Border Patrol Tightening Security

The U.S. Border Patrol is preparing for a post-holiday flood of illegal immigrants by adding personnel and strengthening a steel wall along its busiest stretch of the border in southeastern Arizona.

The agency is welding panels of military-surplus landing mat together to extend a 12-foot-high steel barrier separating the United States and Mexico.

The Border Patrol is also reinforcing its fortifications of remote motion sensors, video and infrared cameras, observation towers and high-intensity lights.

When the work is done, border walls will extend for more than 10 miles east and west of Douglas, about 100 miles southeast of Tucson. Additionally, a barrier of railroad ties concreted into the ground outside Naco will be extended to a length of three miles.

The Border Patrol announced that it will also increase the number of agents assigned to the Douglas-Naco corridor by about one-third by year’s end, bringing the total to nearly 1,000.

The Arizona Daily Star reported that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is upgrading the top Border Patrol post in Arizona in recognition that the state is “ground zero of illegal immigration,” said spokeswoman Virginia Kice. The move will put the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector chief on par with the chief agents in San Diego and Los Angeles.

Tucson sector Chief David Aguilar, a candidate for the job, said the moves signify an effort to crank up the pressure on smuggling organizations and shut illegal border crossings through the Douglas-Naco corridor.

More than 616,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended there last fiscal year, up from 470,000 in the previous year.

Much of that increase was attributed to Border Patrol efforts to increase patrols in California, Texas and urban areas in Arizona. That pushed illegal immigrants into remote areas of the desert, where exposure to blistering summer heat often became fatal.

During the fiscal year that ended Oct. 1, 106 border crossers died in Arizona, double the number of the previous year.

“We want to deter the crossings from ever happening,” spokesman Rob Daniels said Tuesday. “In the cases where they continue to come, the probability of them being caught is very high.”

Daniels said immigrant smugglers are to blame for taking border crossers into the desert and abandoning them.

“When you combine the desperation of the people who are trying to cross with the ruthlessness of the smugglers, that’s a challenge to combat,” he said.

The post-Christmas period starts the busiest time of year for the Border Patrol because many illegal residents return to the United States after holiday visits with their families in Mexico.

Last January, 70,000 illegal immigrants were detained in the Tucson sector, including nearly 3,000 arrested Jan. 12, the record for a single day.

Throughout that area, apprehensions are already down about 7% since October, compared with the same period last year.

Aguilar said the overall level of activity--a measure that includes apprehensions, illegal immigrants turned back or deterred, and estimates of the number of illegal immigrants that got away--has declined about 95% in Douglas.

“A year ago, people were pouring over the fences, and now you can sit there for literally hours and not see anything,” he said. “That is the basis of our strategy, reducing that flow.”