40 Miles Past Border, Crossers 'know They're Home Free'

Sept. 3, 2001
SUSAN CARROLL, Citizen Staff Writer

Once illegal immigrants scramble over the border fence, dodge the sensors and evade Border Patrol agents, they are virtually guaranteed a ticket into the U.S. underground economy.
Why? Because there is no second line of defense.

Border enforcement stops about 30 to 40 miles north of the border, just south of Tucson's back yard.

"They know that once they get past this charade down here, they're home free," said Douglas Mayor Ray Borane, who has watched a massive Border Patrol buildup in his border town, the most popular crossing spot in the nation last year.

Occasional checkpoints and solitary Border Patrol vehicles dot the network of state highways that leads north from the border. But the strategy of "forward deployment" has the vast majority of agents on the front line of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

And efforts to combat people smugglers have prompted the Immigration and Naturalization Service to stop nearly all of its interior enforcement and employer sanctions, said Russell Ahr, INS assistant to the Phoenix director.

"What's happening now in southern Arizona is that people know if they get past that thin green line, they're home free," said David Ray of the Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform.

Pressure for immigration policy reform is high as President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox meet Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

When they met in February on Fox's ranch in Guanajuato state, the two men said they planned to unveil an immigration treaty this week. But border politics have proved controversial, and Bush and Fox instead plan to talk only in terms of broad principles.

In the meantime, the Border Patrol has been beefing up resources in the western corner of the state, where illegal immigrants are dying in record numbers trying to avoid the Border Patrol. In a single incident in May near Yuma, 14 people died in the triple-digit heat after allegedly being abandoned by smugglers.

David Aguilar, chief of the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol, acknowledged that the border strategy by itself is not enough to stop the pull north that drives illegal immigration.

"Is the strategy, as a stand-alone, the solution to illegal immigration? No. It is a big part of a solution," he said.

Aguilar pointed to a 25 percent drop in apprehensions across the entire U.S.-Mexico border in the past year as evidence the Southwest border strategy is a success.

Yet for the Border Patrol to fully gain control of the U.S.-Mexico border will take at least five years, thousands of additional agents and hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a government audit.

"As long as the U.S. is much wealthier than other countries, as long as men and women breathe for a better way of life, you're going to have undocumented migrants," said University of Arizona Professor Edward Williams, who studies border issues.

Some degree of policing of the border makes sense, he added, but securing the border seems "almost an impossibility."

The recent report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that the border strategy has had mixed results, but "the primary discernable effect appears to be a shifting of illegal alien traffic."

The strategy made the trip north longer for Alfonso Sanchez Olguín,19, of Veracruz, Mexico. He was headed to El Paso via Naco when he was picked up by the Border Patrol.

Sanchez said he never considered crossing straight through Texas because he had heard from his cousins, who promised him a job in an El Paso carwash, that the border there was crawling with la migra.

After paying $50 to a smuggler, Sanchez and two companions piled into a van along with a dozen other illegal immigrants and were dropped off about 10 miles west of Naco. Border Patrol agents caught him within a day, on the crest of a hill six miles north of the border.

"They said Naco would be easier, but look at this," Sanchez said in the glow of a Border Patrol transport truck's headlights as half a dozen agents scoured the hill for more migrants. "I have no money now, but I can't go back (to Veracruz.) I have to keep trying."

As immigrant rights advocates and religious leaders call for reform of the border policy, some who live on the front lines of the border battle are glad to have the Border Patrol around.

It was not until the Border Patrol moved into Gerald A. Eberwein's neighborhood that things started looking up, he says.

For 27 years, he has lived in a brick house 85 feet from the border at Naco. The windows are covered with black security bars. The doors have double-key deadbolts.

"I jokingly call it "Fort Naco," said Eberwein, 66, who bought the house when the border fence was still chain link and full of holes.

The retired police officer, who serves as fire chief for the town of 900, says the miles of army surplus fencing and Border Patrol buildup saved Naco.

In the years before the buildup, as far back as the 1980s, the town was plagued by burglaries, he said. At the peak, residents reported one about every 2 1/2 days.

The new fencing went up in the early 1990s as Arizona became the front line in the struggle to secure the border.

"There were a lot of people who opposed the fence, but they weren't from here," Eberwein said. "When it was built, it was like somebody took the switch called crime and turned it off. We had an over 90 percent reduction in crime immediately.

"Now we have younger children, early teens, walking home from their friends' houses at night. We have whole families out strolling around the streets. The town is quiet."

But Borane, the mayor of Douglas, worries that the new-found quiet in his town means more immigrants are dying.
The immigrants "are taking higher and bigger risks. It's more dangerous, and they're having to cover more ground," Borane said. "The reason (the government) is having all these problems with these deaths and getting all this criticism is because they're treating illegals as if they're fighting a war against them. And it's creating all this hardship and human tragedy."

According to the GAO report, the INS underestimated the desperation of illegal immigrants.
"Rather than being deterred from attempting illegal entry, many aliens have instead risked injury and death by trying to cross mountains, deserts and rivers," the report states.

Aguilar placed the blame for the desert deaths not on the policy but on the smugglers.

"We have yet to find somebody, an illegal alien, that has a desire to cross into the United States through the most dangerous area known to man in our Northern Hemisphere," Aguilar said. "That's the bottom line. It's not the people who choose to cross through that area. It's the smuggler."

Aguilar had not met Ofelia Morales Barrera. She ran when a Border Patrol helicopter spotted her group of about 20 near Sells on the Tohono O'odham Nation.

Morales Barrera, 21, was one of the last to be rounded up. She said the group did not have a smuggler, although the agents processing the group doubted that.

Clutching her husband by the arm, she was crying. They had walked three days in temperatures that topped 100 degrees after crossing near Sasabe. They still faced a three-day walk to get to a highway.

Yet Morales Barrera wanted to press on through the saguaro, cholla, senita and creosote.
She talked about her children - ages 5, 3 and nearly 1 - she had left behind in Hermosillo with her sister. The family was homeless, she said, wiping tears that had mingled with sweat from the brief sprint to evade Border Patrol.

"We wanted to earn money so we could send it home. We need a house for our children."
She was nearly home free - about 35 miles north of the border.

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/local/archive/01/immig01/9_3_01border.html