Thread: 72 hours of crime on the San Diego-Tijuana border

May 13, 2017
Kristina Davis

The Nissan Sentra pulled up to the inspection booth at the San Ysidro Port of Entry at 2:19 a.m. on a recent Friday.

The driver, Ricardo de Jesus Vigil Aguayo, gave the Customs and Border Protection officer his U.S. passport. He was on his way to work in Miramar, he said.

It might have been the Sentra’s California license plate, or the driver himself, but something set off an alert in the officer’s computer system. The car needed to be searched further.

Under the massive canopy and bright lights of the secondary inspection area, Vigil’s secret was discovered: a man and a woman squeezed inside the trunk of his car.

Daozeng Sun, a tall, lanky Chinese man, had hoped to make it to New York. He was supposed to pay his smugglers $58,000 for the trip across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Cecilia Gervacio Garcia, who speaks the Mixteco language of indigenous people in central Mexico, was headed for Los Angeles. She was unclear exactly how much money she was on the hook for.

The three were arrested and jailed: Vigil on a human smuggling charge and his illicit passengers as material witnesses to testify against him.

And so began a somewhat typical morning at the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. Here, 38,000 vehicles and 18,900 pedestrians on average enter the U.S. daily as part of a constant ebb and flow of people who are visiting family, commuting to jobs, sightseeing, shopping, searching for economic opportunity and seeking a safe haven.

It’s the people who are doing it illegally who have become one of the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, which has put San Diego and the rest of the southwestern border region on the national radar.

Trump wants to tighten security and ratchet up enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico line. Twice since he took office in January his Homeland Security secretary, John Kelly, has toured San Diego’s border, the last time in April with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Both talked tough about border crime and illegal immigration.

To give a snapshot of the more serious crimes common along San Diego’s border with Mexico, the Union-Tribune observed operations at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, combed federal court records, attended court hearings, and interviewed law enforcement and attorneys. Weekends are busy times at the border, so we focused on a 72-hour period that began on Friday, April 21, and continued through Sunday, April 23. Here’s what we found.

Illegal crossings

Just before sunrise on April 21, Border Patrol Agent Ojeda — who, like most law enforcement officers, is identified by last name only in court documents — was on duty near an area known as “Zuellner’s.” It is about seven miles east of the Tecate Port of Entry, and about a half mile north of the border fence. He checked the area for what — or who — had set off a seismic intrusion device.

Shoe prints indicated maybe three people were headed north. The prints led him to dense brush about 100 yards away, where he found Sergio Dominguez Ramirez hiding with two others.

The trio of Mexicans admitted they were in the U.S. illegally.

Dominguez had been deported before, in April of last year, through El Paso, Texas. He has a criminal record in the United States. He wasn’t processed administratively in immigration court as the two others were. He will be prosecuted in federal court in San Diego.

Farther to the north is the Border Patrol’s Pine Valley checkpoint, where agents usually stop and scrutinize traffic on Interstate 8 looking for drug loads and unauthorized immigrants. But it was closed that morning, so Agent Lopez observed passing traffic from his parked vehicle near Kitchen Creek Road, keeping an eye out for something suspicious. At 8:30 a.m., a gray Nissan Altima passed that was riding especially low — an indicator the car was weighed down with people. He began to follow.

A quick check with dispatch confirmed the car had been flagged in the agency’s computer system as possibly being used for human smuggling.

The driver — U.S. citizen Brandon Cisneros, a 23-year-old unemployed high school dropout from Moreno Valley in Riverside County — slowed the car to 30 mph in the 70 mph zone. The people riding in the back sat up straighter. One person was laying across their laps.

Lopez stopped the car at the Sunrise Highway exit. The four in the back, including a married teenage girl, admitted they were Mexicans here illegally, paying anywhere from $700 to $7,500 to be smuggled into the U.S.

As the agent was about to handcuff Cisneros, he fled into the thick brush and up a hill. A Border Patrol dog found him nearby. Cisneros was arrested.

Immigration trends

It was a distinctly different border in the 1980s and earlier, one with little fencing and fewer patrols. Groups of unauthorized immigrants would stage in Mexico at twilight and surge across the border into San Diego at dark. Border Patrol agents would catch who they could, but they would usually be vastly outnumbered.

That largely ended with 1994’s Operation Gatekeeper, an effort under President Bill Clinton’s administration to fortify the infrastructure and patrols along San Diego’s populated areas. Illegal crossings moved east, into rougher terrain.

Today’s reality is vastly different, said Deputy U.S. Attorney Mark Conover, the second-in-charge at the office and the local border security coordinator — a position Attorney General Sessions created last month in each of the 93 U.S. Attorney’s Offices.

