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Fortress America: Part 1

As the U.S. builds walls and trains agents to bar its southern door from the rush of illegal immigrants, some see only a policy of prison shackles and razor wire.

Story by Michael Riley
Article Last Updated: 03/05/2007 09:04:20 AM MST

Laredo, Texas
Gerardo Carbajal sits on a bench on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande, shivering. Caught that morning by the U.S. Border Patrol as he stepped out of the ice-cold river, he's exhausted, hungry, and he's going home.

At just 17 years old, Carbajal has sneaked across the border six times before. "It's never been this hard," he said, confessing that he would return to his home in the Mexican state of Guanajuato rather than try again.

Although he may not know exactly why, Carbajal knows this for sure: The border is changing.

In federal courthouses in Laredo and Del Rio, a small army of illegal immigrants who a few years ago would have been set free or dumped back across the border are instead going to jail. In Artesia, N.M., there is a ballet of cranes twirling over half-finished barracks in frenzied preparation for a flood of trainees headed to the Border Patrol Academy there.

And in the Arizona desert, Boeing engineers are laying down the first segment of a high-tech "virtual wall" that will eventually stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

From California's Imperial Beach to the Rio Grande, a "Fortress America" is emerging. And while the new Democratic-controlled Congress will have a say in exactly how far the effort will go, its shape is already unfolding.

If all goes according to plan, the strategy will cost billions of dollars, lead to the biggest border prison boom in decades, create the federal government's largest enforcement arm, and literally remake the landscape of the country's 2,000-mile southern border.

Yet for its critics - and there is no shortage - the effort is an expensive, even foolhardy risk, pouring more money into failed border- control strategies when there are cheaper and more effective means to reach the same end.

Even members of the then- Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee recognized last year that a decade and a half of attempts to control the border have been a multibillion-dollar boondoggle, with little to show for it.
Border security spending has increased tenfold since 1995, the committee noted sharply in its 2007 funding report, and the number of Border Patrol agents has climbed from 5,000 to more than 12,000.

"Yet during that same period," the report said, "the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has jumped from five million to over eleven million."

But with the growing public fury over the fact that at least half a million people a year sneak across this country's southern border - most simply walking across unimpeded - a broad consensus has developed among lawmakers in both parties that a border buildup must be part of any long-term solution to the country's illegal immigration quandary.
As the policy unfolds, the impacts are far-reaching and sometimes little-noticed. Among them:

Illegal-immigration-related cases recently surpassed narcotics as the single-largest category of federal prosecutions in the country. An 85 percent jump in federal immigration cases nationally beginning two years ago is traceable almost entirely to a new strategy by U.S. attorneys at the border.

The 2004 Intelligence Reform Act authorized 40,000 new immigration-related detention beds by 2010, and thousands are now being built in border regions like southern Texas. The most direct beneficiary is a slew of private prison companies, which have seen their stock prices climb dramatically, partly as a result.

President Bush has ordered the hiring of 6,000 new Border Patrol agents by 2008. Coming on the heels of a similar buildup in the 1990s, the increase will give the agency one- third more agents than the FBI and 11,000 more than the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The buildup will lock taxpayers into long-term capital costs for decades to come. While border fencing could cost about $3 million a mile to build, congressional auditors recently estimated it could cost $70 million a mile to maintain over the fence's 25-year life.

THE RULE OF LAW

Experts say the benefits of such a broad
buildup on the border will depend on several unknowns - whether officials can overcome the notorious contracting difficulties of past border infrastructure efforts; whether new technology lives up to its potential; and whether Congress can pass a guest-worker program to rechannel much of the flow.
But however those questions are eventually answered, the border is being transformed in countless places: For supporters, it's a long-overdue effort to establish the rule of law; for foes, it's a slow militarization built on prison shackles and razor wire.

To see the sweep of some of the changes, spend a day in the bustling Laredo courtroom of Federal Magistrate Judge Adriana Arce-Flores.

