Arizona border fence lacks financial support
Lawmakers redirect money to sheriff for border security.
PHOENIX — Arizona lawmakers who hoped to build miles of fencing along the border with Mexico using millions of dollars in private donations are instead redirecting the money to buy equipment for a border sheriff ’s office after the state received just a fraction of the donations needed.
The decision Monday by the Legislature’s border security advisory committee came without a mention of the original intent of the donations.
Republican backers of the 2011 legislation hoped for as much as $50 million in private money for the project, which called for building 15-foot fences at busy border-crossing points, then erecting other fences along miles of the state’s nearly 200-mile border that had no federal fences.
Instead, the state received about $265,000.
The effort began during the height of Arizona’s battle against illegal immigration, before a backlash that led to the recall of the Republican Senate president and curbed the GOPled Legislature’s appetite for measures targeting immigration.
The meeting began with members of the committee ripping the federal government for failing to secure the border and keep drugs and illegal activity away from Arizona. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said it’s like “Groundhog Day” and Sen. Steve Smith said “every time we come back here, nothing changes.”
But the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which covers most of the state, remains the agency’s most heavily staffed post in the nation with more than 4,000 agents in 2014 and has 700 more officers than it did in 2010 when the immigration debate was raging.
Immigration from Mexico has also slowed considerably this decade, and the number of immigrants apprehended in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector in 2014 dipped to a 22-year low. Nearby Yuma plummeted to 50-year lows starting in 2011 when the fence fundraising effort was launched. The federal government also beefed up fencing in the last decade to the point that 650 miles of the 1,900-mile U.S.-Mexico border now have fencing. In Arizona, the U.S. Border Patrol says 318 of the 389 miles of the border are protected by pedestrian fencing or vehicle barriers.
The Legislature in August asked sheriffs in Cochise, Pima, Yuma and Santa Cruz counties to present plans for the cash related to border security.
Only Cochise County applied, asking for $220,000 to buy thermal imaging equipment, binoculars, GPS equipment and other gear for border security and ranch patrol teams.
In a letter, Sheriff Mark Dannels praised the efforts of the U.S. Border Patrol to add technology and fencing to the border but said when migrants or smugglers do make it across, law enforcement agencies need to be equipped to respond.