Joel Millman at The Wall Street Journal reports today on a major shift away from the traditional crossings of seasonal laborers, who may have once paid a small sum to a “coyote” to help them cross the border, towards a Mexican gang-driven trade that’s led to a proliferation of “drop-houses” in the United States, particularly in Arizona, where border enforcement in the desert has been less successful than in California and Texas. There are reportedly about a thousand such “drop houses” in Arizona now.

Gang members hold immigrants hostage at these houses until either the immigrants or their future employers pay up. In one recent case, The Journal reports, “the men were being shaken down for as much as $5,000 apiece, a ransom above the $1,000 that each had agreed to pay before being spirited across the border.”

So far, the Department of Homeland Security has been addressing border violence as largely a law enforcement problem. The growing impact on immigrants, however, could create more pressure on the Obama administration to legalize the border crossings of some foreign workers as part of a broader plan for comprehensive immigration reform that immigrants’ rights groups and even labor unions have been advocating.

Implementation of DHS Secure Communities Initiative: $14.0 million and 172 positions (44 attorneys) to implement a Department of Homeland Security initiative, Secure Communities, which will significantly increase EOIR’s [Executive Office for Immigration Review] workload. This funding will enable EOIR to staff 28 additional Immigration Judge Teams. Secure Communities represents a new comprehensive approach to remove all criminal aliens held in the United States prisons and jails. The DHS enforcement activity, particularly as it relates to the Secure Communities Initiative, will have significant ramifications for EOIR, adding tens of thousands of additional cases and appeals to an already burgeoning workload. Immigration and Customs Enforcement received $200 million in FY 2008 to begin Secure Communities. The funding requested for EOIR will ensure that EOIR has sufficient resources to adjudicate cases in a timely manner. The requested program increase will also establish a baseline for this initiative. [Emphasis added.]

Although Napolitano did say she supports the DREAM Act — which would provide some children of undocumented immigrants raised in the United States a path to legalization if they complete two years of college or military service — Napolitano carefully avoided questions about whether a comprehensive immigration reform bill should include broader opportunities for legalization of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Her refusal to offer an opinion on that highlights just how controversial and politically dicey that issue will be as a new proposal for comprehensive immigration reform gets hammered out over the next few months.

Napolitano’s refusal to sanction legalization seemed to please Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the new ranking Republican on the committee, who pressed the issue by saying that while “we need to fix our immigration system” in his view, “the American people correctly are dubious of a plan that gives lawfulness now to people who came in illegally without confidence that the legal system is going to work in the future.”

That “amnesty” would become “a magnet or a message abroad,” he said. “When the American people realize that the broken pipe is being fixed … we can have a far better discussion about how to deal fairly and humanely with people who have been here a long time.” That echoes a common argument from restrictionist quarters that strict border enforcement must precede any considerations of legalization.

Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary Committee chairman, presented a more sympathetic case for legalizing undocumented immigrants now “living in the shadows” and tried to elicit Napolitano’s support. She wasn’t biting.

The secretary refused to say she supports legalization, saying only, in response to Leahy’s question about whether it makes sense to try to deport 11 million people, that “the sheer logistics of doing that are overwhelming.”

The U.S.-Mexico border fence ends on the Pacific coastline of California (Photo/Bisayan lady, Flickr)

“The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand,” Obama said to roaring applause. “The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

Eight months later, hundreds of miles of border fence dividing the United States and Mexico are going up as planned. Despite pleas from some Democrats, environmentalists and local communities to halt construction until the wall’s impacts can be better examined, the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama has so far maintained the same border fence policies as the DHS under President Bush — a position reminiscent of the Obama’s continued support of certain controversial Bush terrorism policies.

The status quo approach comes as something of a surprise. Although, as a senator, Obama voted in 2006 to approve the fence strategy, he said on the campaign trail last year that he would “reverse” Bush-era fence policies in favor of a “better approach,” like deploying more border guards and installing better surveillance technologies.

