Tag Archives: Border Patrol

More high tech gear sought by U.S. border agents

View of Border Patrol camera tower near Laredo Texas

By Julia Harte

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal agents who patrol the U.S. border with Mexico want 23 more miles (37 km) of fences, better radios and more aerial drones to tighten the southern frontier, according to an unpublished U.S. government study that influences budget requests.

The modest scope of the requirements, details of which were contained in internal emails seen by Reuters and described by Border Patrol officials in interviews, contrasts sharply with calls by Republican presidential candidates for more drastic measures to secure the border. Front runner Donald Trump and rival Ted Cruz have both pledged to build a border wall, a project that could cost several billion dollars.

The extra fences sought by agents in Texas and California would be the first major fencing addition to the nearly 2,000-mile-long southern border in five years. They would cost about $92 million based on the costs of previous fences, though experts say that cost has risen.

Border Patrol has not asked its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), to request funding for any new fences so far.

Border Patrol Chief Ronald Vitiello told Reuters that he is aware that some of his agents require “handfuls” of miles of additional fencing, though he declined to comment on the number of additional miles required.

The 653 miles of fencing currently along the southwest border is a mix of wall-like fences and more basic vehicle barriers. About half of it was built for $1.2 billion in the four years after 2007, when Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) a mandate to fence the most vulnerable sections of the 1,954-mile border.

Building those fences required the department to waive 36 environmental and tribal sovereignty laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and mired the government in costly litigation with property owners.

The CBP has for the past three years used the internal study to gauge border agents’ most urgent needs and inform Border Patrol funding requests, though the agents’ specific requirements are not spelled out in budget documents.

The study also uses a border visualization and threat simulator built by Johns Hopkins University researchers who have run similar programs for the U.S. military, according to Vitiello.

The new fencing that agents require is for three sectors of the border, and would mainly consist of metal or concrete bollards clustered closely enough to prevent people from squeezing through, according to a March email between Border Patrol officials.

Apprehensions of people trying to cross illegally into the United States over its southwest border have mostly declined since the 1980s and 1990s, and they hit a nearly four-decade low in 2011. After a small rise, they dipped to near 2011 levels again last year.

Agents have also identified more reliable radios, handheld surveillance drones and all-terrain vehicles as resources they need urgently to close border security gaps, Vitiello said.

VIRTUAL BORDER

The Border Patrol has been doubling down on a “virtual wall” of drones, blimps and tower-mounted cameras, an approach that has produced mixed results.

The bulk of the CBP’s current $447 million annual budget for fencing, infrastructure, and technology goes toward surveillance towers, unmanned aircrafts, retired military blimps, and other advanced technological equipment.

After jumping to $1.5 billion in 2007 following the Congressional mandate to build hundreds of miles of new fencing, that budget decreased for several years, but has been rising steadily since 2013.

A Senate appropriations committee spokesman confirmed that “border security remains the biggest investment area” in the DHS appropriations bill, but he and his House committee counterpart declined to speculate on future funding levels.

The DHS, which oversees the CBP, had taken ownership of more than 3,900 items of excess equipment from the U.S. Defense Department as of a year ago, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection presentation obtained by Reuters. That included “Marcbots” – wheeled robots that detect tunnels – and advanced radar surveillance systems.

But watchdog agencies and the Border Patrol agents’ union have criticized DHS and CBP for neglecting their stocks of basic equipment, such as radios, and not effectively demonstrating how new acquisitions improve border security.

DHS pledged to improve its equipment investment policies following several such reports. A senior official with the department’s inspector general said the internal review of border security gaps will help CBP “re-assess where all the risk is and then re-allocate the resources to the greatest risk areas.”

The Government Accountability Office said it is about halfway done reviewing Border Patrol’s ability to address border security gaps as part of a review requested by U.S. lawmakers on homeland security committees. It expects to release those findings in the latter part of the year.

(Reporting by Julia Harte; editing by Stuart Grudgings)

Federal Agents seize longest Mexico California drug tunnel

United States attorney Laura E. Duffy looks down the opening of a hole in the ground after the discovery of a cross-border tunnel

By Marty Graham

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – Federal agents have seized a ton of cocaine and seven tons of marijuana smuggled through a clandestine tunnel stretching a half mile beneath the U.S.-Mexico border, the longest one yet unearthed in California, authorities said on Wednesday.

Six people were arrested as authorities in San Diego moved on Monday and Tuesday to shut down the tunnel, the 13th underground passageway discovered along California’s border with Mexico since 2006.

The 870-yard-long tunnel, one of the narrowest found in the region, also yielded an unprecedented cache of drugs.

“This is the largest cocaine seizure ever associated with a tunnel,” said Laura Duffy, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California.

The northern end of the tunnel, like most of the others, emerges in a narrow industrial expanse between the Otay Mesa port of entry and the California Highway Patrol’s border facility. The area, known for its heavy clay soil, is primarily traversed by trucks hauling tons of legitimate cargo between the two countries every day.

The latest tunnel, excavated 46 feet beneath the surface, ran from the bottom of an elevator shaft built into a house in Tijuana to a hole in the ground on the U.S. side enclosed within a fenced-in lot set up as a pallet business. The hole was concealed under a trailer-sized trash dumpster that smugglers used to move the drugs off the lot, federal officials said.

“They put the drugs in the dumpster and then hauled the dumpster to another location to unload it,” Duffy said. Federal agents followed a truck that carted the dumpster to a central San Diego spot about 25 miles north of the border and watched as the cargo was loaded onto a box truck, which drove away.

San Diego County sheriff’s deputies who stopped the truck seized 2,242 pounds of cocaine and 11,030 pounds of marijuana, and arrested three men, Duffy said. Federal agents searching the pallet lot and the tunnel recovered an additional 3,000-plus pounds of marijuana and arrested three more suspects, she said.

