The U.S. government has spent nearly $4 billion on various approaches, including a $2.4 billion border fence effort, two deployments of National Guard troops to temporarily bolster the Border Patrol, and a now-defunct $1 billion "virtual fence" that covered 53 miles of the 2,100-mile U.S.-Mexico border until the Obama administration scrapped it earlier this year. "In spite of an effort to do more, there does not appear to be a plan in place that actually accomplishes the objectives of a secure border," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said earlier this month in a speech to the U.S.- Mexico Congressional Border Issues Conference.
The physical fence saw drugs catapulted over it, tunneled under it and even driven over with homemade ramps. "Show me a 10-foot fence, I'll show you an 11-foot ladder" became common wisdom along the border. And the Homeland Security Department now faces lawsuits from landowners who found their property in a no-man's land on the other side of the fence, inaccessible to the rest of the United States. The U.S. also tried the SBInet virtual fence plan, abandoned earlier this year after a billion-dollar expenditure. Now there's a new plan to install cameras, radar and other gadgets. But that gear won't be in place border-wide until at least 2021 and maybe not until 2026, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says these efforts are working, and she points to a 36 percent drop in apprehensions at the border and the addition of thousands of newly hired Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents. Those successes, she tells Congress, need to be built upon. "In March 2009, the Obama administration launched the Southwest Border Initiative to bring focus and intensity to Southwest border security, coupled with a reinvigorated, smart and effective approach to enforcing immigration laws in the interior of our country," Napolitano said in written testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month. "We are now two years into this strategy and, based on our own indicators of progress as well as previous benchmarks by Congress, it is clear that this approach is working."
But that initiative focused almost entirely on adding people and financial resources to the border, an effort that experts say is incomplete without a wider strategy that focuses on hard information about what and who is getting across the border daily, statistics the administration has been unable to collect. Most of the planning at the moment is focused on the Arizona-Mexico border, the busiest section of the border in terms of smuggling drugs and people. For that, Homeland Security has crafted a plan to replace the virtual fence, at a cost of another $775 million and five years. Yet an overall strategy from the Pacific to Gulf coasts is lacking, critics say.
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Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says he will launch his latest crime and immigration sweep on Thursday.
