Homeland security agency evaluates border needs

The U.S. Border Patrol is doing a comprehensive assessment of every mile of the nation's borders to determine what resources and personnel it needs, a top homeland security official said.

"Over the last few years, the Border Patrol has gained better control over larger areas of our border, certainly than we had before," Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert Bonner told Government Executive. "But we don't have the degree of control we need to have."

While the assessment is being done, the Border Patrol will continue an aggressive campaign to gain control over an outlaw area in western Arizona that has been overrun with drug smugglers and illegal immigration, regardless of how long it takes, Bonner added.

Called the Arizona Border Control Initiative, the effort calls for an infusion of 534 more Border Patrol agents and a doubling of aviation assets this year. Bonner said Arizona is the weakest part of the border.

"For national security reasons, we have to keep at it until we accomplish it. But I can't tell you when it will be, and it may not be a near-term thing," Bonner said. "This problem didn't happen overnight. It may well take some time and it may well take some building up further of the Border Patrol itself."

The Border Patrol issued a new national strategy in March that calls for an appropriate mix of personnel and technology. Bonner said the agency will need more agents, but declined to say how many more above the 10,800 there are now.

The Border Patrol is particularly trying to build up a rapid-response capability, in which agents can be immediately deployed to hot areas, even if that means moving them from one sector to another on a moment's notice.

"We have to be more mobile than the Border Patrol has ever been before," Bonner said. The agency has about 400 specialized agents that can rapidly deploy, but it needs more, Bonner said.

Under ideal conditions, detection technology would alert the agency of illegal activity along the border, at which point mobile agents would be deployed. "The faster you can move, the fewer number of agents you actually need to achieve control," Bonner said.

The 9/11 Commission recommended that 2,000 new agents be added to the Border Patrol every year for five years. Bonner said he was never consulted in that recommendation, adding that the patrol now would not be able to absorb that many new agents.

"You have to make sure you don't hire so many, so fast, that it compromises the law enforcement organizational cohesiveness of the unit," he said. "Generally speaking, I think 2,000 a year would be more than could be absorbed and maintain the organizational law enforcement cohesiveness of the Border Patrol."