Author: mopress

Many Guard soldiers eager to serve on border

11:46 PM CDT on Friday, June 30, 2006

By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Staff Sgt. David Martinez is an island of calm as some 200 camouflage-wearing soldiers mill around in an airless cavern of a building. Hurry up and wait is the Army’s favorite pastime. He’s been through it before.

The 26-year-old staff sergeant was among the 3,500 Texas National Guard troops of the 56th Brigade Combat Team who returned in December from a yearlong tour in Iraq. Now, he’s one of thousands of Texas guardsmen who will head south for Operation Jump Start in support of the Border Patrol along the Mexican border.

Like all the others, he volunteered. As other states struggle to meet a goal of having some 2,500 troops on the border by the end of the month, Gov. Rick Perry said Friday that Texas was on track, activating more than 700 Texas Army National Guard troops and more than 300 Texas Air Guard troops under Operation Jump Start orders.

Less than half that total are physically on the border, National Guard officials said Friday.

The group gathered at Camp Mabry from Guard units across the state will be among the first of the 1,200 Texas Guard soldiers eventually sent to the border for road building, surveillance and establishing observation posts. Tours will range from 90 days to a year.

Many of them, like Staff Sgt. Martinez, don’t have to go.

The reasons for volunteering to spend a year on the Rio Grande range from patriotism to a sense of duty – and, for some, boredom with civilian life. For most, it’s simply a way to serve.

“After coming back from Iraq, it really opened my eyes to what we can do to help people. That’s why I wanted to do this. I think we’re all just trying to help our country,” Staff Sgt. Martinez said.

“My time in Iraq was rough on my mom and, at first, she couldn’t understand why I was going back on active duty so soon,” the Laredo resident said. “But she understands that I’m a soldier. And I know she’s a lot happier that I’m not going back overseas.”

The Guard’s border mission is a state deployment and does not trigger limits to federal deployment of National Guard troops, such as to Iraq, to no more than 24 months. But the Guard Adjutant General of Texas has ordered that those who completed a recent tour in either Iraq or Afghanistan not be involuntarily called for Operation Jump Start.

At this point, the Texas Guard’s Operation Jump Start is an all-volunteer force.

“Even though Texas has had major deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and we still have 4,000 soldiers overseas, we’re going to meet our goal to have all the Guard’s obligation in the state filled by Texas troops,” said Col. Bobby Canon, task force commander for the Texas Guard.

“Most of these people are taking pay cuts for this mission,” Col. Canon said. “But they are all responding to this mission because they want to serve.”

Personal motive

One recent combat veteran, Spc. Filemon Cuellar, 26, has a more personal motive for volunteering for the border mission.

“My grandfather came to this country as an illegal immigrant, and the country was very good to him,” he said. “I feel like I’m giving something back for my grandfather.”

Spc. Cuellar joined the Guard after he returned to San Antonio following a tour in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division two years ago. A health care adviser for Humana Tri-Care, he was called up with the Guard for disaster relief following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year.

He acknowledges that his wife, left at home with a young daughter, wasn’t too happy at the prospect of losing him for a year along the Mexican border.

“She’s ex-military too and now, she backs me up,” Spc. Cuellar said. “I simply felt my country needed me.”

William Trejo, 27, of Dallas, a counselor with at-risk children of Katrina refugees, decided to join the National Guard last year – his first-ever encounter with the military.

Now, Pfc. Trejo will put his brand-new medic skills to use somewhere along the Rio Grande.

“I wanted the experience. And going to drills each month just wasn’t enough,” he said. “And for the kids I work with, it’s a way to teach them by example to do the right thing.”

At their Oak Cliff home, Alicia Trejo said she wasn’t too crazy about her husband’s enlistment in the Guard in the first place. And he didn’t make her feel any better when he came home recently with what he called good news and bad news.

“He said he’d be gone a year to the border. And that he volunteered. For me, they were both bad news,” she said. “I know it’s going to be a tough. … I’m suddenly both Mommy and Daddy. But my real concern is for his safety. The border is a very dangerous place, and I worry about that.”

Sgt. Alvaro Alvarez, 37, a 16-year Guard veteran from Laredo, left his job as a postal worker to take part in the mission, which meant a nearly 50 percent cut in pay. But it’s something worth doing, he said.

“This may sound stupid, but I love my country, and I don’t see this as a military exercise. It’s a necessity,” he said. “A lot of people forget we’re at war. But we don’t.”

Minimizing impact

The volunteerism and the Texas Guard’s decision to make the tour longer than the usual two-week training period helps minimize the impact of back-to-back mobilizations, said Christine Wormuth, international security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“If Guard soldiers are volunteering for the mission, then they’ve made the judgment about the effect on their families and their employers,” Ms. Wormuth said.