More recently, his appointment of a vocal fence critic, former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, to head the DHS signaled to many observers that fence policy would be soon to change. (Napolitano once mocked the border fence concept as futile, saying that “if you build a 50-foot-high wall, somebody will find a 51-foot ladder.”) At the very least, fence critics hoped that the Obama White House would reinstate dozens of environmental, public health and cultural heritage laws that the Bush administration waived to expedite fence construction, including statutes designed to protect endangered species, drinking water and Native American graves.

Yet more than two months after both Obama and Napolitano were sworn in, those waivers remain in place. And they’ll stay there, officials say, at least until the 670-mile-long first phase of fence construction is complete.

“We’ve committed to 670 miles,” said Lloyd Easterling, spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a branch of the DHS. “We’re going to go ahead and meet those goals.”

Easterling said “there was some question about stopping construction” when the new administration arrived, but the idea never materialized.

For environmentalists and congressional Democrats worried about the wall’s effects on local communities and ecosystems, the episode presents a dilemma. On one hand, these Obama supporters are optimistic that the young administration will eventually make good on its vows to break away from Bush’s border policies. On the other, they’re wary that the changes aren’t yet installed, allowing fence construction to continue through some of the most sensitive wilderness lands in the country. And of course, once a section goes up, it won’t be easy to get down.

For the administration, the fence is a political landmine that touches on a host of issues no less volatile than immigration, national security, landowner rights, the war on drugs and the environment. Complicating the debate, border violence has crescendoed in the last year, putting pressure on policymakers at all levels of government to prevent that crime from spilling further into the United States than it’s already come.

Still, some fence critics are beginning to challenge the White House to follow through on its pledges to examine fence policy more closely. In February, a group of eight border-state Democrats called on Obama to suspend fence construction until its impacts — cultural, political and environmental — could be scrutinized. The fence was “ill conceived” and “void of any meaningful input from the local communities,” the lawmakers wrote in a Feb. 10 letter to the president. “In an era of advanced technologies, the border fence is an antiquated structure that has torn our communities apart and damaged our cross border relationships.”

One signatory was Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D), who represents the Southeastern tip of Texas. In a telephone interview last week, Ortiz said that members of his office have met with Napolitano’s staff, adding that the new administration has been much more receptive than the last to lawmakers’ concerns about the fence. But Ortiz was also quick to reiterate his opposition to the waivers — and to the continued construction of the fence itself.

“It doesn’t sit well with the people in my district,” he said. “They don’t like it, [and] I don’t like it.”

Aaron Hunter, spokesman for Rep. Susan Davis, a Southern California Democrat who also signed the letter, said last week that the White House has not responded to the lawmakers’ concerns.

Easterling, the CBP spokesman, said the agency doesn’t have far to go to complete the first phase of construction. As of last week, he said, 613 of the 670 miles were up, and the remaining sections — most of which reside in California and Texas — should be finished by year’s end. Afterwards, he added, the administration will pause for a broader review before continuing to the next phase.

That there are fewer than 60 miles remaining in the first phase of construction has done little to stop fence opponents from pushing to have it stopped. Michael Degnan, Sierra Club lands representative, said that some of the unbuilt sections — including stretches in California’s Otay Mountain Wilderness Area and the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas — are also the most isolated, and therefore the most worthy of protecting from development. The wall, environmentalists say, cuts straight through the heart of breeding corridors used by such threatened species as the jaguar, ocelot and low-flying cactus ferruginous pygmy owl.

“Some of the last places are also the most ecologically rich,” Degnan said.

Last week the Sierra Club, which endorsed Obama the candidate, urged Obama the president to halt all current and future fence construction “to review the full impacts and effectiveness” of the imposing barrier.

There are other concerns associated with the border wall. In August, flooding attributed to the fence damaged Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and another flood a month earlier caused millions of dollars of property damage on both sides of the border near Nogales, Ariz.

In 2007, 69 graves of the Tohono O’odham tribe were destroyed by fence construction south of Tuscon, with fragments of human bone discovered in the bulldozer tracks, the tribe’s chairman testified before a congressional panel last year.

