$5,000 Offered in Desert Exposure Deaths

SAN DIEGO —  Making the first use of a reward program aimed at apprehending immigrant smugglers, U.S. authorities Friday offered $5,000 for help in determining who abandoned eight migrants found dead this week in the scorching Imperial County desert.

“It’s a terrible death, an excruciating death, and one nobody should have to endure,” said Johnny Williams, western regional director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Williams said a “very intensive” investigation into Thursday’s discovery of six men and a 17-year-old girl near the Salton Sea had produced promising leads. The group, huddled beneath trees in a desert expanse south of California 78, had no water or gear and appeared to have been left there, officials said.

A day earlier, the body of a man was discovered a few miles to the north and is thought by authorities to have been part of the same group.

It was the largest group of undocumented immigrants to die from exposure while crossing the Southwest border in recent years. An Imperial County coroner’s investigator said Friday it appeared that they may have died up to five weeks ago.

Williams said the reward offer, while modest, is meant to “step up the heat” on smugglers who charge up to $1,000 to shuttle undocumented immigrants over the border.

Brutal heat and perilous canals along Imperial County’s border with Mexico have proven especially deadly this year as a growing number of migrants seek to avoid tighter border control to the west in San Diego.

With the latest deaths, the Mexican Consulate in Calexico counts 61 Mexican nationals who have died this year crossing illegally into the Imperial Valley and into Yuma, Ariz., just to the east. The total of immigrant deaths for California is 88, one less than for all of 1997.

Migrant rights activist Claudia Smith assailed the reward as a “smoke screen” for a border policy that has forced undocumented crossers eastward into more dangerous terrain.

Although smugglers “should have the book thrown at them,” Smith said, “they are not the cause of illegal immigration. And there’s not going to be any scarcity of them because the same border strategy is making them indispensable.”