Thread: 60 MINUTES: Dying To Get In

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/ ... 8476.shtml

Dying To Get In
Former Immigration Officials Says Billions Wasted On Border Control
June 4, 2006

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"Talk with anybody that may have been arrested out in the desert. They'll tell you, 'I'm just coming here to get a job and you want me for that job.'"

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Mark Reed

(CBS) This segment was originally broadcast on Dec. 11, 2005.

When it comes to illegal immigration, the leaders of both parties haven't found much to agree on – except for one thing. Just about everyone wants to spend billions of dollars to tighten the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexican border.

There is nothing new about this. Since 1993, the U.S. government has tripled the budget for border control, spending a small fortune on fences, high-tech surveillance equipment – not to mention thousands of additional border patrol agents. All of this was supposed to make it harder for illegal immigrants to cross over in cities and towns along the border. And it did.

But, as correspondent Ed Bradley reported last December, some of the same people who designed that strategy now say it's been a huge waste of taxpayers' money and that it has done nothing to stop migrants from coming to the U.S. illegally. What it has done, they say, is to force those migrants to cross remote and treacherous stretches of desert, where many are dying.
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The death toll is so high that the Border Patrol now has a special unit whose only job to help migrants in trouble. During the filming of our 60 Minutes story, Officer Garrett Neubauer received a distress call about 20 miles north of the border in southern Arizona.

"What we had is a person walked out to one of the roads, flagged down some agents, waved them down and stated that he had left his friend out on the desert," says Neubauer.

The migrant they're looking for is an 18-year-old Mexican named Abran Gonzales, who has been wandering in the desert for seven days. Agents have narrowed the search area and have found one of his shoes.

"That’s what we’re looking for, and that’s why I wanted to see his shoe. Just to kind of get an idea of what his other shoe looks like. So I know what I’m looking for on the ground. It sounds to me like he’s kind of out of it. He’s dehydrated. His condition is going downhill, so he’s probably not thinking rationally," says Neubauer.

Agent Neubauer has good reason to be concerned. 60 Minutes took a first-hand look at the paths taken by migrants through the desert last summer when temperatures hovered above 100 degrees for weeks at a time. Last year, the Border Patrol reported a record 464 deaths, but by all accounts the number is much higher because of bodies that haven’t been found.

Dr. Bruce Parks, Tucson’s Medical Examiner, has been on the job for years and says he has never seen anything like this. There are so many bodies, they won’t fit in the vaults in the coroner’s morgue.

When 60 Minutes visited, Dr. Parks had found a place to put an extra 60 bodies, a refrigerated truck that costs his department $1,000 a week.

Twelve years ago, things were very different. Back then, no migrants died in the desert. That’s because it was easier to come in through American cities along the border. Too easy, according to Mark Reed, who was the top immigration official in San Diego.

"When I got there, our inspectors were hiding in the inspection booths for fear of stepping out and being run over, literally trampled by people running through the port of entry itself and through the booths where the cars were, over the top of immigration inspectors if necessary," says Reed.

How many would come at one time?

"Groups of 500 people running up the southbound lanes of I-5," he recalls.

The migrants had figured out that if there were enough of them, most of them could get through. The stampedes occurred with such frequency that they became a public relations embarrassment to government officials. The Clinton administration decided something had to be done. Huge metal walls went up, high tech surveillance systems were purchased – and they did seal off major cities along the border, but not the mountains and desert in between.

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(CBS)
Mark Reed helped shape the strategy.

"We thought the mountains and the desert were going to be our friends in terms of this strategy. We thought that would deter entry through those places. And that those would be places that we would not have to worry about," says Reed.

Reed says officials figured the terrain was so difficult it was a deterrent but, he says, it turned out to be "our Achilles’ heel."

"That’s where the smugglers took them," he explains.

In a remote stretch of desert across from New Mexico, 60 Minutes met a smuggler and 11 young men preparing to enter the United States. The men rubbed garlic on their pants to ward off snakes. Then they crossed a three-foot barbed wire fence – each one carrying two gallons of water – nowhere near enough for a journey that could take five or six days. Last year, about a half million illegal migrants came from Mexico to live and work in the U.S., about twice as many as came before the border was fortified.

"It actually encouraged more people to enter the country because what we did is we took away the ability of a worker to come into the country and cross back and forth fairly freely. So they started bringing their families in and actually domiciling in the United States with their entire family because they knew they couldn’t go back and forth," says Reed.

More than 20 percent of the deaths in the desert last year were women and children. The Border Patrol recorded 1.1 million arrests last year, but often it was the same people being arrested over and over again.

"I have caught the same group of people four times in one eight-hour shift," says T.J. Bonner, who is the head of the Border Patrol agents union.

