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New tactics, same battle for U.S. Border Patrol

BY GRAHAM RAYMAN | Newsday Staff Writer

May 17, 2006

"In spite of the major successes in repatriation, many deportees simply turned around and recrossed the seriously undermanned border."

No, that's not a description of the situation that exists today along the U.S.-Mexico border. The line - which was excerpted from the U.S. Border Patrol's official history - refers to a period in the 1950s when the government first attempted large-scale efforts at ejecting undocumented immigrants.

In fiscal year 2005, the agency made 1.2 million arrests of people entering the country illegally - far greater than the 50,000 sent back from 1954 to 1956 in that early campaign.

In many ways, the Border Patrol has been fighting the same battle ever since.

The first Border Patrol began modestly around World War I. As early as 1915, a handful of members of an early version of the agency patrolled the border, mainly looking for Chinese immigrants seeking to slip across the border. But it wasn't until 1920, and Prohibition, when alcohol sales were banned in the U.S., that the nascent agency began to take on a more significant role, expanding to 450 officers.

During World War II, some Border Patrol agents served as guards in internment camps for Japanese-Americans.

The first patrol cars were introduced in 1935, though the agency relied on horses for long afterward. Training is now 19 weeks long.

While there may be 11,300 agents today, only about 25 percent are on the border at any given time, when the three-shift schedule, training time and other elements are factored in, said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council labor group.

"The job has changed in a lot of respects," said Bonner, who argues that as many as 25,000 agents are needed to effectively patrol the border. "The mission remains the same but the job has become much more influenced by politics."