http://www.denverpost.com/fortressamerica/ci_5356695

Building a Border: Part 2

U.S. officials want to make the 2,000-mile southern frontier inhospitable to crossers. But terrain, weather and human ingenuity have been tough on the technology.

Story by Michael Riley
Article Last Updated: 03/06/2007 08:07:13 AM MST

San Diego
A 10-foot-high wall snakes along the U.S.-Mexico border south of here, and behind it another fence, steel mesh and even higher. Cameras sit atop 50-foot poles, and stadium lights can turn night here to day. It's a daunting sight that looks utterly secure.

Until you notice the dozens of divots.

"Everywhere you see a divot, that's where someone has gone over with a ladder," said Damon Foreman, a young Border Patrol agent, pointing to the nicks across the top of the secondary fence.

Sold for $5 on the Mexican side, the ladders are made of rebar and can be carried with one hand at a quick run.

"Ten guys are over that fence in a minute," Foreman said.

Department of Homeland Security officials trying to secure the country's land borders, it's a hard lesson: A $5 ladder trumps a $30 million fence.

In the multibillion-dollar effort to build a Fortress America, nothing has gained as much attention as the effort to wall off America's borders through a combination of one of the oldest technologies in the world - the fence - and some of the newest - advanced radar, infrared cameras, minidrones.

"We're launching the most technologically advanced border-security initiative in American history," President Bush said in a national address last May.

In September, Americans got the first glimpse of what he meant. Boeing Co. was awarded the initial stage of a multibillion-dollar contract to plan and build SBInet, a 2,000-mile combination of physical barriers and advanced technology that officials predict will turn around a decade of failure and give the country "effective control" of its southern border within five years.

A network of 1,800 long-range, infrared and daylight cameras will scan the Mexican and Canadian borders for drug runners and illegal immigrants, while ground radar tracks vehicles. Seismic, heat and motion sensors will scrutinize difficult-to-monitor areas such as canyons and mountain ranges.

Hundreds of miles of new fences and vehicle barriers will augment the line. And Boeing has suggested the use of small, camera-equipped drones launched from trucks that could send video images back to agents on the ground.

It will be a watershed effort, with a price tag to match. Scheduled to be completed on the U.S.-Mexico border by 2011, the project is estimated by Department of Homeland Security officials to cost $7.6 billion.

"GONE AWRY"

But the southern border is a vast place of daunting geography. Almost 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, it includes snowcapped mountains, a sea of arroyo-scarred desert and 1,200 miles of the Rio Grande.

Despite some notable successes in deploying technology, experts warn that there have also been spectacular failures: Private contractors have shoved off shoddy materials; an unforgiving environment has wreaked havoc on sophisticated systems; and the Border Patrol has misjudged technology's value.

In a cramped control room in the Border Patrol's Del Rio sector in Texas, a crisply uniformed agent shows off the program's most technologically advanced system, part of a network originally known as ISIS, for Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System.

From this spot, two dispatchers have a remarkable view of a 24-mile stretch of the Texas border. Using joysticks, they manipulate more than 40 day-and-night cameras, scanning the border's weed-choked riverbanks for illegal immigrants and dispatching agents via encrypted radios.

On a central console, hits from an array of buried ground sensors roll across a computer screen, alerting the controllers to possible smugglers hidden amid the mesquite and river grass.

"With manpower and technology, you can bring the border under control," said Randy Clark, a Border Patrol supervisory agent, as he stood in front of the impressive array.

"Over the next year or two, there are going to be big changes on the border."

But there is another side to the ISIS story, one that skeptics say underscores the major challenges that lie ahead for a program as ambitious as SBInet.

The cameras like those at Del Rio were erected at dozens of places on both borders by a company called International Microwave Corp., part of a $257 million contract awarded in 1999 and completed over several years.

In two audits, government monitors found many of the cameras weren't installed or were replaced with cheaper, less functional versions than what the contract specified.

The failures spawned a criminal investigation and constituted what one auditor for the General Services Administration called "a major program gone awry." Even when they were in place, the cameras froze in winter and overheated in summer, the GSA audit found.

International Microwave Corp. was later purchased by L-3 Communications, now one of Boeing's major subcontractors for SBInet.

BATTLE-TESTED

The ground sensors were less effective still.

A second audit, this one by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general, found that the sensors were often shorted out by insects or moisture. When they worked, 90 percent of alerts were caused by something other than illegal immigrants, and the deployment of agents to check on hits wasted more time than it saved.

The audit found the agency's 11,000 sensors accounted for less than 1 percent of all apprehensions at the border.

Together, government investigators concluded that the $429 million investment in sensors and cameras was close to useless.