Fence critics contend that the waived laws — which include the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — could have prevented such crises.

“If they’d followed the procedure and done the proper impact studies,” Matt Clark, of Defenders of Wildlife, said of the flooding, “they might have avoided a disastrous situation.”

Easterling said the CBP has “been very cognizant” of the wall’s effects, maintaining that the agency has conducted all the appropriate impact reviews. The waivers, he added, were necessary only to prevent lawsuits from hindering the process — a claim strongly disputed by environmentalists.

“There was really no reason for them to waive those laws unless they had reason to think they couldn’t comply with them,” Clark said.

Still, border fence critics have been much easier on the Obama administration than they were on President Bush. When the Bush administration announced a year ago that it was waiving roughly three dozen environmental laws, a number of powerful Democrats signed their support to a Defenders of Wildlife lawsuit contending that the waivers were unconstitutional — an effort spearheaded by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). Requests for comment from nearly all the supporters of that push — including Thompson, who was traveling on the border with Napolitano last week — went unanswered.

In another effort to protect the border environment, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who signed the Feb. 10 letter to Obama, introduced legislation in the last Congress to revoke the waivers — a bill that has yet to resurface this year. Calls and emails to Grijalva’s office also went unanswered.

Politically speaking, the silence is understandable. With the sharp increase in border drug violence making headlines nationwide, very few lawmakers appear willing to criticize the waivers or the fence for fear of being attacked for protecting ocelots above Arizonans.

The Washington Times neatly summarized this disdain for waiver opponents in an April 1 editorial, entitled “All the Pretty Mule Deer.” The paper argued that the fence is a vital, if imperfect, law enforcement tool protecting the U.S. from a tsunami of criminality.

“When floodwaters are approaching, you begin filling sandbags to buttress the levee,” the Times wrote. “You do not go to court to debate what type of sand to use.”

Still, fence critics hope the Obama administration will step in sooner than later with a broad and revamped strategy for tackling the many thorny border issues — a strategy they hope will move away from the current reliance on an intrusive physical barrier dividing border communities and scarring delicate landscapes.

“Putting up a fence,” said Hunter, “is not a comprehensive immigration policy.”

That money, turned over to the state in the form of a FEMA Fire Management Assistance Grant, may be more than a year and half in coming, but do not accuse the Department of Homeland Security of turning a Katrinalike blind eye to wildfire danger in the state.

FEMA officials in Region VIII, which includes Colorado, insist they are all over the wildfire situation in the Centennial State, which is enduring more droughtlike conditions on the Front Range this winter and lately has been whipped by brutal winds. In fact wildfire season has already started (or maybe it never ended), with a blaze near Fort Carson in Colorado Springs this week.

Thing is, FEMA by law can’t get into the mitigation business by helping to clear millions of acres of pine trees killed by a beetle epidemic brought on by aging forests, fire suppression and years of drought and warm temperatures. The agency’s role is mostly to write a check after the fact, although it does engage in disaster preparedness, consulting with local agencies.

Crazy as that seems, with the costs of cleaning up a Haymanlike blaze far outstripping prevention and mitigation, it’s the cash-strapped U.S. Forest Service that’s mostly in charge of forest health.

State lawmakers and local politicians from mountain communities just last week headed to Washington to lobby for any federal funds they could find, but it’s thin pickings these days on Capitol Hill.

Olavarria, in particular, signals a major change for DHS.

Not only does she come from the progressive CAP, but she spent almost 10 years as counsel to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees. Her work there included proposals on comprehensive immigration reform. Olavarria started her career as an immigrants’ advocate when she was a managing attorney of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center; she has also been directing attorney of the American Immigration Lawyers Association Pro Bono Project and staff attorney at the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami.

