National Guard on the border made a difference

NY Times:

Swooping low over the Mexican border in her Blackhawk helicopter, Chief Warrant Officer Christina Engh-Schappert of the Virginia National Guard spots ... nothing. No sign of the migrants who would congregate in the washes for the mad dash to the United States. No clusters of people hiding in the bushes. Nobody in the throes of dehydration and heat exhaustion.

“At first we were constantly catching clients,” Ms. Engh-Schappert said later, using the Border Patrol vernacular for illegal immigrants. “It’s gone from pretty busy to hardly anything in our sector.”

Soon, she will be gone, too, along with 2,600 other members of the National Guard in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas where they are helping to secure the border with Mexico as part of a two-year mission called Operation Jump Start.

Phased down from a peak of more than 6,000 Guard members, the mission is scheduled to end July 15, although a smattering of Guard personnel are expected to remain or return as part of longstanding cooperation with the Border Patrol.

Here, they have built or shored up roads to give federal agents speedier access to the hilly and rocky terrain. They have fixed trucks and monitored cameras and sensors and stood guard in the wilderness, facilitating thousands of arrests by directing agents to illegal border crossers.

But just as Guard members pack up and bid farewell to the desert, an effort is intensifying to have them stay put. The Border Patrol has given the Guard credit for helping to deter and detect illegal crossings, so much so that the governors of the four border states and federal lawmakers now wonder aloud, Why stop now?

...

When President Bush first announced he was sending the Guard to the border, the border security lobby was skeptical and the open borders crowd was against it. Now most people recognize it was a success and think it should continue until the Border Patrol can get an adequate force to space ratio to stop the crossings. Even Democrats support keeping them there. The administration should reconsider its artificial deadline for withdrawing them. After all it opposes an artificial deadline in Iraq. It would be wise to oppose both deadlines.