INS Investigates Border Patrol Arrest Data

The head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service has dispatched an investigative team here to probe allegations that supervisors for the U.S. Border Patrol are falsifying arrest reports in an effort to show Operation Gatekeeper is a success, officials said Friday.

Commissioner Doris Meissner ordered the investigation, which began Monday, after Border Patrol field agents said their superiors instructed them to report fewer arrests to enhance the image of effectiveness for the Clinton administration’s high-profile crackdown on illegal immigration.

“The stories we’re hearing have been very disturbing,” said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents. “It runs the gamut from fudging on how we’re deploying people to out-and-out fraud.”

Mark Moody, a spokesman for the Border Patrol, confirmed that an investigative unit arrived Monday to conduct an initial round of inquiries.

Chief Border Patrol Agent Johnny Williams, who oversees the San Diego sector, contacted Meissner and requested the investigation in response to what he called “serious allegations” about immigration officials “falsifying intelligence reports” to reflect a downturn in arrests, making Gatekeeper appear more strategically effective than it actually is.

Joseph Dassaro, spokesman for Local 1613 of the National Border Patrol Council, said complaints from “upwards of 30” Border Patrol agents have “inundated” his office during the last six months.

Bonner, head of the San Diego-based national union, contended that the problem of underreporting arrests is most serious in the areas closer to coastal communities south of here, which have long been the main path of illegal crossings from Mexico into California.

“I personally have been getting reports for over a year, coming mostly from agents in Imperial Beach,” Bonner said. “The motive? To validate the success of Gatekeeper. They don’t care how high the [arrest] stats get in [eastern San Diego County], since that’s the strategy--to move the traffic in that direction. They want to keep the western part down, because if they don’t, Gatekeeper looks like a failure.”

Charles LaBella, the first assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, said the investigative team from the INS Internal Audit Department is taking the investigation “very seriously.”

“We’re not going to prejudge the situation or say it’s with or without merit,” he said. “But this is not a perfunctory or pro forma type of thing. It’s potentially very serious.”

Operation Gatekeeper has come under sharp attack from Republicans, who argue that it is not sufficient to solve the problem of illegal border crossings.

But LaBella said falsifying arrest reports and intelligence records--if proved true--is a matter that transcends partisan politics. “If true, it’s a very serious matter that can’t be tolerated,” he said.

Launched in October 1994, Operation Gatekeeper doubled the deployment of Border Patrol agents in a 14-mile sector south of San Diego, Chula Vista and Imperial Beach.

Part of the strategy was to deter illegal immigrants by closing off their easiest routes into California. Those determined to cross the border illegally have been forced, for the most part, to eastern San Diego County, where entry is more arduous because of mountainous terrain and where professional smugglers demand higher fees.

Border Patrol officials note that apprehensions of illegal immigrants throughout the sprawling San Diego sector are up 1% in the 20-month period since the beginning of Operation Gatekeeper. But the figures also show 37% fewer apprehensions in June 1996 than in the same month of 1995, and 39% fewer in May 1996 than in the previous May.

And in the western reporting areas near Imperial Beach--where Bonner says agents are asked more frequently to “doctor” statistics--arrests have dropped dramatically. Arrests in the Imperial Beach zone have plummeted to about 60,000 for the first nine months of this fiscal year, compared with nearly 84,000 in the same months of 1995 and 138,000 in 1994.

At the same time, arrests in the Campo and Boulevard zone in eastern San Diego County have risen to 60,000 for the first nine month of the fiscal year, compared with 21,000 for the same period in 1995 and 1,785 in 1994.

Bonner accused Border Patrol supervisors of making a concerted effort to “look the other way” as immigrants pass by; of reporting fewer numbers of illegal immigrants than they catch, and of transporting captured immigrants to stations in east San Diego County to make it appear as though the wave of immigration is moving east, away from Gatekeeper strongholds.

He said some supervisors have told individual agents “to their face” to keep arrests as low as possible “for the sake of appearances.”

“But they’re never going to put that in writing,” he said. “They’re not stupid.”

