Thread: Border crackdown fuels smugglers' boom on U.S.-Mexico border

Border crackdown fuels smugglers' boom on U.S.-Mexico border

The Associated Press
December 31, 2006

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SAN DIEGO - Toughened U.S. border enforcement has prompted substantially more illegal immigrants to hire smugglers to help them cross over from Mexico _ and competition among sophisticated criminal networks for customers has spawned violence and sometimes death.

The evidence is abundant in border boomtowns, where human traffickers rustle together flocks of immigrants for the journey north. Further evidence comes from tens of thousands of interviews of illegal border crossers in surveys by a Mexican government-funded research institution, which were analyzed by The Associated Press.

"What was once a discretionary expense has now become a necessity," said Jorge Santibanez, who oversaw the surveys while president of Tijuana-based El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.

AP's examination of the sweeping data found the use of smugglers on the rise among those surveyed. The interviewees were border crossers who returned to Mexico within three years or were caught and kicked out by the Border Patrol.

About half of those surveyed in 2005 said they had hired a smuggler. That compared to about 1 in 3 in 2004 and just 1 in 6 in 2000.

The actual percentage of illegal immigrants who hire smugglers may be even higher than what the AP analysis found. That's because people may hesitate to admit they hired someone to commit a crime. And the survey excludes those who made it across and remain in the United States _ a successful crossing often depends on the expertise of a hired guide.

"You're less likely to get caught if you're using a smuggler," said David Spener, an immigration expert at Trinity University in San Antonio.

While smugglers have spirited people into the United States since Congress first limited immigration in the 1880s, the current spike coincides with heightened border security following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

In this market, where customers pay several times what they did a decade ago, increasingly brazen organizations compete for business.

While most smugglers walk their customers several nights across the deserts that dominate the frontier's nearly 2,000 miles, others take frightening risks.

Inspectors at a San Diego crossing found a 14-year-old girl strapped under the metal bars of a car seat, the driver sitting atop her, and occasionally find children inside compartments that once served as the gas tanks.

Smugglers in Arizona have hijacked loads of customers from rivals _ in one case, resulting in a highway shootout that killed four people in 2003. In Tijuana, across from heavily fortified San Diego and the world's busiest border crossing, three bullet-ridden bodies were found in May, covered with roasted chickens. Spanish slang for a smuggler includes "pollero," literally a poultry handler.

"It's become a very good business _ more dangerous, but a good business," said Daniel Rivera, 63, who recruits migrants walking the streets of Tijuana.

The Border Patrol has grown from 8,400 agents in 1999 to 12,400 agents today and is projected to reach 18,000 by the end of 2008. President Bush dispatched the National Guard to the border last spring and recently signed legislation to erect 700 miles of fencing from California to Texas. Meanwhile, the government is buying sensors, unmanned aircraft and other border security gadgets.

A senior official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the fact that migrants are increasingly relying on smugglers shows that heightened border enforcement is working.

The trend of hiring smugglers is "a natural outgrowth of the fact that we have more control," said Ralph Basham, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol. He expects it will continue.

Critics say the border crackdown isn't working, that the U.S. government's own estimates suggest the number of illegal immigrants here grew by 2 million between 2000 and 2005 to 10.5 million people. The big winners, they say, are the smugglers.

"It has turned a modestly lucrative business into a fantastically profitable industry," said Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the University of California, San Diego.

For this story, the AP analyzed the responses of nearly 61,000 illegal immigrants interviewed by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte researchers over six years, ending in June 2005. The college surveys were conducted at airports, bus stations and crossings in eight Mexican border cities, from Tijuana on the Pacific to Matamoros, just south of Brownsville, Texas.

The study is one of the most ambitious efforts to quantify immigrant smuggling between Mexico and the United States. People surveyed were about evenly split between those deported and those who returned voluntarily after crossing successfully within the previous three years.

Nowhere are smugglers more prominent than Arizona _ the border's desolate midsection and the central front in the U.S. government's struggle against illegal crossings.

According to AP's analysis, of those who said they crossed the border through one of three major Arizona corridors, 55 percent hired a smuggler last year. That compared to 28 percent in 2003 and 18 percent in 2000.

Along the entire border the numbers were slightly lower: 47 percent of respondents in 2005 hired a smuggler, up from 20 percent in 2003 and 16 percent in 2000.

