As National Park Service staffing drops, the Department of Interior sends "surge" of rangers to assist the U.S. Border Patrol along Mexican border
The Trump administration has ordered rangers from national parks around the country to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border to fight illegal immigration and drug traffickers.
The president continued to ask for $5 billion to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall, but House Democrats did not include such funding in their spending bills. The fight over border wall funding is the same issue that led to a five-week government shutdown at the start of the year, which sent most government workers, including park rangers, home without pay.
Trump has requested $18.2 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection for the upcoming budget year, up from $15 billion in last year’s budget, which includes $5 billion for new border wall construction. Federal officials refused to discuss the operational details behind the latest surge, including the exact number of rangers, U.S. Park Police and other Department of Interior law enforcement officers being used to bolster border security. But the operation is"indeed underway," said Robert “Bob” Bushell, assistant chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which covers a vast landmass along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Bushell agreed that the park rangers received little training before being deployed to monitor the border. Great Smoky Mountains National Park covers about half a million remote, mountainous acres patrolled by 35 law enforcement rangers. In 2017, it had 30,000 calls for law enforcement assistance. In Utah, Zion National Park is the fourth busiest park in the U.S., with 4.3 million visitors in 2018. The park made national news in May after visitors complained of hours-long wait times to hop on hiking trails.
The park is considered one of the most dangerous national parks, precisely because so many migrants and drug smugglers use it to illegally cross the border. Carrying characteristic black water jugs designed to block reflections that could draw a ranger's attention, migrants and smugglers alike sneak into the United States along a network of dusty trails and cactus-studded hillsides where temperatures can soar to about 110 degrees in the summer.
National Parks staffing is at record lowsThe reorganization of federal law enforcement officials comes as the nation's parks are woefully understaffed. The staffing shortage reflects “a serious erosion in our ability to safeguard some of the most iconic areas in the United States for current and future generations,” said PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse.He said he frequently fields complaints from rangers about the dangerous shortage of policing staff in parks.
“There have been steep reductions in national park law enforcement ranks and given that, it seems illogical to me that we would be reassigning more people and creating more of a vacancy in national parks,” said Francis, who is now chairman of the nonprofit Coalition to Protect America's National Parks.
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