U.N. Official to Visit Border to Study Plight of Illegal Crossers

The United Nations’ top human rights official will visit the U.S.-Mexico border today to learn more about conditions faced by immigrants seeking to enter the United States illegally.

Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, is scheduled to tour commonly used crossing spots in Tijuana and meet with academics and immigrant rights advocates who charge that a U.S. crackdown on illegal entries in California during the last five years is largely to blame for the deaths of more than 450 immigrants.

The groups have complained to the United Nations and the Organization of American States that heightened U.S. enforcement in cities such as San Diego breaches international rights standards by diverting undocumented immigrants into life-threatening conditions in the mountains and deserts.

Robinson’s quick tour of the border is part of a five-day trip to Mexico during which she will also visit Mexico City and conflict-plagued Chiapas. While her primary focus is human rights in Mexico, Robinson was urged by advocates and the Mexican government to see the border firsthand.

“She’s heard reports about the situation of migrants--people trying to cross the border. She’s trying to see if these reports have any substance,” said spokesman Jose Diaz.

Critics of Operation Gatekeeper expressed hope that the visit would boost their push for a U.N. probe into the controversial U.S. border strategy, which seeks to prevent illegal crossings by pumping new U.S. Border Patrol agents into porous areas and adding rows of spotlights and fences.

“We want her to hear the concerns we have as Mexicans and as representatives of the voiceless and those not listened to--that this operation be stopped,” said Maria Galvan, who runs a Tijuana shelter for migrant women and children. “Stop criminalizing migrants and stop killing migrants, because that’s what Operation Gatekeeper does.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service countered that the agency’s high-profile efforts to warn immigrants against crossing through mountains and deserts have helped reduce deaths along the 2,000-mile international border to 230 last year from 261. Officials contend that fatalities should drop more as U.S. authorities gain control over other stretches of the border.

“One death is one death too many,” said spokeswoman Virginia Kice. “But the public must bear in mind that the border has always been a dangerous place.”

In 1998, the INS launched a program in conjunction with the Mexican government to dissuade border crossers from trying back-country routes where the risks of extreme weather or injury are high. Border Patrol agents last year rescued 1,042 people nationwide, according to the INS.

Representatives of migrant-rights groups on both sides of the border are to take part in a 90-minute briefing for Robinson that will be closed to the public.

The activists hope to persuade Robinson to make scrutiny of U.S. border policy a top priority for a newly named U.N. special investigator on migration issues. At a news conference Tuesday, policy critics presented figures showing that deaths along the California border rose to 145 last year from 23 in 1994, when Gatekeeper was launched in San Diego. Arrests of undocumented immigrants in San Diego have plummeted to 25-year lows--a sign that the crackdown is preventing illegal crossings there--but apprehensions nationwide have risen.

“It’s deadly, but it’s not effective,” said Claudia Smith, who runs a border project for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. Smith will brief Robinson on behalf of the border groups.