http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/14735535.htm

Posted on Sat, Jun. 03, 2006


IMMIGRATION
Life on a troubled frontier

By JAY ROOT
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

TIJUANA , Mexico — The urge to sneak across the border washes over Jose Antonio Breton like the waves on the sand at his feet. It’s as if the rushing Pacific tide beckons him, just like it did when he was 14 and he bawled like a baby because he was afraid he’d drown.

Breton was just another poor kid from the slums back then, and he didn’t yet know how it would feel to buy those $100 tennis shoes he never could afford. It was before he went to work construction in Los Angeles, before he got married, before he got his daughter’s name – Ginna – tattooed on the back of his neck.

Everything is different now.

Standing at the ocean’s edge on Tijuana Beach, Breton, now 25, could flick a cigarette butt into the United States. But getting human beings over the line — “la linea” as they call it here — has never been more difficult.

When Breton slipped through the first time, this wind-swept patch of coastline was one of the busiest smuggling corridors on the planet. Now, thanks to Operation Gatekeeper, the San Diego-Tijuana boundary has come to symbolize the multibillion-dollar U.S. border security apparatus.

Breton knew all that before he came back to Tijuana a little more than a year ago. But a relative had called him in Los Angeles to say his father was dying and wanted to see his son one last time. Breton regrets leaving L.A. now, because his father’s wake was under way by the time he got home. Now he feels trapped.

Standing a few feet from the U.S., Breton points to the spot, about halfway between the towering border wall and Imperial Beach, Calif., where authorities nabbed him the last time. A mounted Border Patrol agent, maybe the same one who got him 10 months ago, keeps watch.

The agent is in radio contact with a control room, where video images are received from a camera that sits on top of the 50-foot tower just beyond the fence. Other agents sit closer, at deserted Border Field State Park, watching would-be crossers with binoculars through the windows of their Jeeps. A constant whine from helicopters overhead mingles with the cries of seagulls and laughing sun-baked children.

These ultramodern security measures were put in place to keep out people just like Breton. He was jailed, deported and ordered to stay out of the United States.

But on this particular day, Breton’s resolve to sneak in again, to retrieve the life he lost, is as stiff as the towering railroad iron that makes the fence here look like the outer perimeter of a maximum security prison.

One night soon, he says, he’ll stitch together a seaweed blanket to camouflage himself, train his eyes on the lights of San Diego and try to swim past the Border Patrol. If all goes according to plan, Breton said, he’ll be back in L.A. by week’s end.

“They told me not to come back,” he says of the Border Patrol. “But my heart is bigger. I have to go back for my family. Here, I have nothing. The only one I had was my father, and now he’s not here anymore. I’ve got to go.”

Gulf Coast to West Coast
The interview and photos of Breton were gathered by the Star-Telegram on May 9, at the end of a journey that began on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and ended on the Pacific Coast three weeks later. In a rented Saturn Vue, a reporter and photographer traveled more than 3,000 miles — sometimes in the United States, sometimes in Mexico — collecting the stories and images of illegal immigrants, Border Patrol agents, fishermen, smugglers, Minutemen, businessmen, hunters, prostitutes, politicians and tourists. In Matamoros, Mexico, a small-time smuggler named Roberto explained how, for $50 a pop, he takes illegals to a gas station in Brownsville, Texas, calls a taxi for them and then swims back home. Across the river, the Border Patrol agents who play cat and mouse with his ilk promise Roberto’s day will come.

Legal crossers were the target in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. As they dropped their 30 cents into the turnstile at the Rio Grande bridge, protesters jeered at them and yelled “Don’t go to El Paso.”

A few hundred miles to the west, in the Border Patrol’s busy Tucson, Ariz., sector, the “Day Without Immigrants” went uncelebrated: agents caught 1,800 undocumented aliens in that single 24-hour period.

Along the border, armed activists in the U.S. are building walls with donated money on private land. Liberal advocates are filling blue jugs with water for thirsty illegals. And somewhere in northern Coahuila, the jolly owner of a pet javelina named Chena is complaining to anybody who will listen that he can’t find ranch hands anymore because they’re all leaving the country.

