly Ivahnenko
said there were no figures on
whether those staffing additions had
been made, however, due in part to
normal employment turnover. She said
seizure numbers give only part of
the picture and that stepped-up
inspections have forced “smugglers
to change their tactics, sometimes
exposing them to other law
enforcement agencies.”
On the ground
Complicating agents’ hunt at the
border is that most weapons and
bullets are smuggled using “hormiga”
or “ant” techniques, in which items
are carried across in smaller
amounts. Larger caches, stashed in
18-wheelers, are easier to find with
X-ray equipment or sniffer dogs.
A recent visit to the Gateway Bridge
border crossing in palm tree-lined
Brownsville, the nation’s top spot
for smuggling ammunition into
Mexico, showed the daunting task
facing agents: Thousands of cars and
trucks and countless places to stash
items.
Officers rummaged through bags of
groceries and boxes of auto parts,
felt around children’s seats and
behind glove compartments, and poked
flashlights into air conditioning
vents, engine blocks and
wheel-wells.
A fiber-optic scope let them peer
inside gas tanks, and they checked
that door handles had not been
tampered with.
U.S. authorities screen certain
types of Mexico-bound vehicles more
than others, but won’t say which
ones.
Two teenagers in matching Ferrari
leather jackets had their white
pickup poked and prodded for nearly
10 minutes to no avail, while a
woman in a Lexus sedan breezed
through without looking up from
texting.
