US Deploys Forces Along the Mexican Border

Published April 3rd, 2009

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking April 2 at the Mexico / United States Arms Trafficking Conference, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, has vowed that "we will win" in the battle against Mexican-based narcotics cartels, whose violence has metastasized in recent years, claiming thousand of lives and spilling across the border, into American towns and states.

U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have acknowledged in recent days that American demand for illegal drugs and easily obtainable American arms are fueling the expanding Mexican narco-war.

As Holder put it in Cuernavaca, the U.S. "shares responsibility for this problem and we will take responsibility by joining our Mexican counterparts in every step of this fight."

The Justice Department's next moves, Holder specified, will be to detail "100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner.

Those Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents will be going to the Houston field office, where they will support Gunrunner Impact Teams (GRITs), expected to focus on firearms trafficking.

• So far, according to the Department of Justice, Project Gunrunner has resulted in approximately 650 cases by ATF, in which more than 1,400 defendants were referred for prosecution in federal and state courts and more than 12,000 firearms were involved.
• Recovery Act funding for Gunrunner will establish new three permanent field offices, "dedicated to firearms trafficking investigations," according to the DoJ. Those new offices will be in McAllen, TX; El Centro, CA; and Las Cruces, NM, with a satellite office in Roswell, NM.
• In addition, Holder said, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion.

The latest additions mean that 29 percent of the DEA's domestic agents are now in its Southwest border field offices, according to the DoJ.

Holder called for an "attack in depth, on both sides of the border, that focuses on the leadership and assets of the cartel." Arrayed on the U.S. side of Holder's proposed attack in depth will be the Special Operations Division (SOD), a multi-agency task force headed by the DEA, whose mission is to "establish seamless law enforcement coordination, strategies and operations aimed at dismantling national and international narco-trafficking, narco-terrorists and other criminal organizations by attacking their command and control structure";

and various intelligence centers, such as the El Paso Intelligence Center and the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center, according to the DoJ. Holder likened the coming strategy to the "full-bore, prosecution-driven approach that the U.S. Department of Justice took to dismantle La Cosa Nostra -- once the most powerful organized crime group operating in the United States."

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