Patrol Officers On U.S.-Canadian Border Clamor

There's about 150 miles of border from the tip of the Olympic Peninsula to
the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Most of it is coastline, and the
rest is rural farmland. There, the U.S.-Canadian border is little more than
a ditch.

A total of 49 U.S. Border Patrol officers are assigned to cover this area,
though once administrators and support staff are taken into account, there
are actually only 33 officers actually patrolling the border -- three
shifts a day, seven days a week. And while the boat ride from Canada's
Vancouver Island to either Washington's San Juan Islands or the Olympic
Peninsula is only 20 minutes or so, the U.S. Border Patrol doesn't even
have a boat.

"We have three agents here in Port Angeles to cover the entire peninsula,"
said Mike Baker, patrol agent in charge of the Port Angeles office. "We
have really good people, but we don't have the resources."

Ahmed Ressam was arrested Dec. 14 after U.S. Customs inspectors found
nitroglycerin and other potential bomb-making materials in his car after he
arrived in Port Angeles via ferry from Victoria, British Columbia.

From Blaine to Maine, as officers are fond of saying, there are only 289
border patrol officers guarding the areas outside official ports of entry.
Along the U.S.-Mexican border, there are 8,200 agents, according to the
Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"There are areas along the border that just aren't covered on a given
shift," said Keith Olson, president of the local Border Patrol officers'
union in Bellingham, about 25 miles south of the border crossing at Blaine.

Due to the lack of resources, drug imports and illegal immigration are
becoming more of a problem, Olson said. It is becoming less expensive for a
Mexican citizen to fly to Canada, where immigration laws are less
stringent, and sneak across the U.S.-Canadian border than it is to hire a
smuggler to go directly across the U.S.-Mexican border, he said.

Among marijuana users, cannabis from British Columbia is becoming
increasingly popular. Canadian marijuana is more potent than Mexican
strains, and the open border makes it relatively easy to bring it to market.

"We've seized six times the amount of cannabis this year than we did in
'98," Olson said. "That's just the stuff we're catching. Who knows how much
more is slipping through?"

Would-be smugglers know the flaws in the system.

Vancouver's Cannabis Cafe, currently closed due to a police raid, offered
customers maps of the border, noting the areas where patrols were few and
far between. A kayaker from Victoria, British Columbia, was recently
captured by a local sheriff on Washington's San Juan Island with a kayak
full of marijuana.

A lack of border patrol agents has also been blamed for the Oct. 7 shooting
death of State Patrol Trooper James Saunders.

The man charged, 28-year-old Mexican national Nicolas Soloro Vasquez, was
arrested on a drug charge two months prior to the shooting and was released
on bail without being identified as an illegal alien.

The Border Patrol agent assigned to monitor prisons for illegal aliens had
been assigned to Arizona for 30 days to help with border patrols there.

"We're not asking for anything special, just the people we need to do the
job right," Olson said.

"I don't think that's an unreasonable request."