Calling it “the most significant vulnerability to the State of Texas,” Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott outlined last week a broad strategy to secure the Texas-Mexico border.
In a telephone interview, Abbott said as governor he would work to put “more boots on the ground” at the border, improve communication and cooperation between state and local and federal agencies and increase the use of technology, all of which would be funded largely by seizures of illegal assets through aggressive prosecutions of money laundering operations.
This is pure silliness for a number of reasons. First, the border is essentially secure now thanks to a massive federal Border Patrol buildup. The smuggling of both drugs and humans primarily happens through the checkpoints, which are under federal control and not something Texas state officials can do anything about. And Texas border towns are among the safest places in the state - if you were going to focus resources where the crime actually is, it'd be Houston and Dallas, not El Paso and McAllen.“I believe our crackdown and taking of transnational gang and international drug cartel assets will fund a large part of the expansion of operations we need on the border,” he said.
But the biggest fallacy Abbott's promoting is the idea that asset forfeiture would fund all these extra "boots on the ground." Several of Texas' now-defunct regional narcotics task forces tried this "eat what you kill" strategy after Governor Perry cut of their funding in 2006. None of them were able to make it work. And Abbott's own asset forfeiture division at the AG's office hasn't been able to tap into all this extra money, so why would that change if he becomes governor? Forfeiture funds are unpredictable, unreliable, and vastly insufficient. Law enforcement may enjoy temporary windfalls but in aggregate the drug war is a money pit, not a money maker.
No comments:
Post a Comment