Southwest Border Safer Than Ever: Think Tank Report

By: Mickey McCarter

The efforts of US border security agencies have resulted in a safer US southwest border than ever, argued a report released by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, DC, Thursday.

Apprehensions of illegal immigrants along the border have dropped significantly in years, due in part to the success of the buildup of US Border Patrol in troublesome areas, contended Marshall Fitz, director of Immigration Policy at Center for American Progress, in his report, Safer than Ever: A View from the US-Mexico Border: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future.

"All the recent statistics tell us that illegal immigration flows at our southern border have slowed dramatically. Numbers tell us that we no longer have a border across which thousands of people traverse illegally every day without our knowledge. Instead we have a border where the vast majority of attempted entries are identified and a far larger percentage of entrants are apprehended than ever before. Moreover, recent reports persuasively demonstrate that violent crime rates along the US-Mexico border have been falling for years and that border cities of all sizes have maintained crime rates below the national average," Fitz wrote.

Opponents of comprehensive immigration reform have grabbed headlines by painting the border as a dangerous and violent place, Fitz declared, but these claims do not reflect reality.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has pointed to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that concluded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has 44 percent of the southern border under "operational control" as evidence that DHS is failing to secure the border. But the report suggested that Smith and other opponents of immigration reform were misreading that measure.

DHS uses a flexible set of standards to determine security measures in specific areas of the border based on risk. DHS calls those standards, ranked from high to low, controlled, managed, monitored, and low-level monitored. Applying the toughest standards of "controlled" to low-risk areas of the border makes no sense operationally, the report said.

"The GAO report found that 44 percent of the border met DHS's top two standards -- controlled or managed -- which DHS defines as areas where it has 'the ability to detect, respond, and interdict illegal activity at the border or after entry,'" the report read. "Far from representing a failing grade, that is a remarkable accomplishment. Moreover, two-thirds of the remaining 56 percent meets the third level of control: monitored, which means DHS can detect but not necessarily respond to or interdict all incursions. So that means that 81 percent of the border meets one of the top three levels of operational control. The remaining 19 percent of the border is low-level monitored because it covers the most remote, inaccessible, and inhospitable stretches of the border."

DHS has placed unprecedented resources along the US borders, the report said, providing authorities with unmatched ability to "observe, intercept, and impose consequences" on trespassers crossing the border.

Alan Bersin, commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection, pointed to how far the number of apprehensions along the southwest border have dropped since 2000.

The Border Patrol apprehended 616,000 illegal immigrants in the Tuscon sector of Arizona in 2000, said Bersin, speaking at a panel hosted by the think tank Thursday. That number dropped to 212,000 last year. This year, it will drop further to 120,000, he projected.

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