Repatriation Effort Earns Border Patrol Few Fans

By Richard Boudreaux

Sept. 29, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — In what U.S. officials call a rescue mission and critics dismiss as costly folly, thousands of illegal immigrants caught in Arizona this month are being flown in handcuffs to four Texas cities for deportation to Mexico -- in the hope that they will not try again to sneak across the border in Arizona’s killer desert heat.

The U.S. Border Patrol’s “Lateral Repatriation Program” has drawn fire from both sides of the Rio Grande. It has opened a new rift between the Bush administration and President Vicente Fox, whose top foreign policy goal is better treatment for millions of undocumented Mexican laborers in the United States.

Border mayors in Texas and Mexico say the sudden influx of deportees could overwhelm their communities. Migration specialists warn that the effort will not work as a long-term deterrent. A Texas congressman opposed the initiative. So did Fox, whose government has also protested the use of handcuffs.

American officials insist that the experimental program, due to conclude Tuesday, is working. Since it began Sept. 8, they say, more than 5,000 immigrants have been removed from Arizona’s “corridor of death.” Only two immigrant fatalities have been reported during that time in a desert that had been averaging one per day over the summer.

“This program is going to reduce the number of people crossing, and it’s going to reduce the number of people dying in the desert,” Robert L. Harris, deputy chief of the Border Patrol, said in an interview.

But in recent comments at the international bridge here, where they are marched in single file from Laredo, Texas, deportees ridiculed the idea that they had been “rescued.” Most said they planned to head straight back west for another death- defying trek to Arizona, where temperatures are higher than in Texas but no river stands in the way.

“They want us to give up and go home. But if we do that we will starve, and we know that in America our labor is in great demand,” said Fermin Hidalgo, who abandoned a failing farm near Acapulco this month. He was nabbed on his way to seek work as a tree pruner in Chicago -- the kind of job, he said, that “the gringos are too lazy” to do.

Hidalgo, 42, complained that Border Patrol agents had kept him manacled even when he went to the toilet.

“What kind of salvation is that?” he said. “We are not hooligans. We came to your house to ask for work, not to steal.”

The farmer was one of 141 deportees met on the bridge Sept. 17 by Daniel Hernandez, Mexico’s consul in Laredo. The group, mostly dejected-looking men wearing baseball caps and backpacks, had been bused from Arizona border detention centers in Nogales, Naco and Douglas to Tucson, then flown 760 miles by charter aircraft to Laredo.

Some had been in Border Patrol custody -- and the adult males in handcuffs -- for as long as 40 hours. They had been given nothing more than a small hamburger and bottled water, they said. In the fog of exhaustion, some had missed the announcement about where they were going.

“First, you need to know where you are,” the consul told the group after leading them to a Mexican customs post near the bridge. “You are in Nuevo Laredo.”

Then he explained that each deportee was being offered, at Mexican government expense, a phone card, a meal at the diner next door, and bus fare to his or her hometown.

“I think I will go home, rest up and save some money for another trip to the border,” said Daisy Marquez, 27, who had been earning $300 a month pumping gasoline in Culiacan, in western Mexico. She was arrested while on foot near Douglas, trying to get to her sister’s home in Phoenix, 200 miles away, so she could look for a better job.

For two hours after the consul spoke, lines formed at the diner’s service counter and single public phone. Calls went out. Calculations were made. Tortas and burritos were served. Money transfers were solicited from faraway relatives. Choices were debated.

As dusk gathered, it was time to decide. Agustin Gonzalez, a 25-year-old laid-off tire company worker from Guadalajara, admitted being frightened by his first venture into 100-degree desert heat. He and 25 others who opted to go home were driven to the bus terminal.

The other 115 scattered across this city of 311,000 people, seeking at least one night’s shelter in public parks, cheap hotels and free hostels run by the city and the Roman Catholic Church while contemplating a new stab at the border.

Marquez changed her mind about going home. Beaming as she got off the phone, she said she had lined up two wire transfers -- one from her father in Culiacan to pay her way back to Agua Prieta, the tiny Mexican border town across from Douglas, and one from the uncle of a friend to live on until she could reach Arizona again.

