Another Casualty of Tragedy : Law enforcement: Temecula crash leaves many Border Patrol agents demoralized, wondering why they are being portrayed as the bad guys.

By SEBASTIAN ROTELLA

June 21, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The Border Patrol is under siege.

It started June 2 at the Interstate 15 immigration checkpoint in the mountains near Temecula. A stolen vehicle full of illegal immigrants fleeing Border Patrol agents crashed in front of a high school, killing six people and unleashing an all-out assault on the agency.

The reverberations have echoed from federal Immigration and Naturalization Service headquarters in Washington, where top officials are under political pressure to change agency chase policy and tactics, to the dusty Tijuana River levee, where Border Patrol radios drone day and night with the never-ending count of illegal border crossers on the move.

In the trenches of the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol, a tense and frustrating job has become more tense and frustrating. Many agents interviewed during recent weeks see the Temecula crash and the ensuing widespread criticism as a symbol of a larger and lopsided battle: their mission.

It is a battle in which they feel they are neglected by commanders and by the federal government and accused alternately of over-aggressiveness and ineffectiveness. They liken it to a domestic Vietnam; they say they are overwhelmed, under-equipped, tentative.

And alone.

“The Border Patrol is window dressing,” said one veteran agent. “What you have got here is a wide-open border. . . . What happened was a horrible tragedy, but the blame should go right to Washington, D.C. It’s part of what’s happening with the border being completely out of control.”

Rumors have spread among agents that all chases will be forbidden, a possibility that higher-ups reject. Supervisors at roll calls warn of activists with video cameras roaming the border in hopes of catching agents in misconduct. Stations receive angry phone calls, such as a Temecula resident complaining about a “high-speed pursuit”--which turned out to be a Border Patrol vehicle rushing to help an agent in a confrontation with a smuggler.

“I’m sure there’s an acute awareness of the fishbowl effect, of being under the microscope,” said T. J. Bonner, president of the agents’ union, the National Border Patrol Council. “The agents are being very cautious.”

Other than union representatives interviewed for this story, most agents declined to be identified because of strict agency rules against talking to the press.

At the Temecula checkpoint, which closed after the crash, caution has verged on paralysis, agents said. The official word was that agents were performing non-checkpoint patrol duties; in reality, they say, they spent much of that agonized first week sitting around in the station.

“We were getting paid for doing nothing,” a veteran Temecula agent said. “The guys were really upset; it was like we were hiding out because we were guilty.”

The checkpoint reopened recently. But doubt and fear remain. Supervisors are intent on avoiding pursuits. Agents say they have simply watched as smugglers drive up next to them with carloads of illegal immigrants, make eye contact and keep going.

The agents listen, dumbfounded, to the continuing public uproar: Politicians called for the abolition of freeway checkpoints. Temecula sued in an attempt to prohibit high-speed chases.

When anguished Temecula residents at a City Council meeting blamed the Border Patrol for the deaths, agents were dismayed that no Border Patrol representative went to speak on their behalf.

“They think we’re just stone soldiers,” the Temecula agent said, referring to the general public. “They think we don’t have any feelings.”

Sobbing as he recalled the aftermath of the crash, the agent said: “Every one of us has been torn up by this, emotionally and even physically. People are having trouble sleeping. People are trying to get over the trauma.”

The two agents involved in the chase have more than six years on the job and have been psychologically battered by the incident, the agent said. Both are receiving counseling, he said.

Some agents feel betrayed by top Border Patrol officials, who they say compounded the damage to morale by failing to meet promptly with Temecula agents. Although the agency issued statements defending the two agents involved in the chase, several agents interviewed felt the overall response lacked force.

Bonner blamed a tight policy that funnels all comment through agency spokesmen and forbids agents from speaking their mind publicly.

“The entire Border Patrol operates under a siege mentality,” he said. “They feel the press is their enemy. . . . You have to get out there and tell your side of the story, because other people are certainly going to be telling their side of the story.”

San Diego Sector Chief Gustavo De La Vina finally healed some wounds in a candid meeting last Tuesday with Temecula agents, according to agents who attended. Without discussing specifics of rumored new restrictions on chases, De La Vina expressed support and explained his approach to handling the fallout from the incident, said Mike Hance, head of the agents union local in San Diego. “He laid out what he did, and why he did it,” Hance said. “It did a lot for morale.”

The usually accessible and media-savvy De La Vina has declined interviews since the incident--when he said in a statement that the agents acted properly and disengaged from the chase before the crash. A spokesman said De La Vina will withhold comment until a review by a special INS investigator from Washington is complete.

The aftermath has revealed some internal divisions. According to sources close to the Border Patrol, some agents from border-area stations were not surprised by the Temecula crash. They said the Temecula agents have a reputation as “cowboys” with a penchant for getting into high-speed chases.

Other agents acknowledge that Temecula agents get into frequent, almost daily chases, but said that reflects the reality of patrolling a busy smuggling corridor for drugs and illegal immigrants.

Former Border Patrol Agent John Quirindongo knows firsthand what chases are like; he left the agency with a stress-related disability after being involved in a chase that ended in the worst crash in Border Patrol history. Eleven illegal immigrants died in that 1983 incident after their fleeing car hit a hay truck.

Quirindongo has become an impassioned critic of the Border Patrol. He blames the Temecula incident on a “racist” mentality that “permeates the whole agency. These are cowboys on a John Wayne trip. . . . It’s a gung-ho mentality. There is no emphasis on public safety.”

