Thread: ECU professor tells House panel Border Patrol undermanned

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ECU professor tells House panel Border Patrol undermanned, poorly equipped

By Jimmy Ryals
The Daily Reflector

Monday, September 18, 2006

For most of his academic career, Lee Maril, chairman of the sociology department at East Carolina University, focused his research on poverty and social inequality.

Before coming to ECU in 2004, Maril found ample local material on those topics during 20 years at universities in impoverished South Texas border towns.


His studies took a turn in 1999, when some of his students invited him to ride along on their night job as agents in the U.S. Border Patrol.

"Once I did it one time, I was pretty shocked by what I was seeing," Maril said Wednesday. "I realized it was something the public needed to know about. It actually hadn't been studied before."

What Maril saw during two years of ride-alongs was an undermanned law enforcement agency using antiquated equipment to defend "one big crime scene" against heavily armed human and drug traffickers, he said. Maril shared those conclusions with the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during testimony at a Sept. 1 field hearing in Dubuque, Iowa.

"Their work is very dangerous," Maril said of the border agents last week. "They're exposed on a regular basis to high-risk situations that most law enforcement agents aren't exposed to on a daily basis."

Border Patrol agents largely work alone in remote areas made more difficult to patrol by the rugged South Texas landscape. Cane in fields there can grow to 20 feet tall, Maril said, and the Rio Grande River snakes so wildly that "you don't, at times, even know where you are."

Compounding those natural hindrances is the poor equipment, Maril said. Ground sensors planted along the border date back to the Cold War and can't differentiate cows from people, he said. The agents' body armor and communications equipment are also inadequate, Maril said.

While Maril praised the agents he observed for their dedication and bravery, he was critical of a management regime that doesn't require ongoing physical fitness evaluations. The result is that agents who enter the patrol in peak condition gradually fall out of shape, Maril said.

"Everybody thinks it's really easy to catch or apprehend someone who's crossing the river," Maril said. "It's really extremely difficult."

Maril advocates expanding the Border Patrol and improving its equipment. He also said he believes a guest-worker program is a necessity.

Maril's appearance before the House committee wasn't his first foray into the national debate on immigration. In 2004, he published the book "Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas." Last year, he helped two Texas members of Congress draft a bill to strengthen the Border Patrol.

"I'm not the kind of scholar who, once the research is published and done, the job's over," he said. "I'm interested in letting the public know there are certain issues they need to be informed about."


Jimmy Ryals can be contacted at jryals@coxnc.com. and at 329-9568 .

great post.