Posted on Tuesday, 12.02.08

Tougher patrol of Mexican border cuts crossing attempts
Increased enforcement on the U.S. Mexico border has led to decrease in the number of people trying to cross.

Undocumented migrants follow instructions after being captured and transferred to a U.S. Border Patrol processing facility in Nogales, Arizona. JOHN VANBEEKUM/MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Immigrants face tougher border protection
Photo BY FRANCES ROBLES
frobles@MiamiHerald.com
NOGALES, Arizona -- It was about 10 p.m. on a frigid Sunday in the Arizona desert when Avelina, a 24-year-old Mexican textile factory worker, heard footsteps and shouting: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents had found her.

The five days she had just spent trekking by foot across rugged terrain to find a way around the U.S. government's new billion-dollar border fence were lost. Instead of heading to meat-packing plants, lettuce fields or factories across the United States, Avelina and fellow migrant travelers were sent to the federal immigration detention facility in Nogales, Arizona to be booted back home.

''The agents told us they almost missed us, but then they saw us on the cameras,'' Avelina recounted recently while locked up in a holding cell with other women. ``Can you imagine? They have cameras in the middle of the mountains!''

That's exactly the message the Border Patrol hopes people like Avelina will spread back to their hometowns: don't bother; there are too many agents and plenty of cameras.

Unprecedented spending on infrastructure, technology, and thousands more boots on the ground may finally be working. Here in the busy Tucson sector -- which encompasses a third of the U.S.-Mexico border -- 317,000 migrants were apprehended in fiscal year 2008. That's down from 378,000 the year before and 35 percent fewer than just four years ago.

A recent survey by the Mexican government's National Statistics and Geography Institute says about eight of every 1,000 Mexicans left to live abroad between February and May of this year -- a 42 percent drop from the same period in 2006.

In 2006, the survey said, 1.2 million Mexicans left the country, compared to 814,000 a year later.

That decrease is directly related to enhanced enforcement and infrastructure on the border, agents say. A 10-day trip through both sides of the Arizona border, including the northern Mexico towns of Nogales, Sasabe and Altar show they might be right.

Many people acknowledge that the wobbling U.S. economy has clearly crushed the immigration dreams of thousands of U.S.-bound migrants, as people hear tales of out-of-work immigrants who can no longer land day jobs in construction. But the people interviewed who work, live and await passage on the border said the drop in immigration came far before the U.S. recession.

It came, they say, with the fence. Fewer people are making the journey, experts said, and those who for years went back and forth with ease are staying put for fear of getting caught.

''Now you have to walk for eight hours until you find an opening,'' said MarĂ*a de los Angeles, 45, who was caught trying to cross and was sent back to Nogales, Mexico. ``When I am rested, I am going to try again.''

So will Avelina, who spoke on condition that her last name not be published.

''I will try it one more time. I have to rest first,'' she said while still in custody. ``You have to be physically, morally and spiritually prepared. The cold and the hunger are hard. But the second time, you know what you will face.''

Congress last year designated $1.2 billion for a 670-mile fence that covers about a third of the U.S.-Mexico border. Rows of 12-foot high steel columns filled with cement are placed deep in the ground in the hopes of dissuading cars, smugglers and migration.

Bulldozers are still moving dirt, plowing the path for more barriers. Four hundred miles of fencing has been built, as land disputes cause delays in Texas.

Critics say the fence only helped create a billion-dollar industry for smugglers -- known here as coyotes -- who charge higher prices as guides through the treacherous desert.

The longer the trip, the more expensive the fee paid by Mexicans, Central Americans and sometimes people from as far as China and India.

Experts said many migrants used the routes to head straight for building jobs in Central Florida, where they built time share vacation homes. While the construction collapse dissuaded plenty of those workers from making the trip, so did the new wall.

''What the fence did was shift the activity from the urban area to the valleys where it is more dangerous, where they are killing each other and the migrants are prey for robbers,'' said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada. ``It moved them, that's all it did. It also created an industry where smugglers make big money. The individual who in the past could have made it through the desert on their own now has to hire a coyote.''

On that, even the Border Patrol agrees.

''If you don't have a coyote, you get caught like that,'' said the agency's Tucson sector spokesman Michael Scioli, snapping his fingers.

More migrants are using underground tunnels built largely by drug traffickers to sneak if not over the border, then under it. In 2008, the agency discovered 14 such passages, including one just feet from the main Tucson-Mexico border crossing station. One of the tunnels ended in a U.S. federal employee parking lot.

Last year, 3,000 immigrants were caught using tunnels to get around the agents on horseback, bicycle and SUV.

''Before Osama, I used to cross no problem,'' said Julio CĂ©sar Vega Torres, who was recently deported back to Mexico after more than a decade in Los Angeles. ``It's too hard to cross now. They have more security. The border patrol is doing a good job.''

Vega is a vagrant now in the Mexican border town of Nogales, where he spends his days scheming ways to get back to California.

He knows the enforcement numbers are against him.

Ten years ago, there were just 600 agents patrolling this portion of the Arizona border. Now, there are 3,100. The agency expects to have 18,000 Border Patrol agents nationwide by the end of the year, double the number employed when President George W. Bush first took office.

Many Mexicans who work on the border said they hoped immigration would pick up again after President-elect Barack Obama takes office. Obama has said he is committed to enforcing border security, but in Mexico, many people who depend on immigration are hoping he will create a guest worker program or at least create more jobs.

''If there has been a decrease in migration, it's because of three things: Increased manpower, technology and infrastructure,'' Scioli said. ``We have 80 cameras, towers and lights and sensors on the ground that pick up movement. We have aerial vehicles, remote control aircraft doing surveillance. There's radar that picks up heat and sends GPS coordinates. What we had to do in the past was look for signals in the sand. That's pathetic.

``Now we have technology.''

Members of the Minutemen, a civilian illegal immigrant patrol, said the Border Patrol's increased enforcement appears to be working.

''I can't stop illegals. I can't stop drug trafficking. I can make it so inhospitable that they will think to go someplace else,'' said Don Severe, president of the Minutemen's Green Valley, Arizona chapter. ``If that's a vigilante, then I guess we are, but we are not out there with guns chasing people.''

Agents said the technology is fine, but it's traditional desert patrols that actually catch people.

''The only thing that works is to get out and walk ---- old fashioned Border Patrol work,'' said a Border Patrol supervisor who did not want his name published, because he was not authorized to speak to the media. ``People are still coming. They would not keep coming if people were not getting through.''

Marco Antonio MartĂ*nez, mayor of Nogales, Mexico, said border enforcement has toughened so much that migrants who get through have to try a third and fourth time.

''The people in Cuba do not stop coming despite the sharks and the people in East Berlin did not stop coming despite the rifles,'' he said. ``The Mexicans will not stop coming until this dramatic contrast in economies ends.''

Not even the government's new program to criminally prosecute migrants caught crossing will stop them, he said.

The U.S. government recently launched Operation Arizona Denial Prosecution Initiative, a plan to criminally charge 60 randomly selected migrants every day. Judges argue that it's clogging up the federal court system, better suited for other purposes.

''If I get caught, so what. I would only have to serve a little time,'' said Eduardo Flores, 17, who was getting ready to leave.

Rosaber PĂ©rez, a farm worker from Chiapas, said there just is not enough work in his home town, so he spent a few days recently at a ramshackle guest house in the town of Altar, 60 miles south of the border, while he prepared to cross.

''You have to risk it -- you have to risk your life,'' PĂ©rez said. ``The situation at home for me and my four kids keeps getting worse. We can't live in Chiapas anymore. It's going to be hard, but you have to try.

``I am going to Florida.''


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