Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday rolled out the Obama administration's 2011 strategy to curb drug smuggling on the Mexico border, combining measures to tighten security with efforts to reduce demand for narcotics.
President Barack Obama has been under intense pressure to beef up security on the porous southwest border to curb immigrant and drug smuggling from Mexico, and halt the flow of guns and cash proceeds south. The strategy update was the first since 2009.
"Since that time we have been devoting really unprecedented efforts to make sure that the border is safe and secure," Napolitano told a news conference at the Border Patrol station in Nogales, in southern Arizona.
Napolitano, who was accompanied by Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and Alan Bersin, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, presented the report detailing 10 strategic objectives.
Among goals going forward was boosting intelligence and information sharing with state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies along the nearly 2,000-mile border, and enhanced liaison with Mexican authorities.
The plan also sought to increase the use of technologies such as X-ray machines at land border crossings to detect drugs headed north to U.S. markets, and bulk cash proceeds and guns headed south to Mexico to arm the Mexican cartels.
With smuggling by sea on the rise off the coast of southern California, the plan seeks to increase the detection and tracking of small vessels, including submarines -- which have been used by the cartels to run drugs in Pacific coastal waters off Colombia and Central America.
It also set out to increase capacity to detect clandestine tunnels under the border -- usually used to smuggle drugs -- 135 of which have been identified by law enforcement up to March of this year.
A key component of the plan also focused on reducing U.S. and Mexican demand for drugs through education, community development and providing rehabilitation for drug users.
"The strategy provides unprecedented support for stemming the flow of illegal drugs into these communities, but it also puts this renewed emphasis on reducing drug consumption in both countries," Kerlikowske, whose office developed the strategy, told reporters.
"You can't arrest your way out of this problem" he added.
As a metric of the administration's success, Napolitano said gun, drug and bulk cash seizures had increased along the southwest border in the past two years, while the number of illegal immigrants was down "substantially."
"The numbers that need to go up are going up, the numbers that need to go down are really going down, and the president is committed to sustaining that effort," she added.
Republicans in the U.S. Congress, and some officials in Arizona, have slammed the administration for not doing enough to secure the border -- including Paul Babeu, the sheriff of Pinal County, about 70 miles north of the border in southern Arizona.
"Have things improved? There are certain indicators that have improved. But you can't use that as the basis to say everything's fine, everything's safe" on the border, said Babeu, who met with Napolitano and other officials earlier in the day.
"This is about the rule of law in America, we have to get beyond all this ... lulling people into a false sense of security," he added.