Border Security: What is the appropriate response?
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April 03, 2010 10:20 PM
By LAURA TILLMAN, The Brownsville Herald

Progreso interim Police Chief Alberto Rodriguez would like to have a few more guns.

Inside the Progreso Police Department, one half of a small building on FM 1015, there’s a copy machine, a dry erase board for recording arrests (just one entry on April 1 for public intoxication), and a few computers. Rodriguez has nine other officers on his police force, and he worries about the home invasions, kidnappings, and drug trafficking that have been seeping into the 4,851 person town in the past year from Mexico, just across the river.

But more than a fancy office, or guns, or even fast cars, Rodriguez says this stretch of borderland would benefit from more tactical specialists, who are able to connect the dots between cartels and gangs on this side of the border. The violence in Progreso is clandestine and retaliation is feared. Rodriguez learns of home invasions and kidnappings through gossip rather than police reports.

Whether spillover violence is the term used to describe the recent kidnapping of a man from a McAllen Starbucks, or a shooting in a Wal-Mart parking lot, politicians, law enforcement, and intelligence specialists agree with Rodriguez: There has been an increase in certain kinds of drug-related violence along the U.S. side of the border, and the trend is of concern. The question is, what is the appropriate response?

"It would be great for us to have more assistance," Rodriguez said as he patrolled the perimeter of the five square miles his police force covers. "Before this started, we hadn’t seen this kind of violence in a long time."

The Progreso Police Department isn’t responsible for the land south of the Military Highway, next to the Rio Grande. But since the violence started to increase last year, Rodriguez says his officers have added the area to their patrol as a courtesy.

Passing fields of red onion and sprouting corn, he imagines a worst case scenario:

"They’d have machine guns, grenades," he conjectures.

Civilians could get caught in the cross fire, and Rodriguez, sending for backup from Border Patrol and the Sheriff’s Department, would be left with the two other officers on patrol to manage the situation in the interim.

But this scenario has never occurred, Rodriguez readily admits. And he doubts it ever will.


MILITARIZING THE BORDER

Since the Southwest Border Security Initiative began a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security has increased the kind of tactical support that Rodriguez says he needs. DHS has doubled the number of personnel in the Border Enforcement Security Taskforce and tripled the number of ICE intelligence analysts along the Southwest border, according to DHS spokesman Matt Chandler.

Governor Rick Perry, for one, thinks that a military presence is needed. Perry has been requesting that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano send 1,000 National Guard Troops to the border since February of 2009, a request that remains unanswered. Perry also activated a secret spillover violence contingency plan last month.

For its part, Cameron County has a task force in place to address the border violence.

"Anything that transpires, we can respond in minutes," said county Sheriff Omar Lucio. "We always welcome additional people, but do we need them? No."

Samuel Freeman, an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, says that the violence is the predictable result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he says destroyed the Mexican economy.

"When NAFTA was passed, we predicted that (Mexico’s) farmers would be forced to leave their land and come north for jobs. We predicted that cracking down on immigration and a downward economic spiral in the U.S. would cause the Mexican people to turn to drug trafficking, and as cartels fight for control, the violence would increase," Freeman said. "So this is the fruit of the NAFTA."

Freeman believes militarizing the border would only spur violence.

"I spent 20 years in the military," Freeman said. "The military is not trained for these purposes. It trains people to go out and kill, but to take those people trained for war and put them in a situation where they are acting as law enforcement is dangerous."

ACLU spokesman Jose Medina agrees.

"We feel that when you send troops to an area there’s always potential for harm to the law-abiding community," Medina said, adding that racial profiling and civilian casualties are two potential outcomes.


FINDING A BALANCE

Brownsville Mayor Pat M. Ahumada says the military should be reserved for extreme circumstances.

"Bringing in the military for an isolated incident is an overreaction," Ahumada said. "If the government wants to do anything to ensure the safety of our citizens along the border, they should train and fund our existing law enforcement."

But Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos isn’t so sure he wants to wait until the violence escalates.

"How many incidents do we have to have before we pay attention?" Cascos asked. "I’m not trying to overplay it or downplay it, I’m just saying it is not going to hurt to have an increased presence along the border."

In Roma, 75 miles northwest of Progreso, the city’s police department has the same concerns. They’re a small department, ill equipped to deal with a true explosion of violence. But by the same token, such an event may never occur.

Asked whether there are enough law enforcement personnel in the area to deal with the border violence, Lt. Rafael Aguirre asked a question of his own.

"In what situation would enough be enough?"


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