Funneling Immigrants to Their Deaths

In recent years, thousands of Cubans have left Cuba and attempted to enter the United States illegally. Many attempt the journey on homemade rafts, traveling the 100-mile distance from the northern coast of Cuba to the Florida Keys. Such rafts can be used because the Gulf Stream draws rafts north from Cuba toward the Florida Keys before flowing away from the Florida coast and farther out to sea.

The Coast Guard’s duties were expanded in 1994 to include interdiction and repatriation of intercepted Cubans. Suppose that in implementing the new Cuban policy, the Coast Guard made a strategic decision to concentrate its patrols exclusively in those areas where the Gulf Stream comes closest to Florida’s shores--leaving open and unpatrolled the more distant and treacherous reaches of the Gulf Stream, where a rafter has a significantly smaller chance of being seen and rescued before being swept past Miami and away from land. Could such a policy be justified by arguing that the Cubans who choose to risk their lives by taking the more treacherous path do so knowing the risks?

Fortunately, the Coast Guard has not done this in South Florida. Yet the U.S. Border Patrol has done virtually the same thing along the Mexican border: It has implemented a strategic border enforcement program that forces people, primarily Mexicans, to their deaths.

The Border Patrol’s current enforcement program along the U.S.-Mexico border is not a general border interdiction program; it is a channeling operation.

Heavy concentrations of Border Patrol personnel, equipment and fencing have been deployed along selected portions of the border. The portions selected for enhanced interdiction operations have been the portions where, prior to 1994, most immigrants sought to cross the border--areas with roads closest to towns and cities.

Since 1994, there have been three significant expansions of the selective interdiction program. Each expansion has forced border crossers into progressively more remote areas, with deadly results.

Phase 1 of “Operation Gatekeeper� sought to seal the portion of the border running from the Pacific Ocean eastward 14 miles inland.

It had the immediate effect of pushing border crossers into the Otay Mountains of eastern San Diego County. These mountains have a geography described by the Justice Department as “extremely rugged,� including “steep, often precipitous canyon walls and hills reaching 4,000 feet.�

Phase 2 was initiated in 1996 and extended the intensive interdiction program to Imperial County. Border crossers were accordingly pushed east into the 6,000-foot Tecate Mountains. During the first winter, 16 border crossers died in the mountains.

Phase 3, implemented in 1997, pushed border crossers even farther east into the Arizona desert. In a report released this year, the University of Houston’s Center for Immigration Research documented a “clear correlation and pattern� between the border interdiction policy and the increasing death toll among border crossers.

The deaths in Arizona of 14 people this month are unusual only because they may be the highest documented single-day death toll in the past 20 years. No one can know for sure whether this was the deadliest day on the border because no one knows how many people have died and not been found. There is disagreement as to the exact overall death count. Using figures from the Border Patrol, the Mexican government and other sources, the California Rural Legal Assistance estimates that the death toll among border crossers has increased 500% since Operation Gatekeeper and similar interdiction programs in Arizona and Texas began. Assuming no further modifications to the Border Patrol’s strategy, the foundation projects the annual death rate will hover around 500 people per year.

Any country has the right to control illegal immigration, but no country has the right to cause needless loss of innocent life. The Border Patrol has not sought to seal the border but has instead intentionally channeled border crossers into the most rugged and dangerous terrain and thus has guaranteed deaths. Until Operation Gatekeeper and its counterparts are dismantled, thousands more will certainly die.