Over the past three years, as federal prosecutors have attempted to put an end to the border's revolving door, they have sent tens of thousands more illegal immigrants into federal court, and nowhere more aggressively than in the Southern District of Texas.

According to government data obtained by Syracuse University in New York, the number of prosecution referrals for immigration-related crimes in that district jumped in fiscal year 2004 from 4,062 to 18,092 - a 345 percent increase.

Five days a week, Arce-Flores' courtroom witnesses a steady march of men and women in orange jumpsuits, the vast majority of whom are Spanish-speaking immigrants caught near the border.

During a pretrial hearing before another of Laredo's magistrate judges in early December, the judge dispatched 22 cases in four hours. Nearly all the immigrants were charged with a felony - illegal re-entry after a previous deportation or removal. And because all pleaded guilty, exchanges in court were mostly limited to how defendants were detained and a few questions by the judge about their education level and occupation.

The answers were short, as if the less said the better: "Edwin Rodriguez, sixth grade, watch salesman." "Jose Ortiz Reyes, sixth grade, painter."

But it's not so much that the court is spending time jailing gardeners and construction workers, said Arce-Flores, who is one of the busiest federal judges in the country. It's that the enormous immigration caseload is like a large fire that sucks oxygen from a closed room.

Clerks are tired. U.S. marshals are overworked. While the average federal judge has 87 open felony cases at any one time on the docket, that average for each of the two full judgeships in Laredo is 1,400.

"Do you go after the mob or these guys on the border? Do you go after the Ecstasy distribution rings or these guys on the border?" said Charles L. Lindner, a California lawyer and past president of the Los Angeles Criminal Bar Association, explaining how the focus on federal immigration prosecutions is rippling through the system.

"We're short on (assistant U.S. attorneys) in the office here in Los Angeles because they're doing immigration in Laredo," Lindner said.

There is evidence he's right, even if the link is indirect.

The U.S. Justice Department announced in July that it was hiring 20 new assistant U.S. attorneys but said all would be sent to the border to focus solely on immigration- related offenses.

Sitting in her court offices in Laredo, Arce-Flores pulls out a calculator from a large desk and begins tapping buttons - performing a quick estimate of what it costs taxpayers to jail the immigrants passing through her courtroom.

"If I have 30 people a day times five days a week, that's 150 people," she said.

Each costs about $90 a day to keep in jail, the judge said, and the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor offender is six months.

That's nearly $2.5 million, "for just for one week's work," according to Arce-Flores.

"But when they are discussing this in Washington, they keep saying, 'We need to detain every one of them; we need to give every one jail time,"' Arce-Flores said. "I don't think they realize the consequences."

PRISON BOOM

John Ferguson, chief executive of Corrections Corporation of America, certainly does. And for private prison companies like his, these are giddy days.

Over the past year, the stock price of Ferguson's company has climbed 86 percent. The stock of its main competitor, Geo Group Inc., has done even better, rising 155 percent.

The prosecution offensive by U.S. attorneys on the border has meant a boom in demand for rented detention space by the U.S. Marshals Service, most of which will go to companies like his, Ferguson noted in an optimistic conference call to investors in February 2006.

More important, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mi chael Chertoff announced in August an ambitious plan to remedy one of the border's long-standing problems: There aren't enough beds to hold everyone the Border Patrol catches.

In the case of non-Mexicans - who usually can't be quickly returned to their home country - the only choice had been to release them, issuing "Notices to Appear" for a later hearing in immigration court. Less than 15 percent came back.

The end of that policy required the federal government to find jail space for as many as 50,000 more immigrant detainees a year - almost all of which will be contracted to private companies. The jump in demand means prisons are sprouting along the border like prairie grass.

In Laredo, a 1,500-bed "superjail" to hold immigrant detainees is set to be built this year. A new prison in Taylor, Texas, was recently built to house immigrant families with children. And around Del Rio, on the Rio Grande, at least four counties have together added more than 2,000 beds to rent-a-jail facilities in the past year and a half, nearly all filled with illegal immigrants caught on the border.

