The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last Friday gave approval to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to begin on June 1 flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) along a portion of Texas’ border with Mexico.
The approval means that CBP will be allowed to operate its Predator UAVs from Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona east to the Big Bend area in western Texas. Currently, under the first part of a Certificate of Authorization approved by the FAA in 2008, CBP is permitted to fly its Predator drones from Fort Huachuca to about 200 miles east to Deming in southwest New Mexico.
The Big Bend area of Texas is several hundred miles southeast of Deming. Along the way lies El Paso, just over the border from Juarez, Mexico, a city beset by drug-related violence.
“The unspeakable brutality that is occurring at the hands of the drug cartels in Mexico is alarming,” Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) wrote FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt in late April, urging the agency to quickly allow CBP to expand UAV flights over a portion of the Texas and Mexico border. “Ciudad Juarez is not the only flash point in this crisis. The State of Texas shares 1,254 miles of border with Mexico, which is roughly 65 percent of the entire U.S.-Mexico border. The violence and bloodshed of recent gun battles between rival drug cartels in Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo made national headlines in recent weeks.”
CBP currently has five General Atomics-built Predator UAVs and is expected to take delivery of two more shortly. In addition to operations along the southwest border, the Predators are also used along a 230-miles stretch of border between North Dakota and Canada.
The UAVs are equipped with various sensors such as electro-optical and infrared cameras, surface search radar and a ground moving target indicator.
The FAA originally limited UAV flight operations to between Fort Huachuca and Deming until CBP was able to develop appropriate plans for safety of flight operations in the West Texas region.
“I will continue pressing the FAA to allow these Predator patrols to expand to the rest of the Texas border, and pursue additional ways to enhance our border security,” Cornyn said in a statement on Friday.