Border Policy Violates Rights, Groups Charge

In a complaint to an international tribunal, two California groups charged Wednesday that the U.S. government crackdown at the Mexican border violates human rights law by pushing undocumented migrants into often deadly terrain.

The petition to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in Washington said 360 migrants have died trying to enter California without documents since Operation Gatekeeper began four years ago to make illegal immigration more difficult.

“The strategy was explicitly designed to drive migrants farther and farther east into terrain the U.S. government concedes was some of the most punishing and dangerous in the country,” said Jordan Budd, managing attorney for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial counties.

The American Civil Liberties Union was joined by the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation in filing the 50-page complaint.

The petition said the tougher U.S. border strategy violates the charter of the Organization of American States and the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which require that a nation’s border policies safeguard basic rights. The rights commission receives complaints involving OAS members, including the United States.

The panel can hold hearings and urge policy changes, but has no enforcement powers. The petitioners asked the panel to recommend that the United States pay damages to the families of the deceased.

The two groups said deaths of undocumented immigrants trying to cross into California rose to 145 last year from 23 in 1994, a 530% increase. Most died from severe conditions--mountain cold or desert heat--or drowned in irrigation canals of the Imperial Valley. The activists said a program, launched last year, that equipped border agents with such rescue gear as thermal blankets and emergency food supplies, was “too little, too late.”

U.S. officials blame the deaths on smugglers who lead immigrants into harsh conditions and sometimes abandon them. Officials say that stricter enforcement has saved immigrants from making fatal dashes across San Diego freeways or being killed by bandits. Murders at the border in San Diego dropped from 19 in 1993 to three last year. A Border Patrol official said drownings were fewer but still claimed dozens of lives yearly in the 1980s.

“Death on the border is unfortunate, but it’s nothing new. It’s not caused by the Border Patrol. It’s not caused by Gatekeeper,” said Robert Gilbert, a Border Patrol official in the Western regional headquarters in Laguna Niguel.

Gatekeeper doubled the number of border agents and added fences, powerful lights and ground sensors, slowing the flow of illegal immigrants at the western end of the border.

Wednesday’s complaint contends that the crackdown pushed immigrants to try dangerous routes to the east, with minimal effect on the total number of people crossing illegally into California.

Arrests of undocumented immigrants along California’s 150-mile border with Mexico dropped slightly--to 474,672 last year from 477,807 in 1994, government figures show.

The groups called instead for a crackdown on U.S. employers who hire undocumented workers and create a jobs magnet.