Here’s what the National Immigration Forum had to say about today’s choices:

In selecting John Morton, the President has chosen a seasoned federal prosecutor who understands the importance of documenting the facts and ensuring government transparency. These skills will be immediately relevant to the review and assessment ordered by Secretary Janet Napolitano of controversial and loosely managed immigration programs, including partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies and detention conditions for immigrants. The head of ICE will be key in moving DHS towards the vision Secretary Napolitano articulated in her recent directive, “Smart, resolute enforcement by the department can keep Americans safe, foster legal immigration to America, protect legitimate commerce, and lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive reform.”

Esther Olavarria is deeply committed to the goal of crafting immigration policies that are both enforceable and enforced. No person is better suited to help the Secretary and the President understand what ails our current immigration mess and what needs to be done to restore legality, transparency, and fairness to our immigration system.

In an interesting moment of synchronicity with civil liberties advocates, DHS admits, yeah, there may be a few problems.

The assessment — which borrows heavily from earlier reports by internal watchdogs, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and General Accountability Office (GAO) — lists a cavalcade of privacy, transparency and oversight concerns about the fusion centers:

• Privacy: The report concludes that “…frequent and serious privacy violations will erode public confidence in the important purposes of the Initiative.” DHS adopts CRS and GAO recommendations that fusion centers step up their privacy training, establish privacy committees to work with local advocates, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and make their policies available to the public.

• Oversight: Concerns are raised about who’s in charge and who’s watch-dogging the intelligence-gathering mentioned in the assessment, which echo one of many problems outlined in The Colorado Independent’s own reporting on the fusion center that is based in a nondescript office park in Centennial.

• Military-private sector collaboration: One area that is sure to get civil libertarians up in arms is the conflation of businesses and intelligence-gathering, as evidenced by the firestorm set off by the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program involving communications giant AT&T and other firms. The DHS report claims that the perceptions that fusion centers have access to vast amounts of private-sector data is “largely unfounded.”

• Data Mining: The report states that the term “data mining” isn’t well understood by the public, which raises concerns about protecting the privacy of personal information collected by the fusion centers and distributed throughout the intelligence food chain. Yet, without a hint of irony, DHS acknowledges that it doesn’t have any 2008 data from the centers to analyze for compliance with federal privacy rules.

• Excessive secrecy: The department recognizes that its veiled activities are “responsible for the mischaracterization of fusion centers as mini-spy agencies or akin to the FBI’s discredited — and long abandoned — COINTELPRO program.” To counter that perception, it encourages the local fusion centers to make public its privacy policies and legal authority to collect and compile clandestine data — an admirable goal that, by DHS’ own admission, still hasn’t been implemented a decade after the first fusion center was established.

• Inaccurate or incomplete information: In probably the most Orwellian notation in the report, concerns about erroneous data creeping into the information bank are blithely dismissed because “… fusion centers are already practiced in regularly reviewing and purging incorrect or stale information.” The recommendation continues that individuals should be able to seek redress to correct mistaken information contained in a secret, terrorism-busting database, although the subject likely has no knowledge of being monitored or having personal information collected and mined by law enforcement.

• Mission Creep: Lastly, the assessment agrees with a CRS conclusion that the fusion centers have gravitated far beyond their initial counterterrorism missions and now include a broader spectrum of crimes as well as a seemingly limitless “all-hazards” scope. The CRS report continues that there is no one model for how state-based fusion centers should be structured and that they must rely on their own patchwork of state privacy and transparency laws since DHS has no jurisdiction in the new missions.

Precious little has been reported on the Dec. 11 fusion center assessment, but as Ars Technica sarcastically notes:

Readers looking for real meat, alas, will have to wait for one of the promised updates: the current report has the distinct feel of a product hurried to press in order to meet a statutory deadline, and reads, for the most part, like a high school book report cobbled together from newspaper reviews. Though it stresses transparency as a key to bolstering public trust in fusion centers, it contains no real information about how (or whether) the formal principles developed by DHS are being implemented. If fusion centers were a theoretical entity slated to begin operating in a year or two, this might be adequate. As it happens, however, they’re active right now, and with over a year to gather data, the Privacy Office doesn’t seem to have gleaned much information about what they’re actually doing. Perhaps they should consider starting a fusion center.

