Thread: Mexican Cops brief border-bound emigres

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Opinion Sunday, June 4, 2006






Mexican cops brief border-bound emigres

Fernando Pizarro


June 4, 2006

WASHINGTON — Mexico’s Altar-Sasabe road is a mix of desert sand and gravel, with trash strewn on its shoulders. In the morning hours, there’s little traffic in either direction, but around noon that begins to change, as battered Ford and Chevy vans with “Altar-Sasabe” painted above the headlights and on the doors begin to leave every 10 minutes from the main square in Altar, a town in the state of Sonora. Each van is crammed with as many as 20 passengers, carrying little or no luggage, who have paid up to $20 for a one-way ticket north.
By 4 p.m., the vans are filling up and departing every two to three minutes. Soon a caravan of vehicles is snaking north at 40 miles an hour along the dirt road. They’re headed for Sasabe, an impoverished Mexican village that huddles just south of the U.S. border.
Sasabe is a dusty town of unpaved roads and few signs of life, but each day it’s the last stop for thousands of people who, guided by “coyotes,” or polleros, will hike through the surrounding hills under cover of night to bypass the gleaming modern border checkpoint that stands just a few yards away, in the Arizona town of the same name.
Then they will attempt to cross the Sonora desert on foot into the United States — and join the ranks of America’s millions of illegal immigrants.
Before they reach Sasabe, however, the vans come upon the Mexican checkpoint of El Tortugo. A rusted, bullet-riddled sign indicates that the Arizona border is still 22 kilometers away. At the checkpoint one day in January, officers in bright orange shirts ordered a Sasabe-bound van to stop and unload its passengers. Then, with the migrants forming a loose ring around them, the officers proceeded to explain the dangers of the desert. As they do dozens of times each day, they warned the migrants to take a flashlight, to carefully survey the place where they choose to stop and rest or sleep, to check for the presence of animals and for broken glass and other potentially hazardous debris amid the trash that litters the hills.
These are the officers of Grupo Beta. Part of Mexico’s Interior Ministry, this special police unit was created in Tijuana in 1990 to protect Mexican migrants from being preyed upon by criminals and swindlers. Along Mexico’s southern border, the unit’s mission today is to stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Central America. But here in the north, the officers of Grupo Beta call themselves the Mexican migrants’ helping hand or, jokingly, the “pretty face of immigration.” They proudly claim that Mexico is the only country in the world to offer this sort of protective service to outgoing migrants.
The most important advice the officers give is not to run from U.S. authorities. “If you make it to the other side, good for you. But if you’re caught, don’t run,” said the officer in charge of El Tortugo on that January day. “Give yourselves up and go on. You may repeat this once or twice, but you only have one life and you must protect it. There is no way out. If the patrol catches you, they will give you food, some assistance. There are Mexican consulates on the American side where you can go for help and support.”
This advice could save their lives, the officer insisted. “Don’t run, hands always up, don’t put them in your pockets. You are all committing a crime when entering the United States. So they won’t stop to think about whether you are migrants or drug traffickers or something else.” If caught, the officer warned, they must not allow the Border Patrol to separate them from their relatives. Nevertheless, this often happens at the Border Patrol detention centers, where men and women who have been apprehended are kept separate for several hours as they are processed, fingerprinted and photographed to await deportation.
While by law they cannot forbid Mexican citizens to travel to the border, the Grupo Beta officers have orders to detect and detain non-Mexicans who may be in the country illegally. The officers claim to be able to determine people’s home towns on the basis of accents and facial features. But when I was there observing, they did not thoroughly question the passengers in the vans, who remained largely silent while momentarily detained at El Tortugo.
After a five-minute lecture from the Grupo Beta officer, the passengers re-boarded the van. As it pulled back onto the road to Sasabe, there was no time for the officers to regroup or debrief, as the next vehicles were arriving and awaiting inspection. After dropping off their cargo at Sasabe, the empty vans rush back to Altar to pick up more passengers, the drivers hoping to make the 120-mile round trip a few more times over the next several hours.
By the end of their shift, the officers of Grupo Beta calculated that 1,200 migrants had headed to the United States — on that day alone.

Fernando Pizarro is the Washington correspondent for the Univision Television Group. He wrote this for The Washington Post. Contact him at fpizarro@univision.net.





Copyright 2006 Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon

And that jackass Vincente Bush says his brother is our friend. Beyond disgusting.


1. Iraq mess
2. Immigration mess
3. New Orleans still unprepared for 2006 hurrican season
4. "Loss" of my and other veterans and active duty personal data
5. Just being jackasses and wastes of taxpayer dollars

IMPEACH BUSH NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

THE SENATE: The most corrupt institution money can buy!!!!!!!!!

. Along Mexico’s southern border, the unit’s mission today is to stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Central America. But here in the north, the officers of Grupo Beta call themselves the Mexican migrants’ helping hand or, jokingly, the “pretty face of immigration.” They proudly claim that Mexico is the only country in the world to offer this sort of protective service to outgoing migrants.

Outrageous! What a difference...Central Americans stopped and Mexicans encouraged..

I want those van drivers as guest workers in the US and I want there passangers to be south bound.

Dixie