Ill-defined mission
Deployment of 4,000 National Guard members to the border doesn’t make sense.
It’s no surprise that the Trump administration’s directive to send the National Guard to the border appears to have been done with little planning, despite the costs and risks associated with the mission.
In recent days, administration officials and supporters have explained little about what the Guard hopes to accomplish during its mission. A mobilization order signed by Defense Secretary James Mattis approved the deployment of 4,000 Guard members, but didn’t define any explicit goals.
Gov. Greg Abbott, the commander-inchief of the Texas National Guard, went to Weslaco on Thursday for a glorified photo op with the Guard. The governor’s press release ahead of the visit even noted that his briefing with Guard leaders would be good for TV b-roll.
Abbott, of course, has experience with ill-defined border security missions, having pushed through $800 million expenditures in each of the last two bienniums.
On Friday in El Paso, Customs and Border Protection Deputy Commissioner Ron Vitiello joined Border Patrol and Guard leaders for a news conference to discuss the deployment. They provided no information beyond the vague talk about surveillance and infrastructure assistance that the administration had touted in its announcement a week earlier.
Vitiello justified the deployment by saying the Border Patrol had seen a 1,200 percent increase in apprehensions in the past 12 months. That was a whopper. When questioned about the claim, a CBP spokesman said Vitiello misspoke and meant to say a 200 percent increase. That explanation is misleading, at best. While border apprehensions in March were up 203 percent over the same month in 2017, the total number of apprehensions for the past 12 months is 34 percent below the prior 12 months.
That is typical of the Trump administration’s pattern on the border. At best, it cherry-picks data; at worst, it deliberately misleads.
In an appearance before the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Mattis couldn’t answer a question from U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso on the cost of the deployment. At the El Paso news conference, Vitiello couldn’t answer the cost question or say how long the mission might last.
In 2006, President George W. Bush deployed 6,000 National Guard members to the border, for a mission that wound up lasting two years and costing $1.2 billion. Since Bush’s deployment in 2006, the Border Patrol has grown from 12,000 agents to 20,000. More than 650 miles of border barriers have been built. The agency’s budget has increased by an inflation-adjusted 48 percent.
Apprehensions of undocumented immigrants dropped from more than a million in fiscal year 2006 to just over 300,000 in FY 2017, a decline of 72 percent. Many of those apprehended in recent years have been families and unaccompanied children fleeing violence in Central America who surrendered at border crossings.
The border certainly has its hot spots that demand attention. For example, Texas’ Rio Grande Valley has accounted for almost half of all Border Patrol apprehensions on the Southwest border since 2014. But only 19 percent of the agents assigned to the Mexican border are in the Rio Grande Valley sector, according to CBP statistics. The Tucson sector had 500 more agents than the Rio Grande Valley in FY 2017, even though it had almost 100,000 fewer apprehensions.
The Trump administration — like the Obama administration before it — has done too little to shift Border Patrol resources to where they are most needed.
Then again, maybe the White House never intended to confront an actual problem in the first place. The National Guard deployment was ordered after Trump was excoriated by his base for signing an omnibus spending bill that failed to whet their appetite for the wasteful and ineffective border wall. The order came after Fox News breathlessly played up a “border caravan” of Central American migrants heading through Mexico. The panicked headlines failed to inform viewers that the so-called caravan was an annual Easter pilgrimage.
The president’s continuing need to pander to border paranoia likely will cost taxpayers billions of dollars for an ill-defined and unnecessary mission. Border and immigration problems will only be solved when we update our laws to fit with the reality of today’s global economy. And that’s the kind of mission exclusively Congress is equipped to tackle.