Homeland Security placing more agents outside the homeland
ABOARD A P-3 ORION, over the Pacific Ocean — The Department of Homeland Security is increasingly going global.
An estimated 2,000 Homeland Security employees — from Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agents to Transportation Security Administration officials — now are deployed to more than 70 countries around the world.
Hundreds more are either at sea for weeks at a time aboard Coast Guard ships, or patrolling the skies in surveillance planes above the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
The expansion has created tensions with some European countries who say that the United States is trying to export its immigration laws to their territory. But other allies agree with the United States’ argument that its longer reach strengthens international security while preventing a terrorist attack, drug shipment, or human smuggling ring from reaching U.S. soil.
“Many threats to the homeland begin overseas, and that’s where we need to be,” said James Nealon, the department’s assistant secretary for international engagement.
A surveillance mission earlier this month with Homeland Security agents in drug transit zones near South America highlights the department’s efforts to push out the border. Just after takeoff from a Costa Rican airfield, a crew of agents aboard a Customs and Border Protection surveillance plane began tracking a low-flying aircraft that appeared to be headed south toward Ecuador.
The aircraft, which intelligence reports reviewed by agents indicated had no flight plan, flew just a few hundred feet above the ocean — an apparent attempt to avoid detection by radar.
“When they are flying that low, they’re probably up to no good,” said Timothy Flynn, a senior detection agent, watching the plane on a radar screen.
An hour later, and hiding in the cloud cover to stay out of sight, the U.S. P-3 pulled up behind the plane. An agent with a long-lens digital camera snapped a string of photos of the plane’s tail number and other identify-