Illegal Migrants Take Interstates to Mid-America

Two or three times a week, alongside one of the fields of corn, wheat and alfalfa that line Interstate 80 in Iowa and Nebraska, an unlikely confrontation of cultures takes place.

A state trooper pulls over an overloaded van or truck. The driver doesn’t speak English, but the trooper manages to make himself understood. A moment later, a dozen or more men and women spill out, citizens of Mexico, El Salvador and other countries who are being smuggled across the heartland of the United States.

Faced with the unfamiliar landscape of the Great Plains, hardly anyone tries to escape. “They wouldn’t know where to go if they did run,” said Lt. Dave Anderson of the Nebraska State Patrol. “They’d be lost in a strange land.”

Even though the nearest Border Patrol outpost is 400 miles away in North Dakota, the Midwestern highway has become a busy corridor for immigrant smugglers and for the small band of federal agents assigned to catch them.

Last year, authorities in Nebraska and Iowa detained more than 1,700 people in vans, trucks and other vehicles transporting illegal immigrants. Federal officials in Omaha said that there has been an eightfold increase in the number of illegal immigrants detained along the highway since 1996.

Large-scale smuggling has spread to most of the major east-west interstates across the middle of the country, officials say, from Interstate 90, which cuts across South Dakota and Minnesota, to Interstate 40, which runs through northern New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

In response, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials this year began opening offices in three dozen rural and heartland communities, from Fayetteville, Ark., and London, Ky., to North Platte, Neb., and Brush, Colo.

Immigration officials say smugglers have adopted new routes through the Midwest in order to avoid Border Patrol agents in California and Texas, where an intense crackdown has shut down traditional routes. (The INS in general, has more than doubled the number of illegal immigrants it has apprehended and deported since 1996).

“It’s amazing to us because here we are in the heartland of America, about as far from the border as you can get,” said Jerry Heinauer, a top aide in the INS Omaha office. “People don’t know we have an illegal immigration problem here.”

The dangers of the smuggling trade were highlighted last month when a van spun out of control on Interstate 40 east of Albuquerque, killing 13 people. The men and women inside, Mexican immigrants, were headed for Kentucky.

A new smuggling pipeline now takes illegal immigrants from the Arizona-Mexico border near Tucson, north to Denver, and then to Florida, Atlanta and other destinations in the Southeast--a detour of nearly a thousand miles.

The circuitous route is cost-effective for smuggling operations because getting caught means losing an investment of several thousand dollars, said Joe Greene, INS district director in Denver. “It’s all about geography and logistics. From the point of view of trying to move a large number of people safely, it makes sense.”

Veteran INS officer Tom DeRouchey has been assigned to start the agency’s new post in Grand Island, a rail and meatpacking center on the Platte River about 200 miles west of Omaha. The move is an odd switch for DeRouchey, whose previous assignments include a stint on the Canadian border in Vermont, and in Temecula, near San Diego.

“I told people I was coming to Nebraska and they said ‘Nebraska? What’s in Nebraska?’ ”

DeRouchey will head a team of 10 agents. The new office is scheduled to open this month inside a remodeled Sears department store in Grand Island’s old brick-and -mortar downtown. Immigrants detained on the nearby interstate will be placed in one of two holding cells--one for men, the other for women--just a half block from a popular coffee shop where the locals sip espresso.

The new facility will fill a gap in INS coverage between its Denver and Omaha offices. With the nearest immigration office a three-hour drive away in Omaha, Nebraska state troopers sometimes released the illegal immigrants they detained. More often, the state troopers held the immigrants in their Grand Island station, a small brick cube on the city’s outskirts, waiting a few hours for the INS bus to arrive.

“We’ll put some mats out for them in the classroom we have here, or in the garage, which is heated,” said Lt. Anderson.

The encounters with the immigrants--many of whom have spent hours inside a cramped vehicle without even a stop to go to the bathroom--seems to have left a deep impression on those officers and agents who have witnessed their capture.

“You’re talking 16 or more people scrunched into a small van, standing up for hours, conditions that are not fit for humans, really,” said Anderson. “You can understand why they’re leaving [Mexico]. They’re trying to make a better life. It’s the smugglers who are taking advantage of them.”

A tally of the apprehensions along Interstate 40 shows the extent of the problem. One Wednesday in March, 18 people were detained outside the central Nebraska community of Aurora. The following Sunday, another 44 were detained 300 miles away in Kimball, Neb., near the Wyoming line. The next week, another 60 immigrants were detained in stops in three different communities in Iowa.

Smugglers ferry the illegal immigrants from border crossings in Arizona and California to jobs in Chicago and other points east. They are packed into vans and rented trucks, in groups as large as 50. The vehicles rattle up and across the Rocky Mountains, headed for Chicago, or the meatpacking plants of Iowa, or the tobacco farms of Kentucky, or even New York.

The road is not without its perils. There are the icy roads and gusty winds that have caused havoc for travelers on the Great Plains since the days wagon trains followed the future path of Interstate 80 west to California. Even a moderate breeze will cause an overloaded vehicle to sway out of its lane and onto the shoulder.

Once the vehicle is pulled over, “it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on,” said INS agent Ben Bandanza. “The officer will walk up to the driver and look inside and see nothing but heads.”

In October, the driver of a van loaded with 14 immigrants fell asleep at the wheel and crashed outside of Ogallala, Neb. One of the passengers was paralyzed and another, a young woman, had to have part of a leg amputated.

Once in INS custody, illegal immigrants who agree to “voluntary departure” and those ordered deported by a judge, are sent back to Mexico via an airplane of the federal “Justice Prisoner Alien Transportation System.”

The jet arrives in Omaha every Wednesday from Kansas City, Mo., headed for border posts in El Paso and McAllen, Texas. Most take the plane ride in handcuffs, still a bit stunned that the INS caught up with them in Nebraska or Iowa.

“They say, ‘Man, I got all the way to the middle of the U.S.,’ ” said agent Bandanza. “ ‘There’s not supposed to be immigration in the middle of the U.S.’ ”