Things aren't what they seem in border security bureaucracy

[Tom Barry]

I find myself falling deeper into the border security bureaucracy – and find that things are not what they seem.  

 

Only those drawn to the intricacies and previously unnoticed crannies of how DHS engages in the drug war will likely be interested in this exploration of ICE’s Border Security Enforcement Task Forces – BEST. (I wonder if the acronym or the program came first – if they were called task forces only because a “t” was need to finish off a snappy new program name.)

 

Here are the links to two new Border Lines postings about BEST, and the entire exploration is pasted below.

 

Bipartisan Support for Drug Wars

http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/bipartisan-support-for-border-drug-wars.html

 

More Border Security Bureaucracy

http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/more-border-security-bureaucracy.html

 

The BESTs of the Border Security Bureaucracy

 

Border security is about border walls, virtual fence projects, drones, and a proliferation of drug-sniffing canine teams and Border Patrol agents.  But border security is also about expansive big government bureaucracy, which aims to incorporate all other bureaucracies under its own mission goals and apparatus.

 

Border security is the province of the federal government’s most unwieldy and directionless bureaucracy – namely the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Immigration enforcement and border security account for the largest part of the DHS’s $56 billion annual budget.

 

The Border Enforcement Security Task Forces (BEST) teams constitute a little known but illustrative dimension of the ever-expanding bureaucracy of border security.

 

The BEST program is one of numerous attempts by DHS to associate other federal agencies and local law enforcement agencies with its border security and counternarcotics missions.

 

Launched in 2006, the BEST program is now getting a new boost in Congress.

 

Two leading border hawks in Congress, Michael McCaul and Henry Cuellar, are sponsors of new border-security legislation to support the network of anti-drug task forces sponsored by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a DHS agency. The Jaime Zapata Border Enforcement Security Task Force Act was approved by the House in a 351-2 vote and also has been approved by the Senate.

 

The new border-security bill would institutionalize the BEST teams as part of the DHS apparatus and designate $10 million in annual funding for the anti-drug teams.

 

 

 

 

Named after Jaime Zapata, an ICE agent who was killed in Mexico last year apparently as part of the drug wars, the proposed act now awaits the signature of President Obama.

 

ICE established its first BEST team at a time when DHS was ramping up the departmental border security programs through the Security Border Initiative and under the direction of DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

 

By establishing the BEST program, ICE was hopping on the border security bandwagon, which was benefiting from an array of new budget allocations. Although almost all of the billions of dollars in new border security funding flowed to CBP and the Border Patrol, ICE aimed to show that it too was an important border security player. The program was also a way to put ICE at the top – at least on paper – of a multiagency effort to “secure the border” and “combat transnational criminal organizations.”

 

Keeping Alive Border-Security Alarmism

 

McCaul and Cuellar, both from Texas, have help drive border security spending by their alarmist assessments of cross-border threats.

 

McCaul, the Republican set to become the new chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Cuellar, the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Border Security, say that ICE’s BEST teams are essential components of the border security buildup.

 

According to Cuellar, the BEST teams “help secure our Nation’s borders and help dismantle criminal organizations by creating cross-agency teams to combat them.”

 

McCaul boasts to his constituents of his role in getting this new piece of border security legislation passed. After getting the nod to head the homeland security committee, McCaul sent a newsletter to his constituents stating:  “Texas is rich with critical infrastructure and potential terrorist targets including the Port of Houston and adjacent petrochemical facilities…. Our border… remains a gateway for the undetected entry of Mexican drug cartels and terrorist operatives who have increased their presence in Latin America.  On my watch we will make progress securing the border.”

 

“Expanding BESTs,” says ICE, “will help dismantle the leadership and supporting infrastructure of criminal organizations responsible for perpetrating violence and illegal activity along our borders and in the nation’s interior.”

 

ICE contends that the southern border “has experienced a dramatic surge in cross-border crime and violence in recent years due to the intense competition between Mexican drug cartels and criminal smuggling organizations.” What’s more, ICE says that the northern border shouldn’t be ignored in border security spending since “law enforcement agencies at the northern border face similar challenges from transnational organizations.”

 

Drug War Task Forces

 

In essence, the BEST teams are simply another layer of the U.S. drug wars.  Created under the rubric of border security, the teams purportedly combine federal and local law enforcement officials in the “combat against transnational criminal organizations.”

