Mission Focus on the Border

Since Sept. 11 the White House and the Congress have routinely approved proposals for increased numbers of Border Patrol agents. In the last three years, 6,000 additional agents have been added, bringing the total Border Patrol contingent to more than 18,000 – making it by far the largest federal enforcement agency. President Obama has requested funding for an additional 100 Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents as part of his “border security” budget proposal. It’s unclear if such a large force is needed to patrol the borders to, as CBP says, protect the homeland “against dangerous people and goods.” As immigration flows have diminished, Border Patrol agents on both the northern and southern borders are spending less of its time and resources on arresting the immigrants it categorizes as “dangerous people” and more on drug interdiction. In implementing its “drug war” mission, CBP says it is “risk-based.” But neither the its record of its seizures nor the operational deployment of Border Patrol agents indicate that, in practice, CBP and its Border Patrol have a “risk-based” focus. Rather, like its role in immigration enforcement, CBP and the Border Patrol have what is in effect a zero-tolerance policy, and the record of its drug interdictions demonstrate its unfocused, wide-net interpretation of its mission. The vast majority of the drugs that it seizes and the people it arrests are hardly “dangerous” people or goods. They are mostly illegal immigrants looking for work and marijuana. Clearly, there are “dangerous people and goods” that enter our country, and we need government agencies like CBP and the Border Patrol to obstruct this dangerous traffic. But we need to be certain that there is a clear mission focus at CBP and the Border Patrol if we are continue to pour billions of increasingly scarce taxpayer dollars into border security. CBP’s annual budget has more than doubled since 2002, rising to $10.9 billion in 2009. Before President Obama and Congress rush to approve yet more funding for border security, hard questions need to be asked about the lack of mission focus at Homeland Security. Since the “war of drugs” was launched, the federal government has drafted into the questionable war the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), established in 1973 with the Department of Justice as the sole federal agency responsible for drug control. Since then the drug-war bureaucracy has extended deep into the State Department, Defense Department, and into other parts of the Justice Department. In 1988 President Reagan established yet another front in the drug-war offensive with the creation of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. While the Border Patrol and immigration agents have always had bit parts in the drug war, the integration of border patrol and immigration enforcement into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 not only drafted them into the “war on terrorism” but into becoming major players in the “war on drugs.”

At the start of a new administration and a new Congress, it’s time to start asking if the Border Patrol is really focused on protecting the nation against dangerous people and goods or if it, like other law enforcement agencies, have become distracted from the public safety and national security missions by an ill-conceived and long-failing drug war.

Operation Stonegarden's "Friendly Forces" on the Border

The new border security initiative announced by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in March 2009 stresses DHS collaboration with local law enforcement through a variety of operations. Introducing the new initiative in testimony to the Senate’s homeland security committee, DHS Secretary Napolitano said that through the Operation Stonegarden DHS will “enhance state, local and tribal law enforcement operations and assets along the border.”

Operation Stonegarden is a federal assistance program ($60 million in 2009) for local law enforcement that is limited to borderland counties. The assistance is not general funding but for additional personnel and overtime pay for homeland security operations. A major problem, as in all DHS federal/local programs, is that funding is not accompanied with internal regulations specifying exactly what the homeland security funds can be used for.

As a result, Operation Stonegarden recipients can use DHS’ own broad mission – “protecting nation against dangerous good and people” – to justify their own extra expenses picking local drug users and illegal immigrants. Under Operation Stonegarden, dangerous people are defined as “criminal aliens” but criminal aliens include all illegal immigrants, according to the operational contract. Similarly, all illegal drugs are included in the search for “dangerous drugs.”

Since the program was initiated shortly after the DHS’s creation, the rationale for the program has evolved – from a “first-responder” to terrorism program to a border security program focused on drugs and illegal immigrants. Officially it is a program of DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide grants “designated localities to enhance cooperation and coordination among local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in a joint mission to secure the United States borders along routes of ingress…”

The program elapsed in 2005 but was renewed in 2006 under DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. Writing in HS Today, a securities industry magazine, Joshua Filler, CEO of Filler Security Strategies and original director of DHS’s local coordination officer, applauded the relaunching of the operation, pointing to the example of funding in Maine to explain its counterterrorism objective.

“While Maine itself isn’t likely to be the target of a terrorist attack or other catastrophic event, it could be used as an infiltration point or launching pad by terrorists to strike other parts of the US—in fact, that’s essentially what happened on 9/11. If Maine and small northern border states are to receive federal funds, which they should, this is one of the best uses of those funds since it will have the biggest antiterrorist impact with a limited budgetary impact,” wrote Filler. Operation Stonegarden is no longer couched in counterterrorism rhetoric. Basically, it functions as one of the many ICE and Border Patrol programs aimed at increasing cooperation with local police forces, with program recipients being limited to borderland law enforcement agencies. As such, complaints about Operation Stonegarden reflect the kind of criticism leveled against such ICE programs as Operation Community Shield, the 287(g) Program, and Secure Communities, namely that involving local police in immigration enforcement leads to racial profiling and increasing community distrust of law enforcement.

The sheriffs' departments that receive Operation Stonegarden funding don't so much focus on the "routes of ingress" into the United States as on the immigrants and illegal drug users in their own communities.

