J-No’s World

By Rosemary Jenks,
February 4, 2010,

NumbersUSA

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano (aka, J-No) in December 2009 assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Obama Administration had already made great strides in securing our borders, thus moving us one step closer to “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

“Our efforts are achieving their desired results at the border. . . . In short, the security of our southwest border has been transformed.”

–Testimony of Secretary Napolitano before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, December 9, 2009

As proof of this outrageously optimistic assertion, Secretary J-No pointed to a decline in the number of illegal aliens apprehended along the border.

“[A]pprehensions of illegal aliens at the border have dropped to their lowest levels in decades, signaling reduced traffic flows and fewer attempts to illegally enter the United States.”

–Testimony of Secretary Napolitano before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, December 9, 2009

Apprehensions have, in fact, dropped from 723,840 in FY 2008 to around 556,000 in FY 2009, and the FY 2009 figure is the lowest since the early 1970s. It is also likely that some of this decline reflects the fact that fewer illegal aliens are attempting to enter the United States, especially considering our double-digit unemployment. However, even DHS’s own inflated estimates acknowledge that the Border Patrol has “effective control” over only 939 of the 6,000 miles of land borders.

Moreover, when I visited with Border Patrol Agents in the Tucson Sector in mid-October of 2009 and asked if they believe the official DHS line that three illegal aliens successfully enter the United States for every one who is apprehended, they laughed. The reality, they said, is that 10 or more get through for every one who is caught. That was two months before Secretary J-No shared her rosy view with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If the Border Patrol agents’ estimate is correct, that would mean that illegal aliens successfully penetrated our borders more than 5.5 million times in FY 2009. That doesn’t sound much like a “transformation” to me. In Secretary J-No’s world, however, this transformation explains why she has asked Congress for $11.6 million less in funding for “border security between ports of entry” and for $225.8 million less in funding for “border fencing, infrastructure, and technology” for FY 2011.

I also have to wonder if the marked increase in the number of armed illegal aliens and the astronomical increase in the number of reported incidents of violence against border agents are part of the “desired results” that Secretary J-No touted during the Senate hearing. The number of assaults against Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers along the Southwest border increased by 176% in FY 2008. While official data for FY 2009 have not yet been released, anecdotal evidence suggests that violence directed at CBP officers has continued to grow. It seems safe to say that this is not a desired result—at least not for CBP officers, in any case.

Speaking of armed illegal aliens entering the United States undeterred, the accompanying video was captured by “game cameras” (i.e., cameras with motion sensors to activate them) set up by a group of Arizona Minutemen in the Arizona desert in December 2009—the very same month that Secretary J-No was assuring the Senate that the Obama Administration has “transformed” the southwest border. The video you see here is actually three separate video clips caught when the game cameras were triggered on three different days in December. All three are from cameras set up in the Sonoran Desert National Monument, which is comprised of almost 500,000 acres southwest of Phoenix and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which has only a small handful of law enforcement rangers to patrol and protect this vast area.

…PLEASE CLICK HERE for the rest of Rosemary’s report and the VIDEO