Her sister in Phoenix, she said, was paying the $1,500 smuggler’s fee.

Similar scenes are playing out along the Rio Grande as two charter planes from Tucson land in Texas each day, dropping up to 150 immigrants at a time in Laredo, El Paso, Del Rio and McAllen. Each city receives one flight every second day. Normally such deportees are sent a few at a time on foot through the nearest border post.

In Mexico, officials say most of the new deportees have balked at free passage home, swelling the transient populations of border cities on the Mexican side -- Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juarez, Ciudad Acuna and Reynosa. Nuevo Laredo is already on edge over deadly drug gang warfare, and Mayor Jose Manuel Suarez worries that some deportees will stay and turn to crime.

Growing numbers of Mexican migrants have died, mainly from dehydration or heat exposure, trying to cross the Arizona desert over the decade since the Border Patrol began fortifying its defenses around cities in Texas and California. A record 152 border crossers have perished in the last 12 months. Gun- toting vigilantes on the American side are also a threat.

Trying to hold down the death toll, the Border Patrol in June put rescue beacons and additional agents in the desert, deployed more search helicopters and teamed with Mexican officials to warn migrants about the risks.

But what started as a promising binational effort faltered after an early crackdown by Mexico on desert migrant-smugglers.

“There was hope the Mexicans could sustain the effort for the entire summer, but that was not the case,” said Harris, of the Border Patrol.

As Arizona’s death rate continued to rise, U.S. officials in mid-August proposed what Harris called “a full-court press” for September, the final month of the hot season: Washington would pay to have every illegal Mexican immigrant caught in Arizona flown deep into Mexico and bused to their home states, to break the cycle of repeated crossing attempts in the heat.

Mexico refused to go along, insisting that any such initiative be worked into a broader overhaul of the two countries’ 1998 accord regulating the routine repatriation of illegals -- work that would take months.

“This new program was proposed to us with a certain haste,” Mexican Deputy Foreign Minister Geronimo Gutierrez said.

Harris said the urgency was to save lives. The Border Patrol fell back on Plan B -- the unilateral transfer of immigrants. The flights alone cost $1.3 million, not counting fuel.

Although the program is unprecedented in scale, U.S. officials said illegal immigrants transported in large numbers had been handcuffed in the past as a routine security precaution. In the current program, the cuffs come off when the plane lands in Texas.

In Mexico, front-page headlines on the expulsions have underscored Fox’s failure to get a hearing in Washington for his long-proposed expansion of guest-worker programs and amnesty for millions of Mexicans living illegally in the United States.

Protests also came from Texas border mayors, who fear that the new deportees will get back across the river, straining their cities’ police forces, hospitals, water supplies, school systems and social services.

“We’re shocked,” said Laredo Mayor Elizabeth Flores. “It’s Homeland Security’s border, but they didn’t consult my city. We’re on the front line.”

Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) introduced a bill to try to end the program, which he called “a great example of a disconnect between a federal agency and local communities ... an outrage.”

“Their justification is that it’s a humanitarian attempt to keep down the number of fatalities in the desert,” said Joaquin L. Rodriguez, mayor of Eagle Pass, Texas, just upriver from Laredo. “But our part of the country is no better. We have arid land full of poisonous snakes. We have a river. People drown on a weekly basis.”

Border Patrol officials say those fears are exaggerated. Just 41 of those deported through Texas have been caught trying to sneak back over the river, they say. Meanwhile, Border Patrol arrests in Arizona are down from an average of 1,100 a day before the program to 890, a sign of fewer attempts to cross the desert, they add.

Harris said the program might be repeated next summer “if we continue along this path and the analysis does prove that it is successful in saving lives.”

Wayne Cornelius, director of UC San Diego’s Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, warned that such an effort would cost millions of dollars and ultimately fail.

“There are severe limits on how the current border enforcement strategy can be made any safer,” Cornelius said. “The problem is the strategy itself -- forcing human traffic into more remote areas that are increasingly dangerous. There’s no evidence that anything we’ve done over the past 10 years has been a significant deterrent to new entrants.”

Times staff writers Scott Gold in Houston and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this report.