Tuesday, 4 January 2000
Unprecedented measures
Sarah Prall,
The Arizona Daily Star
Ramon Pena waits as a Border Patrol agent at Elfrida checks his resident
green card, then passes on
Border force struggles with migrant crush
By Ignacio Ibarra
The Arizona Daily Star
DOUGLAS - Bulldozers have stripped much of the land along the border here clean of vegetation and anything else that might provide cover for illegal entrants bold enough to climb over the imposing 12-foot-high steel fence that separates this city from Mexico.
At night, lights - portable, generator-powered stadium-light units and permanent pole-mounted lights - illuminate the barren no man's land to deny would-be crossers the cover of darkness.
Remotely operated video cameras, electronic sensors and other ``force multipliers'' provide imagery and other information about the movements of people across the border.
Behind those lights and cameras, more than 400 agents split three shifts. That's nearly 10 times the number stationed here in 1994, the year the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service began the high-profile, high-intensity enforcement strategy known in Arizona as Operation Safeguard.
The latest phase in this unprecedented buildup of agents and equipment at the agency's Douglas Station is intended to curb what is expected to be another record year for illegal entries through this part of the Tucson Sector. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, more than 200,000 of the sector's 470,449 illegal entrant apprehensions were made at the Douglas Station.
The trend continues in the current fiscal year. Between Oct. 1 and Dec. 30, 85,961 illegal entrants were detained by Tucson Sector agents, up nearly 13,000 from the same period the year before. Of those, 46,447, more than half, were made at the Douglas Station.
In Agua Prieta, would-be illegal immigrants are filling hotels and guest houses. They can be seen milling about outside restaurants and at the rows of telephone booths they use to make contact with family and smugglers. And local officials say the crush of migrants isn't even expected until after Thursday, the end of the holiday season in Mexico.
Last Tuesday, agents detained 277 Mexican citizens in two unusually large groups for December, usually one of the slowest months of the year for illegal entrants.
``We think there is going to be an increase in apprehensions initially, in part because we have more agents in the field,'' said George Lopez, an assistant chief with the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector office. ``We hope that the things we've already done - the checkpoints and having our strategy deployed full force in the Douglas area - will convince some of the folks who travel home through this corridor . . . that we are going to be present in a much higher number when they return.''
He said that more than 300 of the sector's 1,300 agents are based at Douglas and that more than 100 additional agents, including two pilots, have been brought in from other sectors to assist in Douglas.
The Tucson Sector includes all of Arizona except Yuma.
By early May, the Tucson Sector expects to add 83 more permanent agents to its force, and most of those will be sent to Douglas, Lopez said.
Some of the agents stay on ``critical'' spots along the six-mile stretch of border from the corrals west of Douglas to the municipal airport on the east side of town, Lopez said. Others keep watch along the border in the rural areas east and west of town.
Still others man a Border Patrol immigration checkpoint about 30 miles north of Douglas, near Sunizona at U.S. 191 and Courtland Road, checking the citizenship of all northbound travelers.
Since the checkpoint went into operation Dec. 8, agents there have detained more than 1,600 illegal entrants, arrested at least 50 people as drivers and smugglers, and seized nearly 150 vehicles used to smuggle people.
Between the checkpoint and the border, other agents troll for illegal entrants on foot, on bicycles, from their vehicles and from helicopters flying overhead.
Despite the continuing increase in apprehensions, Lopez said, the agency's strategy appears to be working in Douglas as it has in San Diego and El Paso - and at Nogales, where apprehensions dropped from 116,000 in the 1995 fiscal year to 86,529 last fiscal year.
``Under the strategy, you have to focus on where you have the biggest entry problems,'' he said. ``At the Douglas station, our biggest problems were in the Douglas-proper area.''
By concentrating resources in that area, the Border Patrol has reduced the number of people moving through the residential and commercial areas, and forced the smugglers to move their operations out into the desert. There, their human cargo is exposed for longer periods before they can reach a vehicle or a safe loading area in the United States.
Jorge Macias heads the Agua Prieta contingent of Grupo Beta, Mexico's multi-agency migrant-protection task force. He has seen the results of the Border Patrol's strategy.
``With so many Border Patrol agents on the other side, we don't see as many attempts to cross here inside the city,'' he said. ``They (migrants) go out to the edges of the city, at the corrals and in the arroyo, where we're seeing more assaults and robberies.''
Grupo Beta has beefed up its presence along the border here by adding 10 new agents for a total of 13 men in the field. The Mexican government has also deployed a unit of federal prevention officers who are charged with combating people-smuggling, banditry and other migrant-related crimes. And the Sonora government has added agents to its judicial police force in Agua Prieta in anticipation of the flood of northbound migrants.
Larry Vance Jr. heads Concerned Citizens of Cochise County, a group of ranchers and other residents of rural areas along the border here. He agreed that the Border Patrol has been able to gain better control over illegal entries in Douglas, but said the flow of illegal immigrants continues unabated in the areas outside the city where he and other members of the group live.
``They've got more agents and equipment, but I don't think they're that much better prepared than they were last year. To control this area, the Border Patrol needs to have twice the (300) agents that they had last year, and they aren't here,'' Vance said.
He said that when the large numbers of Mexicans who have returned to their homeland over the holidays join the ongoing flood of northbound migrants later this week, even more people will be trying to cross than did last year, when about 18,000 illegal entrants were apprehended in January.
Apprehensions last year peaked in March at 60,000, with 27,000 of those in Douglas.
Vance said he's not counting much on official assurances of progress.
``I rely on what I see. I can take a drive along Highway 80 any day of the week, or along Prince Road or Double Adobe Road and along Davis Road, and see the gathering point where they meet up with the smugglers,'' he said.
``All of this border enforcement won't work without internal enforcement (such as employer sanctions and work-site inspections). As long as there is a magnet, these people are going to keep coming in.''
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"The decisive means for politics is violence... Anyone who
fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant."
- Max Weber,
AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 901 (1981)
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submitted by:
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 23:52:39 EST
From: Dreom@AOL.COM (Dewaine Reo McBride)
Subject: Border force struggles with migrant crush