As Reform Falters, Immigration Focus Is on the Frontier
By Angie C. Marek
Posted 6/17/07
YUMA, Ariz.—The assaults here can pile up quickly. U.S. Border Patrol agent Michael Norton, who patrols the area on bicycle, says he was almost drowned recently when he chased two migrant smugglers into a canal where they repeatedly forced him underwater. And last month, another agent was brutally struck in the face by a convicted murderer who had been deported several months before. Still, Norton says he's seen worse. "It's a different border than it was in 2005," he says, padlocking a van with two fresh catches inside. "Back then so many people were crossing here, it was like the Macy's Day parade every single night."

It's the strange philosophy of the Border Patrol that violence is a sign of success. As agents gain more control of an area, the theory goes, criminals will fight back harder. An odd statement, perhaps, considering the recent fate of immigration reform in Washington: After another failed vote in the U.S. Senate, President Bush went to work last week picking up the pieces, backing a funding amendment that would take the bill's focus off amnesty and put it on the more politically palatable matter of enforcement. Yet, despite claims by conservatives to the contrary, statistics show that respectable progress in border control—particularly along key stretches in Arizona and Texas—is already being made. The real problem now is how to sustain it.

Apprehension figures are a notoriously disputed statistic. But they are considered the most reliable measure of illegal traffic, and in the last year, they have been telling. From October 2006 through June 4 of this year, the Border Patrol logged 26 percent fewer arrests than in the same period a year before. In some key segments, apprehensions are down more than 50 percent.

Those numbers look far different from the data on the last major change in migration patterns, when the government changed its strategy from scooping up illegal immigrants to preventing them from coming in the first place. In 1993, the chief of the Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, lined up agents along the Rio Grande to block the immigrants dashing into his city from Mexico. A year later, the feds tackled a chaotic situation in San Diego by building a wall topped with floodlights. Although foot traffic sank in those two areas, it only shifted like a bubble elsewhere. Apprehensions in Arizona spiked, jumping 51 percent in 1994.

To be sure, there are plenty who question the government's math. "Apprehension statistics could mean any number of things," says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors immigration restrictions. "Maybe the administration is making a difference, or maybe the illegal aliens are just getting better at eluding the Border Patrol." Robin Hoover, founder of Humane Borders, which sets up water stations for migrants, says not much appears to have changed. His tanks, he says, are draining at the same rate as last year.

At the same time, some economists have their own theory for the reduced apprehension figures: A burst housing bubble and an economic slowdown mean fewer immigrants are trying to come. Dawn McLaren of Arizona State University's business school says her research shows that illegal immigrants have been harbingers of every major recession in the last decade. "Illegal immigrants are highly networked...and come here with jobs in place," she says. "When construction jobs dry up, they're getting phone calls, and they're staying home."

Whatever the reason, experts on both sides of the issue, along with dozens of border residents, say that change has been dramatic in the year and a half since the Department of Homeland Security kicked off a controversial effort to overhaul the way the border is policed. The Secure Border Initiative, as it's called, focuses mostly on adding infrastructure like walls and roads, military-style technology, and personnel. Critics call it a major militarization of the border, which will only push illegal immigrants to pay more—or do more dangerous things—to get across. But Homeland Security officials insist the new strategy will help them gain "operational control." Essentially, that means allowing them to detect almost all entrances into the United States and giving them a good shot at catching those who get through.

A surge in the workforce is intended to help them meet that goal. The Border Patrol is part way through a hiring blitz that calls for adding 6,000 agents to its 13,200 force by 2009. President Bush has also deployed 6,000 National Guard troops. On the banks of the Colorado River near Andrade, Calif., Sgt. Jimmy Kincaid of Greensboro, N.C., peers through his night-vision scope at about a dozen people, one with an inner tube, gathering on the Mexican side. "They know we're here," he says, "and they're not going to decide to chance it."

