The Cipher Brief is focusing this week on the real national security situation that is building along the southern border. The President recently signed a $4.6 billion emergency spending bill to address the humanitarian crisis there, but Congressman Will Hurd, Republican from Texas, says it isn’t enough.
The Cipher Brief talked with the Congressman, who is also a former CIA Officer, about the underlying issues feeding the crisis, and a national intelligence opportunity that he says could start turning the issue around in a matter of weeks. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
The Cipher Brief: Help us understand the core issues of what we’re dealing with when it comes to national security threats arising from the situation at the border and what can be done to address them?
Hurd: The first thing we need to realize is that the root cause of what I call the ‘push factors’ is violence, lack of economic opportunity, and extreme poverty in the Northern Triangle; El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. One of my solutions for that is for the government to select a special representative for the Northern Triangle - a senior diplomat - in order to coordinate all of the elements from the federal government that deal with foreign aid including OPEC, USAID, INL, and The State Department to make sure that we have a coordinated approach in all three of those countries. That special representative should then be working with the rest of the Western Hemisphere on this problem with other groups like the Organization of American States, the International Development Bank and other countries. This is not just a problem for the U.S., Mexico, and those three countries, so we need to have the whole of the Western Hemisphere approach, and that's why we need a senior diplomat to coordinate those efforts. The question in essence, is can we design a Marshall Plan for that part of Central America? That's a long-term fix that needs to happen.
Violence is coming from criminal gangs like MS-13, which is active there. That's an issue. So, addressing structural issues in those economies, to make sure that they're creating more jobs and stability is critical. Figuring out how we can help the natural gas industry in order to bring down the cost of turning on their lights, which increases their quality of life is an issue to be addressed. Making sure that we train the police in those countries to do community policing like we have here is important. We know this because when we’ve done community policing in those regions, we've seen a decrease in the amount of violence. These are broader form policy objectives that we need to be looking at within those host countries.
We also need to address human smuggling. It’s being carried out by a transnational criminal organization and people coming illegally through the U.S.-Mexico border are largely controlled by human smuggling organizations, which are also drug trafficking organizations. They're called transnational criminal organizations because they’ve shifted focus to services, not manufacturing any longer. So instead of worrying about getting X number of kilos of cocaine from point A to point B, they're now providing the security and are supplying the infrastructure to move those drugs.
Just last month, we had 96,000 people come into the U.S. illegally. The month before that, in May, 144,000 people came in illegally. Just to provide some context for that number, consider that in all of 2018, there were 400,000 people coming into our country illegally. So, it’s likely that many people are using human traffickers.
We can actually collect a lot of information on that. There's a phone number that the person who comes across illegally likely has access to, and perhaps a license plate number of the bus that picked them up. There is a pickup location from the country that they left. There is a lot of information available about how these people are getting here and the Department of Homeland Security is collecting that information.
Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) doesn’t have the capability or the bandwidth to deal with all of this right now. They're the entity that represents the most expertise in understanding these trafficking routes. But to take that information and then use it to disassemble and dismantle the infrastructure that these human traffickers are putting in, we need the resources of the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI working with those partner countries to disrupt that infrastructure. We have to think beyond just the immigration agency to include the intelligence services.
Ultimately, National Security Advisor needs to make countering human smuggling a national intelligence priority so that we are able to use national collection capabilities against this problem. These people aren’t hiding in caves like Al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan in 2001. They out in the open before our eyes. They are sharing videos online, they're getting voicemail messages that say, "Call this phone number," and to me, as a former core collector, this is an opportunity.
The Cipher Brief: How do you see that working on a tactical level?
Hurd: The National Security Advisor needs to declare human smuggling as a top three issue when it comes to the national intelligence priority framework. Then, the NSA is responsible for analyzing all the technical data that the Department of Homeland Security is collecting as they're processing people who are coming into the country illegally. Once NSA does the analysis, it’s given to the CIA in order for them to work with partner agencies to provide disruption opportunities in those host countries.
That's the way the process should work. And this, in my opinion, is not a long-term issue. This is something that we can start working on within the next 30 days, because we have the information. DHS is already collecting phone numbers and other information so let’s turn that into intelligence and a strategy. The number of people who have now come here illegally is close to 600,000. That's a lot of data that we should be analyzing and combing through. The analysis should be able to be done in days and weeks and then provide credible leads for the NSA and CIA to follow up on.
The Cipher Brief: Mexico’s President has recently said that he will send additional troops to both the northern and southern border to help address the problem as well. Where do you see further opportunities that are perhaps being missed?
Hurd: I think there are ways to prioritize the Northern Triangle within the foreign aid budget. And yes, it's not just the United States. Where is the Organization of American States on this? Where is the United Nations in helping with this problem? This is a major humanitarian issue and we need all of these entities involved. The United States should be leading the way in developing an overarching plan on how we address political corruption as well because that's what allows this kind of endemic violence to persist.
The Cipher Brief: What should Congress's role in this be?
Hurd: Congress's role in this is ultimately to provide appropriations, and to make sure all these programs are funded in order to deal with this problem. We have to remember that Border Patrol was not set up for this. When they were assigning Border Patrol units, they were focused on how people were getting through Carrizo Canyon along the border and they were looking to apprehend those people. That was Border Patrol's mission and its role. They were not designed to run a detention facility for children.
Congress needs to make sure that we're funding HHS, because HHS is an entity that is designed to handle children. So, the funding piece is a part of Congress's role along with also making sure that intelligence authorization is done in a bipartisan way. We need to make sure our intelligence agencies have the resources they need in order to address these problems. And then also, we need to consider how to fund our foreign aid budget as well. And let’s streamline legal immigration. When you're at 3.6 percent unemployment, what does that mean? That means that every industry, whether it's agriculture or artificial intelligence needs workers. If we were able to streamline legal immigration, that can also put a dent in the current crisis we're seeing along the border.
The Cipher Brief: And what happens if actions like you describe aren’t taken quickly?
Hurd: In the CIA we have a thing called a starburst. If you know that a local country has a lot of surveillance resources, you send a whole lot of people out the door to tie up those resources and eventually, there are no resources left to surveil the last person to walk out the door. It’s a similar situation with Border Patrol right now. We have pretty much all of Border Patrol dealing with people who are, in essence, surrendering, so the areas in between our ports of entry aren’t being defended. We have some areas where we don't have technology, so we never know the denominator - meaning we don't know how many we're missing. We have an idea of the numbers of so-called "got-aways", but there is a lot we don’t know and that's our blind spot. I'm sure that blind spot is being taken advantage of by people who are pushing drugs into our country. When you look at the number of people who have died from drug overdoses in the last year, it's a staggering number. And that's a significant national security implication to all of this.
Read also The Real National Security Challenges at the Border and Mexico’s Role In Border Security… part of The Cipher Brief’s special coverage on border threats.
And if you’re ready to leave politics at the door and engage directly with public and private sector experts on national security issues, request a spot at The Cipher Brief’s Annual Threat Conference March 22-24, 2020 in Sea Island, GA. Seats are limited so reserve your place at the table today.