Members of Congress and the Bush administration have been pushing for years to bolster domestic military preparedness, claiming it’s the only way to respond to a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction. Critics counter the move is contrary to the 130-year-old Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the military’s role in domestic law enforcement. Here’s the law, in its entirety, cited in a 2002 Department of Homeland Security article arguing that its common interpretation is flawed:

Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

— Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 1385

The Pentagon’s plans to build on NorthCom’s brigade include adding two more brigades of similar size and drawing on 80 smaller National Guard and reserve units totaling 6,000 soldiers, with an aim to have all the units in place by 2011. The shift has been building for years:

Military preparations for a domestic weapon-of-mass-destruction attack have been underway since at least 1996, when the Marine Corps activated a 350-member chemical and biological incident response force and later based it in Indian Head, Md., a Washington suburb. Such efforts accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, and at the time Iraq was invaded in 2003, a Pentagon joint task force drew on 3,000 civil support personnel across the United States.

In 2005, a new Pentagon homeland defense strategy emphasized “preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents.” National security threats were not limited to adversaries who seek to grind down U.S. combat forces abroad, McHale said, but also include those who “want to inflict such brutality on our society that we give up the fight,” such as by detonating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city.

In late 2007, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive approving more than $556 million over five years to set up the three response teams, known as CBRNE Consequence Management Response Forces. Planners assume an incident could lead to thousands of casualties, more than 1 million evacuees and contamination of as many as 3,000 square miles, about the scope of damage Hurricane Katrina caused in 2005.

The American Civil Liberties Union and libertarian Cato Institute questioned the expansion:

Domestic emergency deployment may be “just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority,” or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU’s National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of “a creeping militarization” of homeland security.

“There’s a notion that whenever there’s an important problem, that the thing to do is to call in the boys in green,” Healy said, “and that’s at odds with our long-standing tradition of being wary of the use of standing armies to keep the peace.”

Military units have long responded to domestic emergencies — including Hurricane Katrina and the 1992 Los Angeles riots — but the Pentagon’s proposal would change the ground rules.

Bert B. Tussing, director of homeland defense and security issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership, said the new Pentagon approach “breaks the mold” by assigning an active-duty combat brigade to the Northern Command for the first time. Until now, the military required the command to rely on troops requested from other sources.

“This is a genuine recognition that this [job] isn’t something that you want to have a pickup team responsible for,” said Tussing, who has assessed the military’s homeland security strategies.

The brigade assigned to NorthCom — the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team — returned earlier this year after a 15-month deployment in Iraq and is scheduled to redeploy abroad in 2010. Keeping the domestic force staffed up with two wars under way will be expensive, a military analyst told the Post. “It’s one thing to decide upon a course of action, and it’s something else to make it happen,” said Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense. “It’s time to put our money where our mouth is.”

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote a lengthy examination of the problems with domestic military deployment when news first broke in September, concluding with this observation:

There’s no need to start manufacturing all sorts of scare scenarios about Bush canceling elections or the imminent declaration of martial law or anything of that sort. None of that is going to happen with a single brigade and it’s unlikely in the extreme that they’d be announcing these deployments if they had activated any such plans. The point is that the deployment is a very dangerous precedent, quite possibly illegal, and a radical abandonment of an important democratic safeguard. As always with first steps of this sort, the danger lies in how the power can be abused in the future.

CORRECTION 10/3/08: Glenn Greenwald’s first name was misspelled and Salon.com confused with Slate.com above.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano at a 2008 state Veterans

PHOENIX — If Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano becomes the new secretary of Homeland Security, this centrist Democrat could have the opportunity to institute nationwide reforms to address continuing problems with illegal immigration and border security. These reforms could grow out of the policies and programs that Napolitano has tested in her 15 years of public service in a state that is ground zero in America’s struggle to control its borders.