The challenge for both the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security is to make sure that border security doesn’t become an open-ended job for the Guard and that the soldiers feel they are having a positive impact on the mission, she said.

“A year from now, if the Guard soldiers don’t see their efforts have had a meaningful impact on border security, the eagerness to volunteer may change,” she said.

Sgt. Troy Watson, 35, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice corrections officer at Mule Shoe, sees Operation Jump Start as a continuation of the war on terror, and he wanted to be a part of it. After 14 years in the Guard, including a tour in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division, he’s ready to go.

“I spent time fighting the bad guys over there,” he said. “Now I can help stop the bad guys at the border. I think that’s a good way to spend the next year.”

His employers have been supportive of his Guard deployments, but he knows that his co-workers will continue to advance on the job while he’s gone. “I’m comfortable with that,” he said. “It’s a small sacrifice for what we’re going to accomplish.”

Sgt. Watson then walked into another room and stood before a recruiter, raised his right hand and re-enlisted for another six years.

“These days, when you sign up for the Guard, you know you’re going to be deployed somewhere,” Col. Canon said. “But when other states are having trouble meeting recruitment goals, the Texas Guard doesn’t.”

For the sixth straight year, the Texas National Guard exceeded its annual end-strength goal of 17,095 by 179 soldiers, with three months left in the fiscal year. Texas is one of 43 state National Guard units nationally to meet or exceed goals this year.

Recently, Texas Guard officials announced they had recruited 1,749 soldiers, more than half the goal of 3,090 for the fiscal year.

In the field house, Staff Sgt. Martinez takes his place in line, ready for another round of paperwork. He’s keenly aware that the Guard mission is solely to support the Border Patrol and that his skills as a forkl

ift operator may be more useful than his experience as a cavalry scout.

“There’s still some danger about the mission, especially in Laredo, but it’s not as dangerous as Iraq. They won’t be shooting at us. We hope, anyway.”

BORDER TROOPS

483 – Troops physically on the border in the four border states

1,000 – Troops deployed to the Texas border now*

2,000 plus – Troops training somewhere in the four states

1,750 – Pledged by nonborder states, although just 150 of those are deployed

2,500 – Goal by end of June

6,000 – Goal by end of July

*Many of these troops may not yet be physically on the border but have received their orders. The number of actual troops on the border was not immediately clear.

NOTE: Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, an arm of the Pentagon, said Friday the Guard had deployed more than 2,500 troops “in the four Southwest border states” supporting the mission.

A web page for the Houston protesters who chained themselves to an immigration jail June 4:

myspace.com/houstonsinfronteras

. . . the struggle continues July 4 . . .

A Manifesto for Civil Relations across the Rio Grande

OpEdNews

As citizens of Mexico go to polls, troops from the USA deploy to the Rio Bravo. Only a coincidence you say? I say you avoid any appearance of such confusion by not militarizing that border in the first place. With still only 600 troops to the border out of 6,000 projected, it is time to call this off.
The coincidence of Mexican elections with USA militarization may look like a goof from a Yanqui state of mind, but from the point of view of the peoples of Latin America, the simulataneity of these events is more likely to evoke a shudder, even if the people feeling it do not precisely locate the history of their felt response.

If one is truly American, in other words, if one cares about all Americans, then the militarization of any border between two American states must be rigorously avoided.

The principle to not militarize American borders increases in importance tenfold when the border in question lies between Latin America and Anglo America. One must attend to minimal ethical standards. The military can only be used as a last resort in situations where civil alternatives have been exhausted. Relations between Anglo America and Latin America cannot be made more healthy by another unilateral deployment of military subjects once again backed by questionable political motives.

In civil affairs, moreover, as opposed to military affairs, there must be a minimum of classified information. What is being done at the border between civil peoples in a civil way must be made available to a civil marketplace of ides.

But already with only 600 troops at the border, top officials in Texas are making it clear that they are not playing a deeply civil game when it comes to their documentary involvements in border deployment. And this should be enough to cause a shudder north of the Rio Grande, even if people are not precisely aware of the historical causes behind their felt response.

Thanks again, dear reader, for another delightful surprise. The last day of June was our busiest day of site traffic. No the raw numbers are not astounding, but we like the trend. So thanks, and many happy returns.–gm

Joining the Patrol
Border agency, recruits both face hurdles in training

Susan Carroll
Republic Tucson Bureau
Jul. 1, 2006 12:00 AM

ARTESIA, N.M. – Susana Morales squinted through the sight of a U.S. Border Patrol-issued automatic rifle for the first time as the heat rose up in shimmering waves from the shooting range.