An industry magazine for private prison companies recently estimated that in Texas alone, 7,000 immigration-related detention beds have recently been built or soon will be.

In the tiny Rio Grande Valley town of Raymondville, contractors put up a 2,000-bed facility in just over three months, using a line of credit from Willacy County and an experimental design that looks like a collection of Boy Scout tents on steroids.

"They pay those guards $9 an hour plus. For an area like ours, that's pretty good wages," said Emilio Vera, a silver-haired commissioner for Willacy County who said the prison boom is reviving desiccated rural communities like his.

Immigrant advocates and prison- reform groups are less impressed.

Immigrant detainees held in Raymondville are confined in the windowless super-tents for 23 hours a day, with no partitions closing off toilets or showers, according to immigration attorneys who have visited the facility. Lights are on day and night, and prisoners complain of insufficient clothing and spoiled food.

"I still have clients who complain about rancid milk being served to them and people vomiting," said Jodi Goodwin, a Harlingen immigration attorney who visited the facility several times before officials began limiting access to many areas two and a half months ago.

"There are no windows, so there's very little direct light. The detainees sleep, live and stay in the same space for 23 hours a day," she said.

While officials for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement say all facilities meet federal standards, critics say problems are likely to grow because of the government's reliance on companies with a motive to skim services and increase profits.

"It's almost like a futures market. You have private prison companies gambling on expansion of the immigrant detention system, and basically prison speculators who are convincing communities to do this," said Bob Libal, an organizer with South Texans Opposing Private Prisons (STOPP).

"It's a sick market, but a market nonetheless," he said.

Still, supporters say the vastly increased detention capacity may be the most important step toward a secure border, flaws and all.

"The simplest thing that has happened would have seemed to be obvious, but it's essentially thinking of immigration enforcement as an assembly line and that end part - holding someone and getting them quickly returned to their home country - was always the hardest thing to do," said Stewart Verdery, the former Homeland Security assistant secretary for border security under President George W. Bush.

"By changing the nature of the game on both of those, you've made it much more of a fair fight between the legal process and the pull of our economy," Verdery said.

BIG PLAN, BIG PRICE

In December, the Department of Homeland Security presented Congress with its vision for the border's future. Called the "Secure Border Strategic Plan," the 48-page report described an unprecedented deployment of manpower and technology. In return, it said, America would gain "effective control" over the Mexican border in five years.

The projected cost was $48.8 billion through fiscal year 2011. Even that price is conservative, analysts warn.

But the strategic plan contained a sobering fact.

After billions of dollars already spent and the deployment of thousands of new Border Patrol agents in the past decade and a half, the country had "effective control" over just 284 miles of the Mexican border as of March 2006.

To homeland security experts, all that suggests the architects of the current effort to secure the border must learn the lessons of past ones: Low-tech can trump high-tech; the border is a money sinkhole; and never underestimate the risks immigrants will take to reach the globe's richest economy.

But the most fundamental lesson, said Doris Meissner - who, as Immigration and Naturalization commissioner during the Clinton administration, oversaw the last major push to control the border in the mid- 1990s - is that there will always be unintended consequences.

After the construction a decade ago of 70 miles of double and triple fencing around San Diego and busy crossing points in Texas, millions of border crossers simply shifted to routes across the Arizona desert, thousands of them dying along the way.

The border security strategy of the 1990s reduced the illegal traffic in some border areas while greatly increasing it in others, leading to the biggest jump in illegal immigrants living in the U.S. in more than a generation.

"You have to ask yourself what's the cost-benefit here," Meissner said.

Meissner and others warn that the push to secure the border has taken on a political momentum that may obscure smarter, cheaper alternatives. One would be to create an effective system to check the legal employment status of every worker in the country, require its use by law, then crack down on employers who continue to hire undocumented immigrants.

Without jobs, immigrants would stop coming, she said.

"I think border enforcement is extremely important, but it is absolutely out of proportion to other things that can be done," Meissner said.

But for now, she concedes, all eyes are on the border.

Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-954-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com.

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