Border Patrol Agents Giving LAX a Careful Look

A family from Berlin, arriving recently at Los Angeles International Airport for a vacation, looked a little confused. So a man in a green uniform approached the party, asked where they were spending their holiday, took a look at their tickets and guided them to the correct check-in counter.

A little later, another man in a green uniform approached a teenage girl from Columbus, Ohio, and helped her with directions to the ticket counter.

These officials aren’t airport guides. Inconspicuously observing the throngs at select ticket counters, striking up conversations with strangers about their travel plans and watching anyone who looks out of place, the men in green work for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

For more than a month now, the agency has been watching travelers at LAX, a major hub for illegal immigrants traveling from the Arizona border to the East Coast. It’s part of a crackdown on human smuggling in Southern California and comes fraught with political peril.

Immigration groups have expressed concern that the federal effort would result in racial profiling and harassment of Latinos at LAX. In announcing the LAX monitoring, immigration officials pledged not to target Latinos but rather to confront anyone who looked like they could be involved in human smuggling.

“We are not profiling,” said the agency’s acting San Diego-area chief, Paul Blocker Jr. “We are following investigative leads and engaging in consensual conversations. Our agents talk to everyone.”

The agency has been particularly sensitive to the accusation of racial profiling since a series of immigration sweeps in the Inland Empire by the Border Patrol netted dozens of illegal migrants and stirred up scathing criticism from local politicians and Latino advocates.

Officials insist they are looking at certain types of behavior as they scan airport crowds, searching for indicators of human-smuggling activity.

Illegal immigrants typically buy their tickets in cash, agents say, often taking advantage of last-minute cancellations. In some cases, undocumented migrants betray an unfamiliarity with air travel or they travel through terminals in groups led by guides, who don’t board flights.

“We’re not interested in going out and just interviewing any one individual that would give the impression that we’re targeting a group,” said Luisa Aquino, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. “Our arrests at the airport are intelligence-driven. We’re apprehending people based on information we’re receiving.”

Officials are hoping that the LAX patrols will help them make a dent in the human-smuggling operations. Up to now, federal officials admit they’ve had little success getting to the kingpins that run the smuggling operations despite several high-profile raids on “safe houses” where immigrants are kept.

Southern California has become a magnet for human-smuggling rings, which charge immigrants from Latin America thousands of dollars to transport them across the border and into the Los Angeles area. The immigrants are often then taken to LAX, and on to their final destinations on the East Coast.

Police and agents from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have discovered hundreds of illegal immigrants held against their will at nearly a dozen safe houses across Southern California this year. But for the most part, the smugglers running the operations have evaded capture.

By staking out the airport, officials hope to slowly work their way up the smuggling network hierarchy, eventually reaching the leaders based in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. They also hope the federal presence at LAX in itself will deter smugglers.

Earlier this month, agents stationed at LAX acted on a tip and apprehended 171 illegal immigrants from eight different countries. Interviews with some of those detainees led to the discovery of a secret halfway house in Los Angeles for undocumented migrants on their way from Arizona to the East Coast. Agents found 44 others there, including three suspected human traffickers, who have been charged on suspicion of smuggling.

“We don’t have any reservations about saying that there are bigger fish out there,” said Aquino. “We’re trying to do investigations that are going to lead to the bigger fish and are going to require that we go to the governments of other countries so we can go right to the source.”

Agents hope that increased surveillance at LAX will divert smuggling operations to other transit points, just as an operation on the Arizona-Mexico border this year forced traffickers into Los Angeles. Aquino said that additional safe houses, also known as drop houses, are likely to surface as heightened security at the airport creates trafficking backlogs while smugglers look for safe routes for their human cargo.

“These drop houses are going to be overcrowded,” she said. The more safe houses agents discover, the more leads they will have to follow.

The LAX patrols are based on a similar program at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport that over the last year has netted more than 200 smuggling-related arrests. The Phoenix program has won widespread support, including in immigrant communities, because the human-smuggling rings in Arizona have been far more violent than in California.

Los Angeles, however, presents special problems. Local law enforcement agencies, notably the Los Angeles Police Department, have tried to keep their distance from federal immigration officials. Police agencies want to encourage members of the area’s large immigrant population to cooperate with them without fear that officers will hand over undocumented residents for deportation.

Raquel Fonte, immigrant rights attorney at Public Counsel, a public interest group, said the only way to ensure that the LAX operation doesn’t turn into racial profiling is to have some sort of independent monitoring of the interviews conducted by federal agents.

“The concern that the Los Angeles airport is a hub for human trafficking is a legitimate concern, but the process that [officials] use to stop or screen people need not be unjustifiably intimidating or one that focuses on people exclusively because of physical traits. We need to monitor the way that they are conducting these interviews.”

The airport operation is being executed by 20 Border Patrol agents and 40 plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

During a recent visit to LAX, an observer could see three uniformed border agents standing at three separate terminals where there are frequent flights to and from cities in the Southwest and on the East Coast. The agents stood opposite the ticket counters and only occasionally bantered with passersby.

At least two plainclothes agents were also monitoring the crowds.

At one point, Emmy Allen, 18, who was traveling to Ohio, couldn’t find the right terminal. She was assisted by a Border Patrol agent.

“I don’t even know who he was,” Allen said.

“I just asked him if this was the only Delta ticketing area. I don’t know anything about those guys.”

Jeannette Pritzen, 39, who was on vacation in the United States from Berlin, said she and her family were lost when they were approached by a Border Patrol agent.

“He tried to help us,” she said. “He asked us where we spent our holidays and took a look at our tickets.”

Pritzen said she didn’t have a problem with being questioned by the agent and noted that immigration agents in Germany are much less subtle.

Flavia Gabinio, 34, said she barely noticed the agents, and wished they would be less inconspicuous.

Gabinio, who was on her way to Hawaii to continue her university studies there, said she welcomed increased security at the airport, and didn’t blame the United States for cracking down on illegal immigration.

“I think it’s good,” she said. “I was in Brazil just a while ago and the news was talking about two Brazilians who died trying to get to the states.”