Published: 10.27.2007
Fence tailored to border needs
Not all barriers between U.S., Mexico are the same; some styles provoke distaste
BLAKE MORLOCK
Tucson Citizen
The hilly land outside Nogales once was sliced only by three strands of barbed wire that marked the northern border of Mexico and the southern border of the United States.
A new dividing line is being built, but it's not the uniform border barrier some imagine. The type of fence will vary with terrain and with the strategies agents use for different missions.
Take a tour of the border, bouncing along in a Customs and Border Protection sport utility vehicle, and see.
Border Patrol Agent Mike Scioli, who has been patrolling this stretch for four years, will be the guide. He points to a Border Patrol cruiser stopped in an intersection of dirt roads, its front facing a chain-link fence.
"His job is to sit there all day and watch this spot," Scioli said. "And those two (he points to two men on the Mexican side of the border), they are just watching him."
These stretches of chain-link fence are getting rarer since President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, calling for 700 miles of double-layer fence along the border.
This year, Congress approved $3 billion for border security.
Barriers have been going up in fits and starts. In the past year, 103 miles of "fencing" have been built in the Tucson sector, which includes almost all of Arizona's 350 miles of U.S.-Mexico border. The Tucson sector is the busiest in the country for illegal immigration and marijuana smuggling.
About 28 miles of the new fencing is "bollard-style." That means 6-inch pipes filled with concrete and pounded deeply into the ground. They form an imposing picket fence 16 feet high and are close together to stop foot traffic. They are the new standard for pedestrian barriers, but they represent a small portion of the border fence.
Three-quarters of the fencing actually is "Normandy-style" vehicle barriers - crisscrossing segments of railroad rails that do little to keep people on foot out of the country.
Whether to install pedestrian or vehicle barriers depends on the urgency of the need.
"The difference is whether we are talking seconds to minutes or minutes to hours," Scioli said.
The Border Patrol wants to block pedestrians in places close to easy hiding, such as stores and cars, and near interstates, where people can quickly get out of the area.
Most of the pedestrian barriers in Nogales are steel mats about 12 feet high. They are big enough to dissuade some jumpers, but there's a downside: Agents can't see through them. So smugglers can take a blowtorch to the fence unobserved.
The mat-style fence - big, brown and far from attractive - cuts through downtown Nogales.
"It's a lot better if we can tell what's going on on the other side of the border," Scioli said.
Instead, when people do hop the fence, they are instantly in a chase.
A few miles up the road, Scioli spots a pair of what seem to be border crossers waiting on the Mexican side of vehicle barriers. He stops, talks with them for a few moments, then gets back into his SUV to tell an agent stationed nearby to watch that spot. He would have had no idea who was behind the big mat fence in town.
The vehicle barriers provide quickly erected protection where agents are most concerned with cars and trucks coming across the border in remote stretches and eventually gaining access to highways.
"If they jump the barriers, we have hours or days to catch them," Scioli said.
Here's where the idea of a fence gets funky.
First, there's virtual fencing. Cameras set up along the border in some of the most popular crossing spots give agents in a Nogales command center the ability to scan miles of real estate. Lighting covers 11 miles around the Nogales area. The virtual fence would be unworkable without adequate roads, so 44 miles of all-weather roads have been built in the past 18 months. During the same time, 485 miles of dirt road in the desert have been improved, though that's a loose term.
"There were a lot of places you couldn't really drive more than 10 miles an hour. Even if you knew where people were, it took a while to get to them," Scioli said.
Part of the virtual fence is buried sensors on known immigrant or smuggling paths. Once tripped, they can measure how long a procession is.
Other segments of virtual fencing, part of the Secure Border Initiative of 2005, include sensor towers, satellite phones and unmanned aerial vehicles. That stretch, near Sasabe, is not fully operational because of technical glitches.
"We need infrastructure, people and technology, and once we get it all in place, we'll have operational control of the border," Scioli said.
That doesn't mean the border will be locked down. It means agents will be able to keep an eye on the whole of the border.
The fence, or fencing, has left some people troubled and others frustrated by the progress.
"The crime rate in the urban area has dropped," said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada, "but it's picked up in the rural areas. The assaults, the rapes, the shootouts. We are seeing things in the past 10 years we have never, never seen before."
Estrada has more personal problems with the big, brown, flat fence slashing through Nogales.
"It is ugly. It is intimidating. It is embarrassing. It is frustrating," Estrada said. "It wasn't their (the federal government's) community. They just put it there. They had no understanding of the culture and relationship between Nogales, Arizona, and Sonora."
Such a fence isn't enough for Glenn Spencer of the anti-illegal-immigration group American Border Patrol.
"They're just a tiny town," Spencer said. "We have a nation of 300 million people to protect."
Spencer wants a buffer of land condemned, leveled and left barren on the U.S. side of the border in Nogales.
"They should condemn all those homes and get them out of there," Spencer said.
But he is appalled that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security cut up a stretch of "historic" railroad tracks to make the vehicle barriers.
"They cannibalized the old Southwest Railroad to make miles and miles of cheesy vehicle barriers," Spencer said.
He plans to test that part of the fence by raising money to build barriers on his border-area ranch. Then he'll prove he can drive over them, he said.
U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., this year proposed legislation that would require Homeland Security to consult with communities before building fences.
"Maybe there's another solution than just building a fence," Grijalva said. "They've agreed to meet with Texas communities to build fences on the properties. In Arizona, we don't get that courtesy."

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/67082.php