 

Like the hundreds of anti-drug task forces organized and financially supported by the Justice Department (and coordinated by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy) over the past three decades, the main focus of the Border Enforcement Security Task Forces – called BEST teams -- is the drug control.  Like the DOJ anti-drug task forces, the BEST teams bring together multiple governmental jurisdictions and agencies.

 

Although many are situated along the northern and southern borders, ICE has created teams in other locations where there area adjacent seaports. 

 

ICE established the first BEST task force in Laredo, the center of Cuellar’s congressional district. Initially, the BEST task forces were on the southwestern border. However, as ICE sought new ways to bring in other federal and local agencies into its immigration and customs enforcement operations, it announced new BEST forces are at rapid rate.

 

According to ICE, there are now 32 such teams around the nation, including new task forces in cities with adjacent seaports and in Mexico.

 

Paper Task Forces and Alliances

 

The BEST task forces are largely rhetorical constructs, requiring no additional border security infrastructure. When it establishes a new BEST, ICE simply includes this program as part of the portfolio of its office supervisors around the nation and in Mexico.

 

The new push to institutionalize these teams as part of the DHS bureaucracy and to dedicate new funding for the BEST program has faced virtually no opposition, and ICE has not been called to substantiate its claims about the surge in border violence and about the domestic impact of the drug wars in Mexico. Nor has its claim that TCOs are also threatening the security of the northern border been questioned.

 

Over the past five years ICE has made frequent assertions about the success of the BEST teams.  Mirroring a practice that is routine for the Border Patrol, ICE makes claims about how many drugs have been seized, drug smugglers arrested, and unauthorized immigrants apprehended by the BEST teams.

 

Yet, like the Border Patrol, ICE fails to disaggregate these figures from the total number of seizures and arrests made by the collaborating federal agencies and local law enforcement agencies. For both ICE and CBP, statistics about border arrests and drug seizures are exceedingly fungible in that the same numbers are indiscriminately used to tout the achievements of any number of agencies and initiatives.

 

ICE claims that “BEST teams leverage federal, state, local, tribal, and foreign law enforcement and intelligence resources in an effort to identify, disrupt, and dismantle organizations that seek to exploit vulnerabilities along our borders and threaten safety and security.” On its website, ICE regularly trots out statistics about arrests and drug seizures (including 848,260 pounds of marijuana, as of July 2012). However, ICE hasn’t reported any evidence that these teams have disrupted or dismantled the TCOs.

 

To demonstrate that they are on board with the new combat against TCOs and as a response to political pressure for more border security, ICE and the Border Patrol have created sharply named initiatives, operations, alliances, and task forces that don’t really exist.  The BEST teams aren’t really teams in the sense of crews working together in real operations, they have no team headquarters and rarely if ever even meet together as a team. 

 

CBP has a similar collaborative paper initiative called the Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats (ACTT) in Arizona and planned for three other areas of the southwestern border. Like the BESTs, CBP’s ACTTs are little more than paper bureaucracy created by CBP to demonstrate its commitment to the new combat against transnational criminal organizations. The so-called “alliance” is merely a desk in the CBP sector headquarters.

 

Basically, the BEST program is a paper initiative designed to assuage inter-agency rivalries and to provide a collective rhetorical framework for the new combat against TCOs. These task forces are a new federal overlay to the existing local and regional multijurisdictional task forces and to the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) infrastructure.

 

The border security bureaucracy keeps growing despite the surge of deficit and debt fear mongering.

 

Thanks for the deep bipartisan support for “border security,” the House and the Senate stand united behind institutionalizing and expanding a network of multijurisdictional anti-drug task forces.

 

As President Obama considers the Jaime Zapata Border Enforcement Task Force Act, he might also question DHS about the nature of these ICE taskforces. Does it make sense to endorse ICE’s creation of network of virtual counternarcotics task forces at a time when opposition to U.S drug prohibition and associated drug wars is escalating -- at home and abroad.

 

There is good reason to be concerned about the continuation and expansion of federal anti-drug programs given the decades of failures of these programs, particularly the notorious multijurisdictional narc squads so favored by the federal drug war bureaucracy.