INS Agents Arrest Hundreds in Crackdown at Airports

An immigration service crackdown focusing on airports and immigrant drop houses in Phoenix and Las Vegas has led to the arrest of 15 suspected smugglers and the capture of more than 1,450 illegal immigrants, officials said Friday.

Immigration and Naturalization Service agents began round-the-clock surveillance two weeks ago at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport and Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport to counter smuggling networks that use airlines to send immigrants to the East Coast and Midwest.

Since then, officials have noticed a decline in illegal immigrants trying to go through both airports and an increase in the numbers traveling by car through Colorado, said Russell Ahr, an assistant to the director of the Phoenix INS district.

“We know that’s a result of what we’re doing here in Phoenix,” Ahr said.

Since the operation began Aug. 9, INS agents have caught 524 illegal immigrants at Sky Harbor, 690 at McCarran and 238 at eight drop houses in the Phoenix area. Drop houses are staging areas where smugglers gather immigrants until they pay to be moved on.

Ahr said most of those caught were Mexicans who have since been returned to Mexico. About 20 have been kept in the United States as witnesses against the smugglers, who are in federal custody.

But some human rights groups have complained that the crackdown, intended to disrupt and dismantle smuggling operations, will not solve the problem and will only increase racial profiling of innocent travelers.

“Who do you think is going to be targeted in the airports?” Isabel Garcia, founder of Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, or Coalition for Human Rights, said earlier this month. “It’s going to be brown-skinned people who can’t speak English very well. There’s just no way they can tell who’s undocumented and who’s not.”

INS officials have said the operation will not affect legal travelers and will focus on patterns of behavior often associated with migrant smuggling, such as last-minute purchases of a large number of tickets and late-night flights.

But Garcia said she doubts that the program will work, adding that smugglers will always find ways around it.