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PHOENIX — Gov. Janet Napolitano wants the head of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to stop recruiting his officers to go to Iraq.

In a letter to customs chief Ralph Basham on Thursday, the governor said he cannot fulfill his commitment to Arizona residents to secure the border while "siphoning Border Patrol agents from their critical domestic security mission." She told Basham he should "terminate this misguided recruitment program immediately."

Napolitano also chided Basham, whose agency oversees the Border Patrol, for not mentioning the recruitment program when he met with her last week to discuss border security, a month after Basham sent a memo to all his officers and agents urging them to volunteer for six-month stints in Iraq, with a 70 percent bonus in their pay.

Napolitano did not see the memo until she got a copy from Capitol Media Services this week.

William Anthony, an aide to Basham said the commissioner had not seen Napolitano's letter. But Anthony suggested the governor might be overreacting.

He said only 22 officers are deployed at any one time, "not all of them taken from the same place." And Anthony said the U.S. military has provided far more help to the Border Patrol than the limited number of Border Patrol officers going to Iraq.

But an aide to Napolitano said any diversion of officers from duty along U.S.-Mexican border is unacceptable.

News of the recruitment comes as the National Guard is preparing to send home half the 1,200 National Guardsmen sent to Southern Arizona last year to help while the Border Patrol hired and trained new officers.

But the number of new Border Patrol agents added in the Tucson Sector is just 178. Figures were not immediately available for the Yuma Sector, which covers southwest Arizona and part of California.

Napolitano said the recruitment program also flies in the face of what is happening in Washington.

She said a Senate immigration bill contains "triggers," essentially things that have to happen before provisions to increase the number of guest workers can take effect. One of those involves how many Border Patrol officers are enough to secure the country.

Napolitano said that trigger was originally 18,000 agents, but was raised to 20,000 on Wednesday. There are now about 13,000 Border Patrol officers.

"And 18,000 was going to take to the end of '08 to reach in any event," Napolitano said.

"Yet we're still recruiting from the same pool of people to go to Iraq," she continued. "To me that is, that is self-contradictory. That is not good for Arizona. It's not good for securing the border. It ought to stop."