By Kevin Buey
Deming Headlight
September 11 instantly conjures images and renews memories.
The events of that day in 2001, more than any other in recent history, changed the way of life in the United States.
It has been eight years since hijacked plans crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Passengers on another plane, in contact on cell phones with people watching the devastation on television, sacrificed their lives by overcoming hijackers and crashing another hijacked plane in an open field in Pennsylvania to prevent terrorists from hitting a fourth target.
U.S. residents now live with tighter security -- at airports and other transportation depots, at government buildings and in other venues.
Other security measures are seen in a tighter focus on borders, via increased and improved resources.
“It’s leaps and leaps and bounds in terms of border security,” says Doug Mosier, spokesman for the El Paso Sector of the U.S Border Patrol. “That becomes most evident in the volume of resources, which includes more agents, more technology and more infrastructure.” Technology, he says, is constantly evolving, especially in radar.
“I think,” Mosier says, “the radar will really put us on the cutting edge after all the prototypes are done and we start receiving the final package.”
Prototypes are being tested in Tucson, where former Deming USBP Station Agent-in-Charge Rick Moody is Assistant Chief of Operations.
“We’re working on developing new technology, obviously, as we work with current technology,” Moody says. “We’re working with a new ground-based radar, a more complete picture out there, good optics, so we can see way out there, in day or night. It detects movement and can easily classify that movement.”
New radar, Mosier and Moody say, allows agents to see a greater distance, with more clarity than now possible.
And there are far more agents than in 2001.
“We’re up to about just shy of 2,600 agents,” Mosier says of this sector, covering West Texas and all New Mexico. “We have been getting the last couple of years about 500 a year in this sector alone. It remains to be seen where we’ll be at the end of 2009, but we’ve done very, very well -- in New Mexico and West Texas -- in terms of acquiring new people.”
In 2000, the sector had about 1,000 agents. In 1993, it had just 600.
September 11 led to formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and placement of the USBP under U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), even as the USBP retained its original mission -- detection and prevention of the illegal entry of immigrants and smuggling of illegal contraband into the U. S.
CBP’s primary mission is anti-terrorism, including screening all people, vehicles and goods entering the country and movement of goods and people in and out of the country.
“Day-to-day operation has pretty much remained the same,” Moody says, “because the Border Patrol has always been a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week law enforcement on the border. September 11 brought to life that border security is a very complex issue. Border security is not just about illegal immigration, as some people had understood it. It became very real to the public, as there are people who would exploit our ports and areas between our ports to come into the country, to do harm to the country and September 11 really brought this home.”
About 20 agencies, including the USBP, merged under the DHS heading. While not changing the USBP’s traditional mission, says Daniel Serrato, the Deming Agent-in-Charge since Moody’s transfer last, it widened it.
“It did emphasize,” Serrato says, “that we have to (also) look for terrorists and interdict terrorists who want to come and do harm to this country. Interdiction became more paramount, with tighter security on the borders. We definitely had to become more robust in what we were doing. “Our porous borders had to be addressed. With that, we started receiving a lot more personnel - agents, infrastructure, technology. Tighter security in Deming has been very successful.”
The station now has more than 400 agents. That increase, new technology and even deployment, for a time, of the National Guard dramatically cut the flow of illegal immigrants in the Deming corridor.
“There was a time when Deming was the second-busiest station in nation as far as cross-border activity,” says Moody. “We received a number of enhancements - personnel, tactical infrastructure. We had a great working relationship with federal representatives and local and state representatives. Take that synergy that we got from the locals and really put those things in place and it ramped up control on the border. It shut down and displaced illegal activity.”
Combined with more attention to agricultural, health and safety issues, heightened attention to the border made inroads on many of the problems about which border-area residents had concerns.
Copyright 2009 Deming Headlight