Changing "Paradigm of Border Security" in Texas

(Part of a series on border security in Texas and Austin's outsourcing of border security operations.)

What DPS director Steve McCraw calls the Texas “paradigm of border security” began coalescing in 2005, as Governor Perry was preparing his election campaign and as the national immigration debate was heating up.

 Power Point by DPS/Border Security Operations Center

With McCraw as his homeland security chief, having been appointed in August 2004, Perry made border security a defining issue of his political campaigning and of his revamped homeland security strategy.

Perry and McCraw have assumed full ownership of an aggressive border security response. But they were hopping on a border security bandwagon that was already picking up speed in Texas and elsewhere.

In Congress the House Immigration Reform Caucus, led by Tom Tancredo (R-Col.) launched preemptive strikes against the proposals for comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) that started surfacing in the House and Senate. 

Although the hard-line anti-immigrant measures were mostly defeated, the bills did succeed in shifting the focus of immigration reform from issues of legalization and temporary work programs to the “enforcement-first” and “border -security first” policy frameworks strategically advocated by immigration restrictionists.

Moving along a parallel and sometimes intersecting path, the Bush administration in 2005 let loose its own border security zeitgeist under the leadership of DHS Secretary Chertoff who promised that his Secure Border Initiative would gain “operational control of both the northern and southern borders within five years.”

Recognizing that border security was opening up billions of dollars in new funding for border projects, border politicians and border sheriffs began calling in 2005 for new border security funding streams for local law enforcement along the border. The Department of Homeland Security had already opened up a font of funding for overtime and equipment to border sheriffs and police through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Called together by Sheriff Sigi Gonzalez of Zapata County in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition formed in May 2005.

In the public statements and testimony to Congress, coalition leaders, notably Gonzalez and Sheriff West, have consistently stressed the threat of terrorists entering the United States through what they say is the unprotected border. 

Representing the newly formed southwestern coalition, Gonzalez in a July 2006 congressional testimony to the international terrorism subcommittee of the House Committee on International Relations said: 

“We continue to believe that terrorists have expressed an interest and a desire to exploit the existing vulnerabilities in our border security to enter or attack the United States.”

But illegal immigrants were also an expressed concern for Gonzalez and West. That same month they both were featured at a Capitol Hill press conference organized by a newly formed group of Hispanics called "You Don’t Speak for Me!,' which was formed by the restrictionist institute Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The conference, joined by members of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, had this central message: “Secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws.”

The Texas sheriffs see the frontline as a scrimmage line where the defensive line is weak and full of gaps. Rather than relying totally on the Border Patrol’s frontline, the sheriffs have since 2005 mounted their own border defense through Operation Linebacker as a kind of secondary line of defense. The idea was that if a terrorist, criminal alien, drug smuggler, or any illegal border crosser makes it through the Border Patrol, the deputy linebackers are there to make the tackle.

Yet many border sheriffs, while touting the success of their Operation Linebacker patrols, describe their departments as the first not second line of defense against criminal intrusions – a posture underscored by the anti-Washington pronouncements of Governor Perry. 

Closely following the development of the sheriff’s own storyline is the evolution of congressional border security politicking, spearheaded by Texas congressional members. Here the story starts in the introduction by Cong. John Culberson (D-Tex.) of the Border Law Enforcement Act of 2005.

The bill, sponsored mainly by Republicans but also by a few border Democrats (notably Cong. Silvestre Reyes of El Paso and Cong. Henry Cuellar of South Texas (McAllen and Laredo), was the specter of “lawlessness in border areas.”

Although unsuccessful, the bill did provide the talking points that currently shape much of the border security debate and funding, namely that “federal officials have been incapable of preventing “criminals, terrorists, and foreign nations who have entered the United States illegally from engaging in criminal activity,” that the border’s “local and state law enforcement officials are being overwhelmed by growing lawlessness,” and that “state and local law enforcement count on the “residual full sovereignty of the States to protect the lives, safety, and property within their jurisdiction.”

Explaining the earmarks, Cong. Culberson says: “America needs boots on the ground to protect our Southern border from armed and dangerous criminals, violent gang members, drug smugglers and potential terrorists.”