For Meliton Aurelio Sanchez, hiring a smuggler became a life-and-death question.

The 42-year-old father of three from Mexico's Veracruz state didn't bother hiring a smuggler in 2001 when he and a friend hiked two days across the border near Naco, Ariz., eventually settling in North Carolina to make $6 an hour as a carpenter.

Sanchez eventually returned home and in May set off again for North Carolina. At the same border he crossed without help before, he paused _ spooked by the deaths of hundreds of migrants who perish each year in the desert and convinced that heightened enforcement would force him along obscure routes.

"I'd get lost if I tried alone, left to die in the desert," Sanchez said.

So Sanchez agreed to pay a smuggler $1,500 to get him to Phoenix _ like many, he would pay nothing unless he crossed successfully.

Over a two-week span he tried to cross four times in groups of about 20 people, but the Border Patrol nabbed him each time. After being dumped back into Mexico, Sanchez would return to the bustling border boomtown of Altar, a 90-minute drive from the Arizona state line. Mexicans who are arrested are typically freed within 24 hours, after a quick stop at jail for fingerprints. (Sanchez eventually got across. In a later phone interview from Durham, N.C., where he landed a $10-an-hour carpentry job, he said he paid $1,800 to a smuggler to be guided across the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas, and be shuttled to Chicago by van and bus.)

Like an army in the field, smuggling networks require layers of support. Entrepreneurs have remade Altar, where dozens of boarding houses have sprouted in recent years and shuttle vans line the central square, where migrants gather before they cross. Taco stands share space with a Red Cross trailer that treats migrants for blisters, parasites and swollen fingers.

Francisco Garcia, a former Altar mayor who now runs a migrant shelter, has tallied 14 hotels, 80 boarding houses and 120 taxis _ for a community of about 16,000 permanent residents.

"You would think this was a tourist spot but we have nothing _ no architecture, no beaches to show off," said Garcia, who describes the town as "the waiting room for migrants."

An estimated 3,500 people pass through every day from January to April, the peak crossing season _ before summer, after a home visit for Christmas. Vans line the square, cramming up to 30 people inside and charging the equivalent of $30 a person for a ride to the border.

Tijuana's red-light district offers another glimpse of the increasingly sophisticated smuggling trade.

Before a crackdown in the mid-'90s, illegal immigrants famously massed along an open border and sprinted into the night.

As security increased, smugglers worked solo, collecting $300 tips to guide immigrants on a short walk into San Diego, where the customers would hop a trolley or be collected by a friend or relative. Then came two steel mesh fences, along with more Border Patrol agents, stadium lighting and motion sensors.

Now, the men who worked as solo smugglers a decade ago are minions in a larger scheme. They get paid about $100 to recruit migrants on Tijuana's streets for organizations that charge $1,600 to sneak people through the mountains near Tecate, 35 miles east of San Diego. Some migrants pay $2,500 to hide inside a car trunk.

"Times have changed _ it's a lot more difficult to get across, there are a lot more problems, and there's a lot more walking," said Juan Torres, 45, a smuggler who leads immigrants through the mountains. His cut is about $300 from the usual $1,600 fee. Drivers and people who run safehouses in the United States also get a cut.

Migrants linger inside dingy Tijuana hotels, waiting for a cab or bus ride before sunset to begin a trek that can last up to four days. A driver meets them on the U.S. side and speeds them to a drop house, sometimes with deadly consequences as they try to evade Border Patrol highway checkpoints.

One man who survived a July 2005 crash that killed five people _ including the man's pregnant wife, 13-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter _ said he had agreed to pay $1,500 a person to get his family from Tijuana to Los Angeles.

Business is so good that some Border Patrol agents are taking a cut. In one of several recent convictions, two supervisory agents in southeastern California admitted taking nearly $180,000 in bribes to release immigrant smugglers and illegal immigrants from federal custody.

Smugglers _ often called "coyotes" _ have flourished for decades and witnessed boom times before. Demand grew after a temporary worker program with Mexico ended in 1965 and again after the 1990s crackdown in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

Smuggling entered a new growth phase after 2000 as the Border Patrol shifted agents to Arizona. The Border Patrol's Arizona stations accounted for half of the agency's 1.2 million arrests along the Mexican border in 2005, up from only 8 percent of 1.2 million arrests in 1992.