"The border is an astonishingly inhospitable geography. It is mostly remote. It is subject to bizarre and extreme weather conditions," said Doris Meissner, who under President Clinton was head of the Border Patrol's former parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Even so, some of these things have failed more than they should have.

"The promise of technology has been oversold," Meissner warned. "And Congress is vulnerable to that overselling."

Homeland Security officials vow the latest push will be different.

In announcing the Boeing contract, they said they'll begin with a 28-mile stretch in the Arizona desert, fine-tune the system, then build more. They emphasize that with the military contractor they'll get a sophisticated systems manager and technology that has been proved on the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Either way, the political momentum may be running ahead of both the agency and its critics.

The White House now appears to see a virtual border curtain as a necessary trade-off to gain Bush's proposed guest-worker program. And for many voters, the need for a wall - preferably a physical one - has taken on a life of its own, the bottom line of any serious border policy.

"The bumper stickers are all 'Build walls and hire guards,"' said James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

"The wall is about politics, not about effectiveness," he said.

700 MILES OF FENCE?

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appeared acutely aware of those pressures at a news conference in February when he rolled out the details of the 2008 Homeland Security budget.

He confirmed what many border experts had already suspected: Despite the approval by Congress last year of a 700-mile border fence, only about half of that will ever be built.

But Chertoff spent as much time talking about the 370 miles of fencing that will be part of SBInet as he did about the initiative's 2,000-mile network of cameras and sensors - acknowledging the potency of a border fence as a political symbol.

"The fence is a powerful reminder of the reality that there's a spot at which our country ends and another country begins," said Steve Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington.

"That's an important delineation. We're not all one big happy country. They have their interests and their country, and we have ours."

For supporters of the border fence, there's no better confirmation of their views than the area south of San Diego, the example that shows exactly how effective some of the world's most basic technology can be.

Before the area was partly fenced off as part of Operation Gatekeeper in 1996, 600,000 people were caught trying to sneak across the San Diego sector's 66 miles of border, half of those within the first 5 miles from the Pacific coast.

A decade and a half later, the number crossing the coastal area that now includes a 14-mile stretch of double fencing, stadium lights and sensors was just 18,000. The fence reshaped the border and forced hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants east into the Arizona desert.

But extending it hundreds of miles is another question.

It was not just the fence that brought the area under control, officials say. Operation Gatekeeper saturated the small stretch of border with hundreds of new agents, all close to detention centers and other resources.

And even with all that, holding the ground has been a major effort.

Smugglers have dug tunnels underneath the fence and cut through it with electric saws. Much of the wire secondary fence looks like a metal quilt, patched and repatched by a small army of maintenance workers.

And then there's simple geography.

As the double fence snakes over hills and gullies, there are substantial gaps. Two sections, totaling 4 1/2 miles, are still incomplete because of construction difficulties and environmental concerns.

One of those holes is at a place called Smuggler's Gulch, a ravine about 200 feet deep. Large sections of gulch are not fenced at all. Much of the 10-foot-high primary wall - made of Vietnam-era landing mat - has been washed away by erosion and rain.

There is a plan to fix it: Fill Smuggler's Gulch with 2 million cubic feet of dirt, and erase it as a geographic feature. Homeland Security officials recently used new legal powers to waive environmental restrictions to the plan, and construction is set to begin sometime this year.

When it is complete, fencing the full 14-mile stretch - less than 1 percent of the border - will have cost $127 million, or about $9 million a mile.

From start to finish, the project will have taken more than 10 years.

BY LAND OR BY SEA

None of that means the hundreds of miles of new fencing can't be done.

Israel is close to completing a 400-mile high-security fence designed to keep out West Bank suicide bombers. India is building a 500-mile, 12-foot-high fence across Kashmir, which officials say may be electrified.

Instead, homeland security experts say, the question is how effective such a massive infrastructure project will be and what the trade-offs are.

The $5 ladder used near San Diego shows that even the most expensive fence isn't much of a barrier unless there are border guards waiting near the other side.

And the 18,000 Border Patrol agents set to be in place by 2008 are well short of the 100,000 guards many experts say would be required to effectively seal the border.

Even if SBInet worked perfectly, they warn, big security risks like terrorists will still have plenty of other options: tunnels, boats and ports of entry using forged documents.

"If you throw all your eggs in the border security basket, it's going to cost you a phenomenal amount of money and it's going to fail in the end," said the Heritage Foundation's Carafano.

"It's like I want to play football and I'm willing to pay whatever it takes to get Peyton Manning as my quarterback. That's great, but now I won't be able to afford a line or a backfield," he said.

"Now it doesn't seem like such a good deal anymore."

Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-954-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com.