Taken together, their perspectives on the problems and opportunities found along the 1,952-mile border are as diverse as the landscape, which ranges from semitropical South Texas to the sweltering Sonoran Desert.

There is nevertheless a jarring commonality to the border region and the 12 million people who call it home. From one end to the other, the exchange between the U.S. and Mexico, legitimate and not, fuels the economy and permeates the culture.

Like some volatile force of nature, the border both divides and unites. It is the gateway through which $300 billion in legal trade flowed last year. Over the bridges of Laredo, Texas, the largest inland port of entry in America, 6,000 trucks a day rumble north carrying goods.

America’s southern border is also the crossing point for an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine on U.S. streets and over two-thirds of the country’s illegal immigrants.

It is the dividing line between a world superpower and a nation struggling to leave the Third World. No international boundary of its length separates two nations with such a large gap in standards of living.

That creates a unique kind of pressure, the kind that drives immigrant smugglers to alter their fingerprints with nail clippers to avoid identification when caught. Or the kind that drove a 24-year-old Honduran mother to rely on polluted drinking water for three days and put her 1-year-old baby girl onto an inflated inner tube, without a life jacket, to cross the swift Rio Grande near Hidalgo, Texas

“That’s a huge risk,” said Roy Cervantes, spokesman for the Rio Grande sector of the Border Patrol, which apprehended the mother, daughter and a 17-year-old relative in late April. “For those two or three minutes it takes to cross, she’s basically putting her life in the hands of the smuggler.”

It was along the 320 river miles of the Rio Grande sector — there are nine sectors altogether — that the Star-Telegram began its border journey.

The southern end of the jurisdiction starts where the river plays out, if there’s any water left in it, at Boca Chica Beach on the Gulf of Mexico. At the mouth of the Rio Grande in late April, Mexican nationals were swimming and fishing, sipping beers under colorful umbrellas and eating picnic lunches. Sometimes they stayed on their side, sometimes not, but the remoteness and manned checkpoints nearby make the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge an unfriendly place for crossings.

‘Other than Mexicans’
The laid-back atmosphere and lack of physical barriers belie the fact that the Rio Grande sector, particularly in urban areas lying to the northwest, is the primary border conduit for immigrants from nations other than Mexico.

They are called “Other Than Mexicans,” or OTMs.

In 2005, OTMs from 72 countries made up 60 percent of the 134,185 apprehensions in the sector. The riverbanks in places like Hidalgo overflow with discarded garments, sometimes still wet, along with the black garbage bags used for carrying over a dry change of clothes. ID cards issued from far-flung governments, often ditched so immigrants can conceal their identities, litter the ground.

Ninety percent of the OTMs caught are Latin American. But the Border Patrol declined to release apprehension data beyond the top five nationalities, which, other federal records show, includes people from places as far away as China, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

One U.S. official called the nearby detention facility at Port Isabel, Texas, a “mini-United Nations” because of the multitude of languages spoken within its walls.

The South Texas region is also where the immigrant “catch-and-release” program knows no equal. The phrase refers to the procedure by which illegal immigrants are apprehended by the Border Patrol, released on their own recognizance and issued a notice to appear before an immigration judge. Most are never seen again.

Unlike Mexicans, OTMs cannot simply be taken across the border because, even if they passed through Mexico, that country’s government won’t take them back.

In 2005, 106,832 illegal immigrants nationwide did not show up for their court hearing, a 103 percent increase from the previous year, federal reports show. Circumstances vary by region and nationality, but 52 percent of the no-shows occurred in the administrative courts of Harlingen and San Antonio, where the 2005 failure-to-appear rate was 98 percent and 90 percent, respectively.

To combat the problem, the government is expanding its “expedited removal” program — essentially fast-track deportation. On March 10 authorities began applying the procedure to all but a handful of nationalities, including Cubans and Salvadorans, who have special protective status under U.S. immigration statutes and case law.

Alien releases are now dropping, figures suggest. Last year the Border Patrol released 114,912 aliens on their own recognizance, compared with 36,254 in fiscal 2006, which ends on Sept. 30, agency data shows.

Cervantes, the Border Patrol spokesman, stressed that his agency handles apprehensions while Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is responsible for detention and removal.

