Border Attacks on Its Agents Worry INS

While reporting a six-year low in border apprehensions this year, U.S. immigration officials on Friday expressed growing concern over gangs of Mexican youths who, after using drugs, attack U.S. agents by firing weapons and throwing rocks across the border.

Officials at the Immigration and Naturalization Service here said the incidents, most of which occur near San Diego and along the Texas border, have increased during the last two years, despite continued talks with Mexican officials.

“There is general agreement on both sides that these are problems we must deal with,” Commissioner Alan C. Nelson said at a news conference. He said that U.S. and Mexican officials most recently discussed the problems at a meeting here in July.

INS officials said that 34 firearm assaults against U.S. agents were reported in fiscal 1988, which ended Sept. 30, compared with 23 in the previous year. As significant as the numbers, officials said, is the shift in the kinds of weapons used.

“They are more likely to be automatic firearms,” said Duke Austin, an INS spokesman. “Instead of a .22 pistol you get an AK-47 (a semiautomatic assault rifle). The types of weapons have heightened the concern over the increase in border violence.”

Roberto Martinez, a Chicano rights activist in San Diego who monitors border issues for the American Friends Service Committee, disputed the INS account. He accused federal officials of exaggerating the reports of attacks against agents, probably to justify staff increases for the U.S. Border Patrol, an INS enforcement arm.

“It looks like a complete overreaction and exaggeration,” said Martinez, who heads the U.S.-Mexico border program social action arm of the Quaker Church.

Years Since Agent Shot

Robert Gilson, assistant chief patrol agent in San Diego, the single most active crossing point along the entire 1,952-mile border, said that it has been three or four years since an agent in the sector was shot by an alien. One agent was mistakenly shot two years ago by another agent, Gilson said.

And Dana Cunningham, a Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego, said that he could recall no incidents involving the use of AK-47s or similar weapons against agents in San Diego.

But Martinez noted that more than 10 aliens have been shot and killed and many others wounded in confrontations with Border Patrol and San Diego police units in the past two years.

“We consider many of these unjustifiable shootings,” Martinez said. “A lot of people were shot in the back.”

Officials said no figures on rock-throwing incidents are available, but Nelson asserted that there have been numerous incidents in which gangs have “hit windshields and seriously injured people” with “baseball-size or softball-size rocks.”

In border areas, INS agents have been accused by rights groups of overreacting to such rock-throwing incidents. In the most celebrated case, a U.S. District judge in San Diego awarded a Tijuana teen-ager $574,000 last year for injuries suffered when he was shot in the back by a Border Patrol agent in April, 1985, as he stood in Mexican territory. The officer maintained that he had acted properly against a rock-throwing barrage.

Nelson said that the INS recorded arrests of 940,670 illegal aliens in fiscal 1988, the lowest total since fiscal 1982, when 750,000 were apprehended. The 1988 total represented a 16% drop from the previous year and was 42% lower than the number in 1986.

Staff writer Patrick McDonnell in San Diego contributed to this story.