Fatal Crash Triggers Criticism of Chases : Border Patrol’s Policies Take Heat

The city manager of Temecula on Tuesday angrily demanded a meeting with the Border Patrol over its pursuit policies, reigniting a debate over the agency’s chases in densely populated areas near immigration checkpoints.

“I want to really examine their policies,” City Manager Donald Dixon said. “If their policies say,” ’We can go as fast as we want to,’ I want to say, ‘Not in my town.’ ”

His city of 32,000 had just lost four high school students and a local banker, killed because they happened to be in the intersection where a truck fleeing immigration authorities apparently sped through a red light.

A Border Patrol spokesman said his agency has been reviewing its chase policy and that the deaths will prompt further review.

It’s not the first time a Border Patrol chase brought death to an innocent bystander in the town, according to Dixon and trustees of the Temecula Valley Unified School District. In February, 1990, a woman and her unborn child were killed during a pursuit, Dixon said. The Border Patrol could not confirm the 1990 deaths.

“This tragedy forces us to ask our government to re-evaluate the policies that we have about open or closed borders to the south of us,” school board president David Eurich said tearfully at the board’s regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday evening.

San Clemente city officials have a longstanding dispute with the Border Patrol over high-speed chases prompted by illegal immigrants who run the Interstate 5 checkpoint near San Onofre.

Several fatal and serious accidents on the streets of San Clemente in the past five years angered city officials there, who pressured the Border Patrol to use restraint.

There have been at least 21 fatalities related to Border Patrol chases since 1980 in California.

Border Patrol spokesman Steve Kean said Tuesday that the agency will be reviewing its policy after the Temecula crash, but would not elaborate.

“The policy is being discussed,” he said. “We are looking for alternatives on how to handle pursuits.”

But the Border Patrol has not changed its attitude toward the value of checkpoints north of the border. The agency plans to build a bigger I-5 checkpoint a few miles south of the current San Onofre location, in an area that officials say will be safer for all involved.

Along with the smaller I-15 checkpoint near Temecula at the Riverside-San Diego County line, the San Clemente checkpoint provides an invaluable second line of defense that supplements enforcement at the border, immigration officials maintain. They say the checkpoints are a weapon against both illegal immigration and trans-border drug trafficking.

Roberto Martinez, a San Diego-based migrant advocate who helped author a recent study condemning chase-related deaths, said: “We have been making recommendations for the last 10 years about these high-speed chases, about letting trained law enforcement personnel like the CHP take over and reduce fatalities by using helicopters and other means. The Border Patrol uses a reckless form of hot pursuit that endangers people.”

Another argument by critics is that that the Border Patrol should be particularly cautious because agents are often pursuing people whose only crime has been to cross the border illegally, not desperate criminals.

But Kean said that argument ignores the smugglers who frequently are at the wheel, and who, he said, often commit other crimes and drive stolen vehicles. The Chevrolet Suburban involved in the Temecula accident, for example, had been stolen a week earlier in Orange County.

Existing agency policy calls for agents to break off chases if they feel an undue hazard exists, Kean said. That does not mean agents are automatically prohibited from pursuing suspects into residential neighborhoods or near schools, he said.

“It’s left to the discretion of the agent,” Kean said. “The agent has to consider traffic, the time of day, if it is in a school zone, amongst other factors.”

In the Temecula accident, officials said, the pursuing Border Patrol vehicle slowed down after its emergency lights and siren failed. The agents were “following,” not chasing, a quarter mile behind the suspects when the Suburban plowed into a car in front of the high school, officials said.