Of course, one could argue that DeConcini's border efforts were aimed more at feathering the beds of his friends. The border program the senator is most proud of--the aerostat surveillance balloons--has proved unreliable in spotting border-running drug traffickers. A 1990 report on the PBS show Frontline revealed that two former DeConcini staff members, Romano Romani and Robert Mills, left the senator to lobby for TCOM, the company that makes aerostats. TCOM won a $100 million government contract to produce the balloons soon after. DeConcini has also accepted thousands of dollars in contributions from companies that make border-surveillance devices.
But questions about the propriety of some border-oriented pork projects aside, DeConcini's presence on the appropriations subcommittee did ensure that Arizona would never be at the back of the line when funding was dispensed.
He's still on the subcommittee, but as an announced lame duck, he won't be there for long. Staffers say that the fact that DeConcini wasn't even briefed in advance on the Border Patrol allotments shows that he has been deemed irrelevant by his own party.
"Pleasing DeConcini isn't important anymore," a staff member says. "He's on his way out. The voices Clinton heard on this issue were coming from [California's Democratic senators] Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. They're going to be around a while.
"Arizona has lost its voice on immigration control."
Neither Reno nor Doris Meissner, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service--which developed the new allocation plan--returned calls from New Times. Meissner, however, has been quoted as saying the plan didn't intentionally exclude Arizona from receiving aid, and has promised--at DeConcini's prodding--to provide 33 additional officers for the state.
McCain mouthpiece Celley calls the promise "a token," since the new officers will be secretaries and clerical staff, not line agents. He blames DeConcini for "failing to be forceful enough."
"DeConcini did nothing to help his state. He didn't seem to care. Where was he during the whole process leading up to these manpower decisions?" Celley asks.
Such sniping over border issues is blossoming into the latest political dust-up between McCain and DeConcini, who enjoy a less-than-collegial relationship.
For his part, DeConcini is angry and defensive at the suggestion that he has become politically impotent. Asked to comment on Celley's slap, he tartly replies that he "doesn't want to get into a pissing match with McCain," but then proceeds to do exactly that.
"John McCain has never added anything to our border," DeConcini says. "Everything that has gotten done down there, that's my doing. I'm just glad he didn't try to kill funding for what we did get."
@rule:
@body:To Border Patrol agents on the Nogales line, the political infighting in the carpeted salons of Washington, D.C., seems a million miles away. To them, reality is the daily grind of rounding up as many aliens as they can--while hoping that a wild-eyed kid with a rock, or a gun-toting smuggler they may encounter behind a patch of juniper on the dark desert floor, won't make them a casualty of the border wars.
There isn't much time to think. But in the occasional slow moment, at least one agent confesses to pondering the grim absurdity of life on the Arizona line.
"Sometimes I wonder, if I get killed doing this, what is my family going to say I died for?" he says. "To keep one out of five illegal immigrants out of the country?
"Why are conditions allowed to be so bad here? Why do people like [Janet] Reno let it go on?
"I thought we were all supposed to be on the same team.
