U.S. Plans to Dig Ditch at Border : Otay Mesa Barrier Targeted at Illegal Vehicle Crossings

The federal government, concerned about illegal immigrants and drugs smuggled across the border in trucks from Mexico, is planning to dig a ditch 4 miles long, 14 feet wide and 5 feet deep at the border near San Diego to stop vehicles from crossing into California, according to knowledgeable sources.

The ditch, to be constructed of soil and concrete and projected to be completed by fall, will be next to the port of entry at Otay Mesa, the sources said, a flat area where vehicles currently may cross practically at will.

Told about the plan, advocates for immigrants expressed outrage, but a Bush Administration official defended the plan as necessary to prevent illegal crossings.

Opposition Expressed

“The foolishness of this proposal doesn’t surprise me. . . . About the only thing they haven’t suggested is mining the area,” said Roberto Martinez, head of the San Diego office of the American Friends Service Committee, a group of social activists. “Instead of trying to mend fences and relations with Mexico, they’re looking for ways to tear them down. . . .

“Ditches are not the solution. It’s going to take a bilateral approach to find solutions for the socio-economic problems in Mexico and the deteriorating relations between Mexico and the United States to stop illegal immigration.”

The ditch “should be extremely effective in preventing vehicle traffic,” said one Administration official, noting that in addition to apprehending illegal immigrants, border agents expect to catch more drug smugglers as well.

Similar to Farmer’s Idea

Luis Cacho, whose family has farmed Otay Mesa for generations, thinks that federal officials may have gotten the idea for the ditch from a scheme he devised a few years ago to stop Border Patrol vehicles from running over his fields, trampling crops.

Cacho, 56, dug a ditch on his property and watched with amusement as several Border Patrol vehicles were abruptly stopped by the ditch while in pursuit of aliens before agents got the message. After six months, the Border Patrol sent out an agent with a pick and shovel to try to fill it in, Cacho said.

Authorities estimate that 300 to 400 vehicles, many of them driven by smugglers, cross the border illegally in the San Diego area every month. However, many tens of thousands of immigrants also cross illegally on foot, both through the flat abea in Otay Mesa and the rougher terrain to the west. The ditch plan is not aimed at pedestrian crossers.

“We can’t get all of them,” said an official at the Justice Department, parent agency of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But Arnoldo Torres, national political director for the League of United Latin American Citizens in Washington, called the ditch plan “shocking, for it takes on desperate proportions and will have negative consequences, symbolically as well as substantively. Once again, we appear to be obsessed with dealing with symptoms instead of trying to find solutions” to the problems.

Fall Completion Date

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has commissioned an environmental impact study and is expected to announce the plan soon. “Construction on the ditch will begin as soon as the study is satisfactorily completed,” a Bush Administration official said, adding that the project is expected to be completed by fall.

All this was somewhat of a surprise to U.S. Border Patrol officials contacted Tuesday in San Diego. The ditch, said Armand Olvera, assistant chief patrol agent in San Diego, is one of three proposals being considered. The others are a new fence or another kind of concrete barrier, said Olvera, who described the ditch plan as preliminary. He noted that officials would likely need approval from the city of San Diego, as well as a go-ahead from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “It (the ditch plan) is just one of several different things being kicked around,” Olvera said.

The International Boundary and Water Commission, a committee of U.S. and Mexican officials, has been involved in the planning, although it is not clear what, if any, role the Mexican government will have, according to an Administration source.

The terrain separating Tijuana and San Diego accounts for more than a third of the 1.2 million illegal immigrants apprehended along the U.S.-Mexican border last year. The area, gateway to the booming illegal alien job market in Los Angeles, is considered the single most popular crossing area along the 1,900-mile border.

The idea behind the ditch is to stop vehicles, and officials believe that few vehicles will be able to cross at points beyond the ditch because that hilly terrain is less passable than the land near the Otay Mesa port of entry.

Inadequate Tools

Immigration experts--inside and outside the government--have long asserted that INS resources are inadequate to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

The 1986 immigration reform law provided for an increase in Border Patrol officers, and INS officials said that by Sept. 30, the end of the government’s current fiscal year, the border force will have grown from the current 3,000 to 4,500.

But that number is not nearly enough to cover the nation’s southern border, experts say. At many points along the border, fences need mending--or are nonexistent--and government surveillance equipment is inadequate to keep up with illegal crossings. Thus, the government is trying to find new ways to fight the crossings.

Some plans have failed. For example, in the late 1970s a chain-link fence, known derisively as the “Tortilla Curtain,” was placed along several miles of the border in El Paso at a cost of more than $1 million. It did not take long for illegal immigrants to cut holes in it and make their way into this country.

But a Bush Administration official, noting the distinctions between the fence and the ditch, said: “This is going to work to the extent that it will keep vehicles out. This is not intended to stop people from crossing on foot. Unlike the fence, this is not something that can be easily damaged or destroyed.”

Times staff writers H.G. Reza and Patrick McDonnell in San Diego contributed to this story.