Kentucky Guards the Border

The Associated Press reported last week that the governor of Kentucky has agreed to send a contingent of the Kentucky National Guard to help patrol the southern border.

Kentucky will send up to 650 National Guard troops to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico under an agreement signed by Gov. Ernie Fletcher.

Fletcher said the soldiers could be deployed by July under a memorandum of agreement with several other states.

Fletcher said the troops will not be permanently used for immigration patrols. "It will be on a rotational basis for a short period of time — maybe for several weeks," Fletcher said. "Then they'd come back and we'd have another group go down."

There is no word yet on whether the Guard troops being deployed will include canine units utilizing the state's prized breed of hunting dogs.

Race for the Borders

I still do not think the president's plans for Guardsmen on the southern border — defined as "supportive roles only" — is nearly comprehensive enough, but I must admit I am impressed with the swiftness with which the implementation has begun.

The first wave of about 800 National Guard soldiers will head to the U.S-Mexico border as early as next week, including planners and leadership personnel who will stay longer than the planned 21-day missions, the National Guard chief told lawmakers Wednesday.

Lt. Gen. Steven Blum said 200 soldiers are preparing to go to the four border states — California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico — around June 1. He said the initial troops will be part of a longer-term force of project managers who will stay on the job over time to provide continuity in the new border program.

Homeland Security officials again stated that the Guardsmen will be armed for personal defense, but that they "would not do significant law enforcement duties"; rather, their supportive role would be to provide "engineering, road and fence building, transportation, logistics and surveillance and reconnaissance" for Border Patrol agents. I trust, however, that they their deployment orders would allow them to "defend themselves" if encountering any armed Mexican military incursions.

UPDATE: Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, gave the following report to members of the House Armed Services Committee today:

"This limited, temporary deployment will not adversely affect operational readiness or DoD's ability to conduct the global war on terrorism, nor hinder the National Guard's ability or capacity to aid their states in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency," Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, said in his prepared remarks. The maximum 6,000 National Guard members to support the mission represent just 2 percent of the Guard force, Blum noted. That number, even when added to the 71,000 National Guard members currently deployed in support of the war on terror, "still leaves a pretty robust inventory of over 350,000 citizen soldiers" to respond to hurricanes and other natural disasters, he said.

McHale told committee members the border-security mission will track closely with the counternarcotics mission the National Guard has been conducting along the southwest border for more than two decades. "The difference is the size of the force, and the commitment of resources will be far greater than anything we have done in the past," he said.

Racial Profiling on the Border

Once again, political correctness runs amok:

Worried about possible racial profiling in El Paso County, a South Texas lawmaker has asked Gov. Rick Perry to specify how the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition is permitted to spend nearly $10 million in border security grant money. [snip]

[Sen. Juan] Hinojosa expressed concern that people are being detained in both the roadblocks and the raids on a hunch that they "look" illegal. He said some residents have even complained that they were asked for a Social Security card as a tactic to figure out whether they were illegal immigrants.

This is almost as ridiculous a complaint as those who railed against the government when Arab males were being searched at airports in an attempt to detect radical Islamic terrorists.