New Level for Border Issue : Request for OAS intervention puts spotlight on human rights

Even as immigration authorities aim to get a better handle on their own efforts to control illegal immigration, they have found themselves under increasing scrutiny as they try to do a tough job.

Congressional oversight hearings have been held on charges of excessive force by the Border Patrol and on the agency’s pursuit policy. This week a lawsuit brought by a man whose pregnant wife was killed during a chase went to trial in federal court in Santa Ana. And now, the American Friends Service Committee, charging the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol with human rights violations, has asked the Organization of American States to intervene.

In the aftermath of the deaths of six people in Temecula two months ago during a vehicular chase by Border Patrol agents, the agency issued new restrictions on pursuits that ought to have been implemented long ago. The changes were a signal that practices could indeed be revised, and that care and reason could inform immigration policy on the front lines of enforcement. There is no reason that good judgment and proper training cannot extend to all facets of enforcement along the United States’ border with Mexico.

For some Southern California neighborhoods, dangerous chases on freeways and streets and heavy-handed tactics used by immigration authorities in raids have become issues affecting daily life. Now the request by the human rights group that the OAS use its influence to lean on the State Department has raised U.S. immigration tactics to the level of concern about international human rights.

That international perspective is important. And it is at that most obvious of global meeting grounds--the border--that immigration policy is best carried out with sensitivity and common sense.