Experts Say Chase Shows Smugglers’ Determination

The chase of the battered pickup full of suspected illegal immigrants that ended with the videotaped beating of two of them began after the truck evaded the Interstate 15 checkpoint by using a bucolic two-lane road through a woodsy area known as Wolf Valley.

Once seen on Pala Road, the truck fled for 80 miles at speeds up to 75 mph, endangering the immigrants as well as other drivers.

Border Patrol officials say the incident illustrates a new fact of border life: As U.S. authorities step up efforts to seal the border, smugglers of illegal immigrants are becoming more creative, more determined and more willing to risk their lives and those of their customers and the public.

“I’m hearing more and more about cases of high-speed escapes of smugglers with trucks crammed with large numbers of aliens,” said Jim Hayes, assistant district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles, who is overseeing an anti-smuggling task force. “Smugglers don’t care about the safety of the people they’re smuggling, just the profits they can receive.”

The checkpoint along Interstate 15 just north of the San Diego County-Riverside County border looks formidable enough, with agents able to choke off all northbound traffic though the steep-sided mountainous pass. But smugglers of illegal immigrants are able to bypass the checkpoint by using rural roads in the woodsy De Luz Canyon to the west and the flatter Wolf Valley and the Pechanga Indian Reservation to the east.

Taking winding back roads around the Temecula checkpoint--as well as similar roads, paved and unpaved, around other checkpoints in San Diego County--is one of several methods being increasingly used by smugglers to evade a newly beefed-up Border Patrol.

“We’re seeing an increasing number of desperate people turn to smugglers, who will do anything to get their illicit cargo into this country,” said Jim Pilkington, spokesman for the Border Patrol in San Diego.

Several anti-illegal-immigration efforts in the last two years have pushed illegal immigrants east from the San Ysidro port of entry into the mountainous terrain of eastern San Diego County.

Border Patrol agents from the Temecula station often patrol the back roads looking for smugglers. A video camera is attached to a freeway sign at an offramp at Rainbow, a tiny community just south of the Temecula checkpoint. The camera is monitored 24 hours a day.

Hayes said that if the truck had hit a bump in the road while being chased Monday, many of the at least 19 immigrants riding in the back could have been thrown onto the pavement and killed. “Anyone who puts themselves in the clutches of a smuggler is risking their life,” he said.

One reason for the smugglers’ new recklessness may be an increased aversion to being arrested. Alan Bersin, U.S. attorney for San Diego and Imperial counties, has declared “war” on immigrant smugglers. In 1995, 74 smugglers were caught, tried and sent to prison. In 1996, Bersin wants that number to be more than 300.

More rental trucks are being used so that if they are caught, the smugglers don’t risk getting their own vehicles impounded. One smuggling ring was renting Lincoln Continentals.

One smuggler in eastern San Diego County stuffed 17 immigrants into a portable toilet being towed by a truck. Thirty illegal immigrants were found inside a double-wide horse trailer on Interstate 805.

Agents have reported cases of smugglers leaving stragglers--often women--when they cannot keep up with the nighttime trek through the rough terrain. Most illegal immigrants hike into this country and are picked up by waiting vehicles.

At the San Clemente checkpoint on Interstate 5, 30 illegal immigrants were found in a truck beneath a load of potting soil. Smugglers have painted trucks to look like telephone company trucks, with the drivers wearing blond wigs.

“As we get more determined, so do they,” said Kenneth J. Wilson, assistant agent in charge of the Temecula checkpoint.