Yuma Agent Named Head of S.D. Border Patrol Office

Veteran Border Patrol agent Dale Cozart will head the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s San Diego field office--the biggest and busiest in the United States--beginning in January, it was announced Friday.

Cozart, 46, will replace Chief Patrol Agent Alan Eliason, who is moving to El Paso to work on Operation Alliance, an effort by several U.S. law enforcement agencies to stem the flow of illegal drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border. Eliason, 53 and a 28-year Border Patrol veteran, has directed the INS’s San Diego office for 2 1/2 years.

According to an INS biography of Cozart, he joined the Border Patrol in 1966, after serving five years as a Texas highway patrolman. Cozart is currently the chief patrol agent in Yuma, Ariz., and is expected to move to San Diego in early January.

Previously, he served as an instructor at the Border Patrol Academy at Port Isabel, Tex. (The academy has since moved to Georgia.) A native Texan, Cozart has also worked as a supervisory agent and deputy chief in El Paso.

Cozart was in San Diego on Friday for a tour of the border area, whose steep canyons and mountains are a stark contrast to the flat desert terrain along the border at Yuma.

The local geography and the proximity of Tijuana, a Mexican city of 1.7 million people, are the principal attractions for hundreds of thousands of aliens who enter the United States illegally through San Diego every year.

In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, Border Patrol agents arrested 630,000 illegal aliens in the San Diego sector. That was a 47% increase over the same period in 1985, when 428,000 aliens were arrested. INS officials say that they expect to arrest 1 million aliens in the San Diego sector when the current fiscal year ends in September, 1987.

The San Ysidro Port of Entry is the largest and busiest border crossing in the world. In addition to the thousands of aliens who enter the United States illegally every year through local canyons, 58 million people crossed legally at San Ysidro in 1985. An estimated 17 million vehicles used the 24 lanes at the San Ysidro crossing to enter the United States in 1985.

In order to handle the large volume of legal and illegal crossings each year, the Border Patrol has assigned 900 agents to the San Diego area. This represents the largest concentration of agents in the United States.