But Bonner says the immigrants try to come another way after being turned back. "When I looked in the record log the next day, their names weren’t there. So I can only assume that they got by us the fifth time," he says.

Fortified fences like the one in Nogales, Arizona, protect only about five percent of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Bonner thinks that the number of illegal migrants has actually gone up since the barrier went up. Does he think the millions spent on the fence were a waste of money?

"I think that's a fair assessment," says Bonner.

The U.S. government has spent about $20 billion on border control over the past 12 years. But Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo insists that is just not enough. He's sponsoring a bill that calls for more agents to remove illegal migrants where they work and to vastly increase border security.

"If you only put the fence for this five miles of border, people will go around it, naturally. You have to secure your borders!" says Rep. Tancredo.

He recommends sealing off the entire border, building fences. How much more should the government spend?

"Whatever it takes," Tancredo says. "Billions more. Billions more. Ed, why not? It is our job. It is what the federal government should be doing!"

The University of California’s Wayne Cornelius, a national authority on immigration, predicted ten years ago that no matter what the government does to fortify the border, Mexican workers will still keep coming as long as there are jobs here for them.

"They can earn more in an hour of work in the United States than they could in an entire day in Mexico – if they had a job," says Cornelius.

The government says crossing the border through the desert is breaking the law, but Cornelius says the U.S. is sending a very mixed message.

"The message that we’re sending them is if you can get past the obstacle course at the border, you’re essentially home free. You have pretty much unrestricted access to our labor market and there are employers out there eager for your labor," he says.

(CBS)
About six million illegal migrants are now working in the U.S. The meatpacking industry is one of the many that rely on illegal immigrant labor. Seven years ago, the Immigration Service cracked down on illegal migrants in plants in Nebraska and Iowa.

Mark Reed was in charge of the operation.

"What we did is we pulled together the meatpacking industry in the states of Nebraska and Iowa and brought them into Washington and told them that we were not going to allow them to hire any more unauthorized workers. Within 30 days over 3,500 people fled the meatpacking industry in Nebraska," says Reed.

"We proved that the government without doubt had the capacity to deny employment to unauthorized workers," says Reed.

What happened next?

"We were invited to leave Nebraska by the same delegation that invited us in. The bottom line issue was, please leave our state before you ruin our economy," says Reed.

"The reason is that by putting that factory out of business, not only do we put the unauthorized workers out of business, but we’ve put United States citizens out of business and we destroy, we have the potential to destroy, an entire community," says Reed.

Reed says that this illegal work force is "essential" to our economy.

So what are taxpayers getting for the billions of dollars spent on border security?

"Getting a good story," says Reed. But not a secure border.

One recent attempt to secure the Mexican border is a $14 million pilot-less drone, which scans the desert for intruders and potential terrorists. Fear of terrorism is the latest reason that large bipartisan majorities in Congress have voted to increase the Border Patrol’s budget.

"There are national security implications to porous borders. There really are. I mean, people are coming into this country who want to come into this country for very nefarious purposes, not just to come here to work at the 7-Eleven, no, they’re coming for other purposes," says Rep. Tancredo.

But Cornelius says zero terrorists have been caught on the Mexican border.

"They don’t need to come in that way. They can purchase the best forged documents in the world. The real danger is that they will come through our legal ports of entry with valid visas, just like the 9/11 terrorists did," says Cornelius.

There are now 11,000 Border Patrol agents, three times as many as there were 12 years ago. Only 100 of them are assigned to find illegal migrants where they work. Nearly all spend their time making arrests and dropping migrants off on the Mexican side of the border.

"Talk with anybody that may have been arrested out there in the desert. They’ll tell you, number one, I’m just coming here to get a job because you have a job to give me and you want me for that job. I’m not doing anything really wrong. America wants me," says Reed.

Meanwhile, back in the Arizona desert, Border Patrol Agent Neubauer gets word 18-year-old Abran Gonzales, who had been wandering in the desert for seven days, has been found.

Abran Gonzales had died of thirst just a few hours earlier.

"It’s hard to know that maybe you could have been out there to help this person, and just weren’t able. That’s something you have to deal with and move on," says Neubauer.

Gonzalez came from a small town in southern Mexico. He had gone to the U.S. to earn enough money to buy a new tin roof for his parents’ house. The parents had borrowed $300 for Abran to make the trip, money the parents still owe.

His cousin, Casimira Manuel, was the first to be told:

"The man from the consulate called and told me they found Abran in the Arizona desert and he was dead. He was a quiet kid. He never hurt anybody. He just wanted to work and come back home," Casimira recalls.