Although other agents reject that characterization, they agree with Quirindongo and other critics on one point: although people have died and been injured in chases for years, most of them were illegal immigrants whose misfortune drew little interest.

The Temecula tragedy attracted intense attention, on the other hand, because the dead included four high school students and a banker driving his son to school, as well as an illegal immigrant from rural Mexico, agents said.

The illegal immigrant who was driving the stolen Chevy Suburban that crashed has been charged with murder. Another passenger has been charged with alien smuggling.

At times those suspects seem to have disappeared amid the criticism of the Border Patrol, agents complain.

“This 16-year-old driver gets lit up,” a veteran agent said, referring to the Border Patrol sedan that tried to pull over the Suburban on the freeway by flashing its emergency lights. “He doesn’t stop, which most people would do. He’s in a stolen car. He drives away at 80 miles an hour, he crashes. And it’s our fault? I must be missing something.”

Reaction in Temecula was particularly ironic, agents said, because for many years the Border Patrol was the main law enforcement presence in a once semi-rural, isolated town. Agents responded to traffic accidents and 911 calls relayed from other authorities.

Then the inexorable advance of suburbia spread to the far reaches of Riverside County, bringing a California Highway Patrol station, a sheriff’s station and an influx of middle-class refugees from Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

The newcomers were unfamiliar with the Border Patrol. They did not realize the implications of living on the Border Patrol’s “second front” until the crash, and lashed out emotionally, agents said.

“The agents felt the community had stabbed them in the back,” the Temecula agent said. “They understood it to a point, because most of the community is new.”

Whether official policy eventually changes or not, many agents will shy away from chases on their own, agents said.

“I don’t think there is an agent working now that is going to risk chasing someone in a populated area,” said the Temecula agent. He said agents have learned from informants that immigrant smugglers are taking advantage of the new restraint.

“The alien smuggling rings have kept an ear to this. The word has gotten as far as Acapulco. . . . It’s been pretty much free rein for them around here.”

Two veteran agents scoffed at suggestions that additional helicopters could be used as an alternative in chases. A perennial obstacle hampers the INS, they said: lack of funds.

In fact, San Diego-area stations continue to be plagued with old, defective vehicles that often cannot be driven or malfunction, agents said. The sedan involved in the Temecula chase, for example, reportedly experienced a failure in its emergency lights and siren that caused the agents to slow their pursuit.

“Helicopters?” a veteran agent snapped. “We don’t even have enough cars.”

Agents said a potential response to the danger of chases is the imposition of tough new penalties for alien smuggling and for fleeing from the Border Patrol.

“The judicial folks need to get their act together,” Bonner said. “They need to put the hammer down on those people. . . . Once somebody decides to run, they are out of your control. . . . That is even more deadly than using a gun. A car weighing a ton or more going at speeds up to 100 miles an hour is a very deadly weapon, as demonstrated at Temecula.”

If chases are drastically curtailed, agents predicted, the danger will increase rather than decrease because smugglers will think the best way to escape is to drive as fast and recklessly as possible.

“That would lead to total anarchy,” Bonner said.

As these issues are considered in far-off sanctums of power, the daily business of combatting wholesale illegal immigration continues in the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol.

It is the nation’s busiest sector; its busiest station is Imperial Beach, where last week agents faced the usual onslaught at El Bordo, as the Tijuana River Levee is known.

Asked whether certain points on the always-crowded levee are most favored by illegal crossers, three-year agent Kolo Moser said: “They’ll cross everywhere. There’s just too many of them. We’re spread too thin.”

During the course of the evening, Moser chased down two men sprinting through a field near Dairy Mart Road as horseback riders maneuvered around his Ford Blazer, glancing at the scene with idle curiosity.

He clambered through a steel maze of old tractors and battered machine parts in search of illegal immigrants hiding in a border-area junkyard.

He slogged through mud flats by the beach in Border Field State Park as 50 illegal immigrants advanced through a sewage-infested swamp, which is so contaminated that Moser once became sick and coughed up blood after falling in the water.

The group, who seemed unperturbed by the lone agent trailing them, included a family: a man carrying an infant, a mother, two boys and a little girl in a green party dress.

Moser acknowledged that low pay and grueling conditions have accelerated attrition in the Border Patrol, with many agents leaving for Customs, the Drug Enforcement Administration or city police departments. But he said he has no such plans and said the Temecula incident has not affected his morale or his work.

“I like what I do,” he said. “I love my job.”

Caltrans to Build I-5 Fence

State transportation officials plan to build an 8-foot-tall fence on the Interstate 5 freeway median in San Ysidro later this year to discourage illegal immigrants from crossing the freeway on foot on their way north.

A median fence is also planned for a section of I-5 near the San Clemente immigration checkpoint, according to State Department of Transportation officials.

After lengthy discussion of different methods of keeping pedestrians off the freeway, Caltrans recently completed studies of the safety fence requested by the U.S. Border Patrol, the California Highway Patrol and the San Diego Police, officials said.

The plans call for a tightly woven chain-link fence mounted on top of the concrete freeway median on a 4-mile stretch extending from the U.S.-Mexico border to Coronado Avenue.

The estimated cost is about $800,000, and construction is expected to start in November.

Illegal immigrants use the I-5 freeway median strip as a safe haven after crossing the border, knowing that the Border Patrol and other law enforcement officers will not chase them there because of the danger involved.

Many immigrants have been killed or injured by speeding cars on the freeway near the border and near the San Clemente checkpoint.