Aaron Glantz, OneWorld USThu May 25, 12:42 AM ET
SAN FRANCISCO, May 24 (OneWorld) - Though President George W. Bush's plan to send 6,000 members of the National Guard to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border is meeting with little resistance in Washington, residents of the Texas border town of Redford are not so easily convinced.
On Monday, the U.S. Senate voted 83-10 to support the move, and a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted over the weekend found 74 percent support for the deployment.
But the last time U.S. soldiers were sent to the border in 1997, a camouflaged U.S. Marine shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an 18-year-old Mexican-American shepherd, while he herded goats near his Redford home.
The Marines "were in a listening and observation post about 300 yards away from this young man when he was shot," Hernandez family attorney Bill Weinacht recalled from his office in Pecos, Texas. "They were sitting there in the brush in full camouflage looking for drug activities and they got bored after a while. When Hernandez shot off a .22, the Marines shot him."
In 1998, the Pentagon granted a $1.9 million settlement to the Hernandez family and suspended anti-drug patrols on the border.
Weinacht told OneWorld he hopes the military has learned some lessons from the last time around, but he doubts any military deployment can be successful. "When you have soldiers on the border, you have to make sure they're properly trained. But if you're going to spend a lot on training why not just train more border patrol?"
In a speech last Thursday President Bush said National Guard troops would remain on the border until 2008--until more Border Patrol agents could be hired and trained.
"It is going to take time to get the technology in place and it's going to take time to train the Border Patrol agents," Bush said Thursday in Arizona. "And yet, the need to enforce the border is urgent, and that is why in coordination with our governors, we are going to send 6,000 National Guard troops to be deployed on the southern border."
But some experienced National Guardsmen said it would be wrong to send the Guard to the border for any length of time. "He's just playing politics," the former commander of the California National Guard, Brig. Gen. Ezzel Ware [retired] told OneWorld.
The measure that passed the Senate this week would limit the tour of National Guardsmen on the border to 21 days, making long-term training difficult. Some 71,000 members of the Guard are already deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The rules of engagement on the border are totally different from what the National Guard is trained to do," Ware added. "The National Guard is a fighting force and we're trained to fight the enemy. People crossing the border are not necessarily our enemies. They need to be handled in a different way."
In any case, immigrant rights activists doubt the National Guard plan will have much effect on the flow of people across the border. "It's not going to work," said Saul Soto of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights, which organized a demonstration with Hernandez's family in Redford over the weekend.
"People in other parts of the country might think the border is a line, but it's more complicated than that. There's a river there and lots of communities that the National Guard aren't going to know anything about."
Soto predicted putting the Guard on the border would simply compel migrants to cross in more dangerous, deserted locations--driving up the cost of crossing and putting more money into the hands of smugglers.
What would work, he said, is a comprehensive immigration policy that allows more immigrants to come to the Untied States legally. "It's supply and demand," he said.
As for those undocumented immigrants already in the U.S., Soto said there needs to be a "path to citizenship. Give people a chance to earn the right to live here legally."
The U.S. Senate is also considering a complicated measure that would allow many of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants to "earn" citizenship after first paying a large fine and registering with the Department of Homeland Security. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told reporters in Washington he expects the measure to be approved by the end of the week.
