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

New Consulting Firm at “Epicenter” of Border Security in Texas

Gen. John Abrams (left) 

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

John N. Abrams did what many generals do when they retire – parlay his military contacts and experience into media and business.  

Shortly after retiring, the four-star general was hired as a military expert by the Associated Press and founded Abrams Learning & Information Systems (ALIS). As one of the many new homeland security consulting firms formed by former U.S. military officers in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ALIS aims to secure a piece of the country’s booming homeland security business.

ALIS hasn’t managed to break into the multi-billion contract market at the federal Department of Homeland Security (DPS) – having no DHS contracts in last three years – but it hit a bonanza of homeland security contracting in Texas with its contracts for border security operations.  According to the company’s website:

“ALIS has been commissioned to improve border security along the U.S. – Mexico border through the development of an epicenter for security operations. The objective of the operational center is to plan, coordinate, implement, and evaluate interagency border security operations to counter the threat of organized crime, terrorism, and the flow of contraband and human trafficking to foster a secure border region.”

ALIS boasts that its founder, president, and CEO John Abrams is “an internationally recognized subject-matter expert in border security, public policy, international treaties, operations, training and education, and technology integration.” What is more, Abrams, says ALIS,  “is also a recognized corporate leader in developing sustainable strategies and programs.”

Abrams, whose father was Gen Creighton Abrams (who led the ill-fated Vietnamization campaign and Cambodia invasion during the wars in Southeast Asia), did have several U.S. Army commands – including 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Joint Task Force Kuwait, 2nd Infantry Division, V Corps, and Army Training and Doctrine Command – but his credentials as a U.S.-Mexico border security strategist, technology integration expert, and corporate leader, among other described merits, are questionable.

With no discussion, the Texas Public Safety Commission at its August 12, 2010 meeting in Austin approved an “emergency contract for providing strategies and plans to support the management of the Texas Border Security Operations Center (Abrams Learning & Information Systems).”  The commission also extended another DPS outsourcing contract held by APRISS for another information and technology driven project of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), namely Texas Data Exchange (TDEx).

Border security is a major topic of political debate, public concern, and government spending in Texas. 

Yet neither Governor Perry nor DPS Director Steve McCraw have pointed to the central role of a private consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia in the design and implementation of the state’s border security strategy and operations. No questions are asked by the members of the Public Safety Commission, which oversees DPS budget and activities.  Instead the contracts with ALIS have been renewed three times with little or no discussion, and most recently extended beyond the three-renewal contract limit by an “emergency procurement” measure that the state’s regulatory commission recently approved.

At least publicly, ALIS has not been asked to demonstrate the value of its two interrelated DPS contracts for Border Security Management and Operations and for border crime-mapping through TxMap. Nearly $18 million has been spent thus far on these ALIS projects. Similarly, there is little transparency or accountability with respect to another major DPS contract – with APPRISS, which has a $10 million contract for the similarly enigmatic TDEX crime intelligence project.

Aside from the border security impact of ALIS, there is also the unasked question:  Is it advisable to hand over the responsibility to a private consulting firm – with a minimal track record – for formulating the strategies of border security, homeland security, and public safety in Texas, or anywhere?  ALIS was charged by its contracts to do just that – formulate the Texas Border Security Campaign Plan, 2010-2015 Homeland Security Strategy Plan,  and the TEXDPS Agency Strategy Plan 2010.

(Next: The Outsourced Border Security Operations Center and Joint Operations Intelligence Centers.)


For related material and analysis, see: Tom Barry, "At War in Texas."


http://bostonreview.net/BR35.5/barry.php

Outsourcing Texas Border Security

(First in a BorderLines series on border security outsourcing.)

“Until Washington gets serious, Texas will fight to make our border safe.”  That’s how Governor Rick Perry concludes his “Securing Our Future” campaign ad promoting his border security plan.