The young mother, one of about 570 cadets in the Border Patrol’s academy in Artesia, is an ideal applicant: minority, female and former military.
The academy is in the midst of a massive hiring push to meet President Bush’s mandate to put 6,000 new agents in the field by 2008. About 2,500 of those agents will be sent to Arizona’s border with Mexico.

The Border Patrol faces several challenges at its only training base. The number of new hires is unprecedented, and critics have expressed concern about the agency’s capability to properly train and screen applicants. The agency also has a high dropout rate, with only one in 30 applicants making it through the 19-week training course, the longest law enforcement preparation school in the federal government.

The academy was moved to this small town in southern New Mexico from centers in Georgia and South Carolina in 2004 and has several major construction projects under way as it is pressured to get agents into the field.

On the shooting range, Yuma native Morales, 27, squeezed off five rounds, grazing the lower left and right of the target and hitting once dead in the center.

Like many new recruits, Morales thought about quitting the academy and going home to her 4-year-old, who kept asking when Mommy was coming home.

“It was much harder than I expected,” she said of the academy just days from graduation, “But I’m happy that I stayed.”

Major growth

The Border Patrol has ramped up staffing since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, growing into one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies in the country. Fifteen years ago, the agency had about 4,000 agents. Now, the ranks have swollen to more than 11,780.

With national attention focused on illegal immigration, President Bush in May announced plans to add 6,000 agents during the next two years. The push is already under way, with the agency projecting 9.3 percent growth by the end of the fiscal year in October, said Maria Valencia, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman.

Border Patrol officials said consolidating the training at one facility would be more efficient. They also said the terrain and climate in New Mexico was more in line with the type of environment agents would face along the Southwestern border.

But Border Patrol officials are struggling to accommodate the volume of recruits in Artesia, a town of about 15,000 people roughly 240 miles southeast of Albuquerque. Federal officials have built temporary housing while a $38 million barracks facility is under construction, and they are working on expanding the gym and building an indoor pool.

Charles C. Whitmire, acting chief patrol agent at the academy, said that the growth is a challenge but that officials will be able to accommodate all the recruits sent their way to meet the goal of 6,000 new hires.

“It’s a huge ramp-up that will take a huge amount of money, effort and time,” he said. “We’re breaking new ground here. We’ve never trained this many agents.”

Recruiting push

The agency also has launched a major recruitment campaign, focusing on the North and Midwest. They raised the age limit for applicants to 40 from 37 and are heavily targeting former military personnel, Supervisory Agent Lorenzo Hernandez said.

Officials also are carefully orchestrating a media campaign, opening up the academy to controlled tours to get the message out about the need for more agents.

During an earlier hiring boom in the mid-’90s, the Border Patrol had a series of embarrassing cases of hiring agents with questionable backgrounds, including criminal records. Despite recent reports of corruption, including the suspected involvement of a former Arizona agent in an FBI cocaine sting, officials said they have improved the background-check process and will thoroughly vet new recruits.

Hernandez, a recruiter, said getting a diverse mix of applicants is “the toughest challenge by far.” Although the agency does well recruiting bilingual Hispanics – just over half are Latino -less than 1 percent of the workforce is Black or Asian. Only about 5 percent are women.

Morales said the decision to sign up for the patrol wasn’t easy. Her husband had argued that a Border Patrol job, which involves logging long hours in dangerous terrain, was no place for a woman. But, she said, he eventually came around and is proud of her. She had heard of Hispanic agents facing a backlash for going into the Border Patrol but hasn’t seen that firsthand, she said.

“To me, it’s just a job,” she said, “And it’s a job that has to be done.”

Staying on

The Border Patrol historically has struggled to retain agents. Some have complained about the starting pay, about $30,000 to $34,000, depending on experience. The job is demanding and sometimes frustrating, with some agents reporting sitting in fixed positions for hours at a stretch or catching the same undocumented immigrants over and over again.

The attrition rate in 2004 was 6 percent, but dropped to 4 percent in 2005. Valencia said officials are projecting a 5.25 percent loss this year.

“The biggest trick is going to be, ‘How are you going to hang onto people?’ ” said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the uni*n that represents field agents across the country.

Morales, who spent five years in the Navy before joining the Transportation Security Administration, said she was drawn to the Border Patrol because it was an outdoor job, promising a “little more excitement.”

She struggled through the physical portion of the academy, saying it was tougher than boot camp. When she arrived, she was far from making the cutoff for the physical requirements. Agents are required to run 1.5 miles in 13 minutes. She initially came in more than 3 minutes over, but left 20 pounds lighter, making the time with 12 seconds to spare.

Her first day on the job in the agency’s bustling Tucson Sector is scheduled for Thursday. She said she was looking forward to a short break before starting the job, to have some time with her son.

“I just kept saying, ‘I can do this,’ ” she said, with a broad smile. “And I did.”