U.S. to Add 185 Agents to Fight Smuggling

The Clinton administration announced plans Tuesday to step up the war on illegal immigration by adding 185 Border Patrol agents and sophisticated equipment along a rugged stretch of eastern San Diego County that is the latest hot spot for smugglers.

The stepped-up enforcement will focus on a mountainous 16-mile area east of the Otay Mesa port of entry. Officials said this region has drawn smugglers that have been turned away by heightened border enforcement to the west since Operation Gatekeeper began 19 months ago. The smugglers’ eastward shift has overwhelmed thinly staffed Border Patrol stations and spelled more dangerous conditions for the immigrants who must march overland in desolate terrain.

“We want to drive the smugglers and the illegal crossings out of the mountains. It’s a terribly dangerous place for everybody involved,” Immigration and Naturalization Commissioner Doris Meissner said, announcing the plans on a wind-blown hilltop near Otay Mesa.

Meissner said most of the added agents, who will roughly double the force assigned to eastern San Diego County, will be shifted from other sections of the country. Twenty-eight of the added agents will be assigned permanently to eastern San Diego County, officials said.

In one indication that smugglers have been pushed eastward, arrests of illegal immigrants have quadrupled since last year in some portions of the area from Otay Mesa to Tecate.

The expanded effort is to include back-country horse patrols, two new helicopters, high-powered lights, fencing and ground sensors buried to detect movement.

Meissner said temporary border checkpoints will be established on side roads near the current checkpoint in Temecula. A truck packed with illegal immigrants crashed in the rural terrain near Temecula last month, killing eight occupants and injuring 17. A police chase that ended with the televised beating of two immigrants by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies also began near Temecula.

U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin announced that a team of 11 FBI agents will be assigned to bust smuggling rings in the eastern San Diego County zone. “That’s where they are. That’s where we will be,” Bersin said.

The announcement comes at a time when election year presidential politics and high-profile news events have raised the volatility of the illegal immigration issue.

Architects of Operation Gatekeeper, which until now has focused on a 14-mile stretch starting at the Pacific Ocean, declared the effort a success.

“We gave the Border Patrol the tools that it needed to control a border that for too long had been controlled by illegal immigrants and alien smugglers,” Meissner said. “We have achieved an unprecedented level of control.”

One critic of Operation Gatekeeper said the expanded enforcement would push immigrants still farther east into terrain even more harsh and dangerous.

“What they’re forcing people to do is take bigger and bigger risks . . . into more and more inhospitable areas,” said Claudia Smith, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance. But backers of immigration reform said the border crackdown does not address problems posed by employers who hire illegal immigrants and visitors who stay after their visas expire.

“Putting more people at the border to stand on an ‘X’ is simply not going to do the job,” said Danielle Elliott, western regional director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.