INS Scrutiny Renewed at Arizona, Nevada Airports

Immigration officials began a new enforcement effort Thursday designed to disrupt the smuggling of illegal immigrants, with special emphasis again on the major airports in Arizona and Nevada.

Authorities said Operation Crossroads also will attempt to break up drop houses and curb the escalating violence associated with smuggling.

“There are all kinds of horror stories--children being held hostage for ransom, women being raped, migrants being stripped of their shoes and left in the desert,” said Johnny Williams, Western regional director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“These smugglers have callous disregard for their human cargoes. All they care about is the dollars they make. They increasingly resort to violence,” Williams added. “We will do whatever it takes to weed this evilness out.”

The latest INS effort is similar to Operation Denial, which had agents conducting 24-hour surveillance last year at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport and McCarron International Airport in Las Vegas, considered two top smuggling transit hubs.

That 90-day operation began in August and resulted in more than 2,700 arrests at the two airports in the first month of the crackdown. Nearly 30 smugglers were eventually prosecuted.

“This is a larger operation,” said Roseanne Sonchik, INS Phoenix district director. “In Operation Denial, we had about 60 officers. In this operation, there’s about 100.”

Twenty-four INS agents will again be assigned to Sky Harbor Airport with an undetermined number at McCarron, which had 18 agents the last time.

“We want to severely cripple the smuggling activity through Arizona and into Nevada,” Williams said at a news conference Wednesday. “Their access to these airports [is] essential to their business. We’re going to focus on activity there.”

Williams said the officers--in plain clothes but with badges visible--will be looking for suspicious patterns of behavior associated with migrant smuggling, such as last-minute purchases of a large number of tickets, late-night flights and boarding flights at the last minute.

Some human rights groups say the INS operations at the airports fail to solve the smuggling problem and wind up as racial profiling.

“Our organization is vehemently opposed to this,” said attorney Isabel Garcia, founder of Coalicion de Derechos Humanos in Tucson. “It’s not going to stop smuggling, and brown-skinned people are the ones to suffer. How can they tell who fits the profile? You can’t tell really.”

“These officers have received special training,” Williams said. “We are targeting criminal behavior, not racial profiling. Our goal is not to get in the way of legitimate travelers.”

Sonchik said the extra officers also will work with local police and other agencies to locate and raid drop houses throughout Arizona.

The homes, which can house up to 100 migrant workers in squalid conditions, are used to warehouse people until transportation to their jobs is found.

Williams said the INS will continue to work aggressively to combat smuggling activity along the Arizona-Mexico border. With increased enforcement, arrests of illegal entrants have dropped.

“From October to now, arrests are 20% down in the Tucson corridor compared to a year ago, and in Douglas, it’s 40% down,” said Tony Esposito, an INS assistant regional director.