Guardsmen serve on border amid political heat
Work includes stocking shelves, clearing brush
YUMA, Ariz. — Staff Sgt. Chris Cazares is panting to catch his breath after cutting down a salt cedar on the banks of the Colorado River with one of those orange-handled saws commonly used in school shop class.
A supervisor at a nursing home, the longtime soldier in the Army National Guard was previously deployed twice to Iraq, where he specialized in neutralizing chemical attacks. Now he is deployed to his hometown on Arizona’s border with Mexico. Here, he is neutralizing trees.
Cazares is one of roughly 600 guardsmen serving on the border in Arizona since President Donald Trump dispatched the National Guard last April in support of Customs and Border Protection. Numbering about 2,200 as of early this month, the guardsmen Trump
supplied from across the nation answer to the governor of the state in which they are deployed. The active-duty troops the president sent to the border last fall now number about 4,350; they report to U.S. Northern Command.
Whether Cazares and his fellow guardsmen are needed here on the border has become the subject of a renewed debate that has cleaved along party lines. It has again put the U.S. border with Mexico at the center of national political rancor that is poised to escalate after Trump declared a national emergency Friday, bucking Congress to secure more funding for a wall.
In recent days, the newly inaugurated governors of California and New Mexico, both Democrats, ordered the withdrawal of most guardsmen from the border in their states, suggesting Trump had deployed the Guard not because CBP is facing a crisis but rather because the president wants to sow fear and appear tough on illegal immigration by showing off uniformed officers in the field.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the deployment a “theater of the absurd” upon withdrawing the bulk of the forces from the border in his state and redeploying them to fight fires and target drugs. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who retained a handful of guardsmen on the border, said her state would no longer abide “the president’s charade of border fearmongering by misusing our diligent National Guard troops.”
The Republican governors of Arizona and Texas, meanwhile, have kept the full National Guard border deployments in their states. Supporters of the deployment say the back-end assistance from the Guard frees up Border Patrol agents to deal with threats from drug smugglers and human traffickers. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, they point out, both deployed the National Guard to the border during their presidencies.
The U.S. military cannot conduct domestic law enforcement activities owing to an 1878 federal law called the Posse Comitatus Act. As a result, the uniformed personnel are helping in the background rather than dealing directly with migrants crossing the border.
In Yuma, about 100 guardsmen are performing ancillary tasks for CBP — clearing brush, fixing machinery, stocking foodstuffs and monitoring surveillance cameras at the sector headquarters. The idea is to free up border agents previously assigned to those duties so that they can instead apprehend and process migrants.
“It’s kind of a godsend,” said Vincent Dulesky, special operations supervisor for public affairs at the Border Patrol’s Yuma sector. “As we were getting strained out, you have the National Guard.”
The 126-mile stretch of Arizona and California border that comprises the Yuma sector is a mélange of worlds — tribal areas, military installations, government parks, majestic sand dunes and vast stretches of agricultural land, much of it harvested by Mexican seasonal laborers who traverse the border with work permits. Sometimes described as the sunniest place in the United States, Yuma grows much of America’s lettuce. In a local souvenir shop, one Yuma T-shirt reads: “If you’ve had a salad in the winter, you’re welcome.”
Overall, the number of people apprehended for crossing the border illegally has decreased dramatically from a multi-decade high nearly two decades ago. In the Yuma sector there were 26,244 apprehensions of migrants crossing illegally in the 2018 fiscal year, down from 108,747 in 2000. Across the entire border with Mexico, apprehensions decreased to 396,579 from 1.68 million over the same time period.
Although the number of apprehensions in Yuma are down from 20 years ago, they have more than quadrupled since 2014 amid an influx of families and children, primarily from Honduras and Guatemala, fleeing poverty and violence. The number of border agents assigned to the sector, meanwhile, is roughly the same now as it was in 2014.
More than three-quarters of the people apprehended in Yuma last year crossed as unaccompanied minors or members of families including children. They tend to surrender to Border Patrol immediately after crossing into U.S. territory in what the agents call “give ups” — and many file asylum claims. Border Patrol is supposed to hold them for a maximum of 72 hours. After that, Immigration and Customs Enforcement can keep minors in immigration detention for no longer than 20 days. If a family hasn’t received a hearing by then, authorities must transfer the children to a licensed child care facility or release them with a parent, who often receives a tracking bracelet and a court date.
The Trump administration says these standards create a loophole that is incentivizing migrants to cross the border with children and remain in the U.S. illegally after their release.
The administration initially tried to stem the influx of Central American families by separating children from parents who entered unlawfully, prompting a national outcry. Now the administration has moved to terminate the 20-day rule and expand ICE’s family detention facilities.
In Yuma, Border Patrol agents say the changing character of the migration has strained their force. Whereas years ago they tracked mostly Mexican border crossers looking to evade detection, now they say children and families from Central America are showing up in large groups, many requiring medical care after a perilous journey through the Sonoran Desert.
Last month, a group of 376 migrants from Central America crossed into the sector by burrowing under one of the walls erected there during the Bush administration. Nearly half of them were children.
“Every day that we get over 100 in a group is a strain,” Border Patrol agent Justin Kallinger said.
When the sector was apprehending adult Mexican border crossers, agents would detain them for an average of about eight hours and often send them back across the border, Kallinger said. Now, he said, the average time in sector custody is about the 72-hour maximum, because Central American migrants require a flight to get home and often are making asylum claims. Agents must provide transport, hospital escorts and food in the interim, duties now claiming far more of their time.