The Bush Administration is preparing to send the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border in five days but how prepared is the country’s infrastructure for the influx of help coming to the south?

There’s two points to look at here. The first is to ask, what strategies will be implemented to maximize the use of the extra manpower?

The second is what is going to happen to those strategies if the National Guard troops are suddenly called out to other parts of the country?

Democrats are finding that California will be woefully unprepared for any disaster with guardsmen working the border.

I’ve seen no questioning about upcoming emergencies in Arizona, but this is supposed to be a key wildfire season in this state.

Right now there exists about 3,700 agents and inspectors on the Arizona border.

- 2,400 Tucson Sector agents
- 650 Yuma Sector agents
- 700 Customs and Border Protection agents and inspectors at Arizona ports of entry

Six thousand troops will be deployed to the four border states.

Assuming we receive one-fourth of the troops, that’s a little more than 40 percent increase in border security manpower.

The idea looks great on paper: Build up manpower on the border and apprehensions will skyrocket.
The numbers will be impressive for a time as apprehensions increase tenfold.

But apprehensions are misleading because the same person captured 20 times is simply listed as 20 apprehensions.

The Homeland Security Department, which oversees the Border Patrol, has consistently turned down requests to get accurate arrest data.

So, even though apprehensions will increase, we won’t know whether additional border security is actually having an effect.

Preempting any backlash about inexperienced troops on the border, the administration has said these National Guard soldiers will serve in a support role for federal agents, i.e., manning checkpoints, and monitoring video surveillance camera towers.

What we haven’t heard is what the agents will be doing with their freed up time.

Does the build-up mean that Tucson sector’s deterrence program is dead?

The program was initiated in the 1990s by then-Tucson sector chief David Aguilar and basically, it placed Border Patrol agents at obvious points throughout the sector as a deterrent force, one that would cause illegal border crossers to scurry elsewhere rather than chase them once they penetrated the border.

It was a method put in place to maximize the use of each agent but it came at a time when there were less than 1,200 agents in the Tucson sector.

Now we have more than twice that number.

The Tucson sector has said nothing about whether they’ll do away with the policy once more agents are freed up to man the lines.

Or is there going to be a manning of the lines? Will agents be deployed like a football field line of defense?

We haven’t been told.

What we do know is this:

Unless the freed-up agents are deployed in a consistent manner, an old drama is going to be re-played.

Portions of the sectors will be closed off and the incessant illegal traffic will merely shift to other areas, much as it’s already shifting toward the eastern back country of San Diego County and to the Yuma Sector.