The political theater of President Bush's militarize-the-border immigration policy ran into some hard questions and honest oversight this week in the House Armed Services Committee (HASC). It wasn't pretty.
What I saw in the HASC hearing was what can be expected from a hastily thrown together production -- a cast that wasn't sure of its lines and a set that looks good from the cheap seats but is revealed as cardboard and plywood if you get the chance to sneak backstage.
The President's recent act of sending troops to the border is no more than a play to provide political cover for an immigration plan that splinters his Republican Party. Unfortunately for Americans, the theatrics are about to spill into the real world, and soon. The vanguard is expected to arrive on the border during the first week of June.
I spent 26 and a half years in the Border Patrol, first as an agent and later as a chief along the border. I am also an Army veteran, and I spend a lot of time in Congress practicing oversight of the military. I can see a lot of angles I don't think others can or choose to see. Sending troops to the border would diminish our military readiness at a time when our troops, and especially our National Guard, are stretched thin in critical missions around the world. Bush's plan would alienate allies in Mexico and encourage the sort of anti-Americanism that has swept much of Latin America and that we must avoid just to our south. In addition, stationing the Guard in a domestic setting would force troops trained for "shoot to kill" missions abroad into an unfamiliar law enforcement role in which they'd be unsure of friend or foe.
Not to mention that Bush has come late to making border enforcement a priority. In his Oval Office address, President Bush spoke of his support for and expansion of the Border Patrol. He seems to have forgotten that his fiscal year 2006 budget proposal provided for the hiring of only 210 Border Patrol agents, even though Congress had just recently passed an intelligence reform bill authorizing 2,000 new Border Patrol agents a year.
Bush's scramble to shore up border enforcement and sagging approval ratings at the same time has led to serious policy problems. Here are my top twelve concerns:
1. Although Bush's plan would have an impact on military operations, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale stated in the HASC hearing that the Department of Defense was not consulted until just one week before the announcement.
2. The White House keeps saying that only 6,000 National Guard members will be deployed to the border, but what they aren't telling the American people is that it is 6,000 soldiers at any given time that will be deployed. With most of the troops rotating in for two week training periods, nearly every Guard member could likely spend their training time on the Southwest border under the White House plan.
3. The Border Patrol will need to hire 8,800 agents in two and a half years in order to relieve the National Guard deployment in timely fashion, and the Administration has yet to provide a plan that will make that happen. Does Bush's proposal represent yet another open-ended deployment for our National Guard?
4. With just days remaining before the first deployment, rules of engagement for National Guard troops serving on the border have yet to be developed. Will our Guard troops have adequate guidelines for their new and unfamiliar deployment? When faced with challenging situations, will they know what their superiors and Commander in Chief expect of them?
5. Even though the border plan represents an entirely new and challenging law enforcement mission for our Guard troops, no training plan is available yet.
6. My Armed Services Committee has seen no details about how housing, transportation, and other logistical operations would be carried out.
7. The National Guard intends to match the skill set of each unit (known as their MOS) with the assignment in the border region that matches those skills. For example, engineering battalions will repair roads, but not every specialty transfers so easily from military to civilian law enforcement tasks. In consequence, many of our troops will be doing work that doesn't support their training mission. Or, even more troublesome, those Guard troops whose skill sets don't apply won't be deployed, and the burden will fall harder on a smaller pool of soldiers.
8. The President intends to fund the $1.9 billion cost of this program but cutting emergency spending for equipment such as radios and helicopters needed by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
9. Assistant Secretary of Defense McHale advised the HASC that civilian contractors will be used to support the mission, but major elements of the program such as the number of contractors to be hired and the jobs that they will be assigned have not been finalized, with just days until the deployment begins. This sounds more like Halliburton on the Border than Troops on the Border.
10. The United States Northern Command, known as NORTHCOM, was established in 2002 by the President to do two jobs -- coordinate Defense Department homeland defense efforts and provide military support to civilian agencies. It is clear that NORTHCOM should be the lead agency, but for reasons that have not been fully explained, the plan is to set up four separate task forces (one in each of the border states) to recreate the functions of NORTHCOM.
11. Why are we able to spend $1.9 billion to send National Guard to the border region under this initiative, but we have been unable to even come close to providing the combination of personnel, equipment, and technology that the Border Patrol needs and was authorized under the 9/11 bill?
12. Where are these troops being deployed, and what accommodations are being made in those communities, both for the soldiers and to prepare the residents for military presence in their towns?