Drug traffic gives Coast Guard challenges at sea, budget office
ALAMEDA — Vice Adm. Fred Midgette, commander of Coast Guard operations in the Pacific Area, has a challenge almost as vast as the ocean he patrols in search of drug traffickers, with responsibilities for an area that is twice the size of the continental United States.
The Coast Guard is struggling to keep pace, seizing about 20 percent of all the drugs that come into the United States through a coastal border, as its aging fleet attempts to pursue the speedboats favored by the traffickers.
“When most people think border security, they think Border Patrol,” Midgette said. “What we do by intercepting drugs on the high seas has a direct connection to what happens at the southern border in terms of stopping illicit drugs and illegal immigration.
“When you are stopping drugs at the Rio Grande, that’s already a loss,” he added. “You want to push that stuff off from America as far as you can.”
But that is becoming increasingly difficult for the Coast Guard, which has operated with flat budgets even as its mission has expanded to include intelligence and antiterrorism.
There are newer ships like the Stratton, a Coast Guard cutter, but many others in the fleet are more than 50 years old. President Trump’s new budget would cut Coast Guard funding by 2.4 percent.
About 70 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States passes through a corridor that runs up to the borders of Guatemala and El Salvador.
Catching drugs in the ocean is vital to Homeland Security efforts because that is when the volume and the purity of the drugs are at their highest. It is also where drug traffickers are most vulnerable.
“We take advantage of the fact that we have the advantage on the water,” said Capt. Nathan Moore, the departing commander of the Stratton. ‘’When they see that huge ship coming at them over the horizon, most of them just give up.”
Moore said that even with all the technology on the Stratton, finding a panga or narco sub painted blue to blend in with the ocean was difficult. The Coast Guard said it intercepted a record six narco subs during the 2016 fiscal year.
Funding the Coast Guard at current levels — nearly $10 billion — leaves the service struggling to combat the drug trafficking that has been pushed offshore by beefed up security on the southern land border.