Predators on the border

Washington Post:

 In the dead of night, from a trailer humming with surveillance monitors, a pilot for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency was remotely flying a Predator drone more than 1,000 miles away. 

From an altitude of 15,000 feet, over the desert ranch-lands of Arizona, the drone’s all-seeing eyeball swiveled and powerful night-vision infrared cameras zeroed in on a pickup truck rattling along a washboard road. 

“Hey, where’s that guy going?” the mission controller asked the camera operator of the drone, who toggled his joystick, glued to the monitors like a teenager with a Christmas morning Xbox.
This is the semi-covert cutting edge of homeland security, where federal law enforcement authorities are rapidly expanding a military-style unmanned aerial reconnaissance operation along the U.S.-Mexico border — a region that privacy watchdogs say includes a lot of American back yards. 

Fans of the Predators say the $20 million aircraft are a perfect platform to keep an watchful eye on America’s rugged borders, but critics say the drones are expensive, invasive, finicky toys that have done little — compared to what ordinary Border Patrol agents do on the ground — to stem the flow of illegal crossers, drug smugglers or terrorists. 

Over Arizona, the Predator circled the ranch, as unseen and silent as a hunting owl. On a bank of computer screens, the team watched the truck, which appeared in ghostly infrared black and white, turn and pull up at a mobile home. In the yard, three sleeping dogs quickly woke up, their tails clearly wagging. 

“Welcome home,” one of the agents said.


There are now eight Predators flying for U.S. Customs and Border Protection — five, and soon to be six, along the southwest border. After a slow rollout that began in 2005, government drones are now patrolling most of the southern boundary, from Yuma, Ariz., to Brownsville, Tex. 

To hear their boosters, Predators are the new, sexy, futuristic fix for immigration control, irresistible to border hawks and the so-called “Drone Caucus” in Congress, whose interests in homeland security and defense contractors neatly dovetail to produce a must-have technology to meet the still unrealized threat of spillover violence from Mexican drug cartels. 

California Republican Rep. Brian Bilray has said the drones are so popular that a Predator could be elected president. Texas Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar pronounced domestic drones “invaluable.” Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer called them “ideal for border security and counter-drug missions.” GOP presidential contender Texas Gov. Rick Perry argues that the solution to security along the frontier is not a border fence but more Predators. 

In his trips to testify on Capitol Hill, Michael Kostelnik, the retired U.S. Air Force general and former test pilot who runs the Office of Air and Marine for the Border Protection service, said that he’s never been challenged in Congress about the appropriate use of domestic drones. 

“Instead the question is: Why can’t we have more of them in my district?” Kostelnik said. 

Planning documents for the CBP envision as many as 24 Predators and their maritime variants in the air by 2016, giving the Border Protection agency the ability to put a drone up anywhere in the continental United States within three hours.

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 The mission over the Arizona ranch lands last month was typical. The Predator was searching for scouts who hide in the brush and signal with a cellphone when smugglers can attempt to cross with a load of marijuana or humans. The drone did not find any scouts on this night. The night before, however, they helped the Border Patrol in Texas capture a dozen illegal migrants.

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The critics privacy concerns do not make much sense o me. The flights are banned over urban areas, which means hey are flying over areas with minimal inhabitants.  Other critics complain about the cost, but getting the dame coverage from border agents on the ground would be significantly more expensive.  I think over time the cost will also go down.  As we leave Afghanistan, it will probably free up more birds for use on the border.