Aguilar said Border Patrol cooperation with the National Guard on the southern border would relieve the strain non-law enforcement duties place on the Border Patrol and would allow the agency to focus on its goal of operational control of the border within five years.

Aguilar explained the five-year plan as starting with personnel and expanding from there. As both Aguilar and Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, described it, one of the National Guard's primary roles would be to take pressure off Border Patrol during a crucial time of expansion.

In conjunction with President George W. Bush's new plan for enhanced border security, announced last week, the Border Patrol plans to increase by 6,000 agents before the end of 2008. The National Guard will temporarily perform administrative and operational duties in an effort to increase the Border Patrol's law enforcement capacity and free up time and resources so the agency can focus on expansion and training.

All members of the testifying panel at the hearing stressed the fact that the National Guard would have no role in law enforcement on the border; the Border Patrol will retain that exclusive right.

Aguilar cited additional manpower on the Border Patrol as a necessary component of the five-year plan. However, it alone was insufficient to gain U.S. operational control of the border areas, he said.

"The five-year plan goes beyond personnel," Aguilar said. "It's completing the tactical infrastructure that the military will accelerate for us but will not be able to finish."

This infrastructure will range from physical barriers to virtual walls to the expansion of detention facilities.

Blum and Paul McHale, U.S. assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, asserted that the National Guard's role in building this infrastructure would provide excellent training for National Guard engineers, who would make up 25 percent of guardsmen and women deployed on the border.

McHale said the training National Guard personnel would get on the U.S.-Mexican border would be extremely useful to them in future combat zones.

"Whether you're talking about an intel analyst that will be applying his or her intel skills, a helicopter pilot who will be flying a helicopter, perhaps a UAV pilot who will be flying a UAV -- the skill sets that we will apply along the border are directly related to what these men and women would do in combat," McHale said.

Problems due to lack of space in detention facilities was a point highlighted by Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-TX and echoed by Aguilar.

Ortiz said increasing Border Patrol activities would likely lead to an increase in apprehensions of illegals, but the agency still lacked the facilities to handle this increase.

Already the Border Patrol is forced to release many aliens who can not quickly be returned to their own country because facilities are incapable of high detention levels. Those released are required to return to the proper place within a certain period of time.

"You're supposed to appear in 45 days. They pay the coyotes $5,000, do you think they're going to show up?" he said.

Many of those released are what Ortiz and Aguilar called "OTMs" - other than Mexicans. Detained Mexicans were more easily returned to their home countries than citizens of other nations, they said.

Aguilar said the Department of Homeland Security was working to end its current "catch and release" procedures by working with countries reluctant to take back their own citizens in hopes of reducing the amount of time it takes to remove them from U.S. custody.

Ortiz and Aguilar both said they thought an expansion of U.S. detention facilities would also be necessary, in addition to these efforts.

The release of aliens into the United States also merited concern over national security, the witnesses told the congressional panel. Aguilar said after the hearing that certain apprehended aliens were not released into the United States unless there were exceptional circumstances.

"Any person coming from [special interest] countries, or even traversing to those countries, we handle differently in the sense that we run them through every available database, we run them through every possible check that we have, report them to the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force," he said.

"The special interest country aliens are not released under what you call the catch and release program unless it is absolutely necessary," he said.

The Border Patrol and the National Guard presented a united front at the hearing. The senior officers from both organizations assured the committee that the Guard's ability to fight in war zones and respond to domestic disasters would not be limited and the Border Patrol's capabilities would be enhanced by the temporary presence of 6,000 National Guardsmen on the U.S. southern border.

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