Evolving Threat Assessments

A vast array of intelligence centers, fusion centers, crime-mapping, data exchanges, unified commands, and border security centers have been created in Texas since 2005 – none of which were envisioned the governor’s first Homeland Security Strategy Plan.  

Over the past five years, intelligence and border security operations – initiated by the state and largely funded by Washington -- have become central to homeland security planning in Texas. A review of the governor’s three homeland strategy plans – 2004, 2005-2010, 2010-2015 – also reveals major changes in how the governor and his homeland security office assess threats to homeland security in Texas.

The change that stands out in this evolution of the state’s homeland security strategy and its threat assessments is the core focus on border security, typified by the statement in the 2010-2015 strategy that “there can be no homeland security without border security.” There are 24 more references to the border in the 2010 statement than in the 2005 strategy.

Also noteworthy is the evolution away from a central focus on foreign terrorism to a totally new focus on Mexico-based threats. In the first two strategy statements, there are no references, for example, to Mexican drug cartels or transnational gangs. In the most recent statement, transnational gangs and drug cartels are mentioned, respectively, 13 and 24 times.

It was as if the drug cartels and transnational gangs mentioned in the 2010 strategy statement didn’t previously exist and only recently appeared in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. It was as if the drug trafficking flows from Mexico and farther south in Latin America had only recently sprung up, and as if drug smuggling across the Texas border was a new phenomenon, constituting an entirely new challenge for border control and homeland security.

The evolving assessment by the governor and his homeland security chief of the threats to homeland and border security in Texas now also links drug smuggling and Mexican drug cartels to political terrorism – effectively raising the threat level, but failing to offer any supporting evidence.

The most recent Texas homeland security strategy plan, a document prepared with grants from DHS, states, for example, that “there are numerous reports that Hezbollah [Lebanese Shiite political organization and militia] has a growing relationship with Mexican cartels and uses drug and human smuggling routes into and through Texas to facilitate the full range of its activities.”

The reports are not referenced, and the “full range” of Hezbollah terrorist operations in the United States is left undefined.  

Similarly, in concluding the new section on the threats of drug cartels, the 2010 strategy statement states:

“With the convergence of criminal enterprises and terrorist organizations, Mexican cartels represent an increasingly dangerous threat to United States and Texas security.”

If this convergence is indeed true, then raising the level of alarm about border security, as Perry and McCraw have been doing over the past five years, would be justified.  Yet they offer only assertions, like those in this strategy statement, rather than credible evidence or even plausible scenarios of this “convergence” between drug smuggling and Islamist terrorists.

Image from state's TxMap border crime mapping project, outsourced to ALIS.

"Last, Best Chance" to Defend Arizona

Border Sheriffs, Right-Wing Foundation, & Republican Law Firm Join Forces

Attorney Jordan Rose and Sheriffs Dever, Babeu, and Arpaio

Larry Dever, sheriff of Cochise County, says that fight against the Justice Department’s attempt to quash Arizona’s immigration enforcement law is the “last best chance” to depoliticize immigration and border security debate. 

“Enough is enough,” says Dever, lambasting the Obama administration for leaving his county vulnerable to “hordes” of criminal aliens. There were be other chances to empower the border sheriffs and Arizona to take control of his own border and own population but “none like this one” because of “what the Department of Justice is trying to do to us.”

Dever claims that current immigration and border control practices are “absolutely criminal.”  As a result, Dever asserts that the “people of Cochise County are suffering” and “paying a huge price” in terms of the wave of crime and terror sweeping throughout this vast stretch of desert, mountains, ranches, and farmlands in Arizona’s southeastern corner.

Soon after Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed the controversial SB 1070 immigration enforcement bill, Dever joined forces with another outspoken southern Arizona sheriff, Paul Babeu of Pinal County, to form BorderSheriffs.com.

The latest in a series of border sheriffs organizations that have emerged as some of the most strident and ideological voices for border security – notably Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition and Southwest Border Sheriffs Coalition -- BorderSheriffs.com is focused on upholding SB 1070 and defending law enforcement from suits contending that the bill is unconstitutional and will encourage a civil rights violations and other abuses.

