Plan's aim is cutting border deaths
By Brady McCombs
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.25.2009


An annual summer binational program that offers Mexican illegal immigrants a flight home in an effort to save lives and disrupt smuggling has started a month later than usual and with a new air carrier.
The sixth annual Interior Repatriation Program kicked off on Saturday with 221 people flying from Tucson to Mexico City aboard two Miami Air flights. The program will continue through Sept. 28 with two flights a day at an estimated cost of $6 million.
The flights are voluntary and available only to Mexican illegal immigrants who don't have criminal records. Flights carry at least 133 people, with an average of about 150 a day so far, said John Torres, special adviser to the assistant Homeland Security secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the previous five years, the program began in July and ran for at least two months, at a cost of about $12.5 million a year.
U.S. and Mexican officials said negotiations and logistics delayed the start this year. It was a "no-brainer" to renew the program for the new presidential administration, but things tend to move more slowly in a transition year, Torres said.
"You have to brief all the new officials that have been appointed and/or designated," Torres said. "The briefing process for all topics can be a little lengthier than what we normally see, especially with the focus on U.S.-Mexico relations."
The delay can be attributed to logistics being handled by the U.S. government, said Beatriz Lopez Gargallo, Mexican consul general in Nogales, Ariz. But she said the late start doesn't diminish this year's program.
"If it saves one life, it justifies the program," Lopez said.
The Arizona Daily Star's border-death database shows that June and July are the two deadliest months for illegal immigrants, with August the third-deadliest.
The shift to Miami Air from Aero Mexico (which operated flights the first five years) came down to the lowest bid, and the fact that the Mexican government had dropped a requirement from the first years of the program that it be a Mexican airline, Torres said.
"There has always been interest in getting it to a U.S. carrier," Torres said.
The program's aim is to separate illegal immigrants from smugglers who could put them back in harm's way during the scorching summer along the deadliest stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border. The program is also being offered in the Border Patrol's Yuma Sector.
Those who participate also get bus transportation from Mexico City to their hometowns in Mexico.
"Most of them don't know folks on the border, and they have been lied to to get here in most cases," said Robert Gilbert, chief of the Border Patrol's Tucson Sector. "They are out of money; they are tired; they are hot; they are hungry. This gives them an opportunity."
Of the 18,500 illegal border crossers who took the voluntary flights in 2008, about 10 percent were caught trying to cross again, significantly lower than a recidivism rate that has reached as high as 72 percent in the Tucson Sector, the busiest along the Southwest Border, Gilbert said.
About 60 percent of the apprehended illegal immigrants in the Tucson Sector come from Mexican states south of Mexico City, making the flights attractive to many, Gilbert said.
But critics contend it is a costly shell game designed to give the appearance that the governments are trying something to slow the desert deaths.
There is no evidence that shows the Interior Repatriation Program has made any substantial difference in border smuggling or desert deaths.
In the 362 days the voluntary flights were offered during 2004-07, the bodies of 342 illegal immigrants were discovered along Arizona's stretch of the border — nearly one a day, Southern Arizona medical examiners' records show. The yearly totals recorded by the U.S. Border Patrol show that the number of border deaths each year since the program started in 2004 has been higher than in any of the previous years.
The number of deaths is up this fiscal year as well. From Oct. 1 to Aug. 20, the bodies of at least 185 suspected illegal border crossers have been found along Arizona's stretch of border from New Mexico to Yuma County, up from 166 at the same time last year, medical examiners' figures show.

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