U.S. officials say they make no systematic effort to track how many of the people they arrest hired smugglers. Customs and Border Protection has not responded to a Freedom of Information Act that the AP submitted in April to disclose what information it collects in the Border Patrol's database of apprehensions.

Bulmaro Arizmendez del Carpio, 22, was one of those caught by the Border Patrol. He decided to save the $1,600 fee and forsake a guide, then walked three days in triple-digit temperatures in early June before being arrested with 17 others outside Phoenix. After the first day he ran out of water and twice had to fill jugs with dirty water from cow tanks. His feet were covered with blisters.

Back at a bus station in Mexico, where he was deported, Arizmendez said, "If we had hired a smuggler it would have been different."

Methodology details about poll of illegal border crossers
The Associated Press analyzed 60,349 responses to a survey by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Tijuana, Mexico-based, government-funded research center, from July 1999 through June 2005. The year 2000 represents July 1999 through June 2000; the year 2001 represents July 2000 through June 2001, and so on.

The responses do not reflect all illegal border crossers. The surveys were limited to illegal immigrants captured and returned to Mexico by the U.S. Border Patrol and illegal immigrants who successfully crossed within the previous three years and returned to Mexico voluntarily.

The research center interviewed migrants at airports, bus stations and border crossings in eight Mexican cities spread along a 1,952-mile border with the United States: Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, Piedras Negras, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa. Responses were weighted to account for factors including seasonality, day of the week and time of day.

The questions asked were:

_"With regard to your last crossing to the United States, did you hire someone to help you cross the border?"

_"With regard to your last crossing to the United States, from which Mexican city did you cross?" Responses were sorted by about 30 cities.



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http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/2006 ... S/61231003

http://www.laopinion.com/primerapagina/ ... 0000974860

Festín of ' coyotes'

Greater security in the border, the dealers of people have seen prosper widely his ' negotiated

Elliot Spagat
Associated Press

31 of December of 2006

SAN DIEGO. - - The strictest measures in the border of the United States have caused a substantial increase in the amount of undocumented immigrants whom they contract smugglers to help them to cross the border from Mexico. Also, the competition between the sophisticated criminal networks to obtain clients has generated acts of violence and in some occasions until the death.

More than one its slice takes


At the moment, the men who worked single one decade ago are partisan in a greater project. They receive approximately 100 dollars to recruit immigrants in the streets of Tijuana for the organizations who receive 1.600 dollars to make that the people cross mountains near Tecate, 35 miles to the east of San Diego. Some immigrants pay 2.500 dollars to hide in cajuela of an automobile.

"the times have changed, are much more difficult to cross, are many more problems and are necessary to walk much more", say to Juan Towers, of 45 years, a smuggler who guides immigrants through mountains. The slice that corresponds to him is approximately 300 dollars of the usual tariff of 1.600 dollars. The conductors and the people who also manage the refuges in the United States receive a slice.

The immigrants wait for within the dirty hotels of Tijuana the moment of the trip in taxi or bus before the dusk to begin a long walk that can take up to four days. A conductor waits for them in the American side and he takes them quickly to a refuge, sometimes with mortal consequences when trying to evade the control posts of the Border Patrol.

A man who survived a shock in 2005 July in which five people died -- among them its embarrassed wife, a son of 13 years and one daughter of 11 -- remembers that she had acceded to pay 1.500 dollars to a person so that took to its family from Tijuana to the city of the Angels.

The business is so good that some agents of the Border Patrol are receiving a slice. In one of several recent sentences, two supervisors in the Southeastern of California admitted to have received almost 180 thousand dollars in bribes to release to smugglers and undocumented immigrants who were under federal safekeeping

The tests abound in the border towns that grew quickly, where the dealers of people join groups of immigrants for the trip to the north. Also there are tests of tens of thousands of interviews with undocumented immigrants who cross the border in surveys made by an institution of investigation financed by the Mexican government.

"What before it was a discretionary cost now has become a necessity", says Jorge Santibáñez, supervisor of the surveys and president of the School of the North Border in Tijuana.

The analysis of this great amount of information indicates an increase in the use of smugglers on the part of the encuestadas people. The interviewed people were undocumented immigrants who crossed the border and returned to Mexico during following the three years or were stopped and expelled by the Border Patrol.

