Thread: South Florida Border Patrol Shifts Focus

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South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
Border Patrol in South Florida shifts focus from sea to land
By Alexia Campbell, Sun Sentinel

January 6, 2010

DANIA BEACH

The U.S. Border Patrol says it is seeing fewer boats bringing illegal immigrants to South Florida, so the agency has shifted its focus to catching people trying to sneak in from Mexico by train, bus and truck.

Agents question passengers aboard Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains and stop suspicious cars.

The change has alarmed local immigrant advocates who say U.S. citizens could be improperly questioned and detained.

"What's to stop them from taking an American citizen who has a thick accent?" said Ira Kurzban, an adjunct professor of immigration law at Nova Southeastern University and the University of Miami.

He said he has represented about a dozen Americans in the past 30 years who have been detained in South Florida by immigration officials.

But Supervisory Border Patrol agent Lazaro Guzman says agents can legally ask anyone about immigration status near the border or coastline.

He said he does not know of any case in which agents from the Dania Beach Border Patrol station, which is responsible for a four-county area in South Florida, picked up a U.S. citizen by mistake.

"What it comes down to for us is: Are you allowed to be here or not?" Guzman said. "We need to know if you are."

That's what Border Patrol agents wanted to know on a recent morning when they boarded a Greyhound bus that pulled into the Fort Lauderdale station from Tallahassee.

"What country are you a citizen of?" they asked passengers.

Three men from Mexico and another from Honduras were in handcuffs about 15 minutes later.

Two had been deported before, and one showed agents a handful of identification cards with different names, Guzman said.

Agents question passengers based on unusual behavior, body language, accents and clothing style, Guzman said. If someone's story changes or it seems they're lying, agents take the person to their processing station.

"Sometimes, they run when they see us," he said. "They know our uniforms."

Kurzban said these types of interrogations are unconstitutional because they target people based on appearance and racial profiling.

"[Agents] have a lot of tools in their arsenal to go after smugglers, they don't need to do this," he said. "Our founding fathers would throw up their hands in shame."

Border Patrol agents began shifting resources inland about halfway through 2008, when they noticed a slowdown in illegal immigration coming from the ocean, Guzman said.

The Dania Beach station, which covers Broward, Miami-Dade, Collier and Lee counties, reported an 80 percent drop in the number of maritime migrants detained between fiscal years 2008 and 2009: from 1,294 to 257.

Border Patrol agents in the West Palm Beach district, which covers eight counties, saw a similar drop, from 257 to 63.

Meanwhile, the number of migrants apprehended in private vehicles, trains and buses in the Dania Beach district rose from 865 to 1,036, an increase of about 19 percent during the same period.

In the West Palm Beach district, there were 364 inland apprehensions in fiscal year 2008, and 593 in 2009.

Guzman says a multi-agency crackdown on Cuban smuggling rings in South Florida has played a part in the drop in seaborne immigration. And although the number of arrests made inland has gone up, that doesn't mean more immigrants are coming to Florida from places such as Mexico, he said. It could just as easily be the result of the increased emphasis the Border Patrol is putting on land routes.

Part of the Border Patrol's inland operations includes looking for smugglers driving undocumented immigrants to South Florida in a van or a truck.

To pull over a car, agents need reasonable suspicion to believe smugglers and immigrants are on board, Guzman said.

Some clues: license plates from border states and vehicles that look like they have a lot of weight in the back.

They stop several vehicles a month overloaded with undocumented immigrants on or near Alligator Alley, Guzman said.

Similar crackdowns by law enforcement agencies across the country have sparked a backlash from advocacy groups.

Agents are terrorizing immigrants and harassing Hispanic Americans, said Elena Lacayo, of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization.

"They're driving people into the shadows," Lacayo said. "It's problematic, not just for illegal immigrants, but for anyone who looks Latino."

Guzman said it's tough to always be seen as the bad guy.

"We're not robots," Guzman said. "At times we're torn, but we swore to do our job."

Alexia Campbell can be reached at apcampbell@SunSentinel.com or 954-356-4513.

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