By Calvin Biesecker
In an effort to bolster border security, the Obama administration on Monday said that 1,200 National Guard troops would be deployed to the country’s southwest border beginning Aug. 1 for one year, giving time for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hire an additional 1,000 agents and officers to provide border security in the region.
“These troops will provide direct support to federal law enforcement officers and agents working in high-risk areas to disrupt criminal organizations seeking to move people and goods illegally across the southwest border,” DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano sad in a statement.
It will take about a month to deploy all of the troops, which will support current Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers as entry identification teams, monitoring the border for illegal human and drug trafficking, CBP Commissioner Alan Bersin said at a briefing at the Pentagon. Some of the National Guard troops will also be used as intelligence analysts in the Tucson, Ariz., sector aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Nearly half of the troops, 524, will be deployed to Arizona, where most of the illegal alien and drug smuggling occurs.
Bersin said that in addition to the National Guard troops, CBP will add 300 agents along the Southwest Border and plans to deploy additional technology assets as well, including more Mobile Surveillance Systems (MSS) and six more aviation assets. The MSS systems are typically outfitted with camera and radar.
Obama authorized the National Guard deployment in May (Defense Daily, May 26). The troops will be under control of the governors of the states they are deployed in. The entry identification teams are supposed to support the Border Patrol in self-defense mode and only use force to “extricate” themselves from danger, Gen. Craig McKinley, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said at the briefing.
The Bush administration also sent National Guard troops to the southwest border to enhance border security while additional Border Patrol agents were being hired.