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Published: 07.19.2007
Jet flights taking migrants back to Mexico resume
SHERYL KORNMAN
Tucson Citizen
The program aimed at reducing the number of its citizens who die in the Arizona desert each summer sent 240 people to Mexico City from Tucson Wednesday.
Two flights a day of 120 passengers each are departing from Tucson International Airport aboard AeroMexico headed to Mexico City, said Alejandro Ramos, spokesman for the Mexican consulate in Tucson. The summer program resumed July 9.
Removing the migrants by air from the Arizona border area is intended to discourage them from making another attempt to cross illegally into Arizona from northern Mexico, Ramos said.
The migrants, who volunteer to be "repatriated" to Mexico are interviewed by Mexican consular officials. They are processed by the U.S. Border Patrol in Nogales and Yuma, then turned over to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said Chuy Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in Tucson.
Tour buses hired to transport the migrants bring them to a cargo area at the Tucson airport, where they board a jet for Mexico.
In 2006, about 15,000 Mexicans were flown back to Mexico in the Interior Repatriation Program, Ramos said. The program is in its fourth year.
Open-borders advocates urging comprehensive immigration reform, border-watch groups and a Border Patrol union spokesman contend that the $15 million program is a waste of taxpayers' money.
But Michael Nicley, the former chief of the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, has said those critics are wrong.
"I think this is part of a good effort" to keep people from dying on the border, he told the Associated Press when the program first started.

http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/57866.php