Unlike the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition, which relies on federal and state grants, BorderSheriffs relies on support from a conservative anti-immigrant foundation in Iowa and from a powerful conservative Phoenix-based law firm, which combine to underwrite the ad hoc organization’s expenses, enable its presence in the legal fight, and help project its hard-line message on the border and immigrants.

The debate over immigration and border policy has propelled sheriffs like Dever and Babeu to the forefront of the political battles and to the media limelight. In past years, the radical voices of border security were found mostly in the vigilante groups like the Minuteman, American Border Patrol, and Civilian Defense Fund.

But border sheriffs, mostly from the rural border counties lacking major metropolitan areas, have since 2005 superseded the border vigilantes as the leading spokesman for an aggressive border crackdown.

The credibility of their badges, their cowboy hat allure, and their position as elected officers of border communities have given then great influence in Congress, state legislatures, and in the media.

Gearing up in the fight to defend SB 1070, Dever and Babeu argued that their own deputies were vulnerable to the Justice Department’s and ACLU’s legal strategies to stop the law, which they regarded as absolutely essential to protecting Arizona from criminal aliens and which their legal opponents argued preempted and interfered with federal authority over immigration enforcement. 

Arguing that they may not be able to count on their own county attorneys and even the state (given that the Arizona attorney general opposed the law), Dever and Babeu found they could count on the enthusiastic and generous support of the Legacy Foundation, which was formed by Rep. Christopher Rants, the former House Majority Leader and Republican gubernatorial candidate who was central to the state’s legislative campaign to pass anti-illegal immigrant bills.

Border fence in Naco, Cochise County/Tom Barry

The foundation says it “has a keen interest in making sure that the hands of state governments are not further tied by the Federal government as states step up to be the leader in this area.”

When announcing the creation of the new border sheriffs group, Dever and Babeu asked for donations to their legal defense fund, explaining that they weren’t confident that their respective county attorneys would mount a rigorous defense of their planned enforcement of the newly approved SB 1070.

Also playing a key role in BorderSheriffs.com is the Phoenix-based Rose Law Group, led by prominent conservative attorney Jordan Rose, which is committed to defending the two sheriffs against civil rights and other law suits that charge that SB 1070 is unconstitutional. The Rose Law Group is the lead attorney for the Phoenix Committee for Republican National Convention 2012. To mount its defense of the two sheriffs and SB 1070, the prestigious law firm hired Timothy LaSota, a member of the staunchly conservative Federalist Society who formerly served as a special deputy attorney for Maricopa County. From that legal perch, LaSota has successfully defended Arizona’s employer sanctions and human smuggling laws.

Sheriffs Sought to Intervene in Appeals Case

In early September, Larry Dever took his case for direct intervention by Cochise County in the contest between the Justice Department and the State of Arizona over whether SB 1070 could be implemented before determining its constitutionality. At a special Sept. 1 meeting of the county’s board of supervisors, Dever argued that as a border sheriff he would like to intervene in the case to ensure that the “unique position” of border residents be considered in any ruling.

Without presenting any supporting crime statistics, Dever told the county board of supervisors that the “people of Cochise County have suffered like no other in this unmitigated illegal immigration flow across our border and from the drug smuggling and all the consequences.” 

His intervention in the name of Cochise County would allow the sheriff to explain “how great their peril and how intense and unrelenting our suffering has been.”  According to Dever, “Our people are paying a huge price because of the failure of the federal government to secure the border.”

Asked by one supervisor how SB 1070, if judicially authorized, would affect law enforcement in Cochise County, Dever said there would be a minimal impact given his department’s existing commitment to ferreting out illegal immigrants.

But if the court forced “Obama to lift the suit,” the law would greatly affect Cochise County by allowing the state of Arizona to eliminate “sanctuary cities” – unnamed but presumably Tucson, Flagstaff, San Luis, and  other local governments in Arizona that have repudiated SB 1070 as a threat to public safety and civil rights in their communities.

“SB 1070 requires me to divert department resources away from serious crimes not only to conduct immigration-status inquiries, but to arrest persons who pose no threat to public safety,” wrote San Luis Police Chief Rick Flores, as part of testimony against the implementation of the harsh anti-immigrant law.

