U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will begin sharing drug intelligence with other federal agencies and lift its current cap limiting agents investigating narcotics smuggling, the agency's assistant secretary announced Thursday.

The moves - all part of a new interagency agreement signed with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration - are expected to increase the number of personnel focused on drug trafficking on the Southwest border and minimize overlapping efforts.

"It's long overdue," said ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton in a conference call with reporters. "We're dealing with an outdated agreement with our two agencies that didn't allow us to be as nimble as we needed to be in the modern world of drug trafficking."

Since 2006, law enforcement on both sides of the border have escalated their fight against Mexico's drug cartels - organizations blamed for 3,000 deaths in Mexico since the start of this year and the growth of ancillary crimes in the United States such as cash and weapons smuggling.

But as a series of recent government reports has outlined, even while cooperation with state and local police and their Mexican counterparts is at an all time high, the federal agencies at the forefront of the war on drugs continue to have trouble communicating with each other.

Thursday's agreement was in part prompted by a March study done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that found that "an outdated interagency agreement and long-standing disputes involving ICE's drug enforcement role and DEA's oversight ... have led to conflicts and potential duplicative efforts."

The GAO - a nonpartisan agency that studies government spending - noted that ICE was not contributing as fully as it could be to interagency organized crime task forces and that both agencies needed clearer guidelines on where their jurisdictions began and ended.

To address those concerns, Thursday's agreement will allow an unlimited number of ICE agents to investigate narcotics violations both at smuggling points and in the U.S. interior. Previously, that number was capped at fewer than 1,500.

ICE will also fully share information electronically through an organized crime fusion center, allowing DEA, the FBI and other participating agencies access to each other's case information, Morton said.

"As drug traffickers become more aggressive and violent, they must be countered by greater coordination, cooperation and information sharing," said Michele M. Leonhart, acting DEA administrator.

But as ICE and DEA worked to define the boundaries of each agency Thursday, another GAO report outlined recent clashes between the immigration agency and another federal law enforcement group.

The study, released that same day, found ICE and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives "do not coordinate their efforts in part because of a lack of clear roles and responsibilities."

"Additionally, the agencies generally have not ... gathered, analyzed and reported data that could be useful to help plan and assess results of their efforts to address arms trafficking to Mexico," the document states.

The report outlines a number of instances in which the two agencies actually hindered investigations initiated by the other. In one case, the target of an ICE investigation turned out to be an undercover ATF agent working on bringing down a drug smuggling ring.

In another instance, ATF failed to notify ICE about a covert operation in which agents delivered U.S. weapons to Mexico in an attempt to ferret out illegal buyers.

This failure to coordinate with each other has sometimes become evident in the midst of ongoing local investigations, several Rio Grande Valley law enforcement officials said.

Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño has deputies assigned to multiple task forces involving investigators from agencies such as ICE, DEA, ATF and the FBI. And while his investigators have been working more closely with these federal agencies than ever before, they have also at times found themselves caught in turf wars.

"We used to get caught in the middle all the time," Treviño said. "We had to go with whoever initiated the investigation. We weren't choosing one agency over the other."

Still, the sheriff said, these conflicts appear to be limited to administrators in regional offices and in Washington, D.C., and do not include the men and women working border enforcement in the Valley.

"A lot of these disagreements were in the upper echelons of the agencies - not at the ground level where the real work is done," he said. "There, we're all working together."

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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.