Napolitano, 50, is now frequently mentioned as President-elect Barack Obama’s leading candidate to run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a sprawling bureaucracy with 200,000 employees and a $50 billion budget that is responsible for protecting against future terrorist attacks, securing borders from illegal entry and responding to natural disasters through oversight of the much-maligned Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The department also includes the Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies.

As governor, Napolitano developed expertise in many of Homeland Security’s primary missions. She gained a national profile when she demanded in 2006 that the federal government pay for deploying National Guard troops along the border to help the overwhelmed U.S. Border Patrol, a move that foreshadowed President George W. Bush’s deployment of guard troops to the Mexican border. Those troops have since been withdrawn, and last week Napolitano called for their redeployment.

A former U.S. attorney and state attorney general, Napolitano has been widely popular in a conservative, Republican-leaning state since winning the governorship in 2002. She carried every legislative district in her 2006 re-election.

Critics say Napolitano gained notoriety more through shrewd political decisions, like her call for the National Guard deployment, than by taking tough stands on important issues, including human-rights matters, that could be major considerations for a Homeland Security secretary.

Critics also point to her actions while U.S. attorney for Arizona in the mid-1990s. Napolitano soft-pedaled a Justice Department investigation into the notorious Maricopa County jails operated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who remains a powerful political force in Arizona. Arpaio, a Republican, later supported Napolitano in her first gubernatorial campaign — a race she won narrowly.

If appointed and confirmed as DHS secretary, Napolitano is expected to take a pragmatic approach in dealing with the nation’s porous borders and its estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. She’s against the concept of “sealing the border” with a wall, instead favoring high-tech solutions across the Southwest.

Napolitano has said she has no time for “unrealistic” demands to round up and deport every undocumented worker. At the same time, she’s not about to extend a blanket amnesty, like that approved by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. She has talked instead about a strict protocol for allowing immigrants to remain in the United States, including stiff fines and requiring a history of paying taxes.

Napolitano is also poised to reform the nation’s visa system to increase the needed supply of workers — whether skilled, high-tech experts or seasonal migrant farm workers. But that won’t be a backdoor entry, Napolitano insists, because she supports tough employer sanctions for companies that knowingly hire undocumented workers.

She has steered this meandering course during her six years as governor in a state where voters have passed a series of initiatives that have made life far more difficult for illegal immigrants, including denying welfare benefits. Napolitano vetoed more than a dozen bills that she deemed too harsh or too expensive to implement. But, at the same time, she has demanded that the federal government take immediate steps to control the border and has insisted that the state be reimbursed for the costs of imprisoning illegal immigrants.

Arizona has had to deal with the expenses of severe overcrowding in its prison system because it incarcerates illegal immigrants that are the federal government’s responsibility. Napolitano has sent the Justice Department a bill for $500 million to cover un-reimbursed costs over the last six years, including a $500,000 penalty for each year delinquent and $11 million in interest, calculated at 1.8 percent.

She has also been pro-active in developing bi-national agreements with Mexico to strengthen border security.

Napolitano has managed large-scale emergency response operations that should give her a head start on strengthening FEMA. She has been tested, literally under fire, in developing a statewide emergency response plan for natural disasters that has proven effective in reducing the dangers of catastrophic wildfires that threaten much of Arizona’s 2.5 million acres of ponderosa pine forest. Her experience could offer insights when trying to strengthen the nation’s emergency response system in an era of global warming and powerful hurricanes.

The Arizona governor also has a leg up on anti-terrorism strategies. In 2004, Napolitano opened the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, considered one of the best regional intelligence-gathering operations — though, in general, ‘fusion centers’ are quite controversial because of civil liberties concerns. The center is staffed with more than 200 detectives, special agents, analysts and other personnel representing 34 state, local and federal agencies.

But it is Napolitano’s handling of illegal immigration that has attracted national attention. Illegal immigrants have overwhelmed many of Arizona’s public schools, hospitals and prisons, especially since stronger border enforcement in California and Texas has funneled millions of immigrants toward Arizona. They hike across the Sonoran Desert, a dangerous trek that kills hundreds each year. Arizona, with a population of 6.2 million, has an estimated 650,000 illegal immigrants.