Approximately half of the people encuestadas in 2005 said to have contracted a smuggler. The increase is clear in comparison with 1 of 3 in 2004 and only 1 of 6 in 2000.

The real percentage of undocumented immigrants whom they contract smugglers even can be more stop than what indicates analysis the present. That must to that the people can feel reticent to admit that they contracted somebody to commit a crime. And the survey excludes which managed to cross and remained in the United States: the success of the crossing often depends on the experience of the guide who contracts itself.

"If one uses a smuggler, it is less probable that they catch it", according to David Spener, expert in immigration of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

The smugglers cross to people towards the United States from the decade of 1880, when the Congress restricted immigration for the first time. Nevertheless, the present increase agrees with more safety measure in the border as a result of the terrorist attacks of 2001.

In this market in which the clients pay several times which paid one decade ago, the more and more audacious organizations compete by the clients.

Although most of the smugglers they accompany on foot to his clients during the nights in which they take in crossing the desert that dominates the border of almost 2.000 miles (3.200 kilometers), other people animate themselves to run chilling risks.

The inspectors of the crossing of San Diego found to a girl of 14 years moored underneath the metallic bars of the seat whereas the conductor was seated above; in other occasions one has been to children within compartments that at some moment worked like fuel tanks.

The smugglers in Arizona have cleared great amounts of clients to their rivals; in 2003 this caused a shooting in the freeway that caused the death of four people. In Tijuana, to the other side of the city of San Diego, strongly fortified and that constitutes the border crossing more assets of the world, three covered baleados bodies with roasted chickens were in May. In Spanish the term is used popularly chicken farmer to talk about to the smuggler.

"one has become a very good business, more dangerous, but in a good business", it admits Daniel Creek, of 63 years, that recruit immigrants by the streets of Tijuana.

The Border Patrol has increased its force of 8.400 officials in 1999 to 12.400 at the present time, and the projections for aims of 2008 are that it will reach the 18 thousand elements. The last spring, president George W. Bush sent the National Guard to the border and recently signed a law to construct a wall of 700 miles (1.126 km) of length from California to Texas. Meanwhile, the government is buying sensorial, airships nonmanned and other devices for the security of the border.

A civil employee of high rank of the Department of Seguridad Interna (DHS) said that the fact that the immigrants depend more and more on the smugglers demonstrates that the stricter safety measures in the border are working.

The tendency to contract smugglers is "a natural consequence of the fact that we have more control", explains Ralph Basham, commissioner of Customs and Protection of the Border of EU, that it supervises to the Border Patrol. It hopes that it continues of that way.

The critical say that the measures in the border are not working, that the calculations of the EU government suggest it amount of undocumented immigrants in this country registered an increase of two million between years 2000 and 2005 and reached a number of 10,5 million people. The great beneficiaries, say, are the smugglers.

"he has happened to be a modestly lucrative business to an industry with spectacular gains", says Wayne Cornelius, expert in immigration of the University of California in San Diego.

For this note, the answers of almost 61 thousand undocumented immigrants were analyzed interviewed by investigators of the School of the North Border during a period of six years in a study that finalized in June of 2005. The surveys of the School were carried out in airports, bus-stations and crossings in the eight Mexican border cities, from Tijuana, in the Pacific Ocean, to Matamoros, to the south of Brownsville, Texas.

The study is one of the most ambitious efforts to quantify the traffic of immigrants between Mexico and the United States. Of the encuestadas people, almost half was deported and other half voluntarily returned to Mexico in the last three years after crossing the border successfully.

Arizona is the state where the smugglers have greater importance, due to desolate the central zone and to the emphasis that the government of EU in his fight against the crossing of undocumented immigrants puts there.

According to this analysis, between the people who said to have crossed the border through the one of the three main runners of Arizona year last, 53% contracted a smuggler. That number indicates a clear increase in comparison with registered 28% in 2003 and 18% of 2000.

If the border in its totality is considered, the numbers are slightly more losses: 47% of the encuestados ones in 2005 contracted a smuggler, an increase in comparison with 20% in 2003 and 16% in 2000.

For Melitón Aurelio Sanchez, to contract a dealer it became a question from life or death.

