This policy is not well thought out. NPS Rangers have enough to do without policing the border. I thought we were going to have a fence along the border to keep out immigrants. What happened to the National Guard and increasing number of federal border agents? Leave the NPS ranger force alone to do its basic duty, working in our parks, protecting park resources and helping the visiting public have a quality visit. NPS Rangers are not trained to do the work of border agents. 

I hope the question about whether the costs (& travel against the cap) come out of NPS or DHS budgets still gets asked.  If the 2 week details are year round, that's a bit over $1M/yr for 7 LE rangers and managers salary & benefits.  If ORPI has to pay travel & per diem for park police from DC or even LE rangers from other parks, that would be a huge hit to their budget, and could easily exceed their travel cap.  

Beyond that, neither park is a great place to interdict human or drug smugglers.  It can make sense to _detect_ them as they traverse those particular parks, but there are few routes away from the parks on the US side, and it is much easier to apprehend in those choke points than in the parks.  If this was about effectiveness, there are a bunch of LE rangers and natural resources folks scattered across parks who would be much better at the detection task than DC Park Police.   Park Police are very good at what they do, but this isn't that.  Both what they do and what would be needed in these border parks is a lot more than sitting atop a big horse wearing a big hat, which is about the only thing I see in common between the tasks.

Harry: AMIS is a reservoir on the Rio Grande del Norte, so fence not so much.  Organ Pipe has a large fence for much of the border around Lukeville (spoiler alert: big metal fences cause problems and fail during flash floods in desert washes), and substantial anti-vehicle barriers along the rest.  No one drives a vehicle across the border there: the only vehicles seen in the wildlife cameras are Border Patrol.  In theory you could cross the border on foot and hike 2 days to get to a road on the other side of the park, but with detection and then Border Patrol interdiction along that road, that is high cost low chance of success, and is now a small faction of the rate of a decade ago.  Organ Pipe has reopened almost all of the park to visitors again, and reopened the campgrounds.

Just back from four weeks and 4000 miles of great travel that included a number of NPS sites.  Four weeks with no news and no internet, and now I'm wondering why I bothered to come home to discover that not much has changed.  trump is still here and still lying, but at least the world is intact -- at least for the moment.

This business is simply one more of the outright and outlandish lies of Rob Bishop, trump and his foolish friends, and others who seek to ways to use whatever methods they may dream up to gain support from people gullible enough to believe them.

According to people I met a few summers ago in Organ Pipe and a high-ranking officer with the Arizona Department of Public Safety's Border Protection Division, apprehensions of border crossers in places like ORPI and Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge are in the range of 80%+ while apprehensions of privately owned land along the border run around 18% to 21%.  Why?  Because when electronic sensors detect movement in the monument or refuge, they can easily determine whether or not it is illegal.  While on private lands, movement is most likely a rancher or resident feeding cattle, mending fences, or spreading trump on fields to fertilize them.  

One Border Patrol agent at the time suggested that instead of eliminating environmental protections as Rob Bishop was proposing, the government should simply turn all privately owned border lands into wilderness.