Border Battle’s New Hot Spot

The fields of wheat and alfalfa here are the new front in a border battle once centered comfortably far off in urban San Diego.

Midnight quiet is splintered by Border Patrol helicopters spotlighting undocumented immigrants who’ve made a pedestrian highway of the irrigated rows below. A game of cat and mouse plays out in the tiny downtown: Crossers eye agents through the shabby border fence and dash into backyards on the U.S. side, a mere football’s toss away.

This sunbaked land of crops and canals, long a backwater corridor for drug smuggling, now has succeeded the San Diego area as the leading hot spot for illegal immigration into California--and the scene of a high-profile crackdown that expands on Operation Gatekeeper, which was focused 120 miles to the west. This week, four dozen new Border Patrol agents are arriving to help stem the flow.

The trend has pinned Calexico--population 24,000--in the middle, disrupting daily life and testing the patience of residents generally sympathetic to immigrants.

The eastward migrant movement through deserts and back-country mountains has reached a pocket of the Imperial Valley where Border Patrol agents recall working whole shifts with barely an arrest. Apprehensions of suspected undocumented migrants in the El Centro region recently hit a record of nearly 1,000 a day. The area is now second in arrests nationwide, behind Tucson.

On a recent night in Calexico, groups of migrants were arrested in a variety of spots befitting the agricultural setting: tramping through alfalfa, navigating irrigation trenches, tracking a brush-choked creek bed.

“Three years ago on a midnight shift, it was not uncommon not to catch anything. Now it’s 300 to 400,” said Senior Patrol Agent Dan Murray, a nine-year veteran in Calexico, during a graveyard shift.

What distinguishes this migration wave from the one centered in Tijuana in recent years is a rural setting far removed from the network of freeways, trolleys and taxis readily available to those hopping the border into San Ysidro. Officials say the remoteness of the Imperial Valley has forced migrants to rely more heavily on smugglers who know the vast terrain and has spurred some disturbing tactics, such as cramming scores of people into big-rig trailers.

“We’re very concerned about smugglers using trucks of that size in the heat. The probability of a catastrophe is pretty good,” said Thomas L. Wacker, chief patrol agent for the El Centro sector, a 72-mile stretch from the San Diego County line east toward Arizona.

In early March, agents found 141 undocumented immigrants in the dump bodies of a trio of gravel hauling trucks at a highway checkpoint in Imperial County. Cases in previous weeks included big-rig trailers each loaded with as many as 177 immigrants.

The terrain itself has proved deadly, with more than a dozen crossers drowned in the All-American Canal so far this year. The Border Patrol issued a warning to illegal immigrants last week on the twin perils of savage desert heat and swift-moving canal waters.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has dramatically beefed up border enforcement around Calexico since last fall, borrowing forces from other regions and pouring in newly minted agents so fast they are straining the new station house. The rapid buildup, dubbed the El Centro Initiative, has placed Border Patrol agents every few blocks along the downtown Calexico border. There are plans to erect a fence this year to replace the current one, which is riddled with holes.

The flood of migrants has changed some attitudes around Calexico, a largely Latino community long wary of the Border Patrol. Residents who used to criticize the agency now find themselves applauding the crackdown. The nightly ruckus--the roving spotlights and backyard chases--has proved wearying. “There’s always a helicopter hovering,” said Hildy Carrillo-Rivera, editor of the weekly Calexico Chronicle. “You feel like you’re in M.A.S.H. We’ve gotten used to it.”

That this area is where the action is can be seen, to a lesser degree, in sprawling Mexicali, whose estimated population tops 1 million. People discouraged from crossing in Tijuana cool their heels at migrant shelters operated by churches and independent groups while awaiting arrangements for a potentially dangerous trek that could cost $1,000 for a guide.

“You don’t know how to get past the migra. You don’t know the roads,” said Wilfredo Cruz Hernandez, a 17-year-old from Mexico City staying about 10 blocks from the border fence. He is bound for Michigan, which two brothers have described as a wonderland of jobs. Cruz, waiting for his siblings to raise the smuggler’s fee, hopes to be there in a few weeks. “God willing,” he said.

Julio Callejas, 22, said he hopped the Mexicali fence into a waiting car for a ride to Indio in October--a service for which he paid $700. This time, he and his wife have a 5-month-old son born in Mexicali after she was deported. Now broke, the couple haven’t decided whether to venture crossing again. “It’s too hard with the baby,” said the mother, Josefina Moyao, 20. “It’s very dangerous.”

Spillover From Operation Gatekeeper

The big surge of illegal border-crossers into Imperial County began a year ago, a byproduct of Operation Gatekeeper that sought to cap the San Diego corridor that was once home to a third of the nation’s illegal crossings. Arrests in the San Diego sector have fallen steadily since 1994, dropping to 283,000 last year, a 17-year low.

Officials in the Imperial Valley became fully cognizant of the tide upon them when arrests picked up even in the scorching August heat.

In response, the INS has sent in some 130 Border Patrol agents and other personnel from elsewhere and maintains round-the-clock checkpoints along two rural highways headed north. The 46 new agents scheduled to arrive this week will raise the El Centro complement to more than 300 agents, according to Wacker. That has tempered grumbling that El Centro was being ignored--and overrun--as help flooded San Diego.