Doris Meissner, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the Clinton administration who is now at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington nonpartisan think tank, said Napolitano “has been outspoken about the need for effective federal action” to control the border while “stressing the importance of comprehensive immigration reform legislation.”

Meissner said Napolitano “would be an excellent choice” to lead Homeland Security’s 22 different agencies. “She has impeccable law-enforcement and leadership credentials,” Meissner said, “and as a border-state governor has direct knowledge and experience of how our broken immigration system is affecting her state and the nation.”

Randall Larsen, director of the nonpartisan Institute for Homeland Security, which advocates containing terrorism, said Napolitano’s “resume is very impressive for what you are looking for in a secretary of Homeland Security.” However, Larsen said he was concerned that Napolitano lacked Washington experience, so who she selects as her deputy could be “very important.”

Rodolfo Espino, a professor of political science at Arizona State University, said Napolitano could face a relatively easy confirmation process, in part because Republicans in Arizona are eager to see her leave, for it would open the way for Republican Secretary of State Jan Brewer to succeed her as governor.

Espino said Napolitano has steered a centrist course on immigration policy, angering both the extreme left and far right. He predicted that Napolitano could push states to cooperate more on border security. “She’s going to take a very pragmatic approach that immigration forces are tied to economic trends,” Espino said.

Napolitano, who has declined to comment on her possible appointment, outlined her comprehensive plan on immigration policy in a February 2007 speech to the National Press Club in Washington. The speech provides a window into the policies that Napolitano clearly wanted Congress to implement only a month after she and Obama held a lengthy meeting to discuss a wide range of issues.

“We have to acknowledge that illegal immigration is a supply-and-demand problem, and that Congress must address both sides of that equation,” Napolitano said. The governor said Washington must take a two-pronged approach to addressing illegal immigration by not only cutting off the undocumented workers from across the border, or the supply of labor, but also increasing penalties on employers who hire illegal workers.

She dismissed anti-immigration leaders’ demands to seal the border with a wall as a “simplistic” solution doomed to fail. She repeated her often-used phrase of “show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” Napolitano also said that rounding up an estimated 12 million “undocumented workers” for deportation is a “joke” and “not reality-based.”

Instead of a building an expensive 700-mile-long wall that could be difficult to maintain across vast stretches of the nation’s border, Napolitano said there should be additional federal spending on developing “technology-driven” border controls, including ground-based sensors, radar and unmanned aerial vehicles, backed by more Border Patrol agents.

The governor also said in her 2007 speech that she wants to reform the nation’s visa policies to “widen the legal labor pool” and revise quotas, so that nations are awarded visas on a more equitable basis. She noted that the Dominican Republic, with a population of 8 million, is granted more visas on a per capita basis than Mexico, with a population of 100 million. “No wonder it takes, on average, more than 10 years to get a legal immigrant visa from Mexico,” she said. “Talk about incentive to cross illegally.”

Napolitano signaled that she would support a nationwide requirement that all employers must verify the legal status of employees through a federal database called E-Verify. “Employers who hire illegal immigrants — and know it — should be held accountable and penalized,” she said.

In 2007, Napolitano signed the nation’s toughest employer-sanction law for hiring illegal immigrants after Arizona voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum. The law required employers to use E-Verify on new hires after Jan. 1, 2008. There have been few complaints from businesses since the law was implemented last July. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many illegal immigrants are leaving Arizona.

As far as the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the country, Napolitano said the “only realistic alternative” is to “create a strict, stringent pathway to citizenship.” That pathway, the governor said, “must involve a substantial fine, learning English, having no criminal history, keeping a job, paying taxes, then getting in the back of the line and waiting your turn.”

Napolitano has been an advocate of strengthening the state’s ability to respond to emergency situations and be on the front line of detecting and stopping terrorists. Her philosophy merges with a report last week in The Wall Street Journal that Obama’s advisers have said that the Department of Homeland Security may be in for a major overhaul, with a particular focus on redefining the relationship between the department and state and local officials.

