INS Crackdown Expands Into Imperial Valley

In an eastward expansion of their crackdown against illegal immigration on the California border, U.S. officials announced Tuesday that they were sending 133 new agents, investigators and inspectors to combat immigrant smuggling rings in the Imperial Valley.

Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the $2.5-million reinforcement effort will be in force for 60 days, but could be extended. The team will include 62 Border Patrol agents and 40 investigators assigned to locate smugglers along the border east of San Diego County, officials said.

The foray into Imperial Valley’s El Centro district is the latest step in Operation Gatekeeper, the California component of President Clinton’s 3-year-old strategy to beef up policing along four main routes used by immigrants from Mexico.

The crackdown has slashed illegal immigration in San Diego County to its lowest point in 17 years, Meissner said.

“Today this border is harder to cross than any time in history,” Meissner said at a news conference, held on the third anniversary of Operation Gatekeeper.

A year ago, Meissner sent Border Patrol reinforcements for eastern San Diego County.

This year, immigrants have been pushed eastward into neighboring Imperial Valley.

Authorities detained more than 129,000 immigrants from October 1996 to August 1997 in the El Centro district--more than double the 66,000 of the previous year, Washington INS spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar said.

Investigators said they believe more than 20 San Diego smuggling rings have relocated to El Centro. The new team will focus on locating smugglers and their drop houses, continuing a strategy that has resulted in 3,700 prosecutions since 1995, according to official figures.

Immigrants’ advocates say Operation Gatekeeper, which is mirrored by related efforts in Texas and Arizona, is pushing immigrants into rugged mountains and deserts where they risk death from seasonal heat and cold and are more vulnerable to Border Patrol abuses.

“Our greatest concern is that Gatekeeper continues to push people further east,” said Roberto Martinez, head of the U.S.-Mexico Border Program for the American Friends Service Committee. “It’s almost certain that people are going to try crossing the desert, and it can be deadly in the summer and winter, with the flooding.

“We’re concerned that agents will be ill-prepared, in terms of providing water and first-aid provisions,” he said. “How can they properly train all these new agents to respect the dignity of migrants?’

The authors of a University of Houston study said that while immigrants do not seem to be dying in greater numbers along the 2,000-mile border since the crackdown began, they are dying in different ways, though the vast majority still die from drowning in the Rio Grande River or its tributaries in Texas.

No one disputes that the border is a vastly different place than it was three years ago, when crowds massed each day in San Diego, waiting to cross at night.

Even some conservative critics of Gatekeeper signaled conditional approval to the Tuesday announcement.

“It’s fine as long as we can maintain the levels of enforcement we’ve seen in the last few months in San Diego,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-San Diego. “It’s up to the generals to shift around reinforcements and still hold the line.”

Three years ago, 45% of the immigrant apprehensions in the United States were made in San Diego, Meissner said. In fiscal 1993, the year leading up to Gatekeeper, there were 531,689 apprehensions in San Diego.

From October 1996 through August 1997, 271,634 immigrants were caught in San Diego--the lowest figure since 1980, INS officials say.

The next busiest areas during the same period were Tucson, with 252,532 immigrants detained; McAllen, Texas, with 229,641; and 129,365 for El Centro, where the current crackdown is taking place, according to INS figures. Nationwide, apprehension figures have hovered somewhere above 1 million immigrants annually for years, prompting some critics to say immigrants are not being deterred, just shifted around.

On Tuesday, Meissner said that illegal immigration in San Diego had “fallen to fourth in the nation.”

That ranking holds true for August and September of this year. However, the INS figures show that for the rest of the budget year, San Diego still had the largest number of immigrants detained.