Yuma Marines tell Bush of border travails

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By John Hoellwarth and Gordon Lubold
Times staff writers

Three days after announcing his plan to stem the flow of illegal immigrants across the U.S./Mexican border by mobilizing 6,000 National Guard troops, President Bush visited Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz., Thursday, where vast aerial gunnery ranges on the Mexican border provide an easy place for immigrants and smugglers to cross.

Paul McHale, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, said a way to measure the effectiveness of using Guard troops along the border would be that it would likely increase the amount of training days at Yuma. For years, base officials have had to temporarily shut down training due to illegal aliens crossing the border and wandering onto the Barry M. Goldwater range. McHale, talking to reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday, said Guardsmen could likely build barriers that would help prevent illegal aliens from crossing there.

“We have had a terrible impact upon training opportunities at that Marine Corps range because of the presence of illegal aliens crossing the border, entering the range, thereby causing the range to shut down,” he said, echoing what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had said on the issue on Capitol Hill May 17.

“It's not an insignificant problem, it's a huge problem,” he said.
Air station spokeswoman Capt. Beatriz Yarrish said 80 percent of the Corps’ aviation forces train in Yuma before deploying to combat, making the air station there the busiest in the Naval service.
“Therefore, it would be greatly beneficial to have fewer interruptions in training on our military ranges,” she said.

Yarrish said the Department of Homeland Security currently intends to place vehicle barriers along the portion of the Barry M. Goldwater range that borders Mexico “in order to defeat the ability of smugglers to drive through the range.” She said the vehicle barriers will be environmentally friendly to the natural migration of the area’s threatened and endangered species. “Walk-through traffic” will be monitored by a complex system of cameras, beacons, radar and ground-based sensors intended to form a “virtual wall,” she said.

“Over time, we expect this combined effort will result in fewer range closures and uninterrupted training,” Yarrish said.

She said there have been no instances of illegal aliens being killed on the ranges by the live-fire training conducted there, but 16 “undocumented alien deaths” attributed to heat exposure have occurred on the station’s property over the last three years. There were 11 deaths in 2004, five in 2005, and none so far this year, according to Yarrish.

Yarrish said the station’s Search and Rescue squadron is “routinely called to assist United States Border Patrol in the rescue of undocumented aliens who are suffering from heat exposure.”