But what Perry isn’t saying is that the fundamentals – strategy, planning, coordination, intelligence – of the Texas border security strategy have been outsourced to a Washington Beltway consulting firm. The Arlington, Virginia company, Abrams Learning & Information Systems (ALIS), is responsible not only for formulating the Texas Border Security Campaign Plan but also the state’s Homeland Security Strategy Statement as well as the strategic plan of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

Together with his Homeland Security chief and DPS director Steve McCraw, Perry boasts that Texas is constructing a border security “model” and “paradigm” for border security called Border Star that other border states and the federal government itself should adopt.  In his campaign aid, Perry said he “confronted Barack Obama with detailed steps to reduce drug cartel violence along our border.”  Earlier in 2010 Perry wrote to Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), inviting her to visit Texas “to observe Operation Border Star so that you might consider this approach as a national model to increase border security.”

But the federal government hasn’t taken Perry up on his offers. Like his counterpart in Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer, Perry says that President Obama is indifferent to border security. “I don’t think he cares,” Perry told the conservative magazine Human Events. Although apparently he has not withdrawn his February invitation to Napolitano, Perry more recently has said the DHS secretary is “arrogant” and “hypocritical.”

Border security is one of the main issues driving the election debate in Texas as well as in Arizona, New Mexico, and California.  Along the border, the debate usually pits local and state politicians and law enforcement officials against the federal government – with the federal government saying that it is doing more than ever to “secure the border” with regional figures like Perry contending that Washington isn’t doing enough to meet its responsibility, thereby obligating border states to step into the breach.

Clearly, there are many questions about how effective the federal government is to border security, given the continuing flows of illegal immigrants and drugs across the border. But few questions are being asked about just how effective are the border security strategies and operations undertaken by border states and border sheriffs.  Nor do these local border enforcers make clear just where the money is coming from to formulate these strategies and mount these operations.

What is the Texas border security model, where does it come from, and who pays for it?

The key player in the Texas border security model is a name that never appears in the governor’s stream of press releases and campaign ads about border security or in the get-tough pronouncements of Col Steve McCraw.  Just about the only place that the name of the model-builder for Texas border security appears on the public record is in outsourcing contracts that DPS has entered into with ALIS – the Beltway firm established in mid-2004 by General John W. Abrams and which now boasts as being a “recognized leader in homeland security.”

Over the past three years, under the directorship of Steve McCraw, DPS has spent nearly $20 million in state and federal funds in continuing contracts with ALIS to “refine plans and strategies for seamless integration of border security operations in the State of Texas.” Not only does ALIS formulate the state’s border security model, it has also been charged with coordinating and overseeing many of the Border Star operations, including the “Unified Commands.

The centerpiece of the state’s border security operations is intelligence-driven operations that are managed by the Border Security Operations Center (BSOC) in Austin and six Joint Operations Information Centers (JOICS) along the border. ALIS provides the program manager, analysts, technicians, and information specialists for BSOC and JOICs.

(Tomorrow: More on ALIS and its border security responsibilities.)


For related analysis and reporting, see: At War in Texas in Boston Review, at:
http://bostonreview.net/BR35.5/barry.php

At War In Texas

Boxes of seized marijuana in Hudspeth County Sheriff's Office.

(An excerpt from an investigative article that is the cover story of the Boston Review this month, at: http://bostonreview.net/BR35.5/barry.php)

Heads bowed in prayer, we stand at a bucolic spot on the banks of the Rio Grande known by locals as Neely’s Crossing. Like most of West Texas, there is nothing here. On the other side, drug wars have turned Mexican border towns in the Valle de Juárez and elsewhere into killing grounds.

As Hudspeth County deputies armed with AR-15 semi-automatic weapons stand guard, we close in around Reverend Jim Garlow. “Lord, we thank you Lord for gathering us here,” he says. “We thank you for all you have given us and our great nation. We ask you Lord to protect American exceptionalism, to protect U.S. national sovereignty, and secure our border.” Garlow, a prominent evangelical minister, recently had been selected by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to serve as chairman of Renewing American Leadership (ReAL), a new organization dedicated to promoting the “‘otherness’ of America’s exceptional culture and government [whose] manifest
success . . . . has made us a target.”

