Thread: Boeing's 'virtual fence' raises hope, concern

Boeing's 'virtual fence' raises hope, concern
By Tim Logan
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
11/25/2007


One of nine 98-foot-tall surveillance towers that Boeing is testing along the Mexican border as part of the Secure Border Initiative. This one is just outside the town of Arivaca, Ariz., and holds cameras and radars that Border Patrol agents will use to watch the area.
(TIM LOGAN /P-D)

Part 1 of 2 This is the first of two articles examining Boeing's high-tech bid to bolster the U.S.-Mexico border. Coming Monday We take a look at what the project could mean for Boeing's St. Louis-based defense unit. Inside How does Boeing's border-patrol system work?

The Altar Valley, Ariz. — It used to be, you didn't have to lock your doors around here. Now people encase their windows in wrought iron and their yards in razor wire.

In the quiet night, people say, you can sometimes hear the AK-47s of drug smugglers battling over loads of marijuana.

And every year now, there are hundreds of bodies found in the desert, Mexicans who died walking north for a better life.

This is the front line of our national dilemma over immigration. And it's the place where Boeing is launching a project that just might be part of the solution.

Here in Arizona's Altar Valley, a sea of mesquite and dusty creek beds stretching southwest from Tucson, Boeing's St. Louis-based defense unit is testing something called SBInet. It's a network of ground sensors, radar and high-powered cameras that will scan the desert constantly and could help the Border Patrol "gain operational control" of this vast and wild land.

It's the technological piece of a dramatic hardening of the border that's begun in the last few years, a supplement to fencing, vehicle barriers and thousands of new Border Patrol agents. That hardening, in turn, is key to the broader efforts at immigration reform in Congress: Secure the border, the theory goes, and allow more people to enter the country legally.

But so far, SBInet has been a disappointment.

Only a year old, the 28-mile pilot phase called "Project 28" is already five months behind schedule, bogged down by the difficulties in making cameras and radars work together properly. Critics in Washington say Boeing oversold what it could do. And federal officials are holding back payment until they're satisfied that Project 28 works as intended.

But testing is scheduled to wrap up soon, perhaps as early as this week. And the Border Patrol still has high hopes for this "virtual fence," planning to build it out from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, over the next few years, and eventually over the northern border, too. RELATED LINK
VIDEO: Arivaca, Arizona

"If it works here, we can be pretty sure it'll work nationally," said Osborne Wilder, a Border Patrol agent who's helping oversee Project 28.

"Here" is a dusty, desolate land of 115-degree summer days and vast open stretches with little shade or water. It's also the busiest piece of the busiest sector of the 2,000 mile-long border with Mexico. In the last three years, more than 1.2 million illegal immigrants have been caught trying to cross in eastern and central Arizona, most of them in isolated stretches of desert. No one knows how many made it through.

They've come out here, Border Patrol agents and humanitarian groups say, because it's gotten so much harder to cross in the cities. Places such as Nogales, a border city south of Tucson, have come to resemble armed camps, with 15-foot fences, surveillance cameras and National Guardsmen and smugglers eyeing each other from the hilltops.

In the desert, the only thing separating the two countries is waist-high cattle fence, and the rugged terrain and long distances make patrols more difficult. So the smugglers, known as "coyotes," bring the migrants out here.

"It's kind of like a current flowing," Wilder said. "They'll take the path of least resistance."

That has changed the tenor of life in little border towns such as Arivaca, say the people who live here.

There's more violence now, as the smuggling of drugs and the smuggling of migrants have become increasingly intertwined. There are green and white Border Patrol Chevy Tahoes cruising everywhere. There are 44-seat buses parked on standby, waiting to ship captured border-crossers back to Mexico.

And there's a big tower overlooking Arivaca.

"Until all hell broke loose five years ago, this was a pretty mellow little frontier town," said Mary Scott as she drove one through this isolated hamlet of roughly 1,700 people.

Like many who live here, Scott came from somewhere else — Manhattan, in her case — lured by the quiet and the natural beauty. Now she finds herself in the midst of a national firestorm over immigration.

In her time in Arivaca, Scott has had some run-ins. Her home has been broken into, food and jewelry stolen, and she awoke one night to banging and Spanish voices at her door.

"The only thing I could understand was '300 U.S. dollars,'" she said. "They wanted a ride."

But Scott doesn't have much use for the towers, especially the one just outside town.

It's not going to solve the bigger problems of global economics that force people to cross the desert for a better job, Scott says, and she worries that it seems to have a better view of Arivaca than it does of the main creek beds that smugglers travel. Like many here, she considers it a massive invasion of privacy, and she predicts that other communities in SBInet's path will feel the same way.

"People came out here because they wanted to live without this kind of stuff," she said. "Now it's staring down our nostrils."

But to others, the towers have already been a blessing, even if they don't quite work yet.

Tom Kay lives on a rutted gravel road south of town, and his ranch includes four and a half miles of the border. The last few years, he figures, "1,000, maybe 1,500" people have passed through his land every week, sometimes right through his backyard.

He's constantly mending holes in his fences and water pipes, and he's had cows die from eating the clothing the migrants leave behind. He sees spotters on the hilltops with binoculars, watching for the Border Patrol. He carries a .44 Magnum, his wife a .38.

"We enjoy living here. We don't enjoy all the migrants, all the drug smuggling," Kay said. "It's hazardous. It's scary."

But since three SBInet towers went up nearby, he says, the traffic through his ranch has plunged. The 1,500 became more like 300, he guesses, and there's a lot less trash. Even if it's not fully operational, Kay says, SBInet is a deterrent, and the coyotes and drug smugglers find another way.

Yet that's why the whole thing is futile, says Kat Rodriguez, coordinator for Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, an immigrant rights group in Tucson. It's just another piece of the "militarization of the border," she says. And it won't solve anything.

So long as there are jobs here, immigrants will keep coming north. Drug smugglers, too. They'll just try it in more and more remote areas. And more of them will die in the process, Rodriguez says.

Deaths in the desert have climbed almost every year since the government began hardening the border, Rodriguez notes. In the 12 months ending Oct. 1, 237 bodies were recovered in southern Arizona, up from 205 the year before.

"I'm not going to be tracking any fewer deaths next year," she said.

The answer, Rodriguez and other humanitarian activists argue, is a stronger guest worker program: one that gives immigrant workers their rights and the chance to cross legally, instead of forcing them to pay a coyote fees that start at $1,200 — a year's wages in for many in rural southern Mexico — to risk their lives crossing the desert.

"It reminds me of Prohibition," Rodriguez said. "We've created this huge, unregulated reality."

But it's the reality we have right now, the Border Patrol says. They blame the coyotes who take migrants, many from distant states such as Chiapas and Oaxaca, out into the unfamiliar desert, then take advantage of them. And they point a finger at the businesses all over the country who hire undocumented workers.

"You're not going to stop the immigration until you enforce the laws," said Sean King, a Border Patrol spokesman in Tucson. "Until they do something about the companies hiring all these people, they're not going to stop coming."

Until then, however, the plan is to keep hardening the border, with more fences and more patrol agents and more of Boeing's 98-foot-tall towers scanning the desert day and night.

And even if many of those who live here don't think that'll solve the situation, they're not really sure what else to do, either.

"It's ugly," said Mary Scott back in Arivaca. "There are no easy answers here."

tlogan@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8291
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Virtual fences don't work, and can be turned off. We DEMAND a double-layered 854-mile fence (and more) NOW along with sustained interior enforcement. The law is the law -- OBEY IT.