“Night and day,” Conover said of then and now. “People aren’t crossing in large groups, there are not hundreds amassing and running on freeways. People are trying to elude law enforcement rather than overwhelm from law enforcement.”

That means coming in hidden compartments in vehicles, sneaking in small groups through fencing, using real or fake entry documents, or coming in by boat along the coast.

In the past few months, the number of people crossing illegally into the U.S. has slowed to a trickle — from 2,928 apprehensions in January along the California border to 1,356 in March. The numbers had been trending downward for a while under President Barack Obama’s administration, beginning with the Great Recession.

The Department of Homeland Security attributes the recent decline to Trump’s aggressive stance on immigration enforcement.

In San Diego, Conover said, that has also meant fewer immigrants coming to the ports of entry and claiming asylum.

“We are repatriating more people than before,” he said.

Instead, they are trying to sneak in, he said.

Of the unauthorized immigrants caught along the Southern California border, few are prosecuted criminally. Prosecution guidelines have historically focused on crossers who have been previously deported several times, who have criminal records or who crossed under aggravated or especially dangerous circumstances.

Sessions, carrying out the new president’s agenda, wants to bolster those numbers.

“While dramatic progress has been made at the border in recent months, much remains to be done,” Sessions wrote in an April 11 memo to prosecutors. “It is critical that our work focus on criminal cases that will reduce illegality.”

That includes using existing federal laws whenever possible to prosecute immigration-related violations.

“Everything the attorney general memo said to do, we plan on doing,” Conover said. “It’s just a question of when we get the resources to be able to fully implement all of it. It would require more resources to prosecute everyone illegally crossing the border.”

He added: “I hope the prosecutions we do continue to have a deterrent effect on people coming to the U.S. illegally. It can be dangerous for them. And if they come here and get their lives disrupted and get deported, it doesn’t do good for anybody.”

Sniffing out drugs

It was not quite lunchtime on April 21 at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry — San Diego’s second busiest crossing — when Luis Roberto Revilla drove his green Honda Accord into primary inspection booth No. 4. Revilla, a U.S. citizen, said he was going to work that Friday at a body shop in Otay Mesa.

The Customs and Border Protection officer staffing the booth slapped the sides of the car. The rear quarter panels on both sides didn’t sound right — more solid than hollow. Plus, the interior panel did not fit as tight as it should.

Another officer ran the car through a massive X-ray machine nearby, which revealed anomalies on the passenger side. A drug-sniffing dog then circled the car and gave the signal: There were drugs inside.

Officers pulled out 18 packages of marijuana concealed in the quarter panels and trunk, more than 52 pounds in all.

Similar inspections and searches were happening at the San Ysidro Port of Entry that afternoon.

It was a routine Friday, despite Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kelly being in San Diego for a visit to the border. But they were skipping this crossing and instead touring immigrant detention facilities in Otay Mesa.

Lines of vehicles waiting for admission into the U.S. stretched back into Mexico, idling and creeping forward toward rows of primary inspection booths. Yellow bumps in the road mark the international border on this stretch of asphalt.

Music in Spanish and English from car stereos drifted from open windows. Drivers scrolled through their cellphones, read books or stared ahead waiting their turn. One driver in a white Toyota Camry held a cold can of Coca-Cola to his cheek as the temperature climbed past 80 degrees.

Weaving between the vehicles and through clouds of exhaust were teams of officers with CBP’s Anti-Terrorism Contraband Enforcement Team. They chatted with drivers and quickly swept through suspicious vehicles, searching backseats and trunks, tapping the sides for density.

“We are looking for something that stands out,” said CBP spokeswoman Angelica de Cima.

At one of the 25 booths, part of a new construction project to modernize and enlarge the port of entry’s operations, Officer Jonathan Zinn inspected entry documents, asked drivers where they were headed and scrutinized their vehicles.

A gray Volkswagen Eurovan decorated with surfer decals caught his attention. The density of a side panel seemed off.

The driver was referred to a secondary area for an inspection, but the van came up clean. Zinn smiled and shrugged when he found out what had thrown him off: a table built into a door, a classic VW van feature.

Meanwhile, in the neighboring inspection lane, the driver of a gray SUV was led away in handcuffs. Officers determined he was wanted on a warrant out of Nevada for burglary and identification fraud.

Like many of Zinn’s generation, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, instilled a deep sense of patriotism and ultimately swayed him to join the ranks of public service. Raised in Connecticut, he later moved to San Diego to work for a Christian nonprofit that builds houses for the poor in Mexico. He joined CBP in 2012.