The Cochise County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Dever’s request to intervene with the assistance of the Legacy Foundation and the Rose Law Group in the appeal hearing that started November 1. But the Circuit Court ruled against the petition to intervene.

Nonetheless, Arizona’s hallowed trio of hard-line border security sheriffs – Dever, Babeu, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County – traveled to San Francisco for a media event in which they collectively viewed the appeal hearing before 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, offering their caustic comments about the DOJ’s presentation and approving observations about the performance of Arizona legal contingent.

Serving as Dever’s attorney, Brian Bergin, head of the Rose Law Group’s Litigation Department, was on hand to bolster support for the bill and to shape the advocacy campaign. “The Obama administration’s approach has sent a clear message to Sheriff Dever and the people of Arizona that we’re not going to protect you and do not try to protect yourself,” wrote Bergin.

The increasingly outspoken Dever – who along with Sheriff Babeu have become media stars in the border security debate – said, by way of Bergin, that “hordes of men, women and children have been kidnapped, trafficked, tortured, and even murdered as drug runners battle over territory in Southern Arizona.” 

No evidence was offered about these hordes of victims. 

Nor was there any acknowledgement that southern Arizona has experience steady declines in crime rates over the past several years and dramatic drops in immigrant apprehensions in the last two years.

What is more, neither the border sheriffs, the Legacy Foundation, the Republican law group, nor the Arizona Republican leadership rise above the politics of the border security battle to the heart of how deeply flawed U.S. policies – failed drug wars, drug prohibition, and policies that encourage the continued demand for the cheap labor illegal immigrants – are at the heart of the border control crisis -- not the absence of more enforcement, more walls, and more high-tech surveillance.

Evolution of Border Security in Texas

Leaders of Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition, Zapata Sheriff
Sigi Gonzalez & Hudspeth County Arvin West (r)/Tom Barry

(Part of a Border Lines series on outsourcing border security in Texas.)

“There can be no homeland security without border security.” That’s dogma in Texas, and repeated constantly by Governor Rick Perry and DPS Director Steve McCraw.

But it hasn’t always been the official line about homeland security in Texas.

Before Steve McCraw joined the governor’s staff in August 2004 as homeland security chief and head of the Governor’s Department of Emergency Management (TDEM), homeland security strategy in Texas wasn’t much different than other states that developed first responder and counterterrorism strategies in concert with the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 

Gov. Perry open the first Texas Homeland Security Strategy Plan (January 2004) noting that “Texas has used the national strategy as a model for developing a statewide plan,” explaining that President Bush (who preceded Perry as Texas governor) had called on states and local governments to “implement compatible security strategies.”

The 2004 homeland security strategy of Texas had a clear focus on working with the federal government to prevent foreign terrorism and to respond to homeland disasters.

There is no mention of immigrants or criminal aliens, no talk of the threat of narcoterrorism, drug cartels, or transnational gangs, and no discussion of border crime, spillover violence, or narcotics flows.

The collaborative, we’re-all-in-it-together tone of the 2004 homeland strategy plan is startling in retrospect, now that the governor and McCraw have come to favor a go-it-alone, blame-Washington posture.

It’s worth quoting from Gov. Perry’s introduction to the security plan to observe the contrast in focus and tone between then and now. Since then there has also been less talk of the need to cooperation and a new confrontational posture.

Since 2004 Texas has set out to develop its own homeland security strategies, particularly in intelligence and border security, that run parallel to similar federal operations, albeit tapping federal grants to underwrite these Lone Star border security initiatives.

 The governor wrote that “recognizing that state and local governments play important roles in these efforts, the national plan challenges us ‘to develop interconnected and complementary systems that are reinforcing rather than duplicative.’”

“Our first goal must be to do everything within our power to prevent a terrorist attack,” wrote Perry. “That is why our effort to coordinate communication among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies is so vital.”

The first homeland security strategy plan did have sections on intelligence and border security. Yet, like the entire document, both sections focused on foreign terrorism.

