Fencing Out Danger : Barrier Designed to Stop Illegal Immigrants From Crossing I-5

SAN CLEMENTE — The new eight-foot-high, seven-mile fence looks like any other freeway median barrier.

But this fence, installed near the U.S. Border Patrol’s San Onofre checkpoint, is meant to control people, not vehicles.

This bloody stretch of Interstate 5 south of San Clemente is a focal point in the war to protect the United States’ border with Mexico. Here, droves of illegal immigrants try to bypass the checkpoint by making mad--and often fatal--dashes across the freeway, seeking new lives in Orange County and Los Angeles.

Over the last five years, 37 people have died crossing the freeway here, and hundreds more have been injured, burdening south Orange County hospitals with trauma cases and raising political demands that something be done to stop the carnage.

The result is the $458,000 chain-link fence that is nearing completion along the freeway from Las Pulgas Road north to the checkpoint three miles south of San Clemente. Officials believe it will prove a formidable tactic against freeway deaths, as has a fence that has saved lives along another dangerous stretch of highway through San Ysidro at the border.

“It’s a safety fence, being built to prevent the slaughter that’s going on up there,” said Jim Larson, Caltrans’ community affairs director for the San Diego region. “We are just not going to put up with that kind of activity.”

Women, children and the elderly are most often hit by cars as they move across the lanes, Larson said. “They are the high-incident group. They can’t run as fast and they get left behind,” he said.

Although a fence may provide the answer for transportation and immigration officials, it represents only a Band-Aid approach to some representatives of Latino rights groups and trauma physicians.

Dr. Thomas Shaver, an emergency room surgeon and director of trauma services at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, said a seven-mile fence will not keep migrants off the freeways.

“Are they building a fence from the Mexican border to Canada?” asked Shaver. “These people have a tremendous drive to get here. Some have walked 20 miles across the mountains. Seven miles is hardly any deterrent.”

For Shaver, the immediate issues for the medical profession are safety and cost. The majority of expensive treatments for the injured or dying immigrants must be absorbed by the hospitals, he said. Mission Hospital has treated 34 immigrants injured at the checkpoint, but the total cost of their care is not known.

“The numbers of these injuries are not necessarily great, but the magnitude of the injuries are of such a degree that oftentimes the person is never returned to being a functional human being again,” Shaver said. “And the cost to the health industry is just tremendous. It’s all so unnecessary.”

Father Jaime Soto, vicar for the Latino community for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, applauds Caltrans’ recent efforts to warn drivers of pedestrians on the freeway by placing flashing lights and signs along the hazardous stretch of Interstate 5.

He said the barrier will only serve to make illegal immigrants cross the freeway at a different, unfenced location.

“It may create a safer checkpoint, but I don’t know if it will make the freeway safer,” Soto said. “I’m not convinced it will solve the dilemma of fleeing immigrants using the freeways as a means of getting north of San Clemente.”

In what Soto describes as “the very shadowy world” of migrant smuggling, the people who have made the long, arduous trip north often become victims of the smugglers, called coyotes, who drop them off with little concern for their survival.

“If someone stops a truck on a dark road and tells you to run, I don’t know if you have much of an alternative,” Soto said. “When these people are being brought north, they are in a very vulnerable position. They must do what that individual says.”

In San Clemente, where officials have long condemned the Border Patrol’s high-speed chases of migrants through the community, City Councilman Joe Anderson agrees that freeway crossings are “a terrible problem . . . never far from our minds.”

He supports the fence, arguing that it will at least make the road safer, although it will have no bearing on hot pursuits of illegal immigrants fleeing in vehicles.

“We have two different problems,” Anderson said. “The fence will obviously do nothing to prevent people from coming into this country illegally. But I see it as a humanitarian thing that will hopefully prevent the loss of life from people running across the freeway.”

Perhaps the more long-range solution is to build a newer, more effective checkpoint. The preliminary design for a 16-lane freeway checkpoint proposed for the Horno Canyon area, adjacent to the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, includes 16 electronic gates for traffic flow, extended truck scales, parking areas and booths for Border Patrol agents, who now stand unprotected on the freeway, according to a Caltrans spokesman. The federal government has appropriated $30 million for the project, but it is still a decade away, Larson said.

Such an expense is often justified by the fact that the San Onofre checkpoint, although 66 miles from the Mexican border, continues to be a vital Border Patrol outpost, where 44,182 illegal immigrants were detained last year, said Joe Flanders, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“San Onofre is by far the busiest off-border checkpoint, busier than three-fourths of our locations on the border,” Flanders said.

In the meantime, Larson and Steve Kean, a spokesman for the Border Patrol, said that a similar four-mile fence on Interstate 5 at San Ysidro has proven its value as a deterrent.

The pedestrian count has dropped dramatically since the fence was built, from about 600 to only 66 people a night, according to the California Highway Patrol, which monitors the area.

“We have already witnessed success with this,” Kean said, adding that he does not expect the fence to halt the flow of illegal immigrants. “A fence won’t stop them, but it will force them to choose a different direction and keep them off the freeways.”