BILLIONS ON BORDER: SECURITY, DRUG WAR TO BE DEBATED AT CONFERENCE

AUSTIN -- Congressional leaders traveled the nation, hosting hearings
and ginning up political furor over illegal immigration, lax security
on the southern border and drug violence in Mexico.

That was three years ago, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in a heated
re-election battle, promised to use state dollars to bolster border
security in the absence of federal action.

Since then, the federal government has spent more than $3.7 billion
on border security, including building 700 miles of fence, beefing up
patrols and helping Mexico fight drug cartels.

Texas has spent nearly $200 million on its own border initiatives,
sending dollars to help local officers patrol the border, installing
Web-based surveillance cameras and buying more helicopters and squad
cars to track down criminals and undocumented immigrants.

As the spending continues, so does debate over how secure the border
is and how the United States can keep the raging drug war from spilling north.

Those discussions will go on Monday and Tuesday at a Border Security
Conference at the University of Texas at El Paso. Speakers will
include U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano, who is to make a policy speech on border safety after a
trip to Mexico with President Barack Obama.

Government officials and law enforcement agencies say the billions
spent on border security have prevented crime and dammed the flood of
undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Civil-rights groups and
scholars, however, question whether the initiatives have done
anything to deal with the roots of complex causes that drive the drug
trade and immigration.

Federal action

In the fall of 2006, after lawmakers finished their round of
immigration and border security hearings, including one in El Paso,
Congress approved the Secure Fence Act.

The legislation called for 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico
border to stop, or at least slow down, illegal crossings between
ports of entry.

All but a small part of the fencing has been completed, despite a
spate of lawsuits and protests, primarily in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

As of July 24, homeland security officials said, they had completed
nearly 634 miles of pedestrian and vehicle barriers.

Along with the fencing, Congress and former President George W. Bush
allocated money for 6,000 more U.S. Border Patrol agents.

The Border Patrol's budget has more than doubled since 2006, and the
number of agents has soared from 12,300 to 19,600.

The fencing, the added manpower and technology upgrades have helped
the agency better secure the border, said DHS spokesman Michael Reilly.

"Since we've been catching a lot of illegal aliens and shutting down
a lot of smuggling routes E we've been catching more narcotics than
ever before," he said.

At the same time, he said, immigrant apprehension numbers are falling.

In 2006, the department caught nearly 1.1 million undocumented
crossers. As this fiscal year comes to a close, Reilly said, agents
have caught about 470,000.

The downturn in the economy and lack of work opportunities contribute
to the reduced traffic, Reilly said, but he said the border security
initiatives were also a big factor.

Texas security efforts

Border-security efforts in Texas have focused primarily on manpower.

Lawmakers approved about $110 million for these operations for the
2007 and 2008 budget years. This year, they approved an additional
$87 million to continue those efforts in 2009 and 2010.

Much of that money went to Gov. Perry to award as grants for border
sheriff's departments to pay officers overtime to patrol the border.

The rest has gone to state law enforcement, including the Texas
Department of Public Safety and the Texas Parks and Wildlife
Department, to beef up their border forces.

With the grants, the departments have conducted so-called surge
operations, increasing law enforcement presence in areas deemed hot
spots for border-related crime.

Don Reay, executive director of the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition,
said 18 of the 20 counties in his organization have received about
$12.5 million to conduct Operation Border Star from February 2008
through August 2010.

Reay said sheriffs know that the increased patrols have made border
communities safer, because they get fewer calls from angry residents.

"If we're not hearing complaints about things, that's a good
indicator something's going right," he said.

Crime reports in some rural areas, the sheriffs and Perry have said,
have dropped about 60 percent because of border operations.

Katherine Cesinger, a spokes woman for Perry, said the border
initiatives were intended to deter crime.

Deterrence was also the goal of Perry's Web-based border surveillance
cameras. He gave the border sheriffs coalition $2 million to line the
border with cameras so that anyone, anywhere with an Internet
connection could troll for undocumented crossers.

The first year of the program, though, produced just 11 arrests and
eight drug busts.

Perry has defended the cameras as a way to use technology to enhance
border security where the federal government has failed to.

Perry's spokeswoman Cesinger said Perry has taken a "proactive
approach" to border security.

"Border security is a fed responsibility, but a Texas problem," she said.

Is it all working?

Perry's border-security efforts have produced mixed judgments. Some,
like the border sheriffs, have hailed the initiatives. Others,
including civil-rights groups, have worried that they encourage
racial profiling, discrimination and unnecessary law enforcement work.

Initially, reports from border sheriffs who received money for border
operations showed that they caught far more undocumented immigrants
than criminals.

The operation in El Paso involved vehicle checkpoints that sparked
accusations of racial profiling and caused among immigrants as
officers allegedly asked motorists for immigration papers.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas studied the most recent
border effort, Operation Border Star. Earlier this year, the group
reported that many departments involved in the operation used grant
money to do routine police work, not to investigate border-related crime.

While some agencies, including the El Paso Police Department,
produced a significant number of arrests, others reported very few.
Instead, they reported issuing thousands of warnings and tickets for
traffic violations.

And reports of racial profiling concerns are still coming in to the
ACLU of Texas, said policy analyst Rebecca Bernhardt.

"The lion's share of the responsibility is on the lack of guidance
from the state of Texas about how to target resources and make them
effective," she said.

The Department of Public Safety has also faced heat for its use of
border-security money. A state audit last spring showed the
department had allocated millions in resources, including a
helicopter and about 100 cars, that were meant for the border to
other areas of the state.

Another audit, released last week, said that demands to put more
state troopers in the border region were exacerbating a critical
personnel shortage in the department.

Howard Campbell, a sociology and anthropology professor at the
University of Texas at El Paso, who will be one of the featured
speakers at the Border Security Conference, said the United States
needed to rethink its approach to border security.

Military-style tactics of building barriers and installing more armed
officers on the border, he said, ignore the root problems that cause
illegal immigration, drug trafficking and the cartel wars in Mexico.

"It's sending the message to Mexico that the U.S. views the situation
almost as if Mexico were a hostile enemy," Campbell said.

As long as American drug consumption continues and U.S. companies
need cheap labor, he said, the demand for those resources will remain.

"We're deeply complicit," he said.

The United States, he said, would improve security by finding ways to
allow workers to legally come to the country and by investing in
prevention and treatment of drug addiction to reduce consumption.

Stephen Meiners, senior tactical analyst for Latin America at the
Stratfor global intelligence agency, said higher prices for illicit
drugs in the United States and indications that Mexican criminals are
turning more to kidnapping and extortion for money are signs of some
abatement in drug trafficking.

Security measures such as the fence, he said, could be factors. But
it's hard to find evidence that security policies alone are driving
those changes.

"This is not an issue that can be solved by law enforcement or by any
one tool for that matter," Meiners said.

But slowing immigration numbers can be attributed primarily to
economic conditions, he said.

There's no one "magic bullet" solution to the complex problems that
plague the U.S.-Mexico border, Meiners said.

"There's a reason these problems have continued for decades," he
said. "It's not easily addressed."