Associated Press

SPOKANE — A new emphasis on security at international borders will mean several new U.S. Border Patrol stations in Washington and Idaho next year, an agency official said.

Border communities targeted for new stations are Curlew in Ferry County, Metaline Falls in Pend Oreille County and Nordman in Bonner County, Idaho.

Northport in Stevens County also is under consideration, but the existing station in nearby Colville might be adequate, said Steven Garrett, the region’s assistant Border Patrol chief.

Congress must approve the sites and provide money for the new quarters, but plans to triple the number of Border Patrol agents on the Canadian border over the next two years have brought a new set of problems. One of them is where to put the new agents.

Existing stations in the agency’s Spokane region, which now have 35 agents, can handle the 40 officers who will be added this year. But "next year we’re going to be in trouble" when a similar increase is planned, Garrett said.

Even with the increased staff, the Spokane Border Patrol office needs to increase its use of technology to patrol its 350-mile section of border, Garrett said.

He said more surveillance cameras would help, but they require high-speed fiber-optic telephone lines from the border to Spokane to be effective.

"We’re sorely lacking in that," Garrett said, but officials are trying to encourage construction of new fiber-optic data lines.

Another critical need is for a new computer database that allows law enforcement and regulatory agencies to share information, he said.

Garrett said the Border Patrol also needs some low-tech help to keep terrorists and drug smugglers out of the country.

He hopes to encourage residents of border communities to be the agency’s "eyes and ears." Residents are uniquely able to identify strangers and strange behavior because so many of them know one another, Garrett said.

Spokane-district Border Patrol agents seized 1,500 pounds of marijuana last year, 31 percent of all such interdictions at the Canadian border, even though the office is considered to be understaffed, he said.

"There are nights I don’t have anybody on duty," he said. "It’s on the honor system."

That will change as more agents are hired to catch suspects who sneak through or around ports of entry. The Immigration and Naturalization Service already has beefed up security at the ports.

Although port hours haven’t changed, the INS now has officers on duty around the clock to guard the crossings, Spokane INS official Julia Harris said.

Harris, an adjudication supervisor, said most cars crossing the border now get a complete inspection, and every trunk is examined.

Everyone who is asked to step inside the inspector’s office for questioning gets checked in the INS computer database, she said.

National Guard troops will soon be available to guard the crossings at night and help with vehicle inspections, Harris said.

She said crossings were down almost 30 percent in Eastern Washington and northern Idaho after last September’s terrorist attacks, but crossings here never had the three-hour waits that discouraged some travelers in Western Washington.

Crossings are "slowly but surely creeping back up to our regular levels," she said.

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