The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just announced that the number of illegal aliens apprehended in fiscal year 2011 sunk to a 40-year low at 327,000.
While DHS largely attributes the decline to more stringent border security, it appears that the real reason is something much less impressive.
In May, Arizona Sheriff Larry Dever testified before Congress that Border Patrol’s new policy of giving a warning to illegal crossers rather than taking them into custody, known as “Turn Back South” was not only being practiced near the border, but far north of it as well.
Sheriff Dever told the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security: “It appears, according to numerous reports from current and former border agents, that this practice has gravitated many miles north of the border. That means that, regardless of proximity to the border, people who are detected but not caught are considered to be ‘Turned Back South.’”
A month earlier, Dever told Fox News that over the last two years, U.S. Border Patrol officials have told him they were ordered on multiple occasions to reduce and even stop apprehending illegal aliens crossing the U.S./Mexican border.
Sheriff Dever said that as recently as March 2011, a Border Patrol supervisor informed him that the agency was ordered to keep the number of arrests down during specific reporting periods.
Dever said: “The senior supervisor agent is telling me about how their mission is now to scare people back. He said, ‘I had to go back to my guys and tell them not to catch anybody, that their job is to chase people away. … They were not to catch anyone, arrest anyone. Their job was to set up posture, to intimidate people, to get them to go back.’”
Furthermore, in October 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report claiming that the Interior Department and the Agriculture Department have prevented about 15 percent of the 26 Border Patrol stations in the American southwest from apprehending illegal aliens and drug smugglers.
Before Border Patrol agents can build roads or set up surveillance posts on at least half of the land along the U.S./Mexican border, they must first apply for permission from the Interior Department and the Forest Service. Before permission is granted (if it is), the land management agencies conduct environmental studies which take several months.
Of course, all the while…both drug and human smugglers operate basically unimpeded.
The report stated: “These delays in gaining access have generally lessened agents’ ability to detect undocumented aliens in some areas, according to the patrol agents-in-charge.”
Border Patrol agents in Arizona had to wait four months for permission to move a mobile surveillance system, which left a 7-mile range of border unwatched. By the time the agencies granted permission, the smugglers had moved on to another area.
Even more outrageous, the Border Patrol once had to wait eight months while an “historic property assessment” was conducted in New Mexico, so that they could simply move an underground sensor.
“During this period, agents could not patrol in vehicles or use surveillance equipment to monitor an area that illegal aliens were known to use,” the report read.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has been continuously telling us that the number of illegal aliens entering this country from Mexico has dropped substantially since Obama has become president, based on declining border apprehensions--now we may know why…the agents are simply not being allowed to do their job.
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