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Buckley security risk disputed
By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News
September 22, 2006
Immigration agents say that the raid on a construction site next to Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora on Wednesday was a matter of national security, even though the military agency overseeing the project says it required no background checks on the workers.
The 70-acre construction site, where houses are going up for military personnel and their families, is just outside Buckley's perimeter fence next to the base's western boundary along Airport Boulevard.

The site is close enough to the base that ICE cited homeland security concerns for the raid, which led to the arrests of 122 illegal immigrant workers.

The government conducts global surveillance and operates worldwide missile-warning systems from the base.

"The bottom line for us is that it was under our critical infrastructure program," said Carl Rusnok, an ICE spokesman in Dallas. "We work with facilities such as military bases, airports, power plants and oil refineries - areas that if they were compromised it would have a significant impact."

Rusnok said the Air Force special investigations unit worked with ICE because the housing site is next to the base, although he acknowledged that there is no access from the site to the secure facilities at Buckley.

The Air Force didn't consider the construction site to be a secured area, said Staff Sgt. Sanjay Allen, a spokesman at Buckley.

The base has no provision in its contract with the developer, Hunt Building Co. of El Paso, Texas, to require any security or background checks on any workers on the construction job, he said. In fact, workers had free access to the site from Airport Boulevard to get to the job.

"The workers don't have to come onto the base at all," Allen said.

The 460th Space Wing and the security surveillance facilities can't be reached from the housing construction site, he said.

By the time the housing area opens in March, it will be connected to the base, and a fence and wall will go up around its perimeter, Allen said. Access to the housing area will be through a designated gate inside, and military security units will patrol it.