Border Patrol to Add Staff in Rugged East San Diego County

The Border Patrol is beefing up its presence in eastern San Diego County to discourage a new influx of illegal immigrants diverted there by Operation Gatekeeper, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner announced Thursday.

Since President Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper two years ago, policymakers have doubled Border Patrol staffing in San Diego County to nearly 2,000 agents and bolstered a corrugated steel fence along the more urban 14 miles of the border.

Now, 224 new agents are completing training for assignments in the rugged mountainous desert beyond, known as East County, where a stream of undocumented immigrants has alarmed ranchers and concerned environmentalists, who say wilderness areas are being trampled.

Meissner said the problems in East County are symptoms of Gatekeeper’s success. Since the operation began, undocumented immigrants have quit streaming freely across the western sector of the border into Imperial Beach, Chula Vista and San Ysidro at night. The arduous East County crossing has made smugglers double their fees, she said.

“The border is harder to cross than at any time in history,” the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service said.

Until the 224 new permanent staffers are sent, officials will dispatch 200 temporary agents to reinforce East County patrols, Meissner said. There are currently 250 agents in East County, said Border Patrol spokesman Mark Moody.

Apprehensions have skyrocketed in East County since the implementation of Operation Gatekeeper in October 1994, while they have gone down in the western area.

“We will control East County,” Meissner said. “I hold no illusions about the task we face. It is remote, it is rugged, and only the most desperate people would subject themselves to those conditions.”

In addition, a drive to apprehend smugglers of immigrants will result in the felony prosecutions of 200 people this year, said Alan Bersin, the U.S. attorney in San Diego and President Clinton’s border czar in the Southwest.

Eventually, Meissner said, officials want to create a 66-mile “zone of control” from the Pacific Ocean to the Imperial County line.

The partisan tenor of the national debate over immigration policy was underlined when Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon) appeared at the press conference with placard-bearing supporters, saying it was the Republican-controlled Congress that was responsible for assigning new agents to San Diego County.

Hunter said East County needs 400 more agents--nearly double the number being sent. He called for the strict enforcement of sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants, a provision of federal law that has been generally unpopular among business owners.

“Let ‘em be unpopular. We discovered there are more business owners supporting the Democrats than the Republicans,” he said.

When a U.S. official asked a Hunter supporter to lower his placard, he replied tersely: “I don’t work for you.”

Allegations that Border Patrol agents have been ordered to falsify figures to make Operation Gatekeeper seem more effective are under investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, and Meissner repeated her invitation for agents to come forward with any such information.

“All of us want to know the truth,” she said, adding: “We do not think the operation has been compromised by these allegations. You can see the results.”