Dassaro, head of the local Border Patrol union, said the new strategy places agents in greater danger than before.

“Any time you move agents closer to the fence and require them just to sit there for hours and hours, you end up making them targets--sitting ducks,” Dassaro said.

“Our jobs now,” he said, “are a combination of boredom and danger . . . a horrible mix. Prior to Gatekeeper, the best way to describe the border was anarchy. Agents used to investigate [immigrant] smuggling rings or go hard after drug smugglers. We were pulling vehicles over, making solid criminal arrests. Now, for the most part, we’re merely sitting on a line, guarding a fence.”

Morale among agents is low, Dassaro said, because of long hours, few chances for promotion and inadequate pay. But more than anything, he said, it’s the change in strategy of fighting illegal immigration that’s causing the most concern.

A common tactical approach--and one the unions vehemently oppose, Bonner said--is to deploy agents in locations where opportunities for arrests are limited. He said agents are routinely positioned in a spot and told, “You sit on this X. And if you see something going on somewhere else, don’t worry about it.”

Bonner said agents have complained of having their intelligence reports sent back for changes and revisions that demonstrate more effectively the INS position that “Gatekeeper is a great program that’s working wonderfully well.”

Ron Henley, a supervisory Border Patrol agent, declined to comment on the specifics of Bonner’s charges, saying: “I can’t comment in detail because there is an ongoing investigation.”

William Pink, assistant chief of the Border Patrol, said: “It’s important to note our chief [Williams] called for this investigation. In my view, that’s the key. We’re an open book here. We’ll let Internal Affairs review the facts.”

Asked if he believed the allegations were true, Pink said flatly, “No.”

“Our goals with the Gatekeeper were to move the traffic east, where the likelihood of apprehension was greater because of a much smaller population,” Henley said. “For years and years, about 25% of all apprehensions were just outside the port of entry” in the San Diego County coastal community of Imperial Beach.

“For years, Imperial Beach was No. 1 in apprehensions,” Henley said. “Now, it’s fifth.”

The benefit of moving the flow of illegal traffic to points east of Otay Mountain, Henley said, is that it’s far more difficult to traverse the terrain in those areas, and as a result, it becomes a far more costly endeavor for smugglers and immigrants.

“In the old days, if an alien crossed into Imperial Beach, it took him 10 to 12 minutes to get to a pickup point--a shopping mall, a house, whatever,” Henley said. “But now, it takes a minimum of 12 hours to reach the [east San Diego County] communities of Dulzura or Campo, and even then, you can’t do it without a guide.

“The cost of smuggling these people has gone up dramatically, from $125 or $250 a head to as much as $500 or $1,000 a head--which was largely our intent. From a supervisor’s standpoint, there’s a world of difference between what it is now and what it was five or six years ago.”

But Bonner argues that rather than reducing the flow of illegal crossings, Gatekeeper is merely diverting a massive tide farther east, into the foothills of Tecate and across the border and into the rocky hamlets of Dulzura and Campo, where local residents have complained vehemently of illegal immigrants traipsing through their property by the hundreds.

“The game is to try and focus as much attention as possible on one small piece of real estate,” Bonner said, referring to the urban areas of south San Diego, where Gatekeeper has deployed its greatest resources.

“You then hope everyone ignores the fact that we’re being totally overrun in the rest of the sector--from Otay Mountain all the way to the Imperial County line,” he said. “In truth, it’s busting out all over--Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Texas.

“I don’t see how that translates into success, and why would you need to doctor the numbers if it was a success?”

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BACKGROUND

Operation Gatekeeper began in October 1994 as a $46-million effort by the Clinton administration to change the focus of apprehending illegal immigrants along the California-Mexico border. The main goal was to crack down in a 14-mile sector near the Pacific coast that was most heavily used in illegal border crossings. This had the effect of moving the flow of illegal immigrants to the mountainous areas in eastern San Diego County. Officials expressed the belief that immigrants would be discouraged to try crossing the border in the more difficult terrain. Gatekeeper was patterned after the El Paso blockade, which employed a more traditional layered formation of agents to catch illegal immigrants.