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 Editorials | Issues | March 2007 
When the Wall is No Barrier
 Michael Riley - Denver Post
| | A $5 ladder demonstrates the challenge the U.S. faces in trying to keep illegal migrants out despite a $30 million high-tech fence. |
San Diego - A 10-foot-high wall snakes along the U.S.-Mexico border south of here, and behind it another fence, steel mesh and even higher. Cameras sit atop 50-foot poles, and stadium lights can turn night here to day. It's a daunting sight that looks utterly secure.
Until you notice the divots.
"Everywhere you see a divot, that's where someone has gone over with a ladder," said Damon Foreman, a young Border Patrol agent, pointing to the nicks across the top of the secondary fence.
Sold for $5 on the Mexican side, the ladders are made of rebar and can be carried with one hand at a quick run.
"Ten guys are over that fence in a minute," Foreman said.
For Department of Homeland Security officials trying to secure the country's land borders, it's a hard lesson: A $5 ladder trumps a $30 million fence.
In the multibillion-dollar effort to build a Fortress America, nothing has gained as much attention as the effort to wall off America's borders through a combination of one of the oldest technologies in the world - the fence - and some of the newest - advanced radar, infrared cameras, mini drones.
"We're launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," President Bush said in a national address in May.
In September, Americans got the first glimpse of what he meant. Boeing Co. was awarded the initial stage of a multibillion-dollar contract to plan and build SBInet, a 2,000-mile combination of physical barriers and technology that officials predict will turn around a decade of failure and give the country "effective control" of its southern border within five years.
A network of 1,800 long-range, infrared and daylight cameras will scan both the Mexican and Canadian borders for drug runners and illegal immigrants, while ground radar tracks vehicles. Seismic, heat and motion sensors will scrutinize difficult-to-monitor areas such as canyons and mountain ranges.
It will be a watershed effort, with a price tag to match. Scheduled to be completed on the U.S.-Mexico border by 2011, the project is estimated by Department of Homeland Security officials to cost $7.6 billion.
But the southern border is a vast place of daunting geography. Almost 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, it includes snowcapped mountains, a sea of arroyo-scarred desert, and 1,200 miles of the Rio Grande.
In a cramped control room in the Border Patrol's Del Rio sector in Texas, an agent shows off the program's most technologically advanced system, part of a network originally known as ISIS, for Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System.
"With manpower and technology, you can bring the border under control," said Randy Clark, a Border Patrol supervisory agent.
But there is another side to the ISIS story, one that skeptics say underscores the major challenges that lie ahead for a program as ambitious as SBInet.
The cameras like those at Del Rio were erected at dozens of places on both borders by a company called International Microwave Corp., part of a $257 million contract awarded in 1999.
In two audits, government monitors found many of the cameras weren't installed or were replaced with cheaper, less functional versions than what the contract specified.
The failures spawned a criminal investigation and constituted what one auditor for the General Services Administration called "a major program gone awry." Even when they were in place, the cameras froze in winter and overheated in summer, the GSA audit found.
International Microwave Corp. was later purchased by L-3 Communications, now one of Boeing's SBInet subcontractors.
The ground sensors were less effective still.
A second audit, this one by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general, found that the sensors were often shorted out by insects or moisture. When they worked, 90 percent of alerts were caused by something other than illegal immigrants, and the deployment of agents to check on hits wasted more time than it saved.
The audit found the agency's 11,000 sensors accounted for less than 1 percent of all apprehensions at the border.
Investigators concluded that the $429 million investment in sensors and cameras was close to useless.
"The border is an astonishingly inhospitable geography. It is mostly remote. It is subject to bizarre and extreme weather conditions," said Doris Meissner, who under President Clinton was head of the Border Patrol's former parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Even so, some of these things have failed more than they should have."
"The promise of technology has been oversold," Meissner warned. "And Congress is vulnerable to that overselling."
The White House now appears to see a virtual border curtain as a necessary trade-off to gain Bush's proposed guest-worker program. And for many voters, the need for a wall - preferably a physical one - has taken on a life of its own.
"The bumper stickers are all 'Build walls and hire guards,' " said James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.
"The wall is about politics, not about effectiveness," he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff confirmed what many experts had already suspected: Despite the approval by Congress last year of a 700-mile border fence, only about half of that will ever be built. |
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