Daily Border Bulletin: Texas Border Coalition Report Only Half Right, Ports Must Be Funded, The Administration Has A Plan

Your Daily Border Bulletin is up! Today's border bulletin focuses on a recent Texas Border Coalition report on Ports of Entries along the Southwest Border.

A new report highlights some of the positive results of the Obama Administrations strategy to improve safety and commerce along the Southwest Border while also highlighting work to be done.

Any reasonable look at the data from the past several years makes clear that the new joint Mexican-US strategy is improving the region. Deportations of criminal immigrants, southbound seizures of bulk cash and illegal guns are way up.  We have seen a steady decrease in the number of migrants crossing the border, the number of undocumented immigrants in the country.  Finally crime rates along the US side of the border are all down.  Just last year El Paso, a border city across from Ciudad Juarez one of the most dangerous cities in the world, was named the safest city in the country with a population of 500,000 or more.

While the violence on the Mexican side of the border is still at unacceptable levels, there has been no measurable spillover of the cartel violence into the United States.  So while the things we don’t want happening along the US side of the border are decreasing, the things we do want – trade and legal traffic of people – are increasing.

The Texas Border Coalition’s recent report on the need to fund our ports of entry more fully gets much right in its acknowledgement that the trade relationship between Mexico and the U.S. is of profound significance for the both of our countries. NDN recently released a report on this important relationship. We also agree that we absolutely need to do more to staff our ports of entries in order to facilitate the movement of legal commerce, people and stop narcotics from entering the country.

However it is factually incorrect to say that the federal government does not have a strategy for the ports of entries along the southwest border.

For the full piece be sure to check out the rest of todays border bulletin here.

Also Featured in today's Border Bulletin Congressman Silvestre Reyes weighs in on the work the Administration is doing in the Southwest:

Congressman Silvestre Reyes, has been trying to pass legislation to enhance our ports of entry to the tune of $5 billion dollars for some time, points out that the President Obama’s 2012 budget includes increases in CBP officers:

“I understand that true border security is not achieved through higher fences, but by combining needed changes in immigration laws with additional resources and personnel to staff the border and ports of entry. Expanded funding is also needed to accommodate trade and commerce to increase jobs and opportunity in our region.” Congressman Reyes continued, “I have also urged the White House and the House Appropriations Committee to further increase the number of CBP officers, and both President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal and the Fiscal Year 2012 House Homeland Security Appropriations bill included funding for an additional 300 CBP officers.“

For supplemental information on the Administrations Counternarcotic Strategy please click here.