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Can $5,000 buy homeland security? On the border, tribe waits for more

By CARA ANNA
Associated Press Writer

September 9, 2005, 5:17 PM EDT

ST. REGIS MOHAWK RESERVATION, N.Y. -- As he lies in bed and listens to the smugglers on the river, Andrew Thomas wonders how much homeland security $5,000 can buy.

Thomas is the tribal police chief who patrols a geographic hiccup, the only Indian reservation that straddles America's northern border. Part of the St. Regis Mohawk reservation is in America, part is in Canada, and a river and several islands fall in between, making these 12 miles of rural New York some of America's most popular for smuggling.

And as another anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks comes and goes, this is one door that remains wide open.

Since tribal residents don't like outside officials poking around, Thomas and his officers, all three of them per shift, are America's first line of defense.

For their efforts, they get $5,000 in homeland security money a year.

"Pennies," Thomas says.

But better than nothing, which they got in 2002 and 2003.

At night, the river hums. The smugglers slip from one side of the reservation to the other and back again in their stripped-down boats, carrying drugs, money, aliens and, for Thomas, more than a little frustration.

After dark, he leaves the river to the nearby U.S. Border Patrol station, which watches the reservation waters on the American side. Sometimes the smugglers wait just over the line.

The tribal police have a boat, but not enough people to use it. "An expensive paperweight in the parking lot," Thomas says.

But the $5,000 is being put to good use.

The St. Regis are building a protective fence, around the police station itself.

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"I'm slowly pulling my hair out," says Derek Champagne. "If we're gonna have a border, it should really mean something."

Last year, about $8.4 million in marijuana and $6 million in ecstasy were seized after moving through the reservation and into the quiet farm country of northern New York. Officials arrested 120 people as well, a mix of tribal members and outsiders.

It's a fraction of what comes over.

"Do you honestly think we're getting 5 percent of what comes through?" asks Champagne, district attorney for Franklin County, which surrounds the reservation and prosecutes all crimes committed there.

The numbers come from a two-year-old task force of more than a dozen local, state and federal authorities. But they work mostly outside the reservation and its 9,000 residents on the American side.

Champagne pops in a videotape of the St. Lawrence River that divides the tribal lands in two. On the tape, shot in winter, trucks drive freely over the frozen river. In other parts of the reservation, land roads connect the U.S. and Canada all year, with no checkpoints and no questions.

Earlier this year, Champagne showed the tape to a state terrorism conference in Albany.

"People said, `That's our border?"' he says. There was no other real response.

Bill Ritchie, who leads Franklin County's task force, says he doesn't even know of any sensors on the reservation, like the ones placed along America's borders to monitor illegal crossings.

"How do we police that?" asks the local Border Patrol agent-in-charge, Dick Ashlaw.

Quietly, some law enforcement officials blame the lack of a real solution on the traditional tension between government and tribe, whose members post signs against the "feds" and "Gov. George Custer Pataki" along the reservation's main highway.

"No one wants to look like the big bad government squeezing the Indian," says Robert Singer, a retired Border Patrol agent who lives near the reservation.

It may happen just the same.

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"I'm gonna burn my tribal card," Julius Beeson says.

He grabs his wallet and starts toward the fire that burns outside a longhouse on the reservation.

"I've never been denied access to my own land before," he says.

Beeson just got caught in the unique geography. He tried to cross the one bridge that links the reservation's two halves, but was turned back by federal border officials for not having the right ID.

That's not fair, he says. Like other tribal members, he sees the reservation as a land that can be crossed freely.

But along the edges, enforcement is tightening.

In nearby Massena, the Border Patrol station hopes to move into a new building next year, one that can hold 35 to 50 agents. The station now has 16.

The U.S. Attorney for New York's Northern District wants to open a local office to handle the rising number of prosecutions.

This attention doesn't help, some tribal members say. They didn't create Sept. 11.

"People think we're no-good, friggin' smugglers and we all drive Cadillac Escalades," Beeson says. He gestures to his 1988 Honda with a rusty bottom. "Yeah."

Beeson says he just wanted to go to work, fixing a house on an island on the Canadian side. Now he says he's out a day's pay, and maybe the job.

"And you wonder," he says, still angry, still fingering his wallet, "why so many of us are going back to the river."

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Like other tribes that live along more than 260 miles of U.S. border, the St. Regis can't get homeland security money directly from the U.S. government. Money comes once it's filtered through the states. A bill to give certain border tribes, including the St. Regis, direct money is pending in Congress.

For several years, the St. Regis didn't even have the right to ask. Since 2000, after an argument with Franklin County officials, tribal police had no power to arrest non-tribal members.

Still, 203 such people were turned over to the Border Patrol or state police in the past year.

Full arrest power, and the right to ask for homeland security money, was restored by state law late last month.

Last week, the first non-tribal members since the decision were detained. Ahmed Salah, from Bahrain, and Abdullah Mohammed, from Pakistan, had just been brought across the river on Jet Skis. Having crossed the border illegally, they were turned over to the Border Patrol.

Little of this cheers Champagne. He flips through 2004's arrests and seizures.

"May 18, 29 pounds of marijuana and a boat," he says.

"May 19, 21 pounds and a car."

"May 21, 400 pounds and a high-speed chase."

He looks up. "And this is a small county." The population in 2000 was 51,134, or 41 people per square mile.

In March, knowing the unique limitations of the area's enforcement, Champagne testified for state officials against a proposal that Ashlaw of the Border Patrol simply calls "a nightmare."

The plan would expand the St. Regis reservation. Tribal lands, most of them islands, would cover about three more miles of border.

"May 26, 64 pounds and a boat," Champagne says.

"May 28, 23 pounds and a boat and a truck."

Near his desk is a photo of President Bush and Gov. George Pataki, arriving at the local airport a few years ago. On the photo, Pataki has written, "Derek, thanks for keeping us safe."