Stepped-Up Border Patrol Forces Crossers Into Rougher Terrain

Isabella Angeles sits in the shade outside a general store, crunching on potato chips. In a few hours, she will try to beat the U.S. government’s expanding campaign to stop illegal immigration.

Angeles, 25, has flown from the southern state of Guerrero to the border with California. She has never been this far north, but Mexico’s underground railroad has prepared her well.

“At Tijuana, they told us to go east,” she says through a mouth full of chips. “ ‘Head to the mountains,’ they said.”

A U.S. program called Operation Gatekeeper was started 18 months ago to beef up border patrols at Imperial Beach in San Diego County. Until Gatekeeper began, one in four illegal immigrants passing through Tijuana crossed the border at Imperial Beach.

Word has spread on the streets that Gatekeeper has shut down the five-mile Imperial Beach zone and crossers from Tijuana should attempt to start their journey into the U.S. by crossing to the east--into southeastern California, Arizona or New Mexico.

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Angeles has been told to cross at least 40 miles east of Imperial Beach, and she knows to bring extra money for Tecate’s municipal police officers. The bribe will enable her to break local rules with impunity and rest for a few hours in an abandoned shack before making her move.

Even though U.S. Border Patrol reinforcements have not arrived in this zone yet, the shift eastward plays into the agency’s hands. It wants to force migrants into isolated mountains and deserts where the terrain is rougher, the weather more brutal and the crossing time longer.

Human-rights advocates criticize Gatekeeper, contending it is militarizing the border and endangering crossers’ lives.

“Gatekeeper is forcing these people east into more dangerous situations,” said Roberto Martinez of the American Friends Service Committee.

The steep peso devaluation that battered Mexico’s economy one month after Gatekeeper began is forcing more “economic refugees” into the U.S., he said. “These are desperate times and they’re taking desperate measures.”

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Washington is spending $206 million this year to bolster the campaign against illegal immigrants all along the border with Mexico. In Arizona, the project is called Operation Safeguard and in Texas and parts of New Mexico it is Operation Hold the Line.

About 800 new Border Patrol officers have been added in the Southwest, bringing the total to 5,700.

Officers guarding the scrubby hills across the border from Tecate are based at Campo, Calif., where they are fighting unprecedented numbers of Mexican migrants.

During the first week of May, the Border Patrol’s Campo office arrested 1,367 illegal immigrants. At Imperial Beach, three times the number of agents arrested 1,356 illegal immigrants in the same period.

Over the last year, 48% fewer illegal immigrants were arrested at the well-staffed Imperial Beach section, while 100% more were detained at Campo. Of the 8,893 migrants detained at Campo in April, all but 22 were Mexican nationals.

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In the high desert of eastern San Diego County, as in much of the American Southwest, Border Patrol agents work in relative isolation, miles from headquarters and backup assistance.

The 116 officers in Campo watch over a 25-mile stretch of border without night scopes, all-terrain vehicles or computerized identification systems. More modern equipment is scheduled to arrive in a few weeks.

On a recent night, agent Dean Eppen leaned close to the ground. He gently traced the lines of a migrant’s footprint.

“You catch what you can,” he said. He went a bit farther and saw the migrants had brushed out their prints. “Sometimes the brushouts stand out more than the prints,” he said.

Eppen, a former distance runner, spent 20 minutes hoofing it up a steep incline, chasing what he thought was the footprint he had found earlier. This time he came up empty.

Immigrants arrested in the Campo zone are taken to a trailer with two small holding cells. Agents sit at three desks pushed together and take down the information by hand.

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On a recent night, when 70 migrants were brought in at one time, an agent stood outside and shone a flashlight over the crouching men while other agents sat inside, writing as fast as they could.

With no time or equipment to enter the detainees’ fingerprints into a computer database, there was no way to check aliases against confirmed identities.

Angeles has heard Campo’s processing center is “no big deal.”

“I’m going to tell them I’m a movie star,” she says. “They’ll never know.”