A Model in Fighting People Smugglers

After the discovery in recent weeks of two major immigrant-smuggling safe houses in Los Angeles, federal officials say they would like to duplicate in Los Angeles the immigration enforcement measures used in this sprawling desert city.

Immigration officials here talk about “a love affair” of cooperation with Phoenix police to tackle often-brutal smuggling rings.

Armed with intelligence from police investigators, federal agents here often round up gang members who are illegal immigrants -- many of them juveniles -- for deportation.

Phoenix officials say federal agents come quickly when police discover safe houses that smugglers are using to hold illegal immigrants -- a sharp contrast to complaints by Los Angeles officials about slow responses.

The federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- the successor to the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- stations Border Patrol officers at each concourse of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport. The agents scrutinize crowds for suspected smugglers and their human cargo, a tactic that the bureau refers to as “behavioral profiling.”

Both sets of law enforcement agencies say the cooperation has helped reduce violent crime in Phoenix neighborhoods.

But replicating that level of cooperation in Southern California will be easier said than done, according to police, political figures and community activists in both cities.

If immigration officials and Los Angeles police “tried to do some of the things they do here, they would probably be run over,” said Jose Robles, an official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Phoenix.

Several factors could make Phoenix-style cooperation problematic in Southern California.

One is a lack of demand for tougher enforcement in the communities most directly affected by smuggling.

In Phoenix, concern over high levels of violent crime associated with smuggling has led many people in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods to “turn the coyotes in,” said Frances Medina. She lives near a Phoenix safe house where police recently arrested smugglers and nearly 40 illegal immigrants.

“The coyotes, the smugglers, they have their beautiful trucks, and they’re chained up from the neck down in gold,” Medina said. “You hear about them holding mothers and children hostage. That’s evil.”

By contrast, neighbors of safe houses recently raided in Watts and Canoga Park said they saw no reason to report the houses to police.

“Immigration has not been defined as a local responsibility; it becomes one when local leaders and or groups make it one,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

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Immigrants’ ‘Rights’

“Here in L.A., those groups either haven’t emerged, or when they have, they have been trumped by other groups protecting the rights of immigrants.”

Organized efforts in Los Angeles to protect the rights of immigrants -- including illegal ones -- also are a sign of a distinct difference between the two metropolitan areas.

When LAPD officers found 88 illegal immigrants crammed into a small bungalow in Watts on April 21, immigration agents did not arrive on the scene for hours.

Informed of the discovery by community leaders, however, immigration attorneys showed up quickly.

By the next day, attorneys were able to meet with consular officials from the immigrants’ countries of origin and with immigrants. Within days, almost of all of the immigrants had been released.

Because none of them had criminal histories, they had the option of accepting voluntary deportation or asking for a deportation hearing.

“Once they found out they had a chance to defend against their deportation, many chose not to take a voluntary departure,” said Jessica Dominguez, an attorney who interviewed the bulk of the immigrants.

A similar scenario unfolded a few weeks later when 89 illegal immigrants were found at a safe house in Canoga Park. Dominguez said she expected most of those immigrants also would be released pending deportation hearings. Federal officials say statistics suggest that at least half will never show up.

In Phoenix, by contrast, Russell Ahr, a spokesman for the immigration service, said he’s “never seen an attorney show up at any of our drop-house scenes -- not a single one, and we have a pretty large legal community.”

Most of the smuggled immigrants in south Arizona get deported without asking for or seeing an attorney, Ahr said.

Until the mid-1990s, Phoenix police turned over to the Border Patrol so many suspected illegal immigrants who had been arrested for other crimes that the four agents in one Phoenix office accounted for more than 18,000 “removals” from the country each year, Ahr said.

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Officers Are Restricted

In Los Angeles, it’s been many years since immigration officers routinely launched raids in the city’s interior, nabbing illegal immigrants at work, in shopping areas or on public streets. Most police agencies have policies prohibiting officers from informing federal immigration officials about undocumented immigrants they discover during their normal duties.

Those policies are designed to encourage immigrants to report crimes to police without fear of deportation. Critics, however, have long said that the policies, such as the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 40, amount to turning a blind eye to violations of immigration laws and have weakened preemptive measures against gang members and other criminals who are in the country illegally.

In both Los Angeles and Phoenix, police officials fret about losing the trust of immigrant communities by appearing to work too closely with immigration officials. Indeed, during the late 1990s, LAPD officers were accused of trying to misuse their contacts with immigration authorities to deport people who had witnessed abusive police practices.

But Phoenix police, whose policies on paper are fairly similar to those of the LAPD, said they were confident they could preserve the Latino community’s trust and still work closely with immigration authorities to target crimes.

“It’s very difficult to tell where the community’s bull’s-eye is at, but I think we’ve done a decent job,” said Phoenix Police Sgt. Randy Force. “I would imagine finding that bull’s-eye would be harder in L.A.”

In an interview, former LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates complained that along with the city’s liberal values, its Latino leadership made tackling crimes related to illegal immigrants politically risky.

He said the department frequently had been criticized when officers made arrests at drop houses used for smuggling and held immigrants for federal officials.

“I would sit back and wait for half the Hispanic leaders to call and berate me,” Gates said.

Indeed, after the raid at the Watts safe house, Los Angeles City Council member Janice Hahn, whose district includes Watts, publicly called on police to give immigrants who had been smuggled into the country protection against deportation, saying they should be treated as crime victims. Immigration officials say that approach probably would make smuggling worse.

Phoenix does not have the sort of Latino political leadership that exists in Southern California, said Julian Nabozny, a businessman in Phoenix and a member of that city’s police Hispanic advisory board. Nabozny says that local and federal authorities have made good efforts to reach out to the Latino and immigrant communities. But he also says that police and immigration agents in Phoenix have more freedom to act than they would have in Southern California.

“L.A. has a more mature Hispanic population,” Nabozny said. “It’s a totally different political environment.”