Garlow was speaking to the attendees at a two-day “Border School” sponsored by the Border Sheriff’s Posse, an evangelical group that teams up with the Texas Border Sheriff ’s Coalition (TBSC) and the Southwestern Border Sheriff ’s Coalition to educate Christians about threats some law-enforcement officials believe loom across the border.

Neely’s Crossing became famous for a January 23, 2006 incident that Hudspeth sheriff and TBSC chairman Arvin West contends was a “Mexican military incursion.” The day before we visited the site, we viewed blurry footage of heavily armed men scrambling across the river toward the Mexican side. Several loads of marijuana float downriver as the men try to regroup and get a military-like vehicle, a Hummer or possibly Humvee, back onto Mexican soil. The Mexican government vehemently denied Sheriff West’s accusation that a Mexican military unit had been escorting drug smugglers. The Border Patrol, which had officers at Neely’s Crossing that day, also declined to support West’s account.

Claiming that the federal government has abandoned its border-control responsibilities, West, who is a mainstay of the Border School, warns students and residents of U.S. border communities, “Arm yourselves. It’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.”

This secure-the-line-at-all-costs attitude doesn’t merely foster right-wing ranting. West and other border sheriffs tout border-security lore like the Neely’s Crossing incident in congressional testimony, and FOX News frequently reports their assertions. The complaints that Washington isn’t fulfilling its responsibilities echo across border communities, despite the unprecedented increase over the past five years in the number of Border Patrol agents, immigrant-detention beds, and border barriers. Each year, billions of dollars flow to the border from the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Justice (DOJ).

Time to Rein In Border Security Bandwagon

Border fence at Naco, Arizona/Photo by Tom Barry

(The first in a series of articles on the border security policy and new policy directions.)

The border is not secure.  The Obama administration knows it, border politicians campaign about it, drug smugglers profit from it, and illegal immigrants seek their futures because of it.

Border security is both a national goal and an opposition battle cry. After Sept. 11, 2001, border security became one of the central imperatives of the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its border-focused Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. Congress and the executive branch have dedicated tens of billions of dollars in budget increases for border security.

 Both DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have launched an ever-expanding array of initiatives to secure the border. Yet the alarm about border insecurity continues to intensify. The phrase “Secure the Border” has been, for example, the simple message of Senator John McCain’s 2010 campaign billboards.

Border security policy and operations are the government’s response to what CBP calls “dangerous people and goods.”  In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the functions of border regulation and control were upgraded to security missions. For the government, the border became a “frontline” for homeland and national security. 

Immigrants and Drugs

Although concern about foreign terrorists and imported weapons of mass destruction animated the initial post-9/11 drive to secure the border, the traditional targets of border control -- illegal immigrants and illegal drugs – have remained core to the federal government’s new border security policies and operations. Illegal immigrants and drugs -- reconfigured as national security threats – are also the main concerns of the leading border security proponents outside the administration.

Immigration is now commonly considered a security issue. Border security, for example, has become central to the immigration reform debate. All reform proposals, no matter their political provenance, stress the fundamentality of border security. Since 2005 most congressional immigration reforms explicitly link immigration and security, notably the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005 (introduced by Senators Edward Kennedy and John McCain) and the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009 (introduced by Congressman Luis Gutierrez).

Over the past couple of years, border security has also become synonymous with long-lived war on drugs, especially combating and interdicting Mexican drug smuggling. For many of the most vociferous critics of the Obama administration’s border security efforts, the threats of illegal immigration, illegal drugs, and terrorism are conflated in the form of narcoterrorism.

Border Security Bandwagon

Border security is a consensus political issue. Only the most idealistic voices on the left and the most uncompromising free-market voices o n the right advocate an “open-borders” policy. Most every other political sector explain their positions on the border in terms of the need for “border security.”

Today, the drive for border security seems unstoppable. At a time when calls for fiscal austerity compete with demands that the government do more to take financial measures to end the great recession, there is no public or policy community opposition to ever increasing border security budgets. The latest emergency border security bill was approved without dissent in a voice vote at the close of the 2010 summer session of Congress.

