INS Beefing Up Border Forces for New Year

U.S. immigration authorities are beefing up enforcement at California border crossings to halt the “post-holiday rush” of illegal immigrants who go home to Mexico for Christmas and return to the United States after New Year’s.

Hoping to deter the flood of illegal immigrants who surge into the United States from January until March, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is warning that this time it will be much more difficult to come back.

Mark Reed, INS director for the San Diego district, said officials are increasing the ranks of immigration inspectors, stepping up prosecutions of immigrants with false documents and adding sniffing dogs that can detect people hiding in car trunks.

Reed said the deterrence strategy is focused primarily on San Ysidro, site of the world’s busiest land border crossing. The crossing has become increasingly attractive to immigrants since the Clinton administration began Operation Gatekeeper, a crackdown on illegal immigration along the western border of San Diego County, in October 1994, he said.

Officials plan to:

* Add up to 100 beds at detention facilities in Southern California or Las Vegas.

* Make an additional 120 INS officers available for the San Ysidro, Otay Mesa and Tecate border crossings.

* Assign the district INS anti-smuggling unit to San Ysidro, along with the Border Patrol “wildcat” team, which targets phony document suppliers.

* Open additional traffic lanes and send more roving U.S. Customs Service teams out into the auto lines to detect drug and immigrant smugglers.

“We hope the show of force will discourage people,” Reed said. “Last year, we were taken by surprise. We didn’t have sufficient resources and we failed. We will not fail this year.”

In early 1996, illegal immigrants with phony papers swamped San Ysidro, Reed said, with as many as 150 or 200 arriving on the busiest days. In the past, such people were sometimes simply turned back. Now, Reed said, they will be systematically arrested, detained and deported from the United States. If they are caught again, they will be criminally prosecuted as felons, under a policy approved in July 1995, he said.

Claudia Smith, an immigrants rights advocate with California Rural Legal Assistance, says such prosecutions effectively “criminalize” family reunification, since some illegal immigrants are married to legal U.S. residents and are waiting to obtain legal status.