“There is no doubt that the agents are making the arrests,” Cervantes said. “But sometimes when the agents call for detention space, there is no place to hold them.” In the case of the Hondurans with the baby girl, the Border Patrol had no option but to set the date for a court hearing and release them in the U.S. on their own recognizance. There was nowhere to put them.

On May 15 in Taylor, Texas, ICE opened a 500-bed detention center for families, the first of its kind in the nation. It could help curb a new migration trend: Human smugglers have begun “renting” children in order to secure a quick release of immigrants who get caught, a factor fueling the recent spike in family apprehensions, said Nina Pruneda, spokeswoman for ICE in South Texas.

The drug war
Besides trying to stem the crushing tide of illegal immigration, border authorities find themselves on the front lines of the battle against the illicit drug trade, controlled by criminal networks on both sides.

Thousands of pounds of cocaine, marijuana, crystal meth and heroin are slipped across the southern border inside cars and 18-wheelers, on horses and all-terrain vehicles, and in backpacks carried by human “mules.”

Nowhere is the war on drugs, or at least the war for drug distribution, more intense than in Laredo, Texas, and its Mexican twin, Nuevo Laredo. It is one of the top cocaine smuggling corridors in North America.

Two Mexican-based cartels are locked in a bloody struggle for access to Interstate 35 — and a slice of the $60 billion that U.S. consumers spend every year on illegal drugs. Gangland–style shootings and tales of rampant police corruption are an everyday occurrence in Nuevo Laredo, even if arrests and prosecutions of the perpetrators remain a rarity.

A year ago, armed bandits gunned down Nuevo Laredo’s police chief on his first day at work. Three months ago the Tamaulipas state police chief met a similar fate. Three weeks ago two more state cops were shot dead by assailants carrying Kalashnikov rifles.

The drug violence death toll as of late May: 116, including 11 policemen.

The cartel violence has helped make a boomtown out of Laredo, the refuge of choice for terrorized restaurant owners and businessmen from across the river. But it has dealt a crippling economic blow to Nuevo Laredo.

The Cadillac Bar, serving frog legs and cold beer since 1926, is one of the few famous watering holes in Nuevo Laredo that hasn’t either closed or moved to the U.S. side. A veteran waiter there, who feared repercussions if he was identified, shrugged when asked how long the Cadillac could survive.

“I’ve been through floods. I’ve been through wars. But not this. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Nuevo Laredo,” he said. Sweeping his hands as if holding an assault rifle, the waiter said: “We’ll see who wins. It’s like the era of Al Capone.”

But even in Nuevo Laredo, the lure of the border culture continues to nourish the souls of local holdouts and the occasional foreign visitor. Houston oil executive Thomas Venus, found at the Cadillac Bar after a hunting trip a few weeks ago, still finds the same freewheeling spirit and culinary charm that made him a regular border visitor years ago.

After polishing off a fried seafood sampler platter, Venus, 53, said Americans who aren’t involved in the drug trade shouldn’t expect any more trouble in Nuevo Laredo than they would at home.

“You can be at the wrong place at the wrong time anywhere,” he said.

A sense of camaraderie
None of the lower 48 U.S. states has anywhere near the amount of international boundary that Texas does. It stretches for 1,254 miles, nearly two-thirds of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Ease of passage and at least cordial cross-border relations often left twin towns on the Texas border feeling like one big city. But modern border mayhem has made a mockery of phrases like “ Los Dos Laredos ,” or “The Two Laredos.”

Likewise, fears of cross-border terrorism shut down a handful of informal crossings — technically illegal but officially tolerated — in places like Paso Lajitas, Mexico, and Boquillas del Carmen, Mexico, in the Big Bend National Park region. Now they’re all but abandoned shrines to pre-9-11 innocence.

But in Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Coahuila, 140 miles southwest of San Antonio, there is still a palpable sense of cooperation and camaraderie. Locals attribute it to shared isolation, deep mutual ties to cattle ranching and agriculture, and a sense that international trade benefits them both.

Even now, the Eagle Pass Fire Department routinely crosses the border to put out fires in Piedras Negras, which has a total of 39 fire hydrants serving about 200,000 people.