The objective of local and state intelligence, as set out in the “Intelligence and Warning” section, was to help prevent a terrorist attack by providing alerts based mainly on the “receipt, analysis, and dissemination of criminal intelligence.” There was no mention of fusion centers, joint intelligence centers, border crime mapping, or ambitious data mining projects.

Border fence west of El Paso/Tom Barry

The central focus of the border security section was increased monitoring traffic through sea and land ports-of-entry, regarded then as the most likely entry points for

The page-long section on border security – compared with the five pages devoted to protecting critical infrastructure and four pages to emergency response – includes discussion of response to disasters or terrorist attacks on Texas sea ports.

With respect to the vast international border with Mexico, the strategy plan makes no mention of “sealing the border,” as is the current commitment, but instead addresses the connection between homeland security and border security through training plans to secure border petroleum installations. The plan also mentions that the governor’s office launched a $1.5 million Border Security Intelligence Network.

The 2004 strategy plan concludes with mention of the state’s cosponsoring of a Border Terrorism Conference. In marked contrast to the deeply anti-Mexican tone current border security strategizing by the governor’s office, this conference brought together U.S. and Mexican officials.

The first homeland security strategy plan in Texas may be said to represent one of the last times that homeland security and border security policies in Texas weren’t manifestly politicized issues.

It was also before the governor’s office began outsourcing the new border security, intelligence, and data-exchange operations launched from his office. It was prior, too, to the appointment of Steve McCraw as chief of the governor’s homeland security office.

In 2004-2005 the national attention began to turn from foreign to domestic issues. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan no longer dominated the national news, and public and policymaker alarm about the foreign terrorist threat was fading. The previously widespread consensual support for President Bush’s “Global War Against Terrorism” was also eroding.

At the same time, immigration and immigrant-rights advocates were starting to mobilize in support of a comprehensive immigration reform. But the grassroots backlash against illegal immigration was deepening, and immigration restrictionist institutes in Washington began seeing widening support for their “enforcement-first” and immigration-crackdown positions.

In Texas, conservative politicians, like Sen. John Cornyn together with an array of white, non-border Texas Republican representatives, became national voices for get-tough policies on immigration and the border. The creation of the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition in the spring of 2005 also signaled the emergence of immigration enforcement and border security as popular political issues.

Facing a reelection vote in November 2006, Perry in 2005 began to bolster his border security credentials.

Starting in 2005 homeland security and border security for the state of Texas were no longer issues considered mostly in the implementation of Department of Homeland Security grants.

Newly identified homeland security threats as illegal immigrants, illegal drugs, and border crime became central to political campaign strategies.

Led by the governor’s office, these issues also drove an array of multimillion dollar intelligence, data-sharing, and border security projects, mostly outsourced to private firms such as Northrop Grumman, APPRISS, and Abrams Learning and Information Systems. 

Intelligence and Muscle in Texas Border Security

Gov. Perry and Steve McCraw with Texas Border Sheriffs

Intelligence and muscle. Texas border security has both.

Tough talk about crime, drugs, immigrants, and the border comes naturally in Texas -- and often in football analogies.  Operation Linebacker, the 2005 initiative of Texas border sheriffs and sponsored by Governor Rick Perry, set the muscular, take down all line-breakers Texas commitment to border security.

That macho stance on holding the line in Texas has popular appeal, which Perry has exploited with his series of campaign ads each election season featuring him and the most outspoken and ideological of the rural border sheriffs, usually Zapata County Sheriff Sigi Gonzalez and Hudspeth County Arvin West.

The governor’s office since 2006 has channeled tens of millions of dollars to Operation Linebacker, despite a dearth of impact indicators.

But most of the federal and state funds flowing from the governor’s office and the Department of Public Safety, under the directorship of Steve McCraw (who also serves as the governor’s homeland security director), have gone to intelligence-driven projects. In a “guidance” statement for Texas border security, Perry says:

“Using intelligence, available state assets, and a new command and control structure, we are going to take back the border from those who exploit it.”

But after almost five years of intelligence-drive border security initiatives, supported largely by federal grants to the governor’s office, neither Perry nor McCraw have been able to produce the data demonstrating the worth of these border intelligence projects.

