The surge Defense Department equipment and personnel to the southern border to help staunch the flow of illegal crossings and related activity has played an important role in the Trump administration’s success in its goal in improving border security, the acting chief of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said on Thursday.
The “inject” of additional DoD personnel and the various systems they have brought has provided “more line-of-sight…more technology…more coverage on the border,” allowing our agents to be able to respond and intercept and actually arrest those individuals crossing our border,” Pete Flores, acting CBP commissioner, told the House Appropriations Committee’s panel that funds the Department of Homeland Security.
“So, our autonomous surveillance towers (ASTs), and that type of technology that we’re using across the border today, the increase of what we’re doing from aircraft and unmanned aircraft patrols on the border to provide additional visibility and reaction time for our agents,” he said. “So, those have significantly helped in what we’re seeing today in those numbers.”
CBP operates ASTs along certain areas of U.S. land and maritime borders. The agency also has manned and unmanned aircraft. DoD has brought additional air and aerial surveillance assets, including the mobile Ground-Based Operational Surveillance System (Expeditionary), which includes mast-mounted cameras, radar and infrared sensors (Defense Daily, April 25).
Flores also credited the steep decline in illegal activity to allowing Border Patrol agents to focus on their law enforcement mission rather than “processing, caretaking [and] transportation” functions they were doing during the Biden administration, what he called “administrative or non-LEO (law enforcement officer) type enforcements that we had agents and officers doing on a regular and reoccurring basis.”
Ensuring messaging around illegal entry into the U.S. matches the consequences has also helped, he said.
CBP’s Air and Marine Operations have also stepped up patrols long U.S. maritime borders, resulting a 71 percent increase in apprehensions at sea in Southern California, Flores said.
Amid increased security at the southern border, illegal activity has increased in the maritime approaches near Southern California, Acting Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Kevin Lunday told the appropriations panel on Wednesday (Defense Daily, May 14).