As we grow, we must be careful to keep our stations and sectors balanced. We must have a healthy mix of supervisors, experienced agents, and interns. We must ensure broad opportunities for career growth and mobility. We must provide the infrastructure—like facilities and vehicles—to support our agents in all locations. For example, when increasing our personnel resources on the northern border, we must take into account outdated or inadequate facilities that were never intended to support the numbers of personnel now being assigned to northern border areas. Facilities are being built, but they will take time. We depend on our Chief Patrol Agents to take measured and deliberate steps to carry out our growth strategy without compromising our operational effectiveness.

Today, we are an organization of approximately 15,400 Border Patrol Agents. Under our current plans, our staffing levels will be enhanced to almost 18,000 agents by the end of this year and over 20,000 by the end of 2009. This represents a more than doubling of Border Patrol Agents protecting our nation’s borders compared to the beginning of 2001.

Much of our personnel growth has been on the Southwest Border, but equally important has been our effort to increase the level of staffing and resources deployed to the Northern Border. In 2001, we had approximately 340 agents assigned along our nation’s Northern Border. Today, our Northern Border staffing has been increased to 1,128 agents. Our objective is to assign 1,470 agents to the Northern Border by the end of this fiscal year and 1,845 by the end of FY 2009—almost a six-fold increase. Additionally, we have increased the other resources that support our agents—including the use of new technology and focused application of Air and Marine assets.

In the last few years we have significantly increased opportunities for agents to transfer to locations along the Northern Border. Last year, hundreds of our agents accepted transfers under the Voluntary Relocation Program (VRP). Unfortunately, we were not able to meet our target staffing level for the Northern Border. Although hundreds of agents accepted transfers to the Northern Border, we experienced an approximate 20 percent declination rate from agents that applied for the Northern Border positions for various reasons. We have now added options, not previously implemented, to augment staffing levels to meet the Northern Border sectors’ needs. Our intent when we began to increase our Northern Border personnel numbers was to provide the first opportunity to agents within our organization to apply for the new positions. We did provide for outside applicants to apply for reinstatement to Northern Border locations previously, but did not implement these requests. Now that we have extensive continued mobility opportunities for our current agent population, and continued staffing requirements to the Northern Border, we will expand our recruiting efforts to permit reinstatements of some former agents where those reinstatements make operational sense.

In addition to reinstatements, full-funded lateral transfers to select duty locations—those that have traditionally been "hard-to-fill" will be offered.

Therefore, to increase the level of operational control of our Northern Border, our plan going forward will be to continue to offer VRP and select full-funded relocations, first, to our current agents. Where it makes operational sense and where we will not displace a current agent, we will allow reinstatements on the Northern Border on a case-by-case basis. We feel confident that by implementing a comprehensive resource package that includes the VRP, select full-funded transfers, and select reinstatements to the Northern Border; we will reach our target goals. We will continue to explore and seek additional means to ensure we meet our staffing and operational objectives.

We know that for some, the current economic environment has made it hard to move right now. With the uncertainty of the housing market, we will continue to make every effort to ensure that increased mobility options are available in the future. There will continue to be an operational need for transfers not only to the Northern Border, but to all of our areas of responsibility.