Troops restricted in border surveillance
Monitoring of Mexico out of bounds for Texas National Guard.
The hundreds of National Guard troops deployed by President Donald Trump in April are now busy securing the southern border. But when it comes to surveillance, they are forbidden from looking across it.
The troops operating and monitoring high-tech surveillance equipment along the border have been told they are prohibited from using it to look into Mexico.
The little-known caveat is part of the legal ground rules for the new National Guard deployment along the southwest border, which calls for troops to operate “up to” the U.S.-Mexico border, state and federal officials said.
In Texas, the other side of the Rio Grande is off limits for Guard members overseeing 24-hour surveillance video feeds from camera towers, tethered helium balloons and other equipment.
“We are not doing foreign intelligence collection on the border,” Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement explaining the policy.
The troops face other limitations: They are prohibited from performing law-enforcement duties, making arrests or interacting with migrants.
And while troops are allowed to look across the border with their eyes, the rules on electronic surveillance place a significant restriction on the monitoring capability that federal officials have said is key to preventing illegal entries from Mexico.
“They have their hands tied,” said U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen. “This is not what the National Guard was designed for.”
He said the money spent on
putting troops on the border should be used instead to hire additional Border Patrol agents.
But Republicans in the four states that share a border with Mexico — Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas — have largely supported the call-up.
The roughly 800 troops already working in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona have so far helped Border Patrol agents apprehend more than 1,600 people making illegal border crossings and seize more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana, officials said.
In April, in rural Starr County in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the soldiers stationed at two observation posts appeared to be following the guidelines.
The troops stood on rocky, muddy cliffs on the river’s edge, peering through binoculars and focusing most of their attention on the banks and the brush on the U.S. side.
National Guard officials said the troops were carrying out their approved mission, and said that they did not view the surveillance rules as a prohibition or a restriction but simply as part of the parameters of the deployment.
Their mission, National Guard officials said, is to monitor and detect, and to perform many of the administrative, logistical, maintenance and surveillance tasks that Border Patrol agents would be doing, so those agents can be freed up to be out in the field.
But critics of the deployment say the Guard’s usefulness is likely minimal.
“To me, the whole thing smacks more and more of the absurdity of this call-up,” said Terri T. Burke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “I’m not endorsing surveillance in Mexico. I don’t think our government should be doing that at all. But I have yet to figure out why we need the Guard on the border.”