“It really changed who I was,” Zinn, 34, said of the attacks. “Every day I come to work with the mind-set that that’s not going happen on my watch. We are the front line of the U.S.”

One of his most memorable busts? Stopping a man in a wheelchair at the Otay Mesa pedestrian crossing. “We found out the person didn’t need the wheelchair, and he had a diaper filled with methamphetamine,” Zinn said.

Officers typically seize about a dozen drug loads a day from the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa ports of entry combined, said Port Director Sidney Aki, who oversees the two crossings and the Cross Border Xpress tunnel connecting San Diego to the Tijuana airport.

Methamphetamine, manufactured in massive amounts in Mexican “superlabs” from chemicals overseas, remains the No. 1 hard drug crossing the border, Aki said. Cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and prescription pills are also common. Marijuana, the cash crop of Mexican cartels for decades, has remained stable over the past few years — a trend that will be closely watched as California soon begins legal recreational sales of the drug.

How are the drugs coming in? It’s cyclical, Aki said, as smugglers try to stay one step ahead of port enforcement.

“In the past, it’s been trunk loads and tires. Then they see our officers catch on, and all of the sudden it’s rear quarter panels and roofs. Then we catch on, then it’s engine manifolds,” he said.

And while the number of seizures has remained steady, the size of the drug loads, and the purity of the drugs, has amplified.

“Ten years ago, a 10-pound meth seizure was a big deal,” Conover said. “Now, we see 100-, 200-pound seizures regularly.”

Cocaine, meth and an escape

The next major drug seizure came Saturday morning.

At the San Ysidro Port of Entry, CBP Officer Lee guided his drug-sniffing dog between the vehicles waiting in line at the primary inspection booths. At 8:10 a.m. on April 22, as the pair neared a Saturn Aura, the dog alerted to the car’s undercarriage.

Fresh tool markings marred the bolts connecting the strut to the frame. Another officer drilled a small hole, threaded a fiber optic camera into the void and saw packages. An access panel behind a spare tire revealed fresh paint and spray-on mud.

Nine packages containing 24 pounds of cocaine were recovered.

The driver, Jorge Sanchez Andrade, a U.S. citizen with no criminal history who has lived in Mexico the past 25 years, admitted he was paid $3,000 to deliver the drugs to San Diego. He was arrested on a drug importation charge.

A relatively quiet Saturday along the border — in terms of crime, at least — morphed into an action-packed Sunday for those working the line.

Just past midnight on April 23, a sensor went off in an area agents call “the Goldmine” — about two miles east of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, near where the two fences turn into one. Gerardo Diaz, a Mexican citizen, was found walking in the area and arrested. He had been deported through San Ysidro just three days earlier, and he was back.

He was taken to the Border Patrol’s Chula Vista station to be held on a charge of being a previously deported unauthorized immigrant found in the U.S.



Back at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Carlos Ortega Hernandez walked up to the pedestrian crossing at 8:25 a.m., hoping the CBP officer would give him a break. He was a U.S. citizen but didn’t have any identification on him, Ortega explained. He said he was returning home because he had been reported as a missing person.

His fingerprints told a different story. He was a Mexican citizen with no authorization to be in the U.S., and he’d been removed from the country in January 2014 and October 2016. He was arrested on an attempted entry after deportation charge.

About noon, Border Patrol Agent Wynglarz was directed to a spot known as “Buttewig/Mine Ridgeline,” about 12 miles east of the Otay Mesa crossing. Another agent had observed four people walking north. There, Wynglarz found four people hiding in brush.

Masedonio de Jesus Flores told the agent he’d crossed illegally the day before and was headed to Chula Vista. He works in agricultural fields, making about $200 a month.

He had been deported to Mexico last May and had other immigration violations on his record. He was arrested on a charge of being a previously deported unauthorized immigrant in the U.S.

At precisely the same time de Jesus Flores was being arrested in the desert, David Elvis Maxwell was waiting in lane No. 14 in San Ysidro to approach a booth in what he said was his brother’s white Toyota Camry. He was visiting his sisters in San Diego, he told the officer who walked up to the car.

As the officer did a routine search of the backseat, his elbow crunched on something in the backrest. With help from an X-ray and drug-sniffing dog, officers detected and pulled out 31 packages of methamphetamine hidden in door panels and the backseat, totaling 40 pounds.

A more thorough search of the car turned up another 10 pounds of meth.

Maxwell, a FedEx driver, later admitted he was approached by a man at a Tijuana nightclub who offered him $3,000 to smuggle the drugs.

The day took an unusual twist around 2:40 p.m. when Border Patrol agents got word that Diaz, the man they’d found several hours earlier in the Goldmine area, had somehow managed to escape from the Chula Vista station where he’d been held.

