National Guard pulls soldiers from border
Security operation expected to end next year

By Jeremy Roebuck/The Monitor
May 13, 2007 - 11:32PM
EDINBURG — The Texas National Guard has reassigned hundreds of soldiers deployed along the state’s southern border and expects to remove several more before the end of the summer, military officials confirmed this week.

The shift is expected to free up more guardsmen for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and bolster the state’s preparedness for emergency management at home.

But it could also stymie the U.S. Border Patrol’s efforts to increase manpower along the Rio Grande and slow the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants across the border.

The drawdown comes as part of a planned de-escalation of Operation Jump Start — a controversial security initiative that deployed 6,000 guardsmen to border regions in four states last year to tide over the Border Patrol until it could follow a Bush Administration plan to hire and train an equal number of new agents by 2008’s end.

“We are scaling back in the Valley sector,â€