Added border fencing may make such decisions easier. National Guard engineers are helping to throw up 370 miles of fencing or metal border wall and 200 miles of squat barriers designed to stop cars from rushing the border. In San Luis, the metal fence that's hugged the city for eight years is now flanked with a second fence with holes so tiny agents say only someone with the hands of a 2-year-old could scale it. Vehicle barriers—metal poles filled with concrete—march for 9 miles from the city into the open desert. All told, it creates at least the appearance of an impenetrable fortress. Nestor Martinez, who frequently visits family here, says hotels on the other side that were once full of illegal immigrants are now practically empty.

Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff has also dramatically changed detention practices to alter the flow of immigrants. For years most migrant Mexicans were processed and returned to their country in a matter of hours, while non-Mexicans had to go through other channels to go home. But until recently, because of a shortage of detainee space, the vast majority of non-Mexicans captured by the Border Patrol were let free, pending court dates they rarely showed up for. Officials have since ended that "catch and release" practice"—and arrests have dropped—but they now find themselves with a new challenge: a 52 percent jump in the number of people they are now holding.

Tent city. Some of those detainees landed at the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, a prison of 10 Kevlar pods that can hold a total of 2,000 people in air-conditioned but windowless rooms. Critics call it a claustrophobic tent city, but Chertoff says he plans to build even more of the relatively inexpensive facilities. "It's not the Four Seasons," he concedes, "but it's clean, habitable...and meets any reasonable standard of prison conditions."

Meanwhile, in a flat slice of Texas that includes 210 miles of border along the Rio Grande, border patrols have pioneered their own detention strategy working with local judges and the U.S. Marshals Service. Here in the so-called Del Rio Sector, illegal border crossers are treated more like criminals than violators of civil immigration law. "Around here we lock you up for about two weeks, even if you're a Mexican first-timer," explains agent Hilario Leal. Officials say it appears to be having a deterrent effect. Of the almost 17,900 immigrants who have gone through the program, only 3 percent have been arrested trying to cross any part of the roughly 2,000-mile border again.

But it's what comes next, DHS officials say, that may bring the biggest changes in the border game: military-style technology, surveilling the entire Southwest border and possibly stretching dozens of miles inland. This week, the Border Patrol in Arizona will begin using nine towers with radar and cameras that are capable of identifying the slightest movement as far as 10 miles away. Within six years, if they work as planned, towers are scheduled to dot the entire southern border.

As impressive as the success seems, however, officials admit that holding on to it will be a challenge. The National Guard started drawing down its troops last month; by the end of this summer, Texas and Arizona will see their troops cut in half. "Seeing the progress we've made so far," says Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, "...I'm just extremely worried we're sliding backwards."

One of the problems is that the Border Patrol has never hired agents at such a fast pace. Jim Carafano, a homeland security expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said last year that to get 6,000 new agents by 2009, the Border Patrol's academy would have to pump out seven times as many graduates per year as it was doing. David Aguilar, the top U.S. Border Patrol official, says the agency is on track, but to some, the agency's recruiting tactics smack of desperation. The Border Patrol recently spent $975,000 to put its logo on a NASCAR car, for instance. And it upped the age limit for inexperienced applicants from 37 to 40. "They've basically made a lot of people think they're not going to pull this off," says T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union for agents.

Building more towers won't necessarily be easy, either, in the face of a skeptical Congress. Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has criticized Boeing Co.'s sweeping tower contract, which DHS estimates will cost $8 billion before the towers are ever built on the Canadian frontier. Meanwhile, tower opponents in the tiny town of Arivaca, Ariz., are crusading against what they consider a Big Brother invasion.

Even the real walls can be vulnerable. Smugglers trying to cross the border have successfully cut down some of the vehicle barriers, in some places with power saws. And on another front, Texas officials are protesting a DHS plan to build 153 miles of fence along the Rio Grande. Locals say the fence could destroy parkland and cut off livestock from water. Chertoff has overridden environmental regulations in the past, however, and says that he'll do so again if necessary for security. It's all part of the new border equation.

"It took [the government] 16 years to build 14 miles of fence in San Diego, and people were comfortable with that," Aguilar says. "The changes now can be difficult to accept."

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