The Border Patrol's Out-of-Control Growth
www.truth-out.org/news/item/19769-the-border-patrols-out-of-control-growth
The United States has 60,000 border guards, more than double the size of Ecuador's army.
The Border Patrol's Out-of-Control Growth
Saturday, 02 November 2013 10:34
By Todd Miller, OtherWords | News Analysis
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The army metaphor isn’t far-fetched: Customs and Border Protection has its own air and marine forces, a special operations branch, and a separate tactical unit. Its rapid-response teams have 500 agents ready to deploy anywhere within 48 hours. Its Predator B drones and Blackhawk helicopters are patrolling the desert southwest as if they were in an Afghanistan war zone. It has armored personnel carriers and uses forward operating bases like those in U.S. wars to secure positions in remote areas. Roughly 700 miles of walls have scarred the landscape of the Mexican borderlands, backed by increasingly sophisticated surveillance towers, cameras, and more than 12,000 motion sensors.
Since 9/11, the government has funneled $100 billion into these border weapon and surveillance systems. For what? The United States has friendly relationships with Canada and Mexico.
One salesperson who was trying to cash in on this border security gold rush (he was peddling his company’s mobile surveillance camera) told me “we are bringing the battlefield to the border,” now that U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is winding down abroad.
The Senate’s bill called for adding 19,000 Border Patrol agents to an agency that has already doubled its ranks since 2006. There’s no way that this influx of agents and technology, with its enhanced national security mission, would be limited to the border, where the Homeland Security presence is becoming an occupying army. If this measure were to become law, the federal government would bring the battlefield to our neighborhoods.