Napolitano has earned a reputation for being a quick study, with an ability to bring divergent interests together for a common solution — skills that will be imperative in running Homeland Security. For example, soon after taking office, Napolitano established a statewide task force to develop plans to restore forest health and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires in the aftermath of a June 2002 fire that burned 467,000 acres of woodland. The Arizona governor championed various solutions, including thinning thousands of acres of overgrown and drought-weakened pine forests near populated areas. These preventive steps helped limit to less than 100 acres what might have been a serious wildfire that erupted near Flagstaff in 2006.

“She created a space for people to sit down and respectively build an agreement and then develop strategies that could be successfully implemented,” said Todd Schulke, senior policy adviser with The Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based environmental group. “We will miss her.”

Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command. (Photo/Erin Rosa)

The comments, made at the annual National Homeland Defense and Security Symposium in Colorado Springs last week, reveal more details about the recent stationing of active military personnel inside United States borders for what officials say is a mission centering around responding to catastrophic emergencies.

In September the Army Times reported that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team — a unit based in Fort Stewart, Ga., that most recently spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle gear — would be put under the control of Northern Command, located on Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.

Military representatives claim that the unit, now referred to as the Consequence Management Response Force, is only supposed to assist in responding to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, but that hasn’t stopped numerous civil liberties advocates from speculating just how closely the military will be involved with law enforcement issues falling under a state’s jurisdiction.

“This isn’t a military police brigade or a civil affairs brigade. This is actually a combat brigade being assigned a domestic mission,” said Mike German, national security counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative office in Washington., D.C.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act Request last week with the Department of Justice and the Pentagon asking for records relating to the assignment of domestic forces to the Northern Command.

“One of our founding touchstones of democracy is that the military is not to be used against the American people. Over a hundred years ago that sentiment was put into law in the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the military from being involved in law enforcement functions,” German said. “Our hope is to find as much information as we can to challenge whether this is appropriate or not and to create some public awareness about what’s going on”

Now the commander of Northern Command claims that at least two more military units will be stationed inside the county in the next two years, contributing to an estimated total of 4,700 specially trained service members.

“It’s to help us manage the consequences of a large-scale event,” said Renuart. “We have one [unit] now trained and equipped and assigned to the Northern Command. We’ll grow a second one this calendar year of 2009 and a third one in the calender year 2010 so we can provide the nation three sets of capabilities that could respond to an event of the size of 9/11 or larger.”

According to Renuart, that means the units will have unique training in the logistics and medical fields.

“These are medical personnel, they’re chemical decontamination teams, they’re engineering teams, they’re logistics folks,” Renuart said. “It is really a force designed to respond to an event of catastrophic size. There have been some who say that this is designed as a law enforcement activity or that it will somehow be used to take away the authorities of a governor or a state, and that’s absolutely not the case.”

But German isn’t convinced.

“It’s fine for the general to say that,” the counter-terrorist operations specialist said. “But we want to know what the policies actually are, what the roles are and what the regulations are to see whether this is actually complying with the law.”

During the symposium Renuart admitted that the Northern Command has assisted regularly with law enforcement activities in the past.

“Here in Colorado every day we’re integrated with 45 other federal agencies in our headquarters planning for not only the natural disasters, but what would happen if a chemical attack was brought into our country by a terrorist organization,” Renuart said, emphasizing the command’s roles with intelligence and supporting anti-drug efforts.

“How do we track intelligence information that might identify networks of terrorists that might be around the world trying to get to us? How do we support law enforcement every day in the fight against narcotics entering illegally in our southwest borders? All of these things are part of the Northern Command mission.”

Said German, “It seems to be an incremental approach where the military is being used for narrow missions, but then more and more types of narrow missions until they all combine into one overarching mission.”

It is currently unknown what units may be assigned to domestic tasks in the next two years, but members of Northern Command will undergo a large-scale exercise this month simulating a destructive earthquake in southern California.