Smuggling Rings at LAX Targeted

Federal authorities launched a crackdown this week aimed at breaking up smuggling rings that use Los Angeles International Airport to send illegal immigrants across the United States.

In the first coordinated operation to halt human smuggling at the world’s fifth-busiest airport, uniformed Border Patrol agents and undercover immigration investigators arrested 64 undocumented immigrants on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Smugglers frequently bring immigrants from Mexico and Latin America through Phoenix and then on to Los Angeles, where they catch flights to the East Coast. Jobs are scarce for newly arrived illegal immigrants in Phoenix and Los Angeles.

“This is not about picking up large numbers of illegal aliens using LAX,” said Kevin Jeffery, deputy special agent in the Los Angeles office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “This is about dismantling criminal organizations.”

“Human smugglers are not do-gooders out to help people,” he continued. “They are callous criminals out to make a buck. They think nothing of kidnapping an infant, or leaving someone in the desert to die.”

Although federal officials promised that the operation would rely on intelligence gathered on smuggling rings, not on ethnic profiling, some immigrant rights advocates were skeptical.

Luis Carrillo, a civil rights attorney who has defended illegal immigrants, said immigration authorities would inevitably fall into racial profiling, citing recent arrests by Border Patrol officers in the Inland Empire.

“The Border Patrol maintained that they were acting on intelligence,” Carrillo said. “What was really happening was they were racially profiling. No matter how well-intentioned their effort is, people who look like Europeans will not get stopped and asked questions.”

Customs agents had conducted periodic raids at LAX in which they tried to arrest as many illegal immigrants as possible, Jeffery said. Now, he said, they’re out to arrest mid- and upper-level operatives who coordinate smuggling efforts rather than “drivers and cooks.”

Over the last six months, customs officers have cracked down on smuggling in Arizona, where 40% of all illegal entries into the U.S. occur. That has shifted a large portion of the problem to Los Angeles, officials said.

This became evident when customs officials discovered two drop houses for illegal immigrants earlier this year in Watts and Canoga Park.

“L.A. has always been a hotbed for smuggling, but we’re starting to see some nasty stuff we hadn’t seen heretofore,” said John Clark, director of operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Federal authorities expect the LAX operation will cause smugglers to move their operations elsewhere.

“From here, if they go to McCarran [airport] in Las Vegas or Denver airport, we’re going to be right there with them,” Jeffery said.

They also expect the number of illegal immigrants being held in safe houses to increase as mid-level operatives search for other transportation hubs, making them more visible to law enforcement agencies.

The crackdown at LAX, which will initially last two to three weeks, will not be based on ethnic profiling, officials said. Instead, authorities said, they will pursue intelligence leads about plans by smuggling organizations to ship groups of illegal immigrants by air.

“We can assure the public that we are not going to have an agent go up to an individual and simply ask for documentation without specific intelligence to support probable cause for that action,” said Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security at the Department of Homeland Security.

Hutchinson said the department was taking steps to explain the enforcement campaign to Latino organizations to dispel concerns. But he faces a wary audience.

“Such an effort is unlikely to be effective and will very likely be disruptive to the community that is here legally,” said Cecilia Munoz, executive vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization.

“I am a native-born U.S. citizen, but I don’t carry my passport around with me,” Munoz said. “If I am at LAX and I am asked these questions, I don’t have a way to prove that I am legally in this country.”

Greater enforcement at LAX will “just divert the problem from one place to another,” said Kevin Appleby, director of migration and refugee policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “What we need is immigration reform.”

But federal authorities disagreed, saying the success of the Phoenix program illustrates that such efforts work. Russell Ahr, a Phoenix immigration spokesman, said the crackdowns at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and elsewhere, including seizure of smugglers’ assets and cash, have significantly reduced crime in Phoenix.

“We’re going longer intervals without finding safe houses,” Ahr said. “We’re seeing a lot fewer weapons. The level of violence has diminished greatly. There’s been a drop in homicides, kidnappings and hostage-taking related to immigration.”

Hutchinson did not elaborate on what kinds of intelligence leads agents would pursue. In the past, agents have looked at bookings by travel agencies known to be used by smugglers and blocks of tickets booked at the same time on flights that had been relatively empty.

This spring, several groups of illegal immigrants were arrested at the Newark, N.J., airport after arriving on flights from Los Angeles.

Authorities said the arrestees stood out from other travelers, not simply because they were Latinos, but because they were in large groups, mostly of men, traveling on red-eye flights that usually attract relatively few passengers.

In Los Angeles, officials said that they started gathering intelligence in April by arresting illegal immigrants at LAX and collecting and analyzing what’s known as “pocket trash,” such as pieces of paper with phone numbers, restaurant receipts and hotel bills. Agents put that information, and intelligence collected from immigrants found at local drop houses, into databases and use it to learn about smuggling organizations, Jeffery said.

The effort at LAX is the first phase of a three-part operation that involves 20 Border Patrol agents and 40 plainclothes Immigration and Customs personnel who will attempt to arrest smugglers as they try to board flights.

The second phase will involve arresting mid-level operatives in smuggling rings and monitoring other Southern California airports to see whether smugglers are shifting their operations there. In the third phase, federal authorities will try to seize monetary assets of the organizations.

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Times staff writer Hector Becerra contributed to this report.