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There were 516 bodies discovered in the desert last year - a new record. Including bodies yet to be discovered, the total of migrant deaths is likely to exceed one thousand.

Produced By David Gelber/Joel Bach © MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

I know this is going to sound terrible but consider that Mexico still practices public humiliation of criminals because they have to see it to believe it.

Dr. Bruce Parks, Tucson’s Medical Examiner, has been on the job for years and says he has never seen anything like this. There are so many bodies, they won’t fit in the vaults in the coroner’s morgue.

I don't know why we are keeping these bodies in the first place. If they have no finger prints on file in the US, then send them to Mexico and the people there can start learning what happens to you when you cross the desert. I think we should make it a very public event. I don't suppose America could take their pictures and post unidentified person ads in Mexico's newspapers.

But Cornelius says zero terrorists have been caught on the Mexican border.

Every time I hear this, I'm going to repeat myself. How do you know? They don't! This is an attempt to get you to quit thinking terrorist are crossing our borders. Lee Harvey Oswald crossed that border several times, with a pass port and American citizenship.

Gonzalez came from a small town in southern Mexico. He had gone to the U.S. to earn enough money to buy a new tin roof for his parents’ house. The parents had borrowed $300 for Abran to make the trip, money the parents still owe.

They barrowed more than enough to fix their roof. They were not motivated to fix the roof. They waited until their son was of age and sent him out. Actually, they wanted their son to support them, with American earned Dollars. There is a moral here but I'll leave that for you to ponder.

Dixie

Dixie, I agree.

CBS aired it again last night. I hadn't seen it the first time, so even expecting it to be an apologia for the illegals, I watched. The only way I can be a pest to the media, is if I know what they are currently showing. Found myself talking to the screen last night

Am writing a comprehensive letter to Bradley, even though he probably won't receive it, and if he does, will delete it. Wonder if he's CFR?

Slighty good news...my local station that got mad at me....is now daily, doing something about this issue, usually now edited with a night vision video of illegals being caught by the border patrol. This AM, it was a group of about 15. That's the point. They are using DIFFERENT videos, not just the same one. They are STILL not doing the depth that we want about the core issues, but boy, they've come a long way, baby!

From zero coverage to daily coverage is big, especially for Miami.

I'd like to think that my incessant pressure requesting the whole truth, has something to do with the widening cracks I'm seeing.

Good job curiouspat, keep on them. I have contacted all stations in my area and only one responded stating that they did cover when in fact they were there with cameras and did not show the footage or commentary. Other than that I have gotten nowhere with them. This shows your efforts are paying off.

Thanks, Ismith1338,

I found a few of the media, who SEEM to try to have integrity....as well as pestering the producers, and admin. Frequently, these journalists are on the slightly older side.

They were educated that the media is SUPPOSED give just the facts, man!
Who, what, when, how and why! AND, that the media is supposed to give a non-judgemental view of BOTH sides of any story. These older media folk were also brought up with values, like DUTY, HONESTY, INTEGRITY, Freedom of Speech, etc.

Don't leave me yet. The gov't and media are using psychology on us...turnabout is fair play.

So, I not only email and call re the true costs of massive invasion, overuse of social services, taking American and LEGAL immigrants jobs, crime and the true of stats of crime, the actual ramifications of Social Security Totalization with Mexico, expectations of population explosion in the next 20 years, water, food supplies. I ask them to look at Europe's current experience with unbridled immigration, other countries experiences with Balkanization. I ask them to research for themselves, MEChA, La Raza (and the socialist/communist backers), Aztlan, the Reconquista movement (I give them links to the home sites). I do NOT hit them with all of this at once. I'm planting seeds. Each time I email I add something from the VALUES group, as I've come to think about it.

I acknowledge that their bosses might have trouble with covering this topic from the whole truth, given the predominent Hispanic population here(when I'm contacting the Miami folk), and that they might even run into problems with the home company (ABC, etc), yet talk about courage, etc. The angriest I got after about 1 month of NO response at all, not even a..."thank you for contacting us, we value your input' type of response...well, I'm afraid that I accused them of abridging my Freedom of Speech and accused them of 'lying by omission'.

THAT exchange brought the first response....and the cracks started showing up about 10 days later.

Maybe the youngest of media folk have been educated with a 'Company bias" sort of education...I can't speak to that.

I'm SLOWLY starting to see some responses that could be SLIGHTY on our side. I'll still demand the full truth. I suggest a special investigation.

Gee, doesn't CBS news and 60 minutes have a credibility issue

steelerbabe,

They ALL have a credibility issue. I'm just trying to bring some exposure to the issue to a huge audience. So I figure that the more of us that contact them and let them know that WE KNOW and will hold them accountable...well, maybe enough will be shown to get more citizens curious.