Arrests on Border Fall After 9/11

Arrests of undocumented immigrants on the U.S. border from Southern California to the tip of Texas have fallen sharply since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in some areas dropping more than 50% as officials report remarkably fewer people trying to slip into the United States.

Authorities in Washington and along the nearly 2,000-mile-long border say that, while the sputtering U.S. economy and increasing optimism in Mexico have contributed to the surprising decrease, the growing specter that the United States is no longer a haven likely is playing a significant role. Officials also say tougher inspections at the border are a factor.

Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are telling U.S. Border Patrol agents and groups that work with migrants that they fear future terrorist strikes and are concerned about reports of hundreds of Middle Eastern immigrants who have been detained incommunicado since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“There is a very real ripple effect down here,” said Doug Mosier, a Border Patrol official in El Paso.

Federal District Judge Filemon Vela in Brownsville, Texas--the southernmost point along the border--said Mexican news media have aggressively covered the Sept. 11 attacks and that, though New York and Washington are far away, the story has hit home.

“A lot of the newspapers and stations in Mexico show a lot of this, sometimes more than we do, and they publish gory pictures and stuff like that,” Vela said.

“I watch a lot of Spanish-speaking television, and they cover it as much or more than we do. The fear is out there.”

The Border Patrol--this country’s front guard in trying to stem the flow of illegal immigration--started seeing declines in arrests shortly after three hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Border Patrol officials released statistics Friday showing that the overall drop in illegal border crossings was 45%, with 176,097 arrests between Oct. 1 and Tuesday, compared with 320,367 for the same period a year ago.

In Southern California, the decreases have been equally dramatic. Arrests fell 39% in San Diego, bringing down apprehensions in that busy international zone to a 27-year low. El Centro saw a 59% drop.

Moreover, large numbers of undocumented workers usually return to Mexico for the Christmas holidays, then return to the U.S. border by early January. That did not happen this year.

No one seems to be able to cite a single cause for the decline. Some point to economic problems in the U.S., much of it a direct result of the Sept. 11 attacks. Others said some Mexicans are expressing a renewed hope that conditions will improve in their country under President Vicente Fox.

Still other officials, while saying the aftereffects of Sept. 11 are inescapable for anyone trying to enter this country, disagree about how much undocumented workers really know about Sept. 11 and whether that alone has been enough to keep them out.

Some said the migrants typically are poor and have had little schooling. They disagreed with Vela, saying migrants may know little about the attacks and that, even if they did, their desire for jobs and money still would propel them north.

“A lot of them, probably most of them, have an elementary education,” said San Diego Border Patrol Agent Tony Hicks. “They are aware of 9/11, though many may just know that a building went down in New York.”

They also disagree about how much longer the decline in arrests will last. The number of border arrests for some offenses, such as immigrant smuggling, has remained constant, while there has been an increase in the number of drug seizures.

“We’ve had a Wild West week this week,” Mosier in El Paso said. “We had some drug smugglers take some shots at agents, and they shot out two of the side rear windows on their vehicles.

“Nobody got hurt, and the smugglers were able to get back into Mexico. But they left behind 219 pounds of marijuana.”

In New Mexico, John Crews, the Las Cruces branch supervisor for the U.S. attorney’s office, said that, while illegal entry arrests are down, drug seizures and other cases still are being prosecuted at a steady rate.

He said Sept. 11 brought an increase in police vigilance at the border, with some vacations and days off being canceled. “All the cars and every person are being inspected,” he said.

“They’re trying to maintain a larger, more visible presence on the border and at all the checkpoints.”

Those patrols could increase even sooner, as the Bush administration plans to use the military to help police the border and the Pentagon is devising a plan for enhanced border security as part of the homeland security effort.

In San Diego, illegal entry arrests have been declining for five years. Hicks said the steady drop there is the result of Operation Gatekeeper and other Border Patrol initiatives to beef up patrols.

“It’s enforcement and the manpower,” he said. “And we are continuing to build our infrastructure and our fences.”

Roberto Martinez, recently retired director of a border project for the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego, said he believes migrants still are getting through the border. Migrants are continuing to go around U.S. border checkpoints and through isolated mountain and desert terrain to reach the U.S.

Just this week, five Mexicans were found dead after they apparently hid in a railroad coal car in Arizona.

Martinez’s work drew him close to many migrants and their families, and in the last few months, he said, he has come to believe that “9/11 is making a bad situation for us worse.”

The reason, he said, is that Mexican migrants worry about ending up like the Middle Easterners rounded up in this country after Sept. 11 and held in jails in New York and elsewhere.

“Muslim detainees are complaining in New York, and that’s nothing new for us,” Martinez said. “They are going through the fear factor that Mexicans have undergone for years.”

In McAllen, Texas, federal public defender Tom Lindemuth said his seven staff attorneys have seen their monthly caseloads drop from 50 to 40 clients each.

“It took a nose-dive,” he said, explaining that arrests are down because fewer people are trying to get through.

“The police are inspecting people very closely at the border now. They don’t assume you’re a U.S. citizen anymore, even if you say you are. The lines are a lot longer. There’s almost always a pedestrian line at the bridge.

“It is more of a hassle to get across.”