When Department of Homeland Security officials launched the Arizona Border Control Initiative in March, they said the agency planned to add 260 agents, four helicopters and two unmanned aerial drones, and expand detention space to hold illegal immigrants.
The effort was supposed to be in full swing by Tuesday. But more than half of the promised U.S. Border Patrol agents have not arrived, officials have scrapped plans to add tents for detained immigrants, and the drones remain on the ground.
Asa Hutchinson, Homeland Security's undersecretary, acknowledged Friday in an interview that the push to secure Arizona's 350-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border has posed significant challenges, including "substantially exceeding" the initial $10 million cost estimate.
"We are moving as expeditiously as possible," he said. "In the meantime, we are supplementing (the initiative) in a multitude of different ways."
Hutchinson, who visited Tucson yesterday to assess the initiative's progress, said officials are committed to controlling the Arizona border, the most popular and deadly illegal crossing corridor in the nation.
He said the initiative has scored successes, including "breaking the cycle" of smuggling organizations that shuttled illegal immigrants from the border to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, a major distribution hub for the rest of the country.
Hutchinson said arrests of illegal immigrants in the state have increased to 3,000 daily from an average of about 2,000 a day since March.
Manpower problems
The plan announced in March called for adding 260 agents on the Arizona border this summer, including 200 who would be assigned permanently to the Tucson sector. The remaining 60 agents, members of tactical and search-and-rescue teams, arrived in March on temporary assignments from other Border Patrol sectors. In April, officials sent an additional 50 agents to temporarily help in Arizona.
But the 200 experienced agents still are not on the job. Hutchinson said 159 agents have been selected for the spots, and officials are working to fill the remaining slots.
"It's been simply a matter of giving them a reporting date to get on duty, and that process is ongoing," Hutchinson said. "It is just administratively taking some time to get that done. We're moving as rapidly as we can to get those 200 positions filled."
By the summer's end, officials plan to have more than 2,000 additional agents in Arizona.
In the meantime, the Border Patrol union has raised concerns about an cap set by Congress that limits government employees' overtime. The cap has hamstrung agents who typically work lots of overtime, including members of search-and-rescue search and rescue and tactical teams, said T.J. Bonner, the National Border Patrol Council's president.
Union officials said the cap is of particular concern in the Tucson sector, where one-third of the search-and-rescue agents are restricted from working overtime as the migrant deaths continue to outpace last year's record. Since Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year, the Border Patrol has reported 39 deaths in the sector.
"It's fairly obvious this whole Arizona Border Control Initiative is focused on the aspect of having search-and-rescue agents going out there to try and prevent, to the extent possible, needless death," Bonner said.
"And the fewer agents there are out there, the more likely it is that the body count is going to be fairly high this year."
Tucson sector Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said the overtime cap is "an operational challenge," but officials are adapting and using technology to increase agents' effectiveness in the field.
Hutchinson, who has the power to waive the cap, said in Friday's interview he was unaware of problems that would restrict agents from working overtime. He said he planned to make sure the overtime issue "does not hamper our ability to get the job done."
In addition to manpower problems, Homeland Security has had trouble getting its pilot project, unmanned drones, off the ground.
Agents still are training to fly the unmanned aerial vehicles, which cost $2 million each, and officials have delayed the first patrol to June 30, Hutchinson said.
In March, federal officials announced plans to erect seven air-conditioned tents to accommodate the increased number of migrants caught by Border Patrol agents. The tents, estimated to cost $2 million and house about 300 people, no longer are part of the plan.
Instead, officials at the federally run detention center in Florence have added 100 beds by putting bunk beds in the housing pods on an emergency-only basis, said Phillip Crawford, Phoenix field director for Detention and Removal Operations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Officials also reached an agreement with a privately run detention center in Florence to house up to 125 additional detainees, he said.
Hutchinson said officials have compensated for the detention space issues by running more buses to the border to return illegal immigrants to Mexico.
In addition, Aguilar said, agents have 28 new Humvees to use in the field.
Hutchinson added that Homeland Security officials are continuing negotiations with the Mexican government for an interior repatriation pact, designed to reduce deaths and break up smuggling rings.
The repatriation program, which Hutchinson estimated would cost an additional $13 million, would fly illegal immigrants into Mexico's interior instead of dropping them off in towns and cities along the border.
"We've been through very lengthy negotiations with them working out the operational details," he said. "We have not reached an agreement yet, but I'm still optimistic that we can."
Arrests increase
While apprehensions in the Tucson sector are up 59 percent from last year, there is evidence migrant traffic is being pushed into New Mexico, and there appears to be a shift back into the San Diego area, said Wayne Cornelius, a political science professor and border expert at the University of California at San Diego.
Cornelius said it will be virtually impossible to spread the added resources evenly across the length of the Arizona border, leaving some areas less protected than others.
Hutchinson said officials have prepared for the traffic to shift to other areas of the border. The increase in apprehension numbers does not necessarily indicate that more people are trying to cross, but it may indicate that agents are catching more who try, he said.
Hutchinson does not believe the increase has been spurred by President Bush's guest-worker proposal, which some field agents have reported as a cause for the spike in apprehensions.
"I've explored that, and I find no factual basis to support that contention," Hutchinson said. "There is no indication the increased flow is simply a result of the proposal on the table and currently being debated."