Tightening Net : New San Marcos Office Gives INS Beefed-Up Presence in North County

Beefed-up U.S. Border Patrol sweeps for illegal aliens working and living in northern San Diego County will begin this week with the opening in San Marcos of a field office to be staffed by 13 agents.

The agents will patrol North County from Escondido to Oceanside and south to Del Mar, giving the Immigration and Naturalization Service the highest continuous North County visibility it has had, officials say.

The new station will open Thursday with temporary staffing of agents normally assigned to the El Cajon office until a permanent staff is assigned, probably within two months, said Armand Olvera, assistant chief of the Border Patrol for its San Diego sector.

Olvera said the San Marcos agents will patrol fields and groves for undocumented workers and make unannounced visits to employers to check for the hiring of illegal aliens.

Staffed Out of El Cajon

The North County region previously had been assigned to Border Patrol agents working out of El Cajon and at the San Clemente traffic checkpoint on Interstate 5.

But over the years, Olvera said, the San Clemente station has limited its activities primarily to the traffic checks, and El Cajon agents were spread too thin to give North County all the attention

it needed.

With the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, money was authorized for the hiring of 1,500 more agents nationwide, increasing by 50% the Border Patrol’s force. Of that increase, the San Diego sector was granted 391 more agents, of whom 13 are being assigned to the new San Marcos station. Before the beefing up, the San Diego sector had 761 agents.

The new station will technically be a satellite of the El Cajon field station, one of seven operated by the INS in the San Diego sector. Others are at Temecula, primarily a traffic checkpoint for northbound Interstate 15 traffic; San Clemente, the I-5 traffic checkpoint; Campo, Brown Field, Chula Vista and Imperial Beach. The last four are primarily assigned to check crossings by aliens at the border.

Capacity of 50 Aliens

The San Marcos station is situated in a county public works yard on Pacific Street, near California 78 and Rancho Santa Fe Road. Agents will work out of a relocatable building that has the capacity to hold about 50 illegal aliens at a time until they are transported to San Ysidro for further processing, or taken across the border to Tijuana.

The station will be manned 24 hours a day and, at any given time, three to four agents will be on duty, Olvera said.

Olvera was unwilling to predict the immediate effect of the new station in North County, other than to say that the number of illegal aliens apprehended is bound to increase.

“Approximately 10% to 15% of the aliens apprehended by the El Cajon station have been from the area San Marcos will now cover. We’ve been averaging 3,500 to 5,000 apprehensions a year in that area, and we expect the number to go up because of the concentrated effort we’ll now have there,” Olvera said.

“We had been losing a lot of time in patrolling the area in the past because of the travel time from El Cajon to North County,” he said.