IMMIGRATION-MEXICO: Border Patrols Crack Down as Election Season Begins

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 14 1996 (IPS) - As Republicans opened their 1996 national convention Monday in the southern California city of San Diego, Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) officials were bracing themselves for a wave of people expected to inundate the U.S.-Mexico border — from the north.

Just a few kilometres south of the convention site, on the border with Mexico, some 1,500 INS guards prepared themselves to handle the hundreds of politicians and journalists expected to flock to Imperial Beach on the Pacific Ocean, a time-favoured crossing points for illegal immigrants.

They are ready to give tours of crossing sites that have nicknames such as the Ghost Trail, the Hanging Tree, the Russian Embassy, Old Tough’s Grave, and Smugglers Gulch. But they warn those who come to the border this week to witness front-line action in the battle against illegal immigration that they are likely to be disappointed.

U.S. Border Patrol officials say there is little chance of witnessing the apprehension of illegal immigrants because of the success of ‘Operation Gatekeeper’, a crackdown launched two years ago which reportedly has resulted in a remarkable 71 per cent drop in crossings at these popular border-crossing sites.

Similar get-tough operations have been launched in Texas where ‘Operation Blockade’ has put some 400 agents on a 24-hour watch of a 32-kilometre stretch of the Rio Grande that separates El Paso from its twin city, Ciudad Juarez .

Last December, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner organised special training exercises for border agents to guard against a possible unexpected mass migration from Mexico to the United States in the wake of a disaster.

With help from the U.S. Army, Border Patrol agents went to Florida, Texas and Arizona to practice erecting fenced corrals, herding immigrants through them for emergency processing and loading them onto buses for travel to mass detention centres.

As the presidential election approaches, crackdowns on illegal immigrants have also been stepped up north of the border. Tom Farris, INS assistant district director for investigations, said that in the past nine months some 600 illegal immigrants have been sent back to Mexico from the Chicago area after a series of 55 raids on workplaces.

Last month, Meissner held a news conference in Phoenix, Arizona, to declare that a two-month, workplace enforcement operation freed up more than 3,500 jobs that had been held by illegal immigrants.

“We’re hoping to send a clear message to illegals that there are not jobs waiting for them in Arizona or the rest of the country. We want to restore thousands of job opportunities to legal workers,” she said.

But the real story of the new crackdown on illegal immigrants is a little more complicated.

Two weeks after the Phoenix press conference, Meissner was forced to order an investigation after field agents accused their superiors of falsifying records and altering reports to make ‘Operation Gatekeeper’ appear more successful than it actually has been.

The number of attempted crossings at Imperial Beach is believed to have dropped because migrants have moved some 65 kilometres east to avoid Border Patrol agents by crossing in the mountainous desert where there are fewer patrols.

For example, Border Patrol agents arrested some 1,903 illegal immigrants in the desert town of Campo in the first week of April, compared to 1,177 in Imperial Beach over the same time period.

One unexpected side effect of this shift in border-crossing patterns has been a major increase in wild fires ignited by abandoned or poorly extinguished campfires made by illegal migrants. To date in 1996, there have been over 200 fires along the border, compared to 24 in all of 1994.

Worse still has been the rash of reports of fatal accidents involving immigrants trying to out-run the Border Patrol by sneaking across the border in vans crammed with dozens of people hidden in containers.

In June, one man died and a dozen others were injured when a van packed with more than 20 alleged illegal immigrants skidded off a rural highway and slammed into a gas station as it was fleeing U.S. agents.

The crash was one of five deadly incidents involving immigrants which have been reported in recent months. Eight illegal immigrants were killed and 17 injured in April when an overloaded pickup crashed near Temecula, about 126 kilometres north of the border, as it was being chased by Border Patrol agents.

The incident that grabbed the most attention occurred on Apr. 1, when two illegal immigrants in a packed truck were beaten by police deputies after a long freeway chase that began in the Temecula area. The incident was videotaped by a television crew in helicopters and broadcast on the national news.

Meanwhile, vigilante groups in Southern California have launched their own crackdowns against illegal immigrants, with the most visible being the ‘Roger’s Airport Posse’.

The group first grabbed headlines about six years ago, when it was know as ‘America First’, by organising members to light the border near San Diego border with their vehicle headlights in an effort to keep out illegal immigrants.

Earlier this year the group, which re-named itself after former San Diego mayor and conservative talk show host Roger Hedgecock, showed up at the San Diego international airport to stop undocumented Mexicans from entering the United States.

They stood at boarding gates to make sure that airline agents followed federal rules to combat terrorism and checked identification for all passengers. Days after the vigilante group started its patrols, a judge ruled that the members could enter the terminals only to catch a plane or escort or meet someone.

In response, a group of citizens formed the Chicano Federation to police the airport to make sure that the vigilantes obey court orders not to talk to airline personnel or target suspected illegal aliens.

Immigrant groups elsewhere in the United States also have begun to organise in response to crackdowns by federal officials and vigilantes. The Chicago-based Latinos Organizados Luchando por Avanzar, for example, has started workshops to teach illegal immigrants about their rights.

“It’s very sad that politicians are using immigrants as scapegoats,” Kalman Resnick, a Chicago lawyer specialising in immigration law, recently told a group of immigrants. “Chicago’s economy is in many ways dependent on cheap, productive immigrant labor — both legal and illegal.”