Border Patrol “doing anything except patrolling the border”

Robert Pratt

“While agents in the Rio Grande Valley are working six days per week, Shawn Moran, vice president at-large of the… National Border Patrol Council, [says] some Border Patrol stations have had reductions [in agent hours worked] since the border crisis began,” reported National Review Online.

Former National Deputy Chief of Border Patrol Ronald Colburn told NRO the Obama administration is systematically implementing a liberal approach to illegal immigration that is “starving” Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officials’ operations.

“It’s ironic that over the past decade we’ve doubled the staffing levels of sworn uniformed armed officer personnel, yet we now find them with their sleeves rolled up repairing vehicles, processing paperwork, answering phones, changing diapers, mixing formulas, playing badminton with children—they’re doing anything except patrolling the border,” says Colburn… “And [it’s] contrary to their own mission, but it’s out of their hands.”

Does any of this really surprise us anymore? We spend and spend but get less and less effectiveness – it seems the same for most government programs. No wonder so many conservatives in the House and Senate are now balking at passing any kind of bill, even bills that attempt to deal only with the current unaccompanied-minor border crisis. Despite criticism I think the Cornyn/Cuellar bill is an acceptable short term effort to deal with the current situation but, I fully share the cynicism of its critics in Congress.

Border Patrol is an appropriate function of government but, government can’t even do it effectively and efficiently.