High-Tech Fingerprinting Weeds Out Border Criminals

Most people arrested by the Border Patrol have committed one crime: crossing the border.

Professional criminals--robbers, drug runners, alien smugglers--account for only a fraction of the thousands of daily Border Patrol apprehensions in the San Diego area. That makes them even tougher to find.

Using aliases, carrying no identification, some wanted criminals evade detection repeatedly. They fade into the flow of illegal immigrants routinely sent back across the border.

So the Border Patrol recently created a high-tech response to a prime frustration: AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which resembles computerized criminal identification systems used by other police agencies.

Introduced late last year, the Border Patrol’s system checks fingerprints against internal files and the records of police agencies in California and other Western states. The process now takes hours rather than weeks.

“It used to be a guy would already be through the system and back to Mexico before we found out he was Joe Murderer from L.A.,” said Ted Stark, an immigration inspector at the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

The $3.5-million project exists only in San Diego. It is being installed in Tucson, Ariz., and will eventually extend the entire length of the Mexican border if funding becomes available. Officials have two objectives: cracking down on criminal aliens and alleviating colossal backups that clog border ports of entry and the rest of the immigration processing and detention system.

“Let’s face it, it also serves the public much better,” said Bill Boggs, a Border Patrol management analyst who has overseen the implementation of AFIS. “Rather than tying up an agent, it allows him to take one individual, expeditiously resolve his case, and move on.”

Boggs acknowledges that more immigration agents must be trained to use the computer. There are delays, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays, when police departments crowd the computer lines of the state Department of Justice and other regional data banks with a backlog of weekend mayhem.

But he said the new weapon has already proved itself against adversaries such as a 26-year-old man who recently presented himself at the San Ysidro Port of Entry claiming to be a U.S. citizen.

The man had no documents, officials said. He gave his name as Jose Ramirez--a preferred alias. A suspicious inspector checked his fingerprints in the computer and determined that his real name was Juan de la Torre: his prison record included convictions for drug possession, burglary, assault on a police officer, disorderly conduct and--not surprisingly--giving a false identification to a police officer. He also had been deported once.

In the past, such information might have been gained only through an extensive interview or exhaustive review of fingerprint files, said INS inspector Josie Vargas.

Thirty percent of the fingerprints run through AFIS turn up a criminal record, Boggs said. This has allowed agents to discover wanted criminals and hold them in cases where they would have otherwise been set free, he said.

The target population is not large. Criminal aliens constitute 2% to 4% of the INS apprehensions, Boggs said--a handful of the 2,000 people who might be arrested in the entire San Diego sector on a busy day.

Apart from the port of entry, agents will use the fingerprint system almost exclusively to screen felony suspects--drug or immigrant smuggling cases, for example. Agents will not check those arrested only for illegal entry, unless there is some compelling reason to suspect a criminal past, Boggs said.

“We are not focusing on the migrant worker and the seasonal farm worker,” Boggs said. “We are focusing the money, the effort and the energy on the criminal alien.”