A Gift to the Drug Cartels: Will New Mexico Become the New Arizona?
By Janice Kephart
October 2010
Memorandums


[NOTE: In some versions of the press release, there is a reference to 125 miles of New Mexico border. That is incorrect; the release should refer to 25 miles.]

The border area between New Mexico and Mexico is sparsely populated and has limited natural or man made barriers to illegal crossing. This, coupled with an extensive road network that traverses the state in all directions, makes New Mexico a haven for the transshipment of illegal drugs from Mexico to destination points throughout the United States.

Current enhanced enforcement operations by the Department of Homeland Security in Arizona will most likely force drug traffickers and alien smugglers to shift their smuggling efforts from Arizona to New Mexico. This, in turn, will have a serious impact on enforcement operations and judicial proceedings in New Mexico. While additional enhancements for Border Patrol agents in southern New Mexico has somewhat mitigated the increased use of southern New Mexico as a viable route for alien smuggling, there has been a marked increase in the number of drug seizures and apprehensions of illegal aliens.

- DEA New Mexico Report (200

Obviously, the impact of the [Wilderness] policy is severe on our operations. When you can't drive in those areas, it makes it impossible to patrol and enforce the law, and it transforms it into a sanctuary for illegal aliens."

- T.J. Bonner, President, National Border Patrol Council, the union representing more than 12,000 Border Patrol agents (July 2010)



To date, discussion of the porous Southwest border has largely left out New Mexico. That is about to change if Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, and Tom Udall (D-N.M.) are able to pass an otherwise innocuous bill that changes which laws apply to a stretch of federal land on the New Mexico border. The bottom line is, if S. 1689, the "Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks Wilderness Act," becomes law, New Mexico will likely become the next staging ground for drug cartel and illegal alien smuggling activity, tracking what happened in Arizona. Why? The bill would change the designation of Department of Interior lands, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, from "public lands" to "wilderness," severely curtailing the Border Patrol's ability to conduct preventative, ongoing, and necessary operations due to the stringent nature of wilderness laws that are now four decades old. New Mexico would suffer the same results as those documented by the Center in the "Hidden Cameras on the Arizona Border" three-part series showing the waste, destruction, and unsafe circumstances that borderlands suffer when wilderness laws (and poor federal government policy) create a vacuum of law enforcement presence.



The Bill

S. 1689 was passed out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee on July 21, 2010, by voice vote and is now awaiting consideration on the Senate floor. Specifically, S. 1689 "designates as wilderness 241,400 acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Dona Ana County in southern New Mexico." According to the bill's September 20, 2010, Senate Committee Report its purpose is as follows:

The wilderness and conservation areas would provide protection for large expanses of the Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem, including mountain ranges and grasslands, mesas and canyons, and lava flows and extinct volcanic cinder cones… The region provides important wildlife habitat for both game and sensitive species, and contains a number of archeological and historical sites, including petroglyphs, throughout the area. The proposed-Desert Peaks National Conservation Area lies adjacent to the Prehistoric Trackways National Monument and may contain similar archeological resources as the National Monument.

The bill makes clear at the outset that the Border Patrol's mission is respected and reiterates that access is granted for "undertaking law enforcement and border security activities" under the terms of the wilderness law and a 2006 agreement between the Departments of Homeland Security, Interior, and Agriculture; it also permits low-level overflights of the designated areas. While these elements are superficially supportive of the Border Patrol's already difficult mission in this area (part of the Border Patrol's El Paso Sector), in reality a wilderness designation for borderlands has proven to be severely detrimental to the land itself. The reason: While our government is constrained by law from patrol operations, the illegal smugglers and drug cartels operate outside the law, abusing and destroying the land for illegal purposes, threatening public safety and potentially national security. In addition, the El Paso Border Patrol Sector, which includes the lands allocated by S. 1689 to wilderness, is already deemed 27 percent uncontrolled according the sector chief. A wilderness designation would further exacerbate an existing problem.



Wilderness Laws

In environmental law, federal land designations have wide influence over who and what has access to these lands. In the context of borderlands, a public use designation allows the Border Patrol relatively unfettered access for law enforcement actions, if they choose to use it. Such public lands were the focus of the push to clean up Yuma, Arizona, in Operation Jumpstart from 2006 to 2008, for example, including the deployment of 5,489 National Guard troops to the area and the building of over 100 miles of effective fencing. The result was that over a two-year period, Yuma went from the Border Patrol being outnumbered by 50-to-1 on a daily basis and assaulted daily by smugglers of all kinds to a 94 percent drop in apprehensions and a manageable sector today.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, a wilderness designation on borderlands such as those in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge and Organ Pipe National Monument, both in western Arizona, changes the operational landscape so significantly that few operations can occur unless in "hot pursuit" of known, real-time illegal activity. Nearly the entire expanse of both of these wilderness parks has been negatively impacted by illegal activity, as demonstrated by Department of Interior PowerPoints obtained through 2009 Freedom of Information Act requests. We highlighted the Organ Pipe PowerPoint in our "Hidden Cameras on the Arizona Border 2" video released in July 2010, showing that nearly all of the Monument had been damaged by illegal activity.

To operate in wilderness areas requires tedious bureaucratic requests to the Department of Interior. Operating bases are not permitted. In addition, once land is labeled "wilderness," the Border Patrol must pay mitigation fees for repairing land "harmed" while in the pursuit of illegal activity. Despite the fees, this does not permit greater use of the lands. Instead, every specific task or operational strategy the Border Patrol considers requires approval processes that, in general, prevent timely and effective operations. As a result of the legal barriers that a wilderness designation brings, the Border Patrol loses both incentive and the ability to work on such lands. For example, low-level flights are of minimal value if Border Patrol agents can only act on what they see if they can assure their Interior Department colleagues afterwards that the activity they acted on was a crime or rescue. In addition, the Border Patrol has to be willing to incur mitigation fees. The cartels know this, and they are already chomping at the bit for another American welcome mat.



Drug Cartels in S. 1689 Territory
(note - map at the source link)

Drug cartel forays have already begun in the area Sen. Bingaman wants to designate as wilderness. The parcel spans the middle of New Mexico, where Texas meets the New Mexico border, running about 25 miles from east to west within a mile of the U.S.-Mexico border and about 25 miles north of the border. The land is specified as the Potrillo Mountains Complex, a series of mountains that include oil and gas pipelines (but were excluded from the bill). The specific areas covered by the bill expand beyond the Potrillos (West and East Potrillo Mountains, Aden Lava Flow, and Mt. Riley) to other pockets spanning north. These are: the Sierra de Las Uvas, Robledo and Organ Mountains as well as Broad Canyon and represent potential extensions of corridors north of the Potrillo Mountain Complex, and another series of safe haven pockets. (Essentially enabling these designations further north to become roughly analogous to the public lands now overrun by cartels and smugglers between Tucson and Phoenix in Arizona.) The area encompassed in S. 1689 was highlighted in an October 2, 2010, Associated Press report, reporting that law enforcement is picking up on “obviousâ€