Thread: Fortress America Part III: Cross border, head to jail

http://www.denverpost.com/coloradosunday/ci_5363410

(DPost article is 3rd in a 4-day series "Fortress America" on border control)

Cross border, head to jail

Border sections in Arizona and Texas are hot zones for apprehensions, where the threat of long jail terms is replacing "the inconvenience of getting caught."
Story by Michael Riley
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 03/06/2007 08:25:51 AM MST

Eagle Pass Texas

Climbing out of a white Border Patrol SUV, agent Randy Clark scans the barren golf course. It's not much to look at, empty except for a hardy foursome hacking at the ocher-colored grass. The Rio Grande - low at this point in early winter - snakes slowly nearby.

Still, a wide smile breaks across the agent's face. On this golf course at this moment, "nothing" is exactly the point.

A year ago, "you could sit here and watch dozens of (illegal immigrants) come out of those houses on the other side of the river and wade across. ... Groups of 40 or 50 or 60 would come across in broad daylight, and just cross in a straight line," Clark said.

Groaning under the weight of thousands of undocumented immigrants who saw this dusty town on the Texas border as the ideal place to cross, federal officials decided in late 2005 to try something radical: Treat illegal immigrants as criminals, rather than violators of civil immigration law.

Just about everyone caught on a 205-mile section of Texas border between Eagle Pass and Del Rio is now charged with a federal misdemeanor and sent before a judge, then to jail. Although the federal law in question - illegal entry - has been on the books for more than a decade, it's never been enforced on such a widespread basis.

The experiment, requiring months of negotiations among three different agencies and high-level talks in Washington, is the border's first zero-tolerance zone.

It's been blasted by immigrant-rights activists who assail "conveyor- belt" justice and hailed by border hawks who see it as a bold stroke too long in coming. Either way, the results have been dramatic.

In the first year of the experiment, monthly apprehensions - a rough measure of illegal crossings - fell 57 percent across the Border Patrol's Del Rio sector and 78 percent in the area around Eagle Pass. Agents here seized more than $15 million worth of narcotics in November, about four times what they seized in the same month the year before - the result, officials say, of more time spent on the line and less processing border crossers.
Perhaps just as telling, immigrants as far away as Central America have heard of the program and have begun to view this stretch of the Rio Grande as a place to be avoided.

"When you get back to El Salvador, please tell people" what's happening here, Judge Dennis Green admonished a group as he sentenced them in the Del Rio federal courthouse recently. "I know this has been a long, hard journey for you, and I'd hate to see anyone else go through the same thing."

Still, as a window into the future of border security, the results of what's known as Operation Streamline II are not entirely clear-cut, perhaps explaining why, except for in a small area of western Arizona, the approach has yet to be expanded to other parts of the border.

The experience on this small stretch of Texas border strongly suggests that simply enforcing existing laws can create an effective deterrent and help end the border's revolving door.

Yet as judges cope with overwhelmed courts and jailers scour eight counties to find enough detention space, it's also a primer on why the battle cry of "Just enforce the law" isn't as easy as it sounds.

RULES MANIPULATED

Ask Border Patrol agents in Eagle Pass about the state of this stretch of border 14 months ago, and they point to a couple of mammoth freezers at their station headquarters stuffed with microwaveable burritos.

The freezers were crisis management. Hundreds of immigrants were being detained daily, many who walked right into town. Cells at the Eagle Pass station were so packed that agents fenced a carport and turned it into more jail space. The burritos - heated up by agents in commercial microwaves - were an impromptu chow line for detainees.

It wasn't that agents here were so good at their jobs; it's that the immigrants were coming here because they wanted to get caught.

Most were from Central and South America (known along the border as OTMs, or "other than Mexicans") and they were here to exploit a bureaucratic loophole.
A Mexican caught crossing the border is usually briefly held, then taken to the nearest port of entry and returned home. Border crossers who aren't from Mexico have to be returned to their country of origin and, until recently, all had the right to appear before an immigration judge.

With a shortage of detention space in this area of south Texas, agents were forced to let them go, issuing a notice requiring them to return for an immigration hearing weeks later. In the meantime, the notices doubled as travel papers, allowing them to move legally within the United States.

They could walk out, board any bus or plane, and travel unhindered to destinations across the country. Few came back.

A broad open space adjacent to the Mexican border and near the Border Patrol station, the Eagle Pass golf course became the busiest crossing spot in the sector. Some 1,700 immigrants were caught there in one month in 2005.

"It was like catching a block of ice in a hailstorm," Clark said of the spot. "An agent could stand out there with a flashlight and groups (of illegal immigrants) would come right to him."

To national critics, Eagle Pass became a symbol: The immigration system was being manipulated, and our own government was letting it happen; the border was out of control.

As immigration became one of America's hot-button political issues, officials in the Department of Homeland Security decided to act. They undertook lengthy negotiations with the U.S. attorney's office and the U.S. Marshals Service, eventually getting high-level buy-ins from both.

They worked for almost a year to get it in place, even briefing the White House.

Then on Dec. 6, 2005, the rules of the game on this narrow stretch of border changed.

EXPEDITED JUSTICE

For U.S. Deputy Marshal Ralph Mossman, the date is burned into his memory.

