235 National Guardsmen to arrive at border

National Guard troops are set to make another trip to the Rio Grande Valley to help federal agents secure the border.

The Valley is expected to receive 235 guardsmen as part of a yearlong deployment that begins Sunday.

The 1,200 troops assigned to the entire Southwest border region will be used to free U.S. Border Patrol agents to pursue illegal immigrants and drug smugglers along the border, as they did in 2008, for Operation Jump Start.

Former President George W. Bush signed Jump Start in 2006, ordering 6,000 troops to the border that year to bolster the Border Patrol while it hired thousands of new agents.

The guardsmen left as Border Patrol met its staffing goals, but a recent surge in violence on the Mexican side of the border prompted President Barack Obama to dispatch 1,200 soldiers to the region. Federal lawmakers are working on a $701 million emergency spending measure that would, in part, fund the hiring of another 1,200 Border Patrol agents.

As with Jump Start, guardsmen will not deal directly with arresting and detaining illegal immigrants caught on U.S. soil, Agent Joe Treviño, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, said.

Instead, the guardsmen will help Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers with reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering operations, Treviño said. That will allow more area Border Patrol agents to focus on actively patrolling and detaining immigrants and drug smugglers.

“They’ll be our eyes and ears out there,” Treviño said of the National Guard.

Guardsmen performed similar tasks during their last deployment to the border.

During Jump Start, guardsmen completed paperwork for sworn agents, maintained vehicles and installed security infrastructure such as light posts, sensors and cameras.

Agents apprehended more than 176,000 illegal immigrants during Jump Start and seized more than 321,000 pounds of marijuana and cocaine. Guardsmen also helped rescue 101 illegal immigrants.

Beyond reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, Treviño said the guardsmen’s precise tasks with the upcoming deployment will be decided on a “case-by-case basis.”

Despite Obama’s announcement of the deployment last month, Gov. Rick Perry says the federal government needs to do more to secure the state’s border with Mexico.

The largest number of troops — about 500 — will go to Border Patrol’s Tucson, Ariz. Sector, where agents have seen greater activity than in Texas.

Since January 2009, the governor has asked Obama to send 1,000 guardsmen to the state for border security, despite the hiring spree of Border Patrol agents under President Bush’s administration, Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said. The governor wants the National Guard to be placed under his control to be integrated with state authorities already deployed to the border.

Perry has criticized Texas’ share of the latest deployment as insufficient — just 250 troops, or about one soldier for every five miles of the state’s 1,254-mile border with Mexico. That gives Texas, which accounts for more than 60 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border, 20 percent of the total troop deployment.

“It’s not unreasonable to ask the federal government to pay for something that is their job to do in the first place,” Cesinger said. “The financial burden should not fall on the backs of Texas taxpayers.”

Cesinger said the governor wants an additional 3,000 Border Patrol agents on top of the 7,700 already in the state.