Authorities also temporarily increased, by nearly tenfold, the number of Border Patrol agents assigned to combat smuggling rings operating in the area from bases in Tijuana and Los Angeles. The current strategy is to “knock the smugglers off balance” by confiscating trucks used to shuttle migrants and locating the barns, hotels and homes in the area that are used as way stations, said Salvador E. Wilson, who heads the anti-smuggling detail.

Arrests have soared in the El Centro sector, reaching 30,111 in March--up two-thirds from a year earlier and more than the annual total for 1994. “We’ve had a real time getting control,” Wacker said of the smuggling. “To what degree now we have control, I’m not really sure.”

At the front row of this drama sits Calexico, a Mexican-accented community of humble means that is probably best known to Southern California motorists as the gateway to Mexicali and the popular weekend getaway village of San Felipe.

In the old-style downtown, where stores advertise in Spanish and you can buy gas with pesos, border agents have positioned mobile spotlights and park every few blocks to force migrants to the outskirts. Locals say the strategy has reduced the stream of people crawling through the tattered fence and scrambling for backyards, rooftops or into local shops. “They come right in and hide under the racks,” said Alma Ellis, who co-owns a long-standing downtown department store.

Some residents have grown so used to calling the Border Patrol, they have memorized the number.

But Calexico has shown little desire to seal itself off from Mexicali, which provides a daily tide of legal border-crossers who keep the shops afloat on the U.S. side. A bus takes Mexicali shoppers to the Wal-Mart store on Calexico’s north end, and the close ties are evident even in predawn hours, when the downtown bustles with hundreds of men who have come through the official port of entry to catch rides to jobs in the fields.

Mexican border-town residents can legally cross for up to 72 hours to shop or visit relatives using border-crossing cards issued by the U.S. government.

Though the Border Patrol put up a steel-panel fence on the west end of town last year, community leaders have balked at erecting a solid wall downtown for reasons of aesthetics and neighborliness. The Calexico Chamber of Commerce has endorsed a more stylish design that keeps open a view between the two communities. It appears likely this version will be built.

The deluge of migrants has forced some Calexico residents to rethink old hostilities toward a Border Patrol once widely seen as aloof and arrogant. For Carrillo-Rivera, who once chastised agents in an editorial for overly aggressive pursuits, the turnabout came during a night she accompanied a patrol. After seeing groups of 40 and 50 would-be crossers dodging Border Patrol officers, she said, “I was converted.”

A small-town approach has played a part too. Border patrol representatives routinely show up at public meetings to explain their plans. Three agents attended a chamber lunch recently and, over burritos, solicited comments on the proposed fence.

Not everyone is won over, though. Laura Rodriguez, who lives next to fields where agents often pursue migrants, said speeding Border Patrol vehicles have made the streets unsafe for children living in the subdivision. On this evening, it is barely dusk and the activity is already starting. Rodriguez gestures toward a Border Patrol truck that has pulled into the neighborhood and scowls. She knows that, later on, the scene will probably include migrants racing on foot and the sleep-depriving thump of a helicopter.

“If we had known it would be like this, we wouldn’t have bought a house here,” Rodriguez said.

Out in the fields nearby, the stakes are much higher than lost sleep. For undocumented migrants, the waterways that allow the Imperial Valley to sustain agricultural life are also occasionally deadly. Seventeen border-crossers have drowned in the All-American Canal and in the toxin-laden New River this year. The bleak countryside outside of town, where summertime heat can top 120 degrees, is equally perilous.

Critics of Operation Gatekeeper say diverting illegal immigration to the back country has proved dangerous and inhumane.

“This has mainly just moved the flow out of the public eye,” said Claudia Smith, who directs a border project for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.

Officials counter that the strategy has cut illegal crossings, noting that a big drop in arrests--by 200,000--in San Diego last year exceeded the jump of 80,000 seen in El Centro. Agents contend that in places like Calexico it is easier and safer to round up illegal immigrants in the countryside, where spotters using night-vision scopes can track crossers a mile or more away.

During the recent visit, such a group was spotted in the Alamo River, a grand-sounding name for the mud-caked trench that twists north toward state Highway 98. Two agents plunged into the deep tangle of shrubby trees, training flashlights on men who vainly crouched behind bushes or hugged the dry creek bed. Led to the road, sweating, the men, 21 in all, scraped away dirt and picked brambles from their jeans.

‘Bad Luck’ Proves No Deterrent

For Jose Salvador Rocha Ramirez, a 37-year-old farm worker from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, it was the fourth time in two months he had been caught trying to cross from Mexicali. “Bad luck,” he concluded.

Rocha Ramirez, with a wife and six children back home, was aiming to find work in Los Angeles, but the farthest he would get on this night was the Border Patrol station in Calexico. After booking and a snack of cheese crackers and juice, he was to board a Border Patrol bus and be returned to Mexicali.

He’ll probably try again, he said. He needs the work. It’s a sentiment the locals find understandable and exasperating at once.

“All they’re trying to do is find a better place to live and raise a family,” said Ellis, the department store owner. “But I don’t know why it has to be us.”