U.S. troop deployment cuts crossings from Mexico

SAN LUIS, Arizona (Reuters) - Using troops to help secure the U.S. border with Mexico has cut the flow of illegal immigrants crossing north by more than 40 percent since June, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Tuesday.

President George W. Bush ordered 6,000 National Guard troops to the border in May as a stopgap measure to boost frontier security for two years while more Border Patrol officers are recruited.

Every year, many Mexicans risk their lives by trying to sneak across the border, looking to escape poverty. Millions of illegal Mexican immigrants who work in the United States send home billions of dollars each year to their families.

Chertoff, speaking at a news conference by a stretch of steel fence on the Arizona-Mexico border, said the number of illegal immigrants arrested crossing the border had fallen by between 40 and 55 percent in subsequent quarters.

"This is the kind of tangible indication of progress that the American people have been waiting for," Chertoff said beside a 15-foot (4.6-meter) barrier built by troops under Operation Jump Start.

"We are ... walking the walk and actually getting the tools on the border that the Border Patrol needs to do the job."

The total number of arrests during the period was not immediately available. But last year, the Border Patrol nabbed more than 1.1 million people trekking north over the rivers and deserts of the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border with Mexico -- more than 40 percent of them through Arizona.

Bush ordered the troop deployment as part of a broader initiative to overhaul immigration laws and tighten security on the porous southwest frontier.

The troops are not empowered to make arrests. They carry out tasks ranging from building vehicle barriers and access roads along remote stretches of the border to keeping watch for illegal immigrants crossing north along hidden trails.

The Border Patrol's spokesman for the Yuma sector said the operation had helped drive down the number of arrests on the 125-mile (200-km) stretch of border to about 100 each day from around 600 per day a year ago.

"Nobody expected Jump Start to be this efficient and this effective so quickly," Senior Patrol Agent Chris Van Wagenen told Reuters.

"The manpower, technology and infrastructure are helping us to get much better control over the border."