National Guard at the border?
Laurie Roberts, columnist for The Arizona Republic.

30 guys After months of waiting, President Barack Obama’s vow to put the National Guard on the border comes true today, sort of.

You will recall that on May 25, Obama announced he was sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the border.

On July 19, we learned that Arizona would be getting 525 of those troops and that they would be deployed Aug. 1.

Today, 30 soldiers are to arrive at the Arizona-Mexico border.

Thirty.

Lt. Valentine Castillo, a spokesman for the Guard in Phoenix, told The Republic’s Dennis Wagner that additional troops will be deployed every Monday until the number reaches 532.

“Everything is right on track to be fully operational by the beginning of October,” Castillo said.

At which time the National Guard will not be able to actually, you know, guard the border. Instead, they will handle surveillance and call the Border Patrol if they spot intruders. This is essentially the same job given the Guard during Operation Jump Start, during the Bush administration.

In June 2006, Bush put 6,000 troops on the border then hampered them by not allowing them to enforce the law. Instead, they were there strictly to support the Border Patrol. You may recall that memorable night in January 2007, when the National Guard spotted a group of men, armed with AK-47s, coming across the rugged desert terrain under the gleam of a full moon. Drug runners, probably. One of them came within 16 yards of a Tennessee guardsman standing watch. The soldiers did all they could. They called for help from the Border Patrol, backed away and let the gunmen pass, just as the politicians had decreed that they must.

Still, by most accounts, Jump Start was a rousing success, despite the handcuffs put on our soldiers. The Guard assisted in catching nearly 170,000 illegal immigrants during the two-year deployment and helped seize more than 300,000 pounds of incoming marijuana and 5,000 pounds of cocaine. So, of course, Bush began winding down the program in early 2008, amid pleas from then-Gov. Janet Napolitano to leave troops at the border until the “virtual fence” was completed in 2011. (Something we now know will not happen in 2011 -- or ever.)

“The federal government has no excuse to scale back the program,” Napolitano wrote to then Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in March 2008. “Common sense dictates that the drawdown should stop and that a continued high National Guard presence should be maintained.”

A month later, she warned congressional leaders that halting the operation would be "irresponsible."

These days, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano believes the border is “as secure now as it's ever been.” This afternoon, she'll have a telephone press conference with reporters to discuss the Obama administration’s progress in ”implementing new security measures to combat transnational criminal organizations that smuggle weapons, cash and people across the Southwest border.”

Hopefully, it'll involve more than 30 guys with binoculars.