Mexico v Iraq?

A small item buried in last Sunday’s Brownsville (TX) Herald is worth a second look. With great bally-hoo before the last U.S. election, President Bush (and Texas Governor Rick Perry) sent National Guard troops to “stop the invasion” and said they’d be here until there were enough Border Patrol agents to take up the slack.

The border patrol has been beefing up and there are more and more of them around, but nowhere near the numbers “promised” by Bush and Perry. Seems priorities have changed. I guess there isn’t any “Mexican invasion,” or else those terrorists who supposedly are massing to cross the border have all taken a wrong turn, and ended up back in Iraq. At least until the next round of U.S. elections.

EDINBURG — The Texas National Guard has reassigned hundreds of soldiers deployed along the state’s southern border and expects to remove several more before the end of the summer, military officials confirmed this week.

The shift is expected to free up more guardsmen for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and bolster the state’s preparedness for emergency management at home.

But it could also stymie the U.S. Border Patrol’s efforts to increase manpower along the Rio Grande and slow the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants across the border.

The drawdown comes as part of a planned de-escalation of Operation Jump Start — a controversial security initiative that deployed 6,000 guardsmen to border regions in four states last year to tide over the Border Patrol until it could follow a Bush Administration plan to hire and train an equal number of new agents by 2008’s end.

“We are scaling back in the Valley sector,” said National Guard Lt. Col. Orlando Salinas, who has coordinated border security efforts for the Rio Grande Valley’s National Guard battalion. “As more and more new Border Patrol agents are coming in, our soldiers are heading out.”

Last May, President Bush urged governors in Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico to send the troops for what he described as a “state of emergency” along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry deployed 1,700 soldiers in support of Operation Jump Start, many of whom arrived in the Valley sector.

Keep the Mex Files surge funded…