Illegal immigrants using cell phones to seek help
Jul. 17, 2008 05:03 PM
Associated Press

TUCSON - Increasingly, illegal immigrants crossing the Arizona desert who become distressed are turning to cell phones to call for help, the Border Patrol says.

Patrol paramedics are seeing "a tremendous increase" in 911 calls made from illegal immigrants' cell phones so far this fiscal year.

Overall, rescues by the agency's search, trauma and rescue unit, called Borstar, are down from the same period 12 months earlier - from 341 to 294 from Oct. 1 through June 30.
But there has been at least a 200 percent increase in the number of cell phone-generated calls for help, Borstar paramedic Mario Agundez said Thursday.

"This year is the first year that we've had a tremendous increase of 911 calls," Agundez said. "It seems like more groups are aware of this."

In just three days during the first week in June, for instance, Agundez said agents in the Tucson sector, the busiest section along the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal immigrant traffic, received 10 such calls for help. Nine of those resulted in rescues.

Another four cell phone calls to 911 came in during the rest of the week.

"Before, that's what we had in the whole summer" in cell phone calls for help, Agundez said.

Since the Borstar unit doesn't officially track cell phone calls, officials said no figures are available on how many rescues were generated by phone calls for help.

"I wouldn't say it's a daily occurrence, but it's more than a weekly occurrence," said Pat Joy, the Pima County Sheriff's Department communications supervisor. "We probably started really seeing that about two years ago."

All 911 calls in southern Arizona go through the appropriate county sheriff's department. Calls from immigrants for help can be routed or patched directly to Borstar.

Border Patrol spokesman Mario Escalante said immigrant smugglers are not taking as many chances. "They're taking advantage of the technology and allowing people basically to go out on their own and giving them a cell phone. Or a guide might leave a group, giving them a phone, he said.

Agundez said he believes callers have faked being in distress on a few occasions, apparently trying to get agents out of position or send them on fruitless searches. He said the 10th early-June call may have been one such occasion.

In only some instances can the technology built into cell phones enable agents to pinpoint a caller's location. Other times, it's a needle-in-the-haystack situation.

Depending on where the phone was made and sold, whether there's a service provider and which one, Agundez said, "it could be a rescue of 30 minutes or eight hours."

All cell phones bought in the United States since early 2004 have global positioning system technology that can provide latitude-longitude coordinates. If the user has a service provider, cell towers can triangulate a location, Joy said.

"We have equipment that allows us to plot on an electronic map the location of the caller," she said. "Once we determine where it's at, we're able to give the Border Patrol those coordinates so they know what and where they're dealing with."

But that's only the case with phones activated or initialized by a service provider. For so-called throwaway or pay-as-you-go noninitialized phones, dialing 911 for help will not provide GPS coordinates. They also have no callback number.

That's true for cell phones from Mexico, Agundez said.

Any 911 calls made from border areas west of Nogales or near the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation on noninitialized phones will be transmitted by one of two cell towers with approximately a 50-mile radius.

Once patched through to Borstar, "it's up to the agent to try to decipher within a short period of time," with lives at stake, where the caller is located," Agundez said.

The agents try to pinpoint that by asking what landmarks the caller sees, where the person crossed and what the destination is.

Only some U.S. cell phone providers are capable of having the cell tower bounce a signal back to the cell phone to triangulate the longitude and latitude.

A little more than a year ago, Borstar agents received a 911 call from an American working just south of the border who was dehydrated and in distress.

They had only the broad tower coordinates but started deploying agents along the U.S. side of the border. Finally, they located the man just south of the border and managed to get him back across the line, Agundez said.
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