Northern border may be more secure than depicted

[February 16, 2011]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- Depictions of the northern border as out of control may not be quite accurate because the assessment tools used are outdated, the head of the U.S. Border Patrol told a House panel Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office released a report on Feb. 1 that said the Border Patrol can detect illegal activity and make arrests over just 32 of the border's 4,000 miles, a situation it calls operational control. That detail received the most attention from a 61-page report.

Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher said his agency's measure of whether it has operational control of the border "is not in and of itself an assessment of border security." The measure is used on both the northern and southern border.

Last week at a separate hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said "operational control is a very narrow term of art in Border Patrol lingo."

An area may be considered controlled when resources -- the number of agents, technology and infrastructure -- are enough to bring the area to an "acceptable" level when agents can be aware of and effectively deal with illegal activity and entries.

Fisher said the Border Patrol is working on a new strategy to assess security, although he doesn't know when it will be ready. The new strategy will be risk-based and depend on information and intelligence "to tell us the intent, the capability and the opposition, while continuing to assess our vulnerabilities," he said.

"We will be more mobile, agile and flexible than our adversaries. We will rely heavily on federal, state, local tribal and international partners to ensure operational integration," he said.

"Border security, sometimes, it's teed up as an either-or proposition, either the border is secure or it's not. I'm looking at it as a very dynamic proposition," Fisher told reporters later.

Michigan Rep. Candace Miller, chairwoman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee that held the hearing, asked how Congress can reassure Americans the federal government is securing the border if there is not a good measuring tool. "Our border security policy cannot rely on our best guess," she said.

Richard Stanna, director of GAO's Homeland Security and Justice division, said he didn't think the previous measure was bad. An interim measurement the Border Patrol is using while it comes up with its new tools does not do as good a job of determining whether money was well spent.

T.J. Bonner, head of the Border Patrol union, said in a phone interview the measurement is simple: "True border security means no person or no thing crosses your border without permission."

On the nearly 2,000-mile southern border, 873 miles is considered under control. Of those, 129 miles or 15 percent have resources in place to detect and deter illegal entries. The remaining 744 are managed, meaning a violation could result in an apprehension up to 100 miles from the border or not at all.

Along the remaining 1,120 miles of the southern border, the Border Patrol can detect but not apprehend about two thirds of the illegal entries. For the remaining one third, agents are unable to detect illegal entries, Stanna said.

A report Stanna prepared for the hearing says that the Border Patrol is asking its sectors to use existing personnel and infrastructure as a baseline and to request additional resources based on what is needed to respond to priority threats. Since they expect to be more flexible, Border Patrol is asking for fewer resources to secure the border, the report says.

[Associated Press; By SUZANNE GAMBOA]

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.