Bill White Releases 6-Point Border Plan

Bill White, today, released a 6-point Border Security Plan stating that for ten years Rick Perry has failed to secure the Texas Border. Unlike Perry’s Border talk, White will introduce some manageable ideas that have yet to be attempted by Rick Perry.

• Fund an additional 1000 local law enforcement positions and 250 state troopers using federal grants, state appropriations and additional drug forfeiture dollars.
• Obtain all available federal funding to support border security and direct sufficient discretionary funding to border security efforts.
• Use state appropriations more effectively.
• Establish a formal partnership with local and federal law enforcement agencies and other leaders along the border to promote public safety.
• Revamp the Department of Public Safety to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
• Assist local law enforcement agencies in adopting Secure Communities, a program that ensures that criminals in the U.S. illegally are identified and turned over to federal authorities.

What caught DC’s eye was a bold idea to revamp the Department of Public Safety, including placing DPS investigators inside Texas prisons. It would seem that White is the first Texas politician to put the prison gangs and the Mexican cartels in the same sentence and that’s a good thing because all Perry seems to do is attempt a connect between people who cross the border to work and the drug cartels. As the massacre of 72 migrants by a drug cartel for refusing to become part of their organization show, these folks want to make an honest living and have died for their values and principles.

Now, White also includes in his plan one point that irked me–implementation of Secure Communities. ICE itself has provided reports on the ineffectiveness of Secure Communities given that about a 1/5 of those handed over by local law enforcement agencies actually fall under the title of “deportable felon,” as White states is the target of the ICE policy. But if White is willing to show leadership and state that it is “deportable felons” who are targeted, then that is kind of an advancement in border security talk when it comes to immigration.  Still, Secure Communities is a bad program, much like 287(g), and serves as a means of growing the number of badly-run private prisons and increasing the number of civil rights lawsuits.

For the most part, it seems like a good plan. But if working with the feds is a part of this, then it should extend beyond “security” and include lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform. Given that Latinos are indeed watching, and only 44% seem excited about the 2010 election because of immigration, this alone should be a wake-up call for any candidate in the running who respects the Latino vote.