All along the southwestern border, most illegal immigrants are processed through a civil system, including separate immigration courts and detention complexes. Here, Streamline II has suddenly thrust all of them into the federal courts in Del Rio, where Mossman is in charge of pretrial detention and courtroom security.

The new approach means the number of federal defendants passing through the courthouse in Del Rio has jumped from dozens a month to an average of 1,000.

Without enough jail space, he and his deputies have had to house prisoners across eight counties, some as far away as Waco - an eight-hour bus ride away. Mossman and his deputies suddenly find themselves trying to guard courtrooms that can have well over 100 prisoners in them at a time (he still keeps a picture of the record-setting day - 143 - on his desk computer).

"It's been a united effort. Everybody helps each other out," Mossman said, with a tired look. But "the people are getting worn out. The deputies are busting their butts all the time."

With only a small influx of new resources, Streamline II has meant a lot of impromptu coping. Border Patrol attorneys have been deputized to help the U.S. attorney's office. Agents pitch in to transport prisoners to and from court. And judges have adjusted to a docket size that means speed is critical.

On a recent Tuesday morning, 21 men and women - all recent border crossers - are led into Judge Green's courtroom in Del Rio. Chained together, the defendants swear an oath in unison, before a clerk briefly reads through the facts of each case in a rapid-fire chatter. Green quickly takes their guilty pleas and hands down sentences, ranging from two weeks to the maximum penalty - six months.

In 51 minutes, all 21 cases are dispatched.

Jacques De La Mota, a private defense lawyer who has been tapped to help with the overflow from the federal public defender, said most of his clients have little education and come from desperately poor areas in Central America.

"They have debts or medical problems, children they are trying to support, or elderly parents," he said.

Before their court appearance, De La Mota quickly tries to find if there is anything that might keep his clients in the country, conceding he has only five to 10 minutes with each. He recently managed to get the stay of a young girl extended because she was being abused by an uncle.

Kathleen Walker finds that description of the judicial process appalling. An El Paso attorney and incoming president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Walker said many people who may have legitimate asylum claims are probably falling through the cracks.

And for everyone, the stakes are high. After pleading guilty, the border crossers will have a permanent criminal record without benefit of a trial, Walker said. If they are caught crossing the border again, they could be charged with a felony and might spend years in jail.

Others say that's precisely the point.

"The whole point of this program is to try and create additional penalties other than the inconvenience of getting caught. It's supposed to disrupt the revolving door at the border," said Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., that supports reducing legal and illegal immigration.

SIGNS OF SUCCESS

On the banks of the Rio Grande under the steel lattice of a massive railroad bridge, the ground rumbles as a long cargo train passes overhead from Piedras Negras, on the Mexican side, to Eagle Pass.

That railroad largely explains why so many Central American immigrants have for years come here to try their luck crossing along this weed- choked section of the Rio Grande. They can hide on a cargo train in southern Mexico and end up here within a few days.

But there are far fewer coming this year than last, said Jesus Mesillas, a round-bellied man sitting in a chilly office at a Catholic-run immigrant refuge in Piedras Negras.

Last year, the shelter's dormitories were so full, Mesillas said, he had to lay mattresses in the common room. Now, it's nearly empty. Overall, the numbers of people staying here in 2006 are down by more than half from the year before, the shelter's numbers show.

"It's a tough time to cross," said Mesillas, who had a good grasp of the details of the Border Patrol's crackdown, mispronouncing it Operation "Stripline."

"They're looking for other spots - around Mexicali or through the desert," both more than a thousand miles to the west, he said of the immigrants trying to cross. "Around here, they have a different system that they didn't have before."

If that is strong evidence that Operation Streamline II is succeeding, it also underscores its limitations, critics say.

The strong deterrent in Del Rio may be doing nothing more than shifting the flow elsewhere.

"It's always hard to evaluate something they're doing in only one sector," Camarota said.

"Is it that if you did this across the whole border you'd actually see a drop along the whole border or do you only see this drop in this one sector because people can go elsewhere. That's always the dilemma," he said.

And difficult as implementing the system here has been, observers say the numbers of apprehensions in the Del Rio sector are relatively small compared with other areas. In fiscal year 2006, there were more than a half-million immigrants apprehended crossing Arizona, and more than a million borderwide.

"These things they are trying now are things that have been sought by the agencies that work on these issues for a long time," said Doris Meissner, former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol's parent agency, under President Clinton. She said a similar experiment had been tried during her tenure as part of Operation Gatekeeper in California.

"The ability to actually accomplish them tends to be short-lived, just because of the effects on the courts, the volume of people, the implications for detention and other very expensive budget items," she said.

But line agents still see value if Operation Streamline II is implemented further. Nine months into the experiment, of the 7,251 immigrants prosecuted in the Del Rio sector, only 272 were later caught crossing back into the U.S.

Border Patrol officials believe most of the rest simply gave up and went home.

"It's a long, unforgiving journey from where some of these people come. Knowing you face prosecution and ultimately return, it takes away the draw," agent Clark said.

"The amount of work put into (the program) and into maintaining it was significant," he said. "But the results are astonishing. It's been incredibly worthwhile."

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

They need to expand this program.

Dixie

Originally Posted by Dixie

They need to expand this program.

Dixie

Dixie,

How can we nudge the expansion?