One windy afternoon last week at the border fence, a construction platform carrying a crew of National Guard personnel moved slowly along the barrier, sparks flying from blowtorches as the guardsmen straightened and retrofitted the steel posts. For most of them, it would be their last task on the border.

“I'll go wherever they want me to go,” said Staff Sgt. Dan McBride, 44, the crew's supervisor, a mail carrier from Fresno who plans to go back to his full-time job for a while before his likely deployment to Iraq in February. “But this has been sweet, San Diego.”

After two years spent supporting the Border Patrol, performing jobs that have included surveillance, air transportation, building and fixing border fence and repairing roads, the National Guard begins pulling out Sunday, with the last of the personnel leaving in July.

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Their work was part of a Bush administration project dubbed Operation Jump Start, begun with the idea that the National Guard's assistance with nonenforcement jobs would allow the Border Patrol to use more of its agents for patrol while it went about boosting its staff to 18,000.

As many as 6,000 guardsmen, some just back home from overseas deployment, volunteered along the southern border the first year, with about 1,200 of those in California. Their numbers were halved last year as the operation wound down.

The jury is still out on just how much their presence helped deter illegal immigration and drug traffic. Border-crossing arrests, while down along most of the southern border, have been on the rise in San Diego. Between Oct. 1 and the end of April, arrests in the San Diego sector were up 10 percent. Arrests are seen as a barometer of illegal immigration; when arrests are up, it is assumed that more people are attempting to cross.

“There is no evidence that the Guard's presence on the border has added significantly to the deterrent effect of the Border Patrol, and the physical fortifications already there,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California San Diego.

Border Patrol union leaders, who initially criticized the operation as political window dressing, don't think it has had a great deterrent effect, “but obviously, we can use all the help we can get,” said Chris Bauder, president of Local 1613 of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents San Diego-area agents.

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