Security begins at home

By Aussiegirl

In a story in today's Washington Times, Jerry Seper writes that snipers are targeting U. S. Border Patrol agents on the U.S. Mexico border, at the same time that the Bush administration has refused to hire the 2000 additional border guards authorized by Congress recently.

I find this completely inexplicable, and the one shortcoming in the proposals put forth in last night's otherwise fine SOTU address.
A guest worker program is simply not going to address what is increasingly looking like a shooting war on our southern border. And these are not the hard-working and benign illegal aliens that President Bush was referring to last night when he talked of providing a legitimate way for low-wage jobs to be filled in this country. A guest worker program is meaningless in the face of this full-scale assault by millions of illegal aliens crossing the borders into this country.

Since the announcement of the guest worker program, the numbers of illegals streaming across the border has reportedly INCREASED, rather than decreased. I'm afraid that President Bush's plan is little more than lip service to a threat to our security that is being ignored for some unfathomable reason.

Here are some excerpts:

Snipers working as "lookouts" for drug traffickers and illegal-alien smugglers are targeting U.S. Border Patrol agents from vantage points across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Within the past week, agents assigned to the Douglas station in Arizona's southeastern corner -- one of the nation's busiest illegal-entry points -- have been fired at on at least six occasions, according to federal authorities, and although none of the officers was injured, several reported near-misses.

One agent's vehicle was hit twice as he moved to avoid gunfire. Another sniper fired both at an agent and at a surveillance camera, which was hit by four bullets but was not seriously damaged.

Since Oct. 1, agents assigned to the Tucson sector, which includes the border stations at Douglas, Naco and Nogales in the highest alien- and drug-trafficking corridor in the country, have been assaulted 80 times, nine involving shootings. Responsible for a 260-mile section of the Arizona-Mexico border, the Tucson agents are being assaulted at a rate of two every three days in that period, more than doubling last year's total.

...The rise in assaults comes as the Bush administration reportedly has decided not to hire the 2,000 new Border Patrol agents that were authorized for each of the next five years in the recently passed intelligence-overhaul bill. Most of them would have been assigned to the Tucson sector.

Instead, President Bush is expected to seek an increase of only about 200 agents for the new fiscal year, according to law-enforcement authorities and others.