Border Woes : Immigration: Human rights activists say detained illegal immigrants have been mistreated. Operation Gatekeeper officials deny abuse charges, but say some changes have been made.

While federal officials continue to herald the success of a Border Patrol campaign to choke off the flow of illegal immigration, human rights activists say the high-profile crackdown is also having a lesser-known effect: the mistreatment of migrants awaiting deportation.

In the six months since Operation Gatekeeper swung into action, activists on both sides of the border have been interviewing busloads of recently released illegal immigrants at points of entry from Tijuana to Mexicali.

Those interviews have generated hundreds of complaints, including cases in which men, women and children have reportedly been detained without food or water for up to 24 hours, crammed into holding pens with filthy, stopped-up toilets and forced to sleep on cold tile floors with no blankets and an air conditioner on.

Immigration officials flatly deny any connection between Gatekeeper and any alleged mistreatment of illegal immigrants.

“Those kinds of statements are made without basis or fact,” said Johnny Williams, chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector. “It would be ridiculous to believe, dealing with the volume of people we’re dealing with, that we would have time for such trivialities.”

Nevertheless, human rights activists charge that Border Patrol buses, coming from as far away as Seattle, have been jammed beyond capacity, and that deportees have had to buy their own drinking water and have been restricted from using bus bathrooms because they often are chained to other passengers.

The activists also allege that insults, physical abuse and other brands of so-called border justice have been on the rise since the start of Operation Gatekeeper, an aggressive enforcement effort to beef up patrol of the international boundary in San Diego, the busiest and most volatile section of the Southwest border.

“It is part and parcel of the strategy of Operation Gatekeeper to make things as miserable as possible for those detained by the Border Patrol to deter them from coming again,” said Claudia Smith, regional counsel for California Rural Legal Assistance, an immigrant rights group.

“Everybody--whether they are documented, undocumented or U.S. citizen--is entitled to decent and humane treatment at the hands of law enforcement authorities,” Smith said. “I’m not asking for (deportees) to be coddled, but once they have been detained, they have to be treated decently.”

The complaints center on conditions at the San Diego sector’s six short-term detention facilities, where illegal immigrants are held until they can be processed and sent back across the border, and aboard buses used to transport illegal immigrants from the interior to the border.

Immigration officials say that although they have found the bulk of the allegations to be unsubstantiated, some changes at those facilities and on Border Patrol buses have been ordered as a result of concerns raised by Smith and others.

Blankets and snacks are now offered to women and children no matter how short their detention, said John Chase, director of the Office of Internal Audit for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.

Also, the capacity of Border Patrol buses has been trimmed from 62 passengers to 50. And agents are trying harder to repatriate deportees as quickly as possible.

Chase said all agents have been instructed to provide drinking water to detainees as needed, ensure that toilets are working and that holding cells are not overcrowded, and to feed anyone who has been held for six to eight hours.

“There were some issues that we took note of and there were some other things that when we reviewed them were not as serious as indicated,” Chase said. “If we have a problem, then, by golly, we will take responsibility for that problem. But while they are in our custody, I can tell you we treat them humanely.”

Since Gatekeeper was launched Oct. 1, the Border Patrol has boosted its ranks in San Diego by about 400 agents.

Last month, authorities hailed the success of the stepped-up enforcement effort in stemming the flow of illegal immigrants near the Imperial Beach station, which has accounted for more captures than any other Border Patrol station.

Interviews of nearly 1,000 captured illegal immigrants and of more than 200 migrants in Mexican border towns revealed that it is now harder to cross into San Diego than before Gatekeeper, INS officials said.

But the INS has not been the only agency doing interviews at the border. At the Otay Mesa border crossing recently, Smith joined Tijuana human rights activists waiting for deportees to be ushered through the fence that separates Mexico and the United States.

When a group of about 30 migrants arrived, they told of being held for 15 hours at the San Clemente station without being fed. One man said he continued to ask when they would be released, complaining that the detainees were hungry and hot crammed together in one cell.

“They just slammed the door in my face,” he said.

Of about 110 migrants interviewed in February, more than one-third said they experienced some type of mistreatment at the hands of the Border Patrol, including physical and verbal abuse.

“We would like it to be known as widely as possible the manifold violations of basic human rights being wrought on the deported ones,” said Francisco Ornelas, an adviser to Baja California’s office of human rights.

“We can understand the feelings of agents and patrolmen who must be weary and tired and annoyed by this kind of work, but still, all and all, you can always treat people in a civilized way,” he added. “And these people are clearly not being treated that way.”

Ornelas and other activists are calling for the development of uniformed guidelines for running those centers and for transporting deportees to the border.

Now, the guidelines for transporting or holding illegal immigrants exist in a variety of INS policies, many of which are vague about such issues as what constitutes overcrowding, who qualifies for meals and when medical care should be provided.

The INS is putting together a document to guide the transportation of illegal immigrants, but Border Patrol agents will continue to rely on directives and more general INS guidelines for operating detention facilities.

Immigration officials and Border Patrol agents say they are doing the best job possible, given the nature of their work. They say that up to 1,000 people a day can come through the busiest holding facilities, and that there are bound to be some people unhappy about the experience.

“We think we do a most adequate job of keeping those facilities clean and comfortable,” San Diego sector chief Williams said. “We are making some changes as we go, improvements as we can. But I can assure you we try to do our very best.”