At 6:45 p.m., a citizen reported seeing Diaz walking along Via Del Bardo in San Ysidro. Diaz climbed into the passenger side of a black Ford F-150. Agents approached right away and arrested him, taking him back to the station.

Groundhog Day

About 91 percent of the cases prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego and Imperial counties have a nexus to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Spend any length of time in court here and it starts to feel like Groundhog Day for many of the regulars — the same cases, the same stories, the same characters.

“It is déjà vu every time you go there,” said San Diego defense attorney Michael Crowley, who has represented border cases here for 30 years.

Most of the unauthorized immigrants come to visit family members and to find work, said defense attorney Michael Messina, who has represented hundreds of border cases over the decades.

“Everyone has a story and some of them are quite remarkable in the degree of hardship they have to overcome just to live day to day,” Messina said.

The people who agree to participate in high-stakes smuggling crimes have their own motives.

“It covers the gamut,” Crowley said.

There are career bad guys and those plugged into the cartels. There are also a lot of people who need to make a quick buck.

Crowley remembers one case with three sisters who were the most unlikely drug couriers. “They were so plain spoken, so down to earth,” he said. Their mother had fallen ill with cancer, and they’d told everyone at their church.

Word got back to a drug organization, which persuaded the women to strap meth to their bodies under their big, flowery dresses, Crowley said.

“Cartels have their ear out for desperate people all the time,” he said.

Casinos and bars are a common place where smuggling operations troll for couriers. “You are a mark if you are a U.S. citizen with a border crossing card. Or an LPR (legal permanent resident),” Crowley said.

Some organizations threaten violence against recruits and their families, or coerce lovers to become involved, or tap into a drug addict’s habit.

Then there are blind mules, the border crossers who unwittingly carry drugs in their vehicles. Crowley is convinced there are more blind mules than federal authorities will ever admit.

Risky business

The weekend ended with a dramatic — and dangerous — finale.

Late Sunday night, a sensor went off in an area known as “Triple Nickel” — about a mile east of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry and 2½ miles north of the Mexico border. An agent headed there on his all-terrain vehicle at 11:42 p.m. and saw the lights of a Ford Expedition parked on Alta Road.

The vehicle slowly moved, then stopped. Yelling came from the car, then it drove away.

Supervisory Agent Contreras saw the Expedition coming toward him on Otay Mesa Road and made a U-turn to follow it. The SUV driver began to make erratic moves, tapping brakes and making a hard turn on to state Route 125 north.

Another sharp turn kicked up a cloud of dust as the SUV crashed into the end of a guardrail and into a ditch.

Seven people were scattered around the wreckage — some on the ground complaining of injuries, others standing nearby. A boy suffered cuts to his face and neck.

They admitted to paying from $1,000 to $5,000 to be smuggled into the U.S. One passenger said the driver, Miguel Angel Tejada Loaiza, 21, seemed to purposely jerk the wheel of the vehicle to cause it to roll over.

Tejada, a Mexican citizen without permission to be in the U.S., has no criminal history. He was arrested on suspicion of transporting unauthorized immigrants.

What’s next?

Trump’s border crackdown is just beginning to play out, and it’s not known how the new priorities will affect the smugglers and unauthorized immigrants who have been common to the U.S.-Mexico border — and to U.S. courtrooms — for decades.

For now, the perception of a crackdown, and the fear reverberating on both sides of the border, appears to have had a drastic effect on the number of people trying to cross illegally. Criminal organizations that control immigrant smuggling routes have upped their prices in response.

But will that last? The $1.1 trillion bipartisan spending plan Trump signed this month contains no funding for his border wall or hiring of 15,000 additional border and immigration officers. Even if those two campaign promises do get funded later, they wouldn’t happen quickly.

The budget does, however, call for $1.5 billion for border security measures, including upgrades to infrastructure and technology.

“The wall, if it’s built — although there is the question of if that is realistic and going to happen — will impact migration,” predicted Eric Olson, deputy director of the Latin America program at the Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based, non-partisan think tank. “Will it stop migration? Illegal migration? Probably not. It may reduce it somewhat, but actually stopping it is like trying to stop prostitution. There’s always going to be demand for labor and motivations, and people will find ways to go around it, over it or under it.”

But Conover, the deputy U.S. attorney, said the work being done at the border can’t be underestimated, especially when it comes to intercepting drugs bound for the U.S.

“We get the opportunity to affect the entire nation,” he said.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...513-story.html

So sick and tired of these people. Too bad we can't build an enormous Panama Canal from the Pacific to the Gulf!!!