It’s also the only place on the border where, by mutual agreement, Mexican power lines can provide electricity to the U.S. side in the event of an emergency, Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster said. When a blackout hit Eagle Pass in December, “the first call I got was from the mayor of Piedras Negras saying, ‘What can we do to help?’ ” said Foster, who sounds like a Texas rancher when he speaks English, and a Mexican one when he switches to fluent Spanish.

Illegal immigration is a problem there, too. In fact, golfers at the Eagle Pass Municipal Golf Course, which straddles the river, sometimes have found themselves waiting for immigrants to cross the fairway before teeing off, officials said.

But talk of sealing off the border is a nonstarter. Guillermo Berchelmann, a state economic development official on the Mexican side, said officials in Washington should see how these twin cities interact before crafting new border security legislation.

“To people that have not been exposed to this, it’s very difficult to understand,” said Berchelmann, a fluent English speaker and Texas A&M graduate. “We survive from one another. That’s what makes us tick.”

The ugly reality
Remoteness and isolation also characterize the long swath of border in the Sonoran Desert below Tucson, Ariz. But instead of fostering the kind of cooperative spirit heralded in Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, the far-flung stretches of southern Arizona have become ground zero in the often tense and racially polarizing debate over illegal immigration.

The lack of physical and technological barriers have served both as a giant escape hatch for immigrants and a rallying symbol for critics of a porous, chaotic border. It’s the region that gave birth to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, whose volunteer members underscored American anxiety and outrage over illegal immigration when they began armed patrols there in 2005.

The 261 miles between the New Mexico border and Yuma County, Ariz., to the west are guarded by the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which apprehends far more illegal immigrants than any other sector — about 1,230 a day on average.

Evidence that heightened vigilance in places like El Paso and San Diego has merely shifted the problem to Arizona can be heard every day on the sector’s internal radio system.

It crackles like a police scanner in a modern metropolis, only dispatchers relay reports of international drug busts, windshields being pounded by rocks tossed over the border wall and emergency airlifts of dehydrated, vomiting immigrants.

Apart from its stunning natural beauty, the Sonoran Desert is where all of the border’s ugly reality lies out in the open like a facial wound.

Sixty miles to the south, in Altar, Mexico, hardly anybody tries to hide the obvious: that the 150 flophouses charging $3 a night for a bed, the nine packed hotels, the dirt toll road with migrant-laden vans going toward Sasabe, Ariz. — that it’s all part of a highly organized immigrant smuggling network.

“Altar has no other economic activity,” said Francisco Garcia Aten, human rights coordinator at the Catholic-run migrant shelter there. He said 3,000 immigrants a day arrive in Altar in the busy spring months.

And they are risking their lives when they cross. More than half of the 473 immigrants who died last year were trying to sneak into the southern Arizona region.

“They’re resorting to actually drinking their own urine sometimes,” said Gustavo Soto, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector. “We’re finding people in such bad shape that they’re actually going into renal failure. The smuggler at this point is long gone.”

Longing for the north
The staggering number of apprehensions in the Tucson sector — more than 400,000 last year — also reveals the extent to which Mexico, despite its vast economic riches, has become such a hopeless place for so many.

Every month in Altar a thousand people show up battered and bruised at the International Red Cross trailer. Officials there said the city won’t accept migrants at its public clinic, so it’s the only place for them to get treatment for the dehydration, bone breaks and oozing foot blisters they so often experience trying to cross the desert. Once patched up, they often go right back. It took one man who stayed at Altar’s Catholic shelter 28 times to slip past the Border Patrol.

Walls, imprisonment and even the risk of death won’t stop some of them from trying.

Back at that wind-swept beach in Tijuana, where Jose Antonio Breton was planning his watery exit, any hope for a brighter future begins on the north side of the international boundary line created in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

If he could just get there, Breton said, he won’t be trapped on the other side of it ever again. “I will never come back,” he said. “I will stay there forever.”

Breton said his girl, Ginna, will turn 5 on Tuesday — whether he makes it home or not. He might already be there getting ready for the birthday party.

He could also be back in jail by now. Or maybe Breton is still plotting his escape at the beach, where the Star-Telegram last saw him in early May. He accepted a business card and promised to drop a line if he makes it.

So far, nothing.


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Jay Root, 512-476-4294
jroot@star-telegram.com