TOP STORY >>Building a better border

By Master Sgt. Bob Oldham

More than 30 members of the Arkansas Air National Guard’s 189th Civil Engineering Squadron and other members from around the 189th Airlift Wing helped secure America’s southern border with Mexico during a two-week deployment March 31-April 14.

Members welded fence into place three feet from the Arizona-Mexico border near Yuma, Ariz.

They also helped build a road, assisted with a lighting project and helped build a secondary and a tertiary fence along the border. The team partnered with the 190th Civil Engineering Squadron from Topeka, Kan.

The project, in support of Operation Jump Start, will cost taxpayers $1.123 billion over two years, according to Brig. Gen. Ulay Littleton, an Air National Guard officer in charge of Arizona’s task force.

Operation Jump Start is the National Guard Bureau’s response to President George W. Bush’s plan to send Guardsmen to the border to assist the U.S. Border Patrol for up to two years, allowing more Border Patrol agents to be moved from support jobs to the front lines in the nation’s daily battle with illegal immigrants.

Of the 6,000 Guardsmen on duty for OJS in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, 2,400 are along the border in Arizona working at observations posts and installing physical barriers, helping keep illegal aliens out. The two-year mission is set to end in July 2008.

Since Guardsmen arrived on the Arizona border last year, the Yuma sector has seen a 68 percent drop in illegals trying to cross the border.

While the fence is helping, Airmen and Soldiers at remote posts are also playing a major role, the general said. “We’ve put 120 badges back on the border,” he said.

The troops in the field use binoculars, night-vision goggles and thermal imaging to identify potential border crossings. They call in the Border Patrol on radios or satellite phone, depending on how remote their post is in the Arizona desert. Thanks to the efforts of Guardsmen and Border Patrol agents, the Yuma sector has stopped 36,500 pounds of illegal drugs from entering the country’s black market.

They’ve also seized nearly 70 vehicles and more than 10 weapons. When the mission is complete in 2008, the Guard will have built 3.3 miles of primary fence, 7.2 miles of lighting, 7.2 miles of 15-foot tall secondary fence and 7.2 miles of tertiary chain link fence.