U.S. Outlines Deportation Plan for Illegal Migrants

The Bush administration won Mexico’s tentative backing Friday for a plan in which migrants caught illegally entering the United States would be flown back to their home regions in Mexico rather than dropped off at the border.

The two governments were at odds, however, over the most sensitive detail of the plan -- whether any deportee could be obliged to board the repatriation flights. U.S. officials said mandatory flights might be best to discourage repeat attempts to sneak across the border, disrupt smuggling rings, and reduce the number of migrant deaths in the Arizona desert.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced the outline of the plan after two days of talks here with his Mexican counterpart, Interior Minister Santiago Creel. Both sides called the discussions a step forward after months of discord over border enforcement.

Details of the deportation plan -- including whether the flights would be voluntary, where they would originate, who would pay for them and which migrant corridors would be targeted -- remained to be negotiated. Ridge said he expected a final accord to be signed within weeks so flights could start well before summer.

“We are fully aware that the most hazardous time in terms of crossing some of those dangerous [border] regions is fast approaching, and we are going to redouble our efforts,” he said at a joint news conference.

The plan would apply to the estimated half a million Mexicans caught and deported each year by the U.S. Border Patrol shortly after entering the United States illegally -- not to the estimated 4 million undocumented Mexicans already living and working in the U.S.

U.S. officials hope to persuade 300 Mexican immigrants a day to agree to be repatriated. One estimate suggests that each government-chartered flight would cost about $28,000. U.S. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner said he could not provide details of the cost, but the expense was “a wise investment.”

Last month, President Bush outlined a plan that would allow those settled Mexicans, and millions of illegal immigrants from other countries, to obtain renewable three-year U.S. visas as long as they could prove that they were employed in the United States.

Bush administration officials said Mexico’s final acceptance of the deportation flights could help persuade Congress to pass legislation to enact Bush’s plan.

U.S. officials said their primary goal was to reduce the number of migrant deaths in the brutal heat along the Arizona border this summer. In the 12 months ended Sept. 30, more than 150 such deaths were reported -- nearly half of the 346 recorded along the entire U.S.-Mexican frontier during that period.

In September, the U.S. Border Patrol tried to reduce the deaths by flying more than 5,600 immigrants seized in Arizona to border cities in Texas and then escorting them on foot to the Mexican border. U.S. officials called the 23-day experiment a success because it discouraged repeated crossing attempts in the most dangerous border corridor. The death rate there declined sharply.

But Mexican officials objected to the program because it was mandatory for the deported migrants and imposed, rather than negotiated with their government. The Mexican government also objected to the handcuffing of male deportees during the journey.

“We told the Americans, ‘We do not want any more surprises.’ We want a bilateral agreement on how to discourage illegal migration,” said Magdalena Carral Cuevas, head of the Mexican government’s National Migration Institute.

The dispute led to the current round of talks and the plan for deportation flights into Mexico.

“If we can move migrants back into the interior, closer to their homes, we can achieve our goal to break the cycle of smuggling,” Asa Hutchinson, U.S. undersecretary of border and transportation security, told reporters during the talks here.

He said the United States could offer incentives for migrants to fly back voluntarily, but it believed that the program might have to start with mandatory flights.

At his news conference, Ridge declined to say whether the flights would be mandatory. Creel was emphatic that the flights must be voluntary.

“Our constitution guarantees free movement inside our territory, and of course we are going to comply strictly and exactly with the constitution,” Creel said.

Mexican officials said they had agreed to the principle of repatriation flights in exchange for a renewed agreement by the U.S. to respect the human rights of Mexican deportees. The officials said those accords -- which would allow, among other things, for members of deported families to stay together and for deportees to have access to Mexican consular services -- were often violated.

“We have come a long way in the past six months just having these discussions,” Ridge said. “Both sides have made concessions.”

He said the United States was willing to pay at least part of the migrants’ flights home, although U.S. lawmakers have opposed such initiatives in the past as too costly. The U.S. government spent $1.3 million last September to fly Mexican deportees from Arizona to Texas.

Migrants captured in the United States are usually deported from the nearest border crossing. Before last summer, there had been at least three other U.S. efforts to send illegal immigrants deeper into Mexico -- including a short-lived series of voluntary deportation flights from San Diego in the late 1990s.

Critics of U.S. immigration policy said the latest effort would work no better than previous ones.

“The idea that sending illegal migrants far south of the border is going to discourage immigration is an old idea, but there is no evidence that it has ever been effective,” said Daniel Hernandez Joseph, Mexico’s consul general in Laredo, Texas, one of the busiest deportation points. “I understand the theory, but in practice I just do not think it will work.

“But if the United States is convinced it will bring better results this time,” he added, “then we are willing to try it.”

Gustavo Mohar, who took part in the talks as an advisor to the Mexican Interior Ministry, said a large number of illegal migrants might be willing to fly home voluntarily “because they are tired and have no money, or because they have never been on an airplane before and want to try it.”

He said Mexico was insisting that anyone flown home would have to give their assent to a Mexican consular officer in the United States.

Jorge Bustamante, a Mexican migration specialist, said repatriation flights would not prevent significant numbers of deaths, as Mexicans would continue to migrate in search of jobs. U.S. border fortifications in populated areas that have forced Mexicans to cross in the desert pose the gravest threat, he said.