Posted on 11/23/2002 12:40:14 PM PST by sarcasm
cALLEN, Tex. — The first reminder that human cargo was again steadily moving north from Mexico came in July, when more than 40 people, two of them dead, were found in a truck in Dallas. Then in August, border agents in Sarita, Tex., found 73 men, women and children alive and packed in a tractor-trailer filled with rotten watermelons.
Then in October, in Iowa, the skeletons of 11 people, some later identified as Mexican laborers, were discovered in a locked car of the train that had ferried them north. Weeks later, border agents in Laredo, Tex., found 51 people, uncomfortable but breathing, in a tractor-trailer that had tried to slip past a checkpoint.
The incidents offer vivid evidence that the abrupt slowdown in illegal immigration after the Sept. 11 attacks is over. So do recent statistics compiled by the United States Border Patrol, which show that apprehensions of illegal immigrants — the barometer for measuring activity along the border — are roughly back to where they were before Sept. 11.
"We're running about even with last year, maybe slightly higher," said Ray Garza, assistant chief of the Border Patrol's McAllen sector, which covers South Texas.
Mr. Garza and other officials added that tightened security along the border had made the crossing more dangerous and expensive, since the services of smugglers, known as "coyotes," were now almost always required. The people found in the truck in Dallas, for example, had each paid $1,500 to $2,000, a huge sum for someone who might be lucky to find a $6-an-hour job in this country.
Mario Villarreal, a Border Patrol spokesman in Washington, said the inflated smuggling fees were the result of the increased difficulty of crossing the Rio Grande after a huge expansion of border agents in the 1990's. "Because of the increased enforcement, it's much harder to enter the United States, and that has driven fees up from $1,000 to $2,000 per person from Mexico," he said.
Border Patrol officials often characterize smuggling rings as large, sophisticated operations that are sometimes intertwined with drug trafficking operations. Mr. Villarreal said one smuggling ring was known to send a group of illegal immigrants in one direction as a decoy.
Some analysts say the image of a high-tech human smuggling ring can be misleading. Often, they say, the rings may be a handful of family members or acquaintances who own safe houses along the route north.
One woman here in South Texas, whose nephew used a smuggler to cross, said the local rings often communicated by cellphones and pagers, tipping one another to patrols. The woman, who would only allow the use of her given name, Elizabeth, said the smugglers falsified documents to help people pass checkpoints on the international bridges. For those without papers, smugglers often provide safe houses, then transport groups to Border Patrol checkpoints in towns like Sarita and Falfurrias.
"They will take them to Sarita, and then tell them how to walk," said Elizabeth. She said immigrants would walk through the scrub desert to avoid the checkpoints along the highways and then be picked up at an assigned spot by a smuggler to continue north. In the summer, when temperatures exceed 100 degrees, the bodies of immigrants who were lost or abandoned by smugglers are sometimes found in the desert.
The Rev. Mike Seifert, pastor of San Felipe De Jesus Catholic Church in Cameron Park, a border community, said only the determination of Mexicans and others to find a better life could explain their willingness to place themselves in the custody of smugglers. He said he had counseled women who had told horrific tales of smugglers raping and intimidating them on the trip north..
"They traffic in human misery," Father Seifert said. "They make their living out of people's desperation, and their price goes up with it."
Fernando Garcia, executive director of Border Network for Human Rights, an El Paso advocacy group for immigrant groups, said coyotes were a creation of the Border Patrol policies in the last decade, such as Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego and Operation Rio Grande in South Texas. These crackdowns involved increased patrols, as the Border Patrol, in some areas, more than doubled its number of agents.
As a result, the journey has become harder as immigration routes have moved from city crossings to the desert. They "put more risk on the immigrants trying to cross the border," Mr. Garcia said. "One of the immediate results was deaths on the border. The other major consequence of these operations and policies is that they actually gave the coyotes a reason to exist."
Mr. Villarreal, the Border Patrol spokesman, said the patrol's crackdowns were in keeping with its mission of securing the border against illegal immigration and smuggling. He said border agents had rescued hundreds of immigrants abandoned by smugglers. He also said the policy has worked, noting that the number of apprehensions had fallen from more than 1.6 million in 2000 to fewer than 1 million in fiscal year 2002.
The biggest crackdown, of course, occurred after Sept. 11, when crossing on border bridges ground to a virtual halt. Trips that had previously taken a half hour suddenly took half a day. And the number of apprehensions plummeted, falling 25 percent during the 2002 fiscal year.
Gradually, numbers have been returning to previous levels. In August, more than 82,000 people were caught on the southern border, compared with about 84,000 in 2001. In September, 15,000 more people were apprehended than last September, though that number probably reflects the Sept. 11 crackdown.
He's mentioned them several times in speeches.He doesn't always use the words "illegal aliens",though. I think I have heard him call them "undocumented workers",for instance. He mentioned them a LOT before 9-11. He even has a plan to allow the illegals to stay here and apply for citizenship.
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