The expansion of criminal activities along the border – including “coyotes,” who bring illegal immigrants into the United States and now also use them as drug mules, and crime as a funding source for terrorist groups – has led to a major U.S. reassessment. While the Mexican government continues to fight the cartels as something akin to a 21st century version of U.S. Prohibition-era gangs, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently reflected the new American perspective in calling them a criminal “insurgency,” seeking not to overthrow the government of Mexico, but to control it.

A July 2011 National Security Staff report – “Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime” – set out five primary policy objectives for a coordinated national and international approach to “constrain, shrink, disrupt and dismantle” transnational organized crime (TOC):

1.          protect Americans and our partners from the harm, violence and exploitation of transnational criminal networks;

2.          help partner countries strengthen governance and transparency, break the corruptive power of transnational criminal networks and sever state-crime alliances;

3.          break the economic power of transnational criminal networks and protect strategic markets and the U.S. financial system from TOC penetration and abuse;

4.          defeat transnational criminal networks that pose the greatest threat to national security by targeting their infrastructures, depriving them of their enabling means and preventing the criminal facilitation of terrorist activities; and

5.          build international consensus, multilateral cooperation, and public-private partnerships to defeat transnational organized crime.

All of which the Border Patrol and their law enforcement partners already were pursuing, at the “pointy end of the spear” level.

“Today these organizations often work as networks, loosely affiliated in some cases, smuggling whatever they can for profit, even independent of what the larger cartel has in their ‘mission statement.’ You might compare it to the counter-insurgency effort DoD [Department of Defense] has seen in recent years,” Fisher said.

“The typical investigative strategy we used years ago against the Mafia really doesn’t work here. We have seen arrests of individuals in charge of finance, for example, and it has not crippled the cartel, so you can’t just cut off the head of the snake and kill it any longer. Intelligence, investigation, and interdiction can no longer be looked at as mutually exclusive – nor can we go back to pursuing independent efforts.”

That assessment has led to making full cooperation a permanent part of law enforcement in the future, he added. One such example was creation of a Maritime Unified Command, under the Coast Guard in San Diego, to generate and distribute intel to help defeat threats coming in from the Pacific, such as smuggler boats launching out of Tijuana and landing on the beaches of Southern California. Another is seeking an end to interagency battles over jurisdiction.

“Looking at a potential threat from a national security standpoint – maybe a tunnel – we would go to the FBI and ask to work with them. As recently as 10 years ago, we might have been told to keep hands off because they already had an open case,” Fisher said. “But today that paradigm has shifted to a sharing of files and views of vulnerabilities of the target organization and jointly working on how to dismantle that organization.

“Which cannot be done in a vacuum. Whether we have Border Patrol agents assigned to the FBI Joint Terrorist Task Forces, to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] special teams, or a host of state, local, and regional task forces, we’re not there just to liaise, but to provide value and exercise our unique strategic ability to target and make law enforcement more impactful in that area.”

Employing those relatively new inter- and intra-agency agreements, as well as lessons learned from Mexico, the Border Patrol is intent on not standing still while the threat continues to evolve. It is, however, a task further complicated by budget cuts and force re-alignments, including the Obama administration’s plan to significantly reduce the National Guard presence along the border, which Lee said has been “a big force multiplier” in his sector.

“Obviously we will always keep abreast of any changes in [cartel] tactics and how we source those with technology, K-9 units, and personnel,” Lee said. “I don’t think much is likely to slip through, but we will always be looking for gaps and vulnerabilities.”

That includes the specially trained teams Fisher mentioned, now employed by every USBP sector – Border Patrol Tactical (BORTAC) units and Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR). Lee said his sector trained 114 agents for tactical response teams in 2010-2011, part of some 2,400 USBP agents in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.

“That’s about double where we were 10 years ago,” he noted. “Right now, the Rio Grande Valley is one of the priority areas for CBP. I don’t know if we will see any further gains in personnel, but we will be looking at the ability to use all DHS capabilities, including bringing in additional resources from neighboring sectors, as needed,” he added.

The USBP also is looking at incorporating appropriate military equipment coming back from Southwest Asia – and combat-experienced former warfighters who used it.