This was the case in Otero County, in southeastern New Mexico, where sheriff deputies used the Stonegarden grant to hunt for illegal immigrants in the Chaparral, a largely Latino settlement on the edge of El Paso. In September 2008 a federal judge issued an injunction barring the sheriff's department from enforcing immigration laws through the Operation Stonegarden.

The injunction specifically bars the department from "engaging in unlawful discriminatory activities and racial profiling for the purpose of identifying and apprehending undocumented and illegal immigrants pursuant to Operation Stonegarden." In addition, the order bars the department from "unlawful retaliation, coercion, harassment, threats and intimidation," and tells the department not to conduct "unlawful community-wide raids targeted low-income Latino residents in Otero County."

In addition to receiving Operation Stonegarden funding, Otero County is cashing in on the immigrant crackdown boom by way of two county-owned prisons that house ICE and U.S. Marshall Service detainees. Both are operated by Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based private prison firm.

While the founding premise of Operation Stonegarden was that the borderlands – north and south – were the gateway regions for potential terrorists and therefore needed increased vigilance, the practice of involving local police has focused DHS resources on borderland residents at least as much as transients.

The program is also controversial in the northern borderlands, where local police have become increasingly involved in the Border Patrol’s crackdown on immigrants and illegal drugs. In Washington State, a county sheriff has declined Stonegarden funding, saying that immigration law enforcement is not a public safety priority. The sheriff in Jefferson County in Washington, near the northern border, declined to apply for a Stonegarden grant in 2009.

Sheriff Michael Brasfield complained that the language in the grant application that described undocumented immigrants as "criminal" was insensitive and felt the overall document was unacceptable. “Unfortunately, the inclusion of language describing illegal aliens as 'criminal aliens' that 'are drawn here by criminal activities', coupled with the requirement participating agencies (described as 'Friendly Forces') agree to detain illegal aliens and turn them over to the Border Patrol, makes the overall document unacceptable," Brasfield wrote in his Jan. 12 letter.

Echoing the common complaint that Border Patrol and local police in involved in joint operations are intruding into the lives of community members in the Bellingham, Washington area, activist Rosalinda Guillen told a local TV station, "It's almost like they're looking for something to do and we're the targets."

The Failed Secure Border Initiative

Something isn’t working. In late 2005 Michael Chertoff, the new secretary of the Homeland Security Department, launched the “Secure Border Initiative” as the umbrella program for border control and immigration enforcement. The announced goal of SBI, described as “a comprehensive multiyear plan to secure America’s borders and reduce illegal migration,” was to gain “operational control of both the northern and southern borders within five years.” Now, in response to calls for more border security by region politicians and fears of a spillover of Mexico’s drug-related violence, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced a renewed operational focus on Southwest border security. The new initiative, “The Southwest Border: The Way Ahead,” continues to meet recent increases of cartel violence in Mexico with strong action and solidified coordination with federal, state, local, tribal and Mexican authorities. SBI benefited from an infusion of new congressional funding initiatives in 2005 and 2006 for the border wall, the virtual fence, more Border Patrol agents, and more detention beds. The new initiative, in contrast, will largely rely on redeploying existing personnel and resources to the border. It emphasizes increased collaboration between federal and local law enforcement agencies to rid the country of “criminal aliens” and to interdict flows of drugs and arms. Risk-Based Security Enforcement DHS says the new initiative will be based on a “risk-based decision-making process.” All the various DHS initiatives that are part of its SBI umbrella program contend that they are “risk-based.” DHS contends it is protecting the homeland against “dangerous goods and people.” In practice, however, its array of border control and immigration enforcement programs cast a wide net – with most of the arrests being immigration violators and drug law offenders rather than dangerous criminals. Marijuana leads, by far, the list of illegal drugs seized, even though there is widening consensus, even in the criminal justice community, that marijuana is not a “dangerous good,” especially when compared with cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines. A key component of the new border security initiative is the Border Enforcement Security Taskforce (BEST), which brings together federal and local law enforcement agencies, along with Mexican officials, in a collaborative but ICE-directed effort to deploy teams “where transnational criminal organizations exploit vulnerabilities along the nation's border.” DHS is doubling the number of ICE agents on BEST teams throughout the Southwest borderlands that will lead transborder criminal investigations. The expansion will allow DHS to “strengthen the program's ability to dismantle the leadership and supporting infrastructure of the criminal organizations responsible for perpetrating violence and illegal activity along our borders and in the nation's interior.” The achievements of the existing BEST teams don’t support ICE declarations that their investigation and prosecutions are “risk-based.” The existing 95 members of BEST teams in the Southwest were responsible for 1,000 criminal arrests in 2008, but most of its arrests – 1,256 – were for administrative violations, presumably transgressions of immigration law. Marijuana seizures topped the list of drugs confiscated. BEST seized 42,400 lbs. of marijuana, 1,803 lbs. of cocaine, and 66 lbs. of heroin. Next: Operation Stonegarden Photo: Michael P. Farrell/Hearst Newspapers. Border Patrol agents detain a Chinese immigrant after canine team finds a marijuana joint in her knapsack in upstate New York.