Obama’s Border Efforts to Focus on Technology

The Obama Administration and the Department of Homeland Security is trying to improve border security by using technology that failed pilot tests during the Bush administration. DHS is working on a five-year plan that will link tower sensors along the 2,000-mile Southern border, which the department believes will speed up border agent’s response time to illegal aliens and drug smugglers.

The Obama Administration is moving away from the Bush Administration’s border fence project and trying to expand on the technological aspect of border security that Bush tested in the Tuscon, Ariz. area. Obama hopes to secure the border before moving on with amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens currently living in the United States.

“What the Obama administration is trying to do is sending this political message, ‘We’re doing enforcement,’ ” The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano said in a Washington Post article.

Carafano, who is a national security expert, went on to say that focusing on technology, though, could be “overpromising and under-delivering.” Between 1998-2005, the federal government spent more than $400 million on border surveillance that proved to be unsuccessful.

U.S. officials have begun erecting 17 camera and radio towers on a 23-mile stretch near Tucson. They expect to add 36 more this summer with plans to expand it across 320 miles of the Arizona border by 2012 and most of the Mexican border by 2014.

For more on this story, see the Washington Post.