Senators call for openness in contingency plans for violence along U.S.-Mexico border

Texas’ U.S. senators called for more openness from President Barack Obama’s administration Wednesday on its response plans for escalating violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But the exact terms of the situation to which they asked the federal government to respond remain a matter of confusion.

In a letter to the president, Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both Republicans, urged him to provide a full briefing on the border security situation and to visit the border region himself in the near future. They also asked Obama to outline a concrete plan to members of Congress addressing the ongoing violence.

They join a growing group of state and local officials who have pushed for some sort of federal response to reports of escalating border violence in recent weeks.

But while some argue that Mexican drug violence has spilled over to Texas and is directly affecting border residents, others maintain that significant spillover has yet to occur.

“The impression that we have is that violence is overtaking Mexico to the extent that we have an almost lawless situation there,” McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez said. “But to suggest that that threat currently exists for U.S. communities is ridiculous.”

SPILLOVER OR NOT?

Cornyn’s own statements Wednesday straddled both sides of that line.

“The spillover violence in Texas is real and escalating,” Cornyn and Hutchison wrote in their letter to the president. “Our border patrol agents and local law enforcement are more regularly engaged with gunmen associated with drug cartels.”

He contradicted himself, however, in a conference call with reporters later in the day in which he said, “As far as the Texas border is concerned, we have not had spillover violence, per se.”

The senator’s staff later said that he misspoke in his second statement, pointing to a kidnapping case at a McAllen Walmart that Rodriguez described earlier this week as “cartel related.”

Rodriguez said Wednesday, however, that his office had no evidence linking the abduction directly to Mexican drug trafficking organizations.

“I think they are misinformed,” the chief said. “Those leaps can eventually be made in every drug-related case, but at this time there is no known direct nexus to cartel activity.”

Gov. Rick Perry, too, has offered similar mixed messages in recent days.

On Tuesday, he initiated the first phase of his own spillover violence contingency plan, while renewing calls for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to send 1,000 National Guard troops and unmanned Predator drones to secure the state’s southern frontier.

“How many Americans will have to die before our federal government takes serious action along the Texas-Mexico border?” Perry said in a statement issued Monday. “For years, they have failed in their vital duty to secure the border, resulting in escalating violence.”

Meanwhile, during campaign stops as recent as last week, he continues to tout a 60 percent drop in border crime overseen by his administration.

Describing the border region as plagued by drug violence has needlessly scared residents of the area while contributing to misperceptions in the rest of the country about the realities in the region, Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño said.

“How can you claim that the crime rate in this whole area has dropped, while at the same time saying that crime is out of control?” he said. “Explain that to me.”

DEFINING TERMS

The confusion seems to lie in semantic differences.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Southwest Border Task Force issued two definitions key to the ongoing debate.

Border violence, the group said, consists of the routine violent crime that happens in border communities as a result of the drug trade. The task force, however, distinguished this from “spillover violence,” which it defined as incursions by Mexican drug cartels into U.S. territory.

Border residents have been dealing with the first issue for as long as there have been drugs moving through the area, said Treviño, who also serves as a vice chair of the panel.

Spillover violence has remained relatively isolated, despite an escalation of cartel-related attacks over the past month on the Mexican side of the border.

“I have no problem with more security,” the sheriff said. “But the problem I do have is that this instills fear within our local constituency.”

Both the federal and state governments have had contingency plans in place since last year to deal with the threat of spillover violence. Details of both have not been publicly disclosed because they contain sensitive law enforcement information.

But even Cornyn, who argued Wednesday that those plans should be shared with members of Congress, acknowledged that his colleagues in Washington may have a skewed sense of the current state of the border.

“Part of the problem in here is that the knowledge people think they have about the border is derived from reading novels and watching movies,” he said. “It would be beneficial for the president to come down and see it himself.”

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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 587-9377.