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    Arizona border 'weakest spot' on Mexico border

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    Arizona border 'weakest spot' on Mexico border
    Feds putting more resources into security

    Susan Carroll
    Republic Tucson Bureau
    Mar. 31, 2005 12:00 AM

    TUCSON - Calling Arizona the weakest portion of the Southwestern border and warning that terrorists may try to exploit its vulnerability, top Homeland Security officials on Wednesday pledged to add 534 Border Patrol agents and to more than double the number of aircraft within six months.

    Robert Bonner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said officials have a "comprehensive strategy" designed to secure Arizona's border, a goal that has remained elusive despite record manpower increases in recent years. Department of Homeland Security plans include increasing the number of agents in the state to more than 2,900 by the end of September and adding 23 helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft and targeting popular smuggling corridors controlled by organized-crime networks.

    But some border security experts and academics said they doubt the increase, although widely recognized as significant, will be enough to stem illegal immigration through Arizona. The state shares 389 miles of border with Mexico and includes remote, treacherous expanses of desert and well-established smuggling corridors.

    Arizona remains the most popular illegal-crossing corridor in the nation, last year accounting for 52 percent of the 1.1 million arrests along the entire length of the 1,950-mile border with Mexico.

    "This is a national security issue and homeland security issue, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Arizona," Bonner said, adding that the data clearly show it is the "weakest spot in our border right now."

    The vulnerability of Arizona's border, where agents arrested an average of 1,600 undocumented immigrants a day last year, has gained greater urgency with reports from top Homeland Security and FBI officials that al-Qaida operatives are eyeing the Southwestern border, although no one has publicly offered evidence to support that information.

    "The reason we have to get control along the borders of our country is because we have an enemy that is bound and determined to attack us, and that's al-Qaida and associated terrorist organizations," Bonner said.

    He said that officials have information that the organization that orchestrated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, "has contemplated and planned the potential for getting terrorist operatives into Mexico and across the border into the United States illegally."

    The push to secure the border here is dubbed Phase II of the Arizona Border Control Initiative, a program launched in March 2004.

    Last year, the agency added more than 200 agents and four helicopters but found that more resources were needed, officials said.

    This time, Homeland Security is bringing in reinforcements and outlined a plan to target specific corridors, starting with a popular smuggling route dubbed the "west desert" that runs through the Tohono O'odham Reservation, an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Officials anticipate targeting corridors to the east, near Naco and Douglas, and to the west, near Yuma, as the migrant traffic shifts.

    "Aliens and their smugglers will have to run a gantlet," Bonner said. "The borderline is just the beginning. We are and will be using interior checkpoints and interdicting at transit locations," including airports, and bus and train stations in Tucson and Phoenix. Officials also plan to continue cracking down on drophouses, where smugglers stow migrants waiting for transportation from Arizona to destinations across the country.

    Still, union officials and critics of the overall strategy questioned whether the latest increases could stem the flow of undocumented immigrants across the Southwestern border.

    Frustration with U.S. border policy has led to a movement called the Minuteman Project, a volunteer civilian effort that plans to begin a monthlong patrol of the Arizona border starting Friday. Border Patrol officials have said they do not endorse such civilian patrols.

    "This is such a myopic strategy, that we're just going to focus on Arizona, like the smugglers and terrorists can't figure out there are many other holes to exploit on the border," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents more than 9,000 agents.

    He said the results likely will be the same as in past years: When Border Patrol agents target an area, smugglers shift to new areas. Like "squeezing a balloon, the pressure is going to come out one side or another, or both," he said.

    The Border Patrol developed a strategy called Operation Gatekeeper in the 1990s and fortified fences and doubled, then quadrupled, manpower in urban areas from Texas to California. Eventually the undocumented-immigrant traffic shifted to Arizona, now the epicenter for illegal immigration, with hundreds of thousands of arrests and record-breaking migrant death tolls each year.

    Last year, agents in the Tucson and Yuma sectors of the Border Patrol reported 589,831 arrests, more than those of Texas, California and New Mexico combined.

    Steven Camarota, research director for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, said the added agents in Arizona, about 200 of whom are assigned temporarily from other portions of the Southwestern border, fall far short of the 2,000 Congress requested that President Bush fund in the 2006 budget.

    "What it probably will do is bring some greater order to the border in Arizona, . . . but beyond that, its overall impact on illegal immigration is not likely to be significant," he said.
    "This country has lost control of its borders. And no country can sustain that kind of position." .... Ronald Reagan

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    By any means necessary.


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