Blockade at the Border : El Paso Called a Success After 1 Year; San Diego on Tap

Border Patrol agent Billy Black stands his daily watch on the Rio Grande in a mixed state of boredom and satisfaction.

His once-exciting job of chasing down illegal immigrants has become a monotonous exercise of sentry duty, watching the river day after day--a result of the patrol’s year-old border blockade.

“It’s a total turnaround from what it used to be,” Black said. “It’s effective. It’s not 100% effective, but it’s to where we like it.”

The blockade was unique to the El Paso area until this weekend, when it was scheduled to be expanded to San Diego. The Border Patrol plans to double the number of agents along the busiest stretch of the border.

In Texas, the experiment began when Silvestre Reyes, chief of the sector’s Border Patrol, strung his agents out within sight of each other along a 20-mile section of the Rio Grande. It takes 160 to 200 agents to maintain the 24-hour blockade line every day.

First dubbed Operation Blockade, it was meant to keep people from trying to cross the border illegally and to capture anyone who made the attempt anyway. The strategy marked a radical departure from the patrol’s old approach of letting people come across, then apprehending them and sending them back.

One year later, patrol officials say the operation--since renamed Hold the Line--has given them unprecedented command of an area where ferrymen known as “lancheros” once did a booming business taking boatloads of illegals across the river.

“During the last 12 months, we’ve seen that a border as active as El Paso can be controlled,” Reyes said. Citing agency estimates, he said illegal entries in the El Paso sector have decreased from an average high of about 10,000 a day before the blockade to about 1,000 now. An entry is considered to be someone who eludes the Border Patrol.

Apprehensions of illegal immigrants, an indication of how many people are trying to get across, have fallen from an average of about 1,000 per day to an average of less than 200 now. “We’re very much impressed,” Reyes said.

So are others. “I think the net effect has been very positive,” said El Paso Mayor Larry Francis.

Many agents have complained about the tedium of sitting on the riverbanks during an entire 10-hour shift without much relief, but they support the strategy.

But some critics say there are indications the blockade has simply pushed large numbers of illegal immigrants toward other areas, such as Arizona and New Mexico. Reyes, whose district includes New Mexico, acknowledged that apprehensions have risen outside the El Paso area.

Border Patrol figures show no clear pattern. Apprehensions are down from last year in Yuma, Ariz., but up in the Tucson area, where 125,335 apprehensions were reported from October, 1993, to August, compared with 82,092 during the previous year’s reporting period.

One agent who refused to be identified for fear of reprisal said that since the inception of the blockade the Border Patrol has cut back on the number of agents on the line, making the operation less effective. Reyes acknowledged the decrease in manpower but said it wasn’t decreasing effectiveness.

Immigration-advocacy groups have also criticized the strategy for militarizing the border and, they say, straining relations between the communities of El Paso and its sister city, Ciudad Juarez.

During the days after the blockade’s inception, Juarez residents protested and tried to blockade international bridges. Those protests were short-lived.

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Finally, some say using apprehension figures to show a decline in border crossings may be misleading, because even the patrol agrees those statistics don’t account for multiple arrests of the same person, a common occurrence.

Suzan Kern of the Border Rights Coalition, an immigration-advocacy group, called the blockade a “Band-Aid on a gaping wound.”

It remains difficult to pin down the blockade’s overall effects, such as supporters’ claim that the operation has reduced local crime.

“The majority of those people came over here to work, not commit crimes,” said police Sgt. Bill Pfeil.