South Texas Democrat Wants to Change Border Security Data

12/23/2014

Sen. Rodriguez proposes principles, good data about border security

RUBEN R RAMIREZ—EL PASO TIMES State Senator Jose Rodriguez, adrressed the committee made up of several organizations that have been getting the word out on how El Pasoans can sign up in the "Enroll El Paso," plan to get insurance beginning October 1, 2013.

AUSTIN >> Decrying the Texas Department of Public Safety's continuing lack of data regarding whether the border is secure, Texas Sen. José Rodríguez is calling on the agency, lawmakers and other state officials to adopt a new approach to the issue.

Rodríguez, an El Paso Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Hispanic Caucus, is putting forward a set of principles aimed at reframing the discussion about border security.

Among the measures he is advocating: policy makers should stop conflating illegal immigration with cartel activity and law enforcement should apply the same techniques against the cartels as have worked against the mafia.

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	Marty Schladen

"They need to go after the money," said Rodriguez, who added that the effort should focus on big cities in the Texas interior where cartels are active — instead of just on the border with Mexico.

Gov. Rick Perry and many other Texas Republicans have claimed that the border with Mexico is woefully unsecure and last summer implemented a program that spent $17.2 million a month to send National Guard soldiers and DPS troopers to the border. The "surge" occurred amid an influx and Central American children and families.

The National Guard deployment will end in late March, but Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus last month agreed to spend $86 million on the deployment and the trooper surge through August.

The Department of Public Safety requested another $310 million for the program during fiscal years 2016 and 2017, according to its request to the governor's office and the Legislative Budget Board.

But the department appears to lack comprehensive data that measures border security over time.

In July, when Perry announced the National Guard deployment, he cited a DPS statistic about crimes committed by "criminal aliens."

An analysis of those figures showed, however, that they looked at all noncitizens instead of only those who crossed Texas' southern border illegally. They also showed that noncitizens had committed crimes at a slightly lower rate than the general population.

Last month, the outgoing governor held a press conference in the Capitol to claim that Operation Strong Safety had been effective securing the border. Again asked for data, the governor directed the El Paso Times to the Department of Public Safety.

DPS spokesman Tom Vinger responded with a compilation of statistics known as the"Border Security Dashboard." It provides numbers of drug interdictions and apprehensions of undocumented immigrants since fiscal year 2011.

When the Times made a public-information request for earlier-year drug interdictions so it could make a comparison, the department responded that it hadn't tracked them. It also asked the Texas Attorney General's office exempt it from responding to the request, arguing that it would compromise ongoing investigations and confidential law-enforcement tactics.

Asked again last week for data showing that the Texas border is unsecure, Vinger responded by email, saying, "The border is not secure — that is a fact; not a position or a claim.

"There is ample evidence of illegal entries, multi-ton quantities of drugs, stolen vehicles, fugitives and contraband of every type that make their way across the Texas-Mexico border every single day, week, month and year. Securing the international border is the responsibility of the federal government; however, keeping the people of Texas safe is the responsibility of the Department of Public Safety — a responsibility we take very seriously."

With one exception, however, Vinger's email did not include year-by-year statistics that would allow one to determine whether the border is more or less safe over the past five or 10 years, as requested by the Times.

The exception is a document which tracked cash seizures from 2006 to 2014. The seizures were made all over Texas instead of just along the border, and their amounts didn't indicate any trend.

As evidence that Operation Strong Safety has been effective, Vinger pointed to a 73 percent drop in the number of undocumented immigrants who were apprehended in June, when a surge of DPS troopers first was sent to the border, and November.

But Rodríguez and others have questioned the assertion, saying the drop was due to efforts on Mexico's southern border and in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to convince people not to flee their strife-torn countries and head to the United States.

Also, local officials in areas that were at the center of last summer's wave of illegal migration said unaccompanied children and families were crossing the border and immediately turning themselves in to authorities. Rodríguez said that since they were doing so, it's dubious to claim that more law enforcement on the border deterred them from coming.

"The border in my view is more secure than it has ever been," he said.

Some experts share that view.

Tony Payan, director if the Mexico Center at Rice University's Baker Institute, last month said Border Patrol funding and personnel have doubled since 2004. The fact that apprehensions have fallen at the same time, he said, shows that security is tighter and fewer people are trying to immigrate illegally.

Earlier this month, Michelle Middlestadt of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C. said that in 2012, U.S. immigration-enforcement agencies got $17.9 billion — a 15-fold increase over 1986 and more than the total all other federal agencies for which law enforcement is their primary mission.

Rodríguez said that Perry and national Republican leaders are emphasizing border security for political reasons.

"They know that the polls indicate the public is concerned about border security," said Rodríguez, who added that by continuing to hype it, they raise the level of alarm even further. "It's kind of a circular thing."

Rodríguez reiterated concerns raised by border officials that misperceptions of border violence harm their communities' economies.

Last week, the El Paso senator proposed a set of border-security principles to Texas' Senate Democratic Caucus:

• The border is not a war zone — Some Republican leaders have referred to it as such, but Rodríguez said that crime in Texas border cities is, on average, lower than in big cities that lie to the north.

• Border security should not be equated with immigration enforcement — Rodríguez argues that illegal immigration and cross-border threats from groups such as drug cartels are separate things and should be treated that way.

• Any border security plan should provide support for border economic development — Cross-border trade is vital to the Texas economy and any plan should secure and strengthen such trade through measures such as providing better infrastructure, Rodríguez argues.

• Any border security plan should be in collaboration with local law enforcement — It's cheaper to fund beefed-up local agencies and they know the terrain better than the Department of Public Safety, Rodríguez said.

• Transparency and accountability — Rodríguez said any spending on border security should be measured against historic benchmarks and quantifiable goals.

• Border security priorities and funding should be focused on organized cartel activity — Drug cartels should be taken on using techniques that have worked with other organized crime groups, they should be attacked in large Texas cities where they do their work and infrastructure at Texas ports of entry, through which they ship much of their product, should be upgraded, Rodríguez said.

• Border security if a federal responsibility and the federal government has prioritized it — Rodríguez pointed to much-greater resources over the past decade devoted by the federal government to border security.

• Unaccompanied minors represent a humanitarian crisis; not a national-security risk — Claims that exotic diseases and terrorists were crossing the border this summer along with Central American children were utterly unsubstantiated, Rodríguez said.

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