Despite the continual stream of pronouncement about border security coming from the governor’s office and DPS, there is little hard information and even less understanding about how Perry and McCraw are putting state assets – and the even more extensive federal assets under their control – to work in, what McCraw calls, “operations-focused intelligence” for border security.

The same is true for the state’s overall commitment to ensuring that intelligence and information-sharing are at the core of public safety and homeland security in Texas.

Steve McCraw and Gov. Rick Perry

Overview of Intelligence-Driven Public Safety

and Homeland Security in Texas

The impetus and the funding to create the Border Security Operations Center (BSOC) and the associated Joint Operations Intelligence Centers (JOICs) came mainly from the federal government’s post Sept. 11, 2001 commitment to homeland security. The same is true for the creation of the state’s fusion centers and data-exchange and crime-mapping projects.

All of the above draw heavily not only on the federal information- and intelligence sharing initiatives precipitated by 9/11, but also on the increasing emphasis on intelligence in policing and in U.S. military operations, particularly as relates to narcotics trafficking and transborder crime.

“Intelligence-led policing” or “intelligence-driven policing” arose in Great Britain in the 1990s and took hold in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t information and intelligence sharing among police agencies. But “intelligence-led policing” has become a driving force in shaping the form of police work and in funding new policing projects. At the federal level, the creation of the National Intelligence Sharing Plan and the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative by the Department of Justice underscored the prominence of this new emphasis in public safety operations.

The military influence in the surge of intelligence operations in Texas is seen, for example, in the creation of the border JOICs, which mirror the DOD’s Joint Intelligence Operations Centers (JIOCs). According to DOD, a JIOC is “an independent, operational intelligence organization…that is integrated with national intelligence centers, and capable of accessing all sources of intelligence impacting military-operations planning, execution, and assessment.”

In Texas, the incubator of intelligence and high-tech information sharing in homeland security, border security, and public safety was situated in the governor’s office until 2009. Steve McCraw, who since August 2004 served simultaneously as the chief of the newly created Office of Homeland Security and governor's overseer of the Governor’s Department of Emergency Management (GDEM), whose director was Jack Colley.

Appointed by Perry, McCraw came to the governor’s office from the FBI, where he had worked since 1983, including as Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence and Inspection Division in Washington, DC. McCraw, who grew up in El Paso, served as a narcotics investigator with DPS before joining the FBI.

(More on intelligence in Texas in next installment of this series on outsourcing border security in Texas.)

New Strategy for Border Control

Early Border Patrol/Arizona Historical Society

(Second part of "Time to Rein in the Border Security Bandwagon" policy report. First installment at:

http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/time-to-rein-in-border-security.html )

They say it couldn’t be done.  

In its 1994 Strategy Statement, the Border Patrol acknowledged what could not be stated today without igniting a firestorm of criticism. As part of the strategic planning process, the Border Patrol said it “accepted that absolute sealing of the border is unrealistic.”

While Border Patrol officers and most border observers still share this assessment made more than fifteen years ago, the new wave of border security hardliners, found mostly in Texas and Arizona, dismiss this assessment as typical liberal wish-wash.

Not totally sealed or secured, the border, however, “can be brought under control,” said the Border Patrol in 1994. It would do this, as the strategy statement outlined and subsequently operational priorities revealed, mainly by focusing on the main corridors of illegal border crossing.  Not only did the Border Patrol for the first time commit itself to defined “geographical priorities” along the southwestern border, it also began coupling this with a new strategy of border control that it called “prevention through deterrence.”

The Border Patrol has long attracted former soldiers and military officers. Yet, over the past couple of decades, with its rapid expansion, the Border Patrol has increasingly taken on a distinct military cast with its internal language, chain of command, insularity, and predilection for measuring progress by such body-count indicators as drug seizures and apprehensions.

“Prevention Through Deterrence,” the strategic philosophy of border control adopted in 1994, remains the Border Patrol’s operational philosophy. It didn’t come full blown from within the ranks of the Border Patrol, but was the product of consultancies with the Department of Defense’s Center for Low Intensity Conflict and with Sandia Laboratories, the Department of Energy’s privately managed nuclear weapons development center in Albuquerque.

