– Knight Ridder Newspapers
EL PASO, Texas – There’s a growing sense of urgency among those who police America’s long, porous borders that tighter control is needed to prevent terrorists from slipping into the flood of illegal immigrants entering the United States.
The Sept. 11 Commission found that the nation’s borders are largely unprotected and recommended that border security become an integral part of national security policy. Now that airline security has been improved, terror suspects increasingly are being detected trying to enter the country on ships or overland.
A military unit called Joint Task Force-6 is greatly expanding its role in supporting the hunt for terrorists trying to slip across the Mexican and Canadian borders.
A modern control center at its headquarters at Fort Bliss in El Paso, which starts operations next month, will gather feeds from U.S. intelligence agencies. And the commander of JTF-6 gets military Reserve units from all over the country to volunteer for missions along the southern border. He tells them there’s no better place in America to get the kind of training that will prepare a unit for deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq.
Units come here for two weeks at a time, in lieu of ordinary summer training back home. This month, Army Reserve engineers from New York were out in the 115-degree heat building roads on the border at Nogales, Ariz. Marine Reservists flying Super Cobra helicopter gunships with forward-looking infrared radar were helping the Border Patrol by scouring the border at night looking for smugglers and illegal immigrants.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the government has directed more resources at tightening border security. Still, the commander of JTF-6, Brig. Gen. John “Jay” Yingling, said his nightmare is that al-Qaida terrorists will slip in with illegal immigrants and attack the United States again.
Authorities see Latin America as a potential recruiting ground for terrorist groups because it has weak governments and police, drug smuggling conduits for moving people and goods and its own lax border controls.
Some recent developments have heightened concerns:
-Authorities in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, have received information suggesting that a group affiliated with al-Qaida has been planning attacks against the British, Spanish, and American embassies. Security was increased around the embassies on Friday.
-Other police reports suggest at least one Saudi-born member of al-Qaida, Adnan el Shukrijumah, may have been in Tegucigalpa in July, having crossed the border illegally from Nicaragua after a stay in Panama.
Yingling and his bosses at the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado hope to see the Joint Task Force become an interagency operation that will get all law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the same sheet of music.
On October 1, JTF-6 will be renamed Joint Task Force-North, and after years of working within the entire continental United States, primarily focusing its efforts along the U.S.-Mexican border, the task force will start looking across the nation’s borders into Mexico, Canada and beyond.
Yingling has built a modern state-of-the-art control center at JTF-6 headquarters at Fort Bliss to coordinate and sharpen the impact of law enforcement.
Intelligence feeds gathered by the center’s computers can be displayed on large plasma screens.
“There is too much stove-piping of information and intelligence,” Yingling said. “The events of 9-11 are a striking catalyst for change. We need to bring it all together – human intelligence, signal intelligence, radar, all of it – to be more effective, more pro-active.”
Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 900,000 illegal immigrants who were trying to get across the border. Some agencies estimate that for every one apprehended, four others make it across and disappear.
What JTF-6 watches most closely are “special interest aliens” – those whose native countries are of high interest in the global war on terrorism. The Border Patrol detained 303 such people crossing the border from Canada last year and 262 crossing from Mexico.
Carl L. McClafferty, the deputy chief of the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol, said his agency has increased manpower in the stations along the Arizona border, doubling and even tripling the number of agents. Arrests, he said, are up, and the flow of illegal immigrants is down.
After heightened security and better fences made smuggling difficult in the high-traffic areas of San Diego and El Paso, smugglers rerouted the flow of aliens and drugs toward Arizona. The Border Patrol then built 14-foot-tall steel fences and installed 60-foot-tall towers equipped with infrared cameras and other detection equipment for several miles through each of the major crossing points in Arizona: Douglas, Nogales, Naco and Yuma. That forced the smugglers into the desert.
McClafferty said finding and apprehending smugglers and illegal immigrants is easier in the desert, far from cities and towns where they can quickly blend in.
But the desert is unforgiving. Last year, 66 illegal immigrants were found dead there; so far this year, 39 bodies have been recovered. Border Patrol aircraft this year have rescued more than 400 stranded people, many of them women and children.
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McClafferty said the “coyotes,” those who smuggle illegal immigrants across the border for money, tell their customers they will only be walking a few miles and will need only a gallon plastic milk jug full of water. In fact, some may have to walk several days and up to 60 miles through heat that can reach 130 degrees. When they become dehydrated and exhausted and fall behind, McClafferty said, the coyotes, who have already been paid, abandon them to their fate.
Flying out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, HMLA-773, the Marine reservists of the Red Dog squadron and their Super Cobra helicopters, are temporarily helping McClafferty’s ground and air units.
The squadron, which draws pilots and crew from the Atlanta and New Orleans areas, was activated for two years of active duty last September. Half the squadron is flying combat missions for special operations forces along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The other half, training in Arizona, will go to Afghanistan to relieve them this fall.
In addition to flying the border at night, the Red Dog pilots and gunners have been doing live-fire training with Hellfire missiles at the Gila Bend target area. The squadron, which normally gets to fire only four of the $40,000 Hellfire missiles in a year of training, this time had 100 of them, enough for each pilot to shoot between five and 10 in practice.
Right behind the 3.2 miles of steel fence that runs through and divides the Mexican and American halves of Nogales, the 854th Army Reserve Engineer Battalion is grading and building an all-weather road over steep hills to help Border Patrol vehicles respond quickly.
Each of the battalion’s companies – the 306th from Amityville, N.Y., the 328th from Atlantic City, N.J., and the battalion headquarters out of Kingston, N.Y. – has taken a two-week turn at the project.
On occasion, the opposition lobs two- or three-pound rocks by catapult from beyond the fence. The Border Patrol covers its vehicles with heavy steel mesh to protect its agents. When the rocks start flying, the Army engineers sometimes take cover behind a metal mesh structure that looks like a baseball backstop.
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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): BORDER-MILITARY
AP-NY-08-27-04 1600EDT
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