Border Patrol: Look for fewer crossings

March 14, 2011 9:44 am
Philip Franchine, Green Valley News Green Valley News & Sun and The Sahuarita Sun

Tucson Sector Border Patrol Chief Randy Hill said Friday that the agency will have control of the western part of Arizona by October after seeing notable success in the eastern part of the state.

Arrests in what the agency calls the West Desert, west of the Baboquivari Mountains northwest of Nogales, are up this year, Hill said, even while they are dropping sharply elsewhere in the sector that sees the most illegal crossings in the country.

Hill was in Tucson with Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin, who spent a day and a half touring the sector. Bersin said the Tucson Sector will soon be seeing a continued reduction in border crossings, just as the San Diego and El Paso sectors have seen, because of a heavy concentration of resources in recent years.

Hill said the agency has been so successful in the rest of the sector, from the New Mexico border to the Baboquivari Mountains, that arrests are down 44 percent sector-wide this year. That includes a 70 percent reduction in the area around Douglas; a 53 percent reduction in the central corridor around Nogales; and an increase of 13 percent in the West Desert, west of the Baboquivari Mountains. The West Desert covers 108 miles of the 262-mile Tucson Sector’s border with Mexico; the sector runs from New Mexico to the Yuma Sector near Yuma.

“What we’ve done is applied significant pressure in the Ajo and Casa Grande stations and Three Points satellite station,â€