Simply stated, the new strategy was to prevent the large-scale entry of illegal border crossers through the main entry corridors by concentrated force that not only would arrest most of those who crossed illegally but would also deter crossing attempts by force presence and barriers at the border.  Prior to the implementation of the deterrence strategy, the Border Patrol never had much of a border control strategy.  Since its creation in 1924 the Border Patrol functioned mostly to give the impression of some semblance of border control. 

The border was too vast to effectively control, but the presence of Border Patrol agents did send the message that the U.S. didn’t have open border as it once did. Not only was the border long – stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific – most of it was extremely remote.  

To reach the border in many regions meant taking rough dirt roads, and once at the border there were only rarely roads that paralleled the border. This led to a de facto Border Patrol strategy of patrolling areas that were far removed from the border but must be crossed by illegal crossers if they were successfully to make their way into the country’s interior.  In effect, then, the focus was on catching not stopping entrants.

While the official provenance of “Prevention Through Deterrence” was a strategic planning process initiated by the Border Patrol, the thrust of this strategy emerged at the grassroots from concerns of border residents.  Given the current outcry for increased border security led largely by anti-immigrant forces and Republican politicians, one might assume that these were also the forces that pressured the Border Patrol to overhaul and ramp up their border enforcement operations in the mid-1990s.

At this time, it’s certainly was the case that immigration restrictionists and assorted anti-immigrant grassroots groups, mainly in California, were raising the alarm about the “invasion of illegals” in the early 1990s. Illegal immigration flows from Mexico and other Latin American countries were rising to unprecedented levels – giving rise to an anti-immigrant backlash in California mostly among sectors that saw the white-majority threatened and deepening the conviction among restrictionists that the 1986 immigration reform functioned mostly as a platform for more illegal immigration.  

Grassroots backlash and restrictionist policy came together in the form of Proposition 187, the successful 1994 California referendum to deny public services to unauthorized immigrants, which had key support from the restrictionist Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) but was quickly judged unconstitutional. 

(Next: in series: "Prevention Through Deterrence"Doctrine Emerges.)

Consultants as the Commanders of Texas Border Security

(Third in a series on border security outsourcing in Texas.)

Who is Leon “Leo” W. Rios? 

Gen. John Abrams at Germany reunion

News reports along the Texas border about the “border surges” of the governor’s Operation Border Star variously identity Rios as an official with the Texas Department of Emergency Management (TDEM), a senior DPS analyst, or a manager of the Border Security Operations Center.

Rios speaks to the media as if he were a Texas government official. But his current official position is senior vice president for border and port security at Abrams Learning and Information Systems (ALIS), a Washington Beltway homeland-security consulting firm.  ALIS asserts that Rios’s work in Texas for the Governor Rick Perry and the Department of Public Safety (DPS) has “facilitated development and coordination of interagency border security concepts, plans, and operations to improve U.S.-Mexico border security—resulting in a significant reduction of border-related crime.”

Rios comes to the homeland security and border security consulting business by way of the U.S. Army, along with his boss Ret. Gen. John N. Abrams, who founded ALIS in August 2004.

Former Col. Rios served in command positions with Abrams in Germany in the late 1980s in the 11^th Armored Cavalry Regiment, which Abrams commanded and was charged with protecting the German inner-border. At a recent reunion in Germany that brought business colleagues Abrams and Rios together, Abrams and other former army officers spoke of their role guarding the line between East and West and on “the separation between freedom and oppression, good and evil…,” according an account of the reunion by the Blackhorse veterans group.

While an army officer, Rios published a couple of military strategy studies, at least one of which has bearing on his role in shaping border security in Texas. While stationed at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff at Ft. Leavenworth’s School of Advanced Military Studies. Rios in 1985 authored, “Will, Technology, and Tactical Command and Control.” 

According to the report’s abstract, the army “is becoming increasingly dependent on technical communications systems for command and control although the systems are vulnerable to failure, interception, or interference. The technical complexity of communications systems present new sets of problems rather than facilitating and sustaining command and control.” (That conclusion is just as pertinent 25 years later, given the disarray, confusion, and ineffectiveness of the technology-driven information and intelligence operations under ALIS control.)

