Mexico Refuses to Take Chinese Detained at Sea

Mexico will not accept 658 Chinese immigrants currently detained at sea by the U.S Coast Guard, saying it is up to the United States to resolve the six-day crisis, Mexican officials asserted Monday.

After a weekend in which U.S. officials indicated that an agreement between the two countries could be near, Mexican diplomats flatly said they have rejected the Clinton Administration’s request that Mexican authorities accept the immigrants being held off Ensenada in three smuggling vessels, then repatriate them at U.S. expense.

“We are not negotiating anything,” said a senior official in the foreign relations secretariat in Mexico City. “We were not participants in the original policy that led to this problem and we are not participants in the current policy. It is a U.S. policy and they will have to deal with the consequences.”

Current discussions between U.S. and Mexican diplomats concerning Chinese immigrants are “strictly informational,” the official said.

Mexican navy ships are patrolling the waters west of Baja California to ensure that smuggling vessels do not attempt a landing, the official said. He also repeated Mexico’s determination to apprehend and repatriate any Chinese immigrants who enter Mexican territory.

This adamant posture contradicted the tone of U.S. officials, seeming to bode ominously for the Clinton Administration’s hopes of enlisting Mexico as a partner in turning back the wave of seagoing illegal immigration from China.

Nonetheless, State Department spokeswoman Maeve Dwyer said Monday that discussions with Mexico regarding the U.S. request were “continuing and constructive.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a U.S. official said Monday: “Negotiations are going very well.”

The U.S. asked Mexico’s help last week after intercepting and boarding the three vessels; the smugglers reportedly planned to land in Baja California and bring the immigrants across the Southwest border.

Aboard the three crowded, rusty smuggling vessels 60 miles west of Ensenada, another long day passed for the marooned passengers, who reportedly have spent 90 days at sea. Conditions aboard were described as tense and squalid. The Coast Guard has been working to provide food, water and other basics, but has not been able to provide portable toilets or other sanitary facilities.

The immigrants crammed onto the deck of the freighter Sing Li 6 have fashioned crude, poignant signs expressing their sentiments to news photographers.

“Longing to Go American,” one sign read.

“Bread we want, Freedom we want,” read another.

Adding to the confusing saga, rumors persisted in San Diego and Baja California on Monday that a breakthrough was imminent and preparations were under way to receive the Chinese in Ensenada.

There was even a report that Mexico had asked to borrow detention buses from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to transport the immigrants from the port of Ensenada to the Tijuana airport, from which they would presumably be flown back to China. Using the agency’s distinctive green and white buses to carry prisoners in Mexico would be unprecedented, officials said.

Mexican immigration authorities in Tijuana have received no alert to prepare for what would be a massive and delicate task of guarding and transporting hundreds of people, officials said.

“Nothing has changed,” a Mexican official said.

Taking custody of 658 prisoners in Ensenada would be risky and cause logistics problems for Mexican authorities, who expended considerable effort after arresting more than 300 Chinese immigrants in April. That group was first housed in overcrowded jails and recreation facilities in Ensenada, then transferred to a more spacious gymnasium in Mexicali.

As in several other cases of captured Chinese immigrants, more than 100 of the group managed to escape from the Mexicali airport in May and flee across the border. Mexico deported the others after last-minute wrangling with U.S officials, who agreed to pay part of the flight costs but denied permission for a refueling stop in Alaska.

That dispute may be influencing the Mexican response in this case. In addition, detaining and deporting immigrants apprehended by the United States would set a politically risky precedent for the Mexican government.

The Clinton Administration is exerting pressure aimed at achieving a twofold goal: preventing the 658 immigrants from seeking political asylum in the United States and sending a stern message to the worldwide network involved in immigrant smuggling.

But at least one of the boat people--a 19-year-old woman flown from a freighter to a San Diego hospital Sunday by the Coast Guard--is considered an applicant for political asylum. She remains hospitalized after an emergency operation to terminate a three-month pregnancy, an INS spokesman said Monday.

“The INS is treating her as a political asylum applicant because of the sum total of her actions and what she has said,” said spokesman Rudy Murillo.