The man of 42 years, father of three children, native of the Mexican state of Veracruz, did not contract a smuggler in 2001 when he crossed the border near Naco, Arizona, walking during two days with a friend and finally he settled down in Carolina of the North, where he gained 6,00 dollars the hour like carpenter.

More ahead, Sanchez returned to house and in May she started off again for North Carolina. One stopped in the same border that had crossed without aid, scared by the deaths of hundreds of immigrants who perish every year in the desert and convinced that the hardening of the measures in the border would force it to follow ways tenebrous.

"it would lose to Me if it tried it single and it would die in the desert", says Sanchez. For that reason, it acceded to pay 1.500 dollars to a smuggler so that it took it to Phoenix. Like many, would only pay if it managed to cross.

During a period of two weeks it tried to cross four times in groups of approximately 20 people, but the Border Patrol catched it in each one of the opportunities. After they gave back it to Mexico, Sanchez returned to the town of Altar, boisterous and in continuous growth, to 90 minutes in automobile of the state limit of Arizona. The Mexicans which they are arrested normally are released in following the 24 hours, after a fast passage by the prison so that they take the digital tracks them.

Sanchez finally managed to cross. In one he interviews telephone made later from Durham, North Carolina, where he obtained to a work of carpentry to 10 dollars the hour, he said that he had paid 1.800 dollars to a smuggler so that he guided it in order to cross the Grande River near Laredo, Texas, and he sent it to Chicago in light truck and bus.

SUPPORT

Like an army in the battlefield, the networks of the smugglers require of different levels from support. The industralists have reconstructed Altar, where years arose in the last dozens from houses of lodging and in the main seat, where the immigrants meet before crossing and are several light trucks hoping. Positions of sale of tacos share the space with a rolling house of the Red Cross who offers treatment for blisters, parasites and fingers swollen to the immigrants.

Francisco Garci'a, an ex- mayor of Altar that now is owner of a refuge for immigrants, entered 14 hotels, 80 houses of lodging and 120 taxis, everything for a community of approximately 16 thousand permanent residents.

"One would think that it is a tourist place, but we do not have anything, is no architecture, is no beaches, is nothing no to show", comments Garci'a, who describes the city as "the waiting room of the immigrants".

One calculates that 3.500 people spend every day from January to April, the season tip to cross, before the summer and after a visit to house in Christmas. The light trucks surround the seat, crowd together up to 30 people in the interior and receive the equivalent one to 30 dollars by person by a trip until the border.

The red zone of Tijuana offers another look of incredibly falsified business of the contraband.

Before the measures in the middle of 1990, he was known that the undocumented immigrants crossed in great amounts an open border and soon they ran in the dark.

As he increased the security, the smugglers worked of a one, receiving 300 dollars to guide the immigrants in a brief long walk towards San Diego, where the clients rose a street car or she gathered a friend or relative. Soon two walls of steel mesh were placed and more agents of the Border Patrol, illumination of stage and sensors of movement added themselves.

The smugglers, also called coyotes, have prospered during decades and have been witnesses of times of great growth. The demand increased after a program with Mexico for temporary workers finalized again in 1965 and after the measures that were taken in the decade of 1990 in San Diego, California, and in the Step, Texas.

The contraband of immigrants entered in a new stage of growth after 2000, when the Border Patrol transferred agents towards Arizona. The stations of the Border Patrol in Arizona represented half of the 1,2 million arrests throughout the Mexican border in 2005, an increase with respect to 8% of the 1,2 million arrests in 1992.

The American civil employees say that they do not make any systematic effort to take the account of how many of the people who arrest they contracted a smuggler.

The Office of Customs and Protection of the Border has not responded to the request of data according to the Law of Freedom of Informacio'n (FOIA) that AP presented/displayed in April so that it was disclosed what information takes shelter in the data base of arrests of the Border Patrol.

Bulmaro Arizméndiz of the Carpio, of 22 years, was one of the people catched by the Border Patrol. It decided to save the 1.600 dollars and not to have guide, reason why it walked during three days with temperatures of three digits at the beginning of June before being along with arrested other 17 people in the outskirts of Phoenix. The water in the first day finished to him and in two occasions it had to fill the containers with dirty water of the tanks for the cows. It had the feet covered with blisters.

Of return in a bus-station in Mexico, where they deported it, Arizméndiz said: "If it had contracted a smuggler it would have been different".