Yet we want to rely on the cooperation of this corrupt, crime bloated, cesspool to help us seal off the borders?

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3399165

For migrants passing through Mexico, full detention centers often mean they are set free
By JAMES PINKERTON
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

REYNOSA, MEXICO - After two months of dodging thieves and thundering trains during the perilous journey from Honduras, Marco Antonio Vasquez has finally reached the Rio Grande.

Now plotting his next move, the 26-year-old displaced factory worker sits on the steps of a Reynosa church and worries aloud that, if the Border Patrol catches him, he'll be deported and his hopes of finding a job in Houston will be dashed.

What he may or may not realize is that he would likely be freed in Texas, even after American agents stop him, because there isn't enough jail space to hold him.

More than 47,600 illegal border crossers from "countries other than Mexico," so called OTMs, have been caught in South Texas this year. But 42,000, or more than 88 percent, have been promptly released and most have simply melted into society, failing to show up for required immigration court hearings, according to the Texas governor's office.

Alarmed that OTMs from not only Central America but also such nations as Syria, Yemen and Iraq are being freed, Texas lawmakers last year demanded that the Bush administration do something.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry reiterated that concern last week when he unveiled a $9.7 million border security plan.

''Al-Qaida leadership plans to use criminal alien smuggling organizations to bring terrorist operatives across the border into the U.S.," Perry warned. "There can be no homeland security in Texas without border security.'"

Last week , the Department of Homeland Security launched a pilot program to speed the removal of Honduran detainees. Honduran consular officials now interview detainees via video teleconferencing to confirm their nationality, allowing the State Department to quickly issue travel documents so the migrants can return home.

The measure is one of many that Homeland Security officials have taken since last year to try to get the OTM problem under control.

In general, Mexican migrants who are caught choose voluntary departure.

Another program, called "expedited removal," allows agents to remove OTMs without sending them before an immigration judge if they have spent less than 14 days in the U.S. and are apprehended within 100 miles of the border.

''It's a process aimed at reducing the number of illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico," said Todd Fraser, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

But some immigration-control advocates say the federal government isn't doing enough.

Jack Martin, director of special projects for the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the OTM situation is similar to the flood of asylum seekers who entered the country in the 1990s.

''What were facing right now with OTMs is a similar type crisis, where the word is out around the world," said Martin. '' 'All you have to do to get in and work is be an OTM and come in illegally from Mexico, because the detention facilities are full.' "

Martin said the Bush administration should declare an immigration emergency and house detained immigrants from countries other than Mexico in state jails or abandoned military facilities.

Government to blame?

Immigration lawyers in the Rio Grande Valley say the OTM crisis is one of the government's making, noting that existing detention camps hold many migrants who are fighting deportation for past, and in some cases minor, criminal violations. ''Those are policy decisions made by the same congressmen who think the next terrorists are coming across the border," said Jodi Goodwin, a Harlingen lawyer. ''We're stuck with (those policies) until they're changed."

No one knows just how many OTMs have blended into the landscape. But some lawmakers fear that the federal government has lost track of several hundred thousand of these migrants in recent years.

A large number are from Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil and other Latin American nations with which the United States is friendly. But others are from the U.S. government's so-called "countries of interest," including Pakistan, Iran and Sri Lanka, and that concerns some lawmakers.

The stream of OTMs has created an incongruent spectacle in South Texas, where bedraggled groups of Chinese join Mexican migrants huddled around pay phones as they call their relatives in the American interior.

Fear of robbery

Vasquez, the factory worker from Honduras, said he spent the past week in an immigrant shelter next to the sanctuary of the Guadalupe Church in Reynosa.

On a recent morning, he and a older companion were shopping for a human smuggler â€â€