In the 1990s Rios served as director of Policy and Strategy at the U.S. Southern Command, the U.S. military’s “unified command” for Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

Steeped in military practice and thinking, the ALIS senior leadership have brought this military tradition to the challenges of homeland security and border control in Texas. This can be readily seen in its work for the governor’s office and DPS through its favoring the military terminology and structures -- “unified commands,” “operations ,”  “”ranger recons,” intelligence centers,” “forward deployment,” and “surges”  Like the military, the military-styled Operation Border Star has little transparency or accountability, and the battles are always being declared victories despite the absence of measurable indicators.

Depiction of Operation Wrangler (a 2007 Border Star surge) by DPS/Border Security Operation Center

Consultants as Managers, Strategists, and Evaluators

Abrams and Rios are no longer in command.  They are hired guns, consultants for Operation Border Star -- the border security campaign launched by Governor Rick Perry and DPS director Steve McCraw.

Contracted to “refine plans and strategies for seamless integration of border security operations,” ALIS has been charged with directing, coordinating, operating, and staffing the state’s border security infrastructure – the Border Security Operation Center and the six Joint Operations Intelligence Centers (JOICS). DPS has contracted ALIS to “sustain continuous border security operations” for the state and to manage BSOC.

Among the main goals of ALIS’ Border Security Management and Operations contract are:

·         * Develop and refine “plans and strategies that will support continuous operations in all sectors to ensure a secure border region by countering the threats of organized crime, terrorism, and the flow of contraband.”

·         * “Implement procedures to create an effective interagency unified command structure that provides unity of effort among local, county, state, and federal entities participating in border-related law enforcement activities.”

·         * “Coordinate operations, exercises, and other readiness activities by establishing centralized operational planning and oversight  [emphasis added] as well as continual support to steady-state and enhanced-state operations along the border.”

·         * “”Orient senior governmental leaders on border security issues.”

·         * “Oversee the implementation of the state-selected technology for the web-based Texas Border Neighborhood Watch Surveillance Program [which is part of the Texas Sheriffs Border Coalition] to include sensor technology as well as other available technical support of both fixed and mobile law enforcement operations.”

·         * “Identify and document ‘best practices” throughout all border security operations and implement a process whereby these ‘best practices’ are codified and implemented as a measure of incremental organization and operational improvement.”

·         * “Assess organizational and operational efficiency/effectiveness and provide a method for achieving continuous improvement throughout all sectors of border operations.”

·        * Besides staffing the Border Security Operations Center [with 19 ALIS contract staff including Rios], “field operations staff support will also include the necessary manpower required to support and sustain the JOICs.”

In addition to these functions – from design, management, and implementation to oversight, assessment, and advisory roles – in Texas’ vaunted border security model, ALIS has also been contracted to formulate and manage the information and intelligence systems of Border Star through the TxMap border-crime mapping project, fusion center mergers, and “border- security operations information and data exchange.”

From the beginning of Operation Border Star and the border-targeted “surges” of border sheriffs, state police, and Texas National Guard, Leo Rios has brandished his DPS identity rather than his identity as a Beltway consultant.  During a series of “border surges” in mid-2006, Col. Rios and Col. McCraw visited the targeted security zones in the Rio Grande Valley.  

Exiting their Chinook helicopter, like military commanders inspecting the frontlines, Rios and McCraw met with border sheriffs and other sympathetic law enforcement officials.  Variously identified as a DPS intelligence analyst or a TDEM official, Rios told reporters and assembled troops that Operation Border Star was demonstrating the state’s ability to shut down the border.

"Lo and behold, we started up again,” said Rios.” We hit them again, and we had a sizeable number of seizures and arrests," The bottom line from the operation was that "we're capable of shutting down all transports of illegal drugs and criminals in this area to zero for up to seven days. This was due to be a banner year, and we shut them down," Rios said.

Year after year the consultancies and contracts continue to be renewed by the governor’s office, DPS, and the Public Safety Commission. Although only consultants, the ALIS border security team in Texas act like and are treated as commanders who answer to no one.

(Next: How JOICS and BSOC Work, Or Don't)

Also see Tom Barry, "At War in Texas," Boston Review at: http://bostonreview.net/BR35.5/barry.php