Southbound border inspections lead to 90 deportations
By Kelly Davis , Kinsee Morlan 11/20/2007

If you were motoring on the southbound 5 or 805 freeways last Wednesday between noon and 8 p.m., you might have found yourself a little inconvenienced as traffic slowed to a crawl between the Mexican border and, at times, as far north as downtown San Diego. If you made it to the border, you found out why.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, along with officers from the California Highway Patrol and the San Diego Police Department, had spread out among the six lanes entering Mexico and were conducting the same sort of inspections you normally see happening on the northbound side before you enter the U.S. at San Ysidro.

Angelica De Cima, spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, said that while her agency's focus is on policing "people and things and goods coming into the country," the southbound inspections happen "several times a year on an unannounced basis whenever we have resources we can allocate."

The stated purpose of the operation is to ferret out obvious criminal operations: "They are looking for drugs, wanted felons, high-technology that shouldn't be leaving the country, stolen cars," said Vincent Bond, also a CBP spokesperson.

The search resulted in the seizure of one weapon, two stolen vehicles and two fugitives. Four people were smuggling cash and one person violated export laws. There were also 11 traffic citations handed out and one DUI arrest.

But the operation's biggest catches were folks who didn't have the proper documentation to be in the U.S.--a total of 90 people were detained, processed and deported. De Cima said it was a "safe bet" that they were Mexican citizens.

But why go through all that trouble to apprehend people who were only inches away from returning to their home country?

"They're here in the country illegally; they already violated our laws," De Cima said. "We want to annotate that and put them in the system as them having committed an illegal act already."

According to CBP numbers, between Oct. 1, 2006, and Sept 30, 2007, agents arrested 1,905 fugitives trying to enter California from Mexico and apprehended 49,000 undocumented migrants.

http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/?id=6386