The suspects were all jailed on various drug-trafficking conspiracy charges.

Federal agents who patrol the Otay Mesa area immediately north of the border began watching the pallet company, its yard stacked with grimy, wood-frame racks, in October, Duffy said.

“The investigation began with an astute border patrol agent who identified this business as suspicious,” Duffy said. “They began monitoring this location and saw the people here conducting dry runs.”

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Andrew Hay)

U.S. Officials Deporting Fewer Illegal Immigrants

Newly released data indicates Homeland Security officials removed far fewer unauthorized immigrants from the United States this past fiscal year, but the department says the drop reflects efforts to prioritize catching those who present the most risk to the public.

The Department of Homeland Security released its annual report on immigration enforcement on Tuesday. It covers the period from Oct. 1, 2014, to Sept. 30, 2015.

The data show Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials deported 235,413 people in that period. That number was 315,943 in 2014, 368,644 in 2013 and an Obama administration high of 409,849 in 2012.

However, as the number of deportations dropped, the percentage of convicted criminals removed rose slightly. In 2012, about 55 percent of ICE removals were convicted criminals. That rose to 59 percent last year.

In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the data “reflect this Department’s increased focus on prioritizing convicted criminals and threats to public safety, border security and national security.” Officials said 86 percent of the deportations were “top priority” cases that were considered threats.

Crunching the numbers further, ICE reported about 91 percent of its nearly 70,000 interior removals – people who were living in the United States, rather than being caught as they tried to illegally cross the border – were convicted criminals, a 9 percent increase from 2013.

Officials also reported a stark drop in the number of people apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol arrested 337,117 people in the past fiscal year, which the report said was the second-lowest yearly apprehension total since 1972. The number of arrests was 486,651 last year and 420,789 in 2012.

Johnson said that the consecutive drops reflect “a lower level of attempted illegal migration at our borders.” But not everyone with ties to the Border Patrol sees it that way.

“To me, if our numbers of arrests have gone down, that just means that we have missed more (people). The same number of people are getting in, we’re just taking in less,” Terence Shigg, the president of a local chapter of the National Border Patrol Council, told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Homeland Security officials said 18 percent fewer Mexican nationals were apprehended in fiscal year 2015 than in fiscal year 2014. Arrests of people from other countries – mainly Central America – dropped about 68 percent. Officials also seized some 3.3 million pounds of narcotics.

“(Fiscal year) 2015 was a year of transition, during which our new policies focusing on public safety were being implemented,” Johnson said in a statement. “In (fiscal year) 2016 and beyond, I want to focus even more interior enforcement resources on removing convicted criminals.”

Border 40 Percent Secure; 1 in 5 Intercepted Illegals Have Criminal Record

The head of the U.S. Border Patrol testified to Congress that less than half of the southern border is under “operational control.”

Brandon Judd cited violent conditions as part of the problem and added that one out of every five people caught attempting to enter the U.S. has a criminal record in Mexico or the U.S.

In 2014, the border patrol caught around 486,000 illegal immigrants, but only 91,000 were returned to Mexico.

“This is the challenge we are facing at the border today. There are those who will point to lower apprehension rates and tell you the border is secure. Border Patrol agents, however, throughout this nation will tell you the border is not secure and the southwest border certainly is not safe,” Judd testified.

Judd also said that drug cartels are a major issue.

“These cartels are well organized, heavily armed, and pathologically violent. To give you sense of the violence the official death, as quoted earlier, toll from the cartel violence in Mexico is 60,000. This is more than the United States military lost in in Vietnam. However, the unofficial death toll in Mexico is over 120,000 killed and another 27,000 missing and presumed dead,” Judd said.

“In Mexico, the cartels kill without hesitation or fear of prosecution. In May of this year, cartel members shot down a Mexican Army helicopter in the State of Jalisco. Why would we expect them to behave any differently on the U.S./Mexico border?”

ISIS Kills Border Guard In Saudi Arabia

Islamic terrorist group ISIS has launched their first attack against Saudi Arabia.

Four terrorists attacked a Saudi border patrol post on the Iraq/Saudi border that left three Saudi border patrol officers dead along with two others injured.

The attack is the first since the Islamists stated their desire in November to take over Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Press Agency said the four terrorists were caught attempting to sneak over the border around 4:30 a.m. by a lone border patrol agent.  The terrorists opened fire and killed the agent.

More agents were sent after the terrorists.  One killed two agents when he detonated a suicide vest.  All four terrorists were killed.

“It is the first attack by Islamic State itself against Saudi Arabia and is a clear message after Saudi Arabia entered the international coalition against it,” an Iraqi security analyst with close ties to the Saudi interior ministry, Mustafa Alani, told Reuters.

The Saudi government has built a 600-mile long fence along their border with Iraq.  They have contributed to the U.S. led effort to destroy ISIS.

Pastors Banned From Border Detention Facilities

Credentialed pastors are being banned from ministering to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants being kept at border patrol facilities in Texas and Arizona.

“Border Patrol told us pastors and churches are not allowed to visit,” said Kyle Coffin, the pastor of CrossRoads Church in Tucson, Arizona to Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “It’s pretty heartbreaking that they don’t let anybody in there — even credentialed pastors.”

A Border Patrol spokesman confirmed the surprising ban.

“Due to the unique operational and security challenges of the Nogales Placement Center, religious services provided by outside faith leaders are not possible at this time,” the Border Patrol told me in a statement. “However, CBP’s chaplaincy program is supporting the spiritual needs of the minors for the limited time they are at the center.”

Area churches are even prohibited from donating items like soccer balls or other recreational items for the children.

A counselor that worked at the Lackland Air Force base center said in their entire tenure at the facility not a single minister or chaplain was brought to the children.