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Jewish World Review May 16, 2011 12 Iyar, 5771 Obama administration boasting about border security By Glenn Kessler
--President Obama, May 10, 2011
President Obama traveled to El Paso, Tex., Tuesday to give a speech on immigration, even though virtually no one in Washington thinks there is any desire in Congress to tackle the issue. For that reason, as colleague Chris Cillizza noted on “The Fix,” the speech should be understood as “a political document rather than a policy one.” In that context, it’s important for the president to demonstrate he is working hard to improve border security. We were struck by the section above, in part because it sought to claim credit for a doubling of agents but also acknowledged a debt to former president George W. Bush. (We will not delve in the historical question of whether “more boots on the ground” is accurate, since our colleagues at Politifact.com did a fine job of exploring that question last year.) How much did the Obama administration do on this issue?
The FactsThe Border Patrol, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for patrolling the borders with Canada and Mexico, as well as coastal waters around Florida, but the majority of its agents — 85 percent — are focused on the southern border with Mexico. At the time of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there were slightly more than 9,000 Border Patrol agents. Even after 9/11, growth in the Border Patrol was limited to about 500 a year until immigration became a hot issue. In 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which called for adding no less than 2,000 border agents a year “subject to the availability of appropriations.” Then, in 2006, President Bush announced he would immediately dispatch 6,000 National Guard members to the Southern Border states and seek to double the number of agents by quickly hiring 6,000 new ones. In his speech, Obama gave a nod to Bush’s actions, saying this was a “build up that began under President Bush and that we have continued.” This is a more elegant formulation than the phrasing used by Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, in briefings previewing the speech this week. Carney simply erased Bush out of the picture. On Monday, Carney said: “I think he [Obama] will make points about the steps we've taken on border security, the fact that the number of border agents today is double what it was in 2004.” On Tuesday, Carney said: “We have substantially increased the number of Border Patrol agents twice -- more than 20,000 now -- twice the number that there were in 2004.” However, that 20,000 number was on track to be achieved before Obama ever took the oath of office. By the end of fiscal year 2009, which began on Oct. 1, 2008, there were 20,119 Border Patrol agents. On Oct. 20, 2009, the Border Patrol website put up a notice saying it was no longer hiring: “The Border Patrol successfully filled the Presidential mandate of hiring 6,000 additional Border Patrol Agents (BPA) and presently has sufficient applicants to meet their continuing hiring goals. Therefore, the Reinstatement Program is indefinitely suspended and will no longer accept applications.” That would be Bush’s mandate. In fact, in the fiscal year 2011 budget, announced in early 2010, Obama proposed to let the number of border agents drop by 180 through attrition as a budget-saving maneuver. But then in June of last year, after Republican lawmakers balked at an immigration overhaul without a boost in border security, the administration suddenly requested an additional $600 million for security along the southwest border. The money in part would be used to hire an additional 1,000 agents. That bill passed a few months later. In its 2012 budget proposal, the Department of Homeland Security said that it had hired 439 additional agents in 2010 and was on track to have a total of 21,370 agents by the end of this fiscal year. Homeland Security said it would maintain that level in 2012. There are currently about 20,700 border agents, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said.
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An award-winning journalism career spanning nearly three decades, Glenn Kessler has covered foreign policy, economic policy, the White House, Congress, politics, airline safety and Wall Street. He was The Washington Post's chief State Department reporter for nine years, traveling around the world with three different Secretaries of State. Before that, he covered tax and budget policy for The Washington Post and also served as the newspaper's national business editor. Kessler has long specialized in digging beyond the conventional wisdom, such as when he earned a "laurel" from the Columbia Journalism Review
• 05/11/11: Kathleen Sebelius's outrageous claim that cancer patients would 'die sooner' under the GOP Medicare plan • 05/09/11: A gusher of oil rhetoric • 05/04/11: The Obama administration's odd claims on export growth • 04/28/11: How effective are sanctions in ‘changing behavior’? • 04/14/11: ‘Biggest cuts in U.S. history’? Well, no. • 04/08/11: Nancy Pelosi's absurd math on senior citizens losing their meals • 04/06/11: Hillary Clinton's uncredible statement on Syria • 03/25/11: Libya, Obama and the tragedy in Darfur • 03/22/11: Gifts of bogus statistics for the health-care law's birthday • 03/21/11: Mitch McConnell's not-so-happy birthday greetings for the health care law • 03/10/11: A job-loss statistic produced out of thin air • 03/10/17: A budget analogy that earns a Geppetto checkmark • 03/10/11: Four pinocchios for the American public on the budget • 03/09/11: Obama and the White House's ‘halfway’ fixation with the budget • 03/08/11: Foreign policy braggadocio on Libya and AIDS • 03/07/11: Democrats keep misleading on claimed budget ‘cuts’ • 03/01/11: Mike Huckabee is on to something here, but jumped the gun
• 02/25/11: Harry Reid's illusory $41 billion in budget cuts
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