Operation Gatekeeper

Re: “Why Violence Is Growing on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” by Michael Huspek, Opinion, Aug. 24:

August has been a particularly deadly month for those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, at least along the California stretch.

As the planners of Operation Gatekeeper openly acknowledge, they are now betting on the Imperial Valley, where temperatures often reach 120-plus degrees for days on end, to stop would-be border crossers. From my observation during recent trips to Mexicali to interview migrants, it is not working. Although some are deterred, hundreds and hundreds are risking the desert each day. So far this month, the official body count is 14 and many men, women and children have been found close to death from the intense heat.

There is something intrinsically immoral about this new phase of Operation Gatekeeper. The issue is not whether we have a right to control the border. It is about overreliance on border control efforts. It is also about the lengths to which we will go to dissuade Mexico’s poor from doing what for decades we encouraged them to do: come north by whatever means.

The standard response from the Border Patrol to criticism of a strategy which puts people in mortal harm’s way is to blame the smugglers. Of course traffickers who take migrants on treks of up to 60 miles over some of the most forbidding terrain in the Southwest and abandon those who fall behind must be held responsible. But smugglers are not the cause of illegal immigration and the risk of apprehension is not going to dry up the supply of guides as long as the potential payoff is so big.

Operation Gatekeeper has done little more than shift illegal border crossings eastward.

CLAUDIA E. SMITH

Border Project Director

Calif. Rural Legal Assistance

Foundation, Oceanside