Data on Border Arrests Raise Gatekeeper Debate

Five years after federal officials unveiled Operation Gatekeeper as an answer to runaway illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the vaunted clampdown has slashed the number of people arrested for unlawful entry in San Diego to levels not seen since Richard Nixon was president.

But arrests of undocumented immigrants, the U.S. government’s rough gauge for estimating illegal entries, have risen by an even greater margin across the rest of the Southwest border during the same five-year period, government figures show.

The numbers cut both ways for architects of the Clinton administration’s toughened border enforcement strategy, inaugurated amid considerable fanfare Oct. 1, 1994, with the roll-out of Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego.

Arrests in San Diego for the fiscal year ending last night were expected to total about 181,000--the lowest since 1973. That is a stunning drop from 524,231 arrests during Gatekeeper’s first year and the product of millions of dollars in new U.S. Border Patrol agents and high-tech gear, plus border fences and lights along a 66-mile stretch that once accounted for nearly half of all arrests along the Southwest border.

“Operation Gatekeeper has really been an unprecedented success,” said U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat. “What it tells me is it’s a myth that the border can’t be enforced. It can be enforced.”

Nationwide figures, however, suggest that those enforcement tactics, replicated to varying degrees in Imperial County and traditional entry spots in Arizona and Texas, have not deterred immigrants from back county routes elsewhere. Arrests of undocumented immigrants across the Southwest during fiscal 1999 topped 1.5 million, slightly more than last year and 20% higher than during the first year of Operation Gatekeeper in California.

The jump in arrests in outlying areas is not surprising. The crackdown around cities such as San Diego and El Paso was expected to shift the flow of immigrants away from places where freeways, trolleys, buses and taxis made it easier for smugglers to sneak their clients north. But the shifting bulge underscores the difficulty--and likely expense--of achieving results that are similar to San Diego’s $200-million-plus annual program across broad swaths of the border.

“We’ve reached the point where we’re achieving diminishing returns,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, an immigration expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Those people who are committed to coming are going to do the kinds of things necessary to come.”

Inspired in part by the success of a virtual blockade by Border Patrol agents along the border in El Paso in 1993, policymakers introduced Operation Gatekeeper to San Diego at a time when political passions were boiling around the illegal immigration ballot measure, Proposition 187, in vote-heavy California. The number of agents guarding San Diego’s border has since grown to 2,200 from 1,272.

Subsequent buildups in selected zones from Imperial County to south Texas have nearly doubled the ranks of the Border Patrol to 8,200 agents nationwide. In that time, the Border Patrol budget swelled to $952 million from $374 million.

Some skeptics say that the buildup has fueled growth of a smuggling industry on both sides of the border while doing little to reduce the lure of U.S. jobs. The critics further charge that tighter enforcement in San Diego has led to fatalities among undocumented immigrants entering California through remote deserts and mountains where conditions can be perilous.

“It’s brought us 444 deaths and counting,” said Jordan Budd, managing attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties. The group has charged before an international tribunal that the Gatekeeper policy violates human rights standards by pushing immigrants into harm’s way.

U.S. immigration officials, who have said the expanding crackdown should deter immigrants from attempting unlawful entries, argue that the effort is evolving. They say that adding agents and technology to block illegal crossings in key locations has brought calm to a handful of former trouble zones, but needs more time to unfold in new hot spots, such as the ranching country around Douglas, Ariz.

Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is to visit Arizona next week to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing such crossings, which have caused havoc and raised fears of a violent backlash by Douglas ranchers.

“You can’t just put in place all along the border what it would take to gain control in certain places. You have to do it in steps,” said Robert L. Bach, INS executive associate commissioner for policy and planning. “It’s not failure and it’s not uncertainty. It’s a planned work in progress.”

Officials said the strategy has reduced border crime where it has been implemented and led immigrant smugglers to raise fees by as much as four times, an indication of how hard it is to cross the border without papers.

Observers on all sides agree that immigration arrest data offer an incomplete snapshot of what is happening on the border because they tally each apprehension, even if the same person is detained again and again. Moreover, they do not show how many people get through.

Some U.S. officials suggest that more arrests nationally might reflect a triumph: it could be that fewer immigrants are making the trek but getting nabbed more often because more agents are out to catch them. But the INS lacks data that would show whether this is true. A computerized fingerprint system to track repeat immigrants has been hobbled by glitches that make reliable yearly comparisons impossible.

Some immigration scholars say there is no sign that Mexican immigrants are choosing to stay home.

A U.S. General Accounting Office analysis this year found that the Southwest strategy has played out in some ways as expected, such as by shifting arrests from once-porous areas to other locations. But the analysis, its third since Congress enacted a sweeping 1996 law to curtail illegal immigration, concluded that too little was known still to judge the program’s overall success or failure.

One result of Operation Gatekeeper is certain: The decibel level surrounding illegal immigration in San Diego has fallen as steeply as the arrest numbers. Rapes, killings and robberies along the border are now rare--as is the sight of border jumpers sprinting across freeways at San Ysidro’s port of entry. Politicians no longer show up to fulminate about a border that is out of control. Border Patrol commanders who once begged for agents from other zones now lend them out.

What controversy remains centers on the immigrant deaths. Mexican politicians and rights advocates have condemned the stepped-up border enforcement as inhumane. The Border Patrol is quick to blame smugglers and note that scores of immigrants have been rescued under a year-old safety program.

Officials in San Diego said there were no plans to cut back patrols.

“For us to go below the staffing levels that helped us realize these record-setting statistics--you can’t risk giving up the control we have,” said Mario Villarreal, Border Patrol spokesman in San Diego.

Papademetriou, the immigration expert, said the United States, having demonstrated its resolve on border enforcement, should negotiate a new immigration arrangement with Mexico. “You can only go so far without bringing Mexico into the equation,” he said.

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Border Arrests

While a five-year border crackdown has sent arrests of undocumented immigrants tumbling in San Diego, arrests across the rest of the Southwest have risen.

Arrests in San Diego

In thousands, by fiscal year

1994: 450, 152

180,810 through Sept. 26

Total arrests along U.S.-Mexico border in thousands, by fiscal year

1994: 979,101

1.527 million through Sept. 26

Sources: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; Individual Border Patrol regional headquarters.