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Chapter 3

Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control

Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control

This activity contains 3 questions.

	What strategies is the U.S. is proposing to use to secure our borders in President Bush's Secure Border Initiative?   Creating a 'virtual fence' using new technologies such as "unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment" already being used in Iraq. Use of the 6,000 National Guard to patrol the border "Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008." Senate voted...to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico.

	How do new proposals for border control differ from past efforts?   "The Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders ...It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers." "We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said...he is "convinced that the government could get it right this time." "The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)" The companies bidding on the Secure Border Initiative have "studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain." "The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually." "We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday. "The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them - all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job."

	What are some of the controversial issues around the new border control efforts?   The companies bidding on the Secure Border Initiative contracts are the same companies that "have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results." Many problems with using technology to detect and apprehend illegal immigrants at the board: "Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general. A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month." "We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?" Critics complain that "despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders." "...an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders - a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success." "The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border - devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million - is dismal."

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