The generous authorization of border security funding has not been constrained or checked by either monumental failures of border security initiatives (such as SBInet’s proposed “ virtual fence”), the absence at DHS of a detailed border security strategy, or even the lack of a working definition of “border security.”  

The increasingly clamor of border politicians claiming that the federal government is failing its responsibility to secure the border, horrifying drug-related violence in Mexico, and the hope that increased border security will create more political space for immigration reform are among the driving forces of the border security bandwagon.  For the White House – the Obama administration like its predecessor – the enthusiastic bipartisan consensus and lack of popular opposition also explain its role in fueling the runaway border security bandwagon.

The apparent simplicity of the border security issue and the undeniable recent advances in controlling the border also drive border security.  If the problem at the border is illegal entry of people and goods, then all it takes, it is argued,is a combination of personnel, infrastructure (mainly fences), and technology to stop this illegal traffic.

What is more, not only is the solution simple and readily understandable. It also works, as the Border Patrol can readily attest.  Starting in the early 1990s the Border Patrol has demonstrated that concentrated resources – personnel, infrastructure, and technology – can shut down the border, or at least urban sections of it.

No doubt that the border is more controlled as the result of the succession of border security funding bills and annual budget increases, both at DHS and DOJ as well as the dramatically increased involvement of state and local law enforcement.  The Obama administration is certainly right to say that the border “has never been more secure” when measured in terms of immigrants apprehended, immigrants deterred, drugs seized, narcotics arrests, and the increasing costs of cross-border smuggling.

Still, the demands for more border security continue to intensify.  Complaints that the federal government is not doing enough continue to reverberate among border politicians and to echo nationally.

Although never in the quantities demanded by the most vociferous of border hardliners, the Obama administration is yielding to demands for more Border Patrol agents, more money for local law enforcement, more unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, National Guard deployments, and more prosecutions of drug users and immigrants.

Neither in raising new border security demands or in yielding to them, however, has it been considered relevant to note the lack of any evaluation of the impact of such initiatives, any cost-benefit analysis, and any assessment of how these measures increase America’s security. Both at the border and in Washington, border security is more about political gamesmanship than about solving the challenges of counterterrorism, drug control, or immigration policy – as pointed out in 2000 so astutely by Peter Andreas in his excellent Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide.

There’s no going back to the failed policies of the past, back to the badly broken borders of the era when border control was haphazard, largely localized, and based on practices rooted in tradition.

Yet, just as assuredly, there should be no more moving forward with slap-dash border security operations shaped more by politics than by strategy. Nor should we continue to fund expanded border security efforts simply because there is no opposition to proposals to use deficit dollars in the name of increasing our security. 

Although current border security discussions generally revolve around drugs and immigration, the concept of border security was a creature of Sept. 11. And just as advisability of the resulting “global war on terrorism,” along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have come under deserved public and policy-community scrutiny, so too should the still popular commitment to border security.

Policy and operations should target to core problems.  That’s never been the case with U.S. border control, and this disjuncture between policy and problem solving has widened over the past decade.  Since border control has been framed as a security issue, there has been less political space to question the value and cost of border control operations.

Port-of Entry Ft. Hancock, Tx/El Porvenir, Chihuahua/Tom Barry

True Before 2001, True Now

The threat of cross-border terrorism has created new policy challenges. But what was true about border policy before Sept. 11, 2001 remains true today, namely:

1)      Border security is mostly about political showmanship and manipulation,

2)      Border security  favors sweeping rather than focused operational responses,

3)      Border security compounds existing problems in our criminal justice system, and

4)      Border security has ignored the obvious policy causes – drug, immigration, and employment policies -- of the perceived border problems.

Not only has our ill-considered commitment to border security unnecessarily drained the national treasury, it has obstructed immigration and drug policy reforms while dangerously skewing counterterrorism policy. The lack of a coherent border policy has also allowed the politics of reactionary populism and nationalism to flourish at the local, state, and federal levels, as especially evident in Arizona and Texas.

(Next in the border security series:  Prevention through Deterrence Strategy.)