BORDER PATROL

Soldiers Not Good For Civilian Operation

In her new best seller, "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists,
Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores," Michelle Malkin writes
that "at the northern border with Canada every rubber orange cone and measly
'No Entry' sign should immediately be replaced with an armed National
Guardsman." She suggests something in the neighborhood of 100,000 troops.

Armed soldiers at Niagara Falls? Surely not.

Malkin is not alone. Politicians such as Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo, R-Colo.
and Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly also are
calling to militarize our borders.

The U.S. military is the most effective fighting force in history - so
effective some people have come to see it as a panacea for every security
problem posed by the terrorist threat. But on the home front, there are many
tasks for which the military is ill-suited and its deployment would be
ineffective and dangerous.

The same training that makes U.S. soldiers outstanding warriors makes them
extremely dangerous as cops. Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of
defense in the Reagan administration, put it succinctly: The military "is
trained to vaporize, not Mirandize."

No one knows this better than the military itself, which is why the Pentagon
has consistently resisted calls to station troops on our borders, most
recently last spring, when Congress pushed for border militarization.
Pentagon officials raised the possibility of an "unlawful and potentially
lethal use-of-force incident" if the troops were armed. Ultimately, some
1,600 National Guard troops were placed at the Mexican and Canadian borders
for a six-month mission, from March 2002 to August 2002; most of them were
unarmed.

The Pentagon was right to worry. U.S. troops have been placed on the borders
in the past, as part of the quixotic fight against drug smuggling. Even
though those deployments have been limited to surveillance and support
roles, they have led to tragedy.

In 1997, a Marine anti-drug patrol fatally shot 18-year-old high-school
student Esequiel Hernandez Jr., who was carrying a .22-caliber rifle while
tending goats near his farm in Redford, Texas, near the Mexican border. The
Justice Department paid $1.9 million to the Hernandez family to settle a
wrongful death lawsuit.

The new proposals to use troops for border patrol work would greatly
multiply the problems revealed by the Hernandez killing.

Unlike the soldiers deployed for the drug war, the troops on border patrol
duty would be given arrest authority and allowed to directly engage
civilians.

The danger to civilians wouldn't be limited to border areas, given that
federal law allows the Border Patrol to set up checkpoints as far as 100
miles inside the United States.

Having the military enforce the immigration laws isn't wise, isn't necessary
and isn't legal. Both the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the
Border Patrol are getting a dramatic new infusion of cash - a $1.2 billion
increase over 2002 in the president's proposed 2003 budget - and rapidly
hiring agents.

Border security can be provided without the danger and the inefficiency that
come with asking soldiers to do civilian work.

Healy is senior editor at the Cato Institute.