Patrolling Along Border Gets ‘Boring’ for Agents

SAN DIEGO —  On this night, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Araceli Garcia will make zero arrests. She will see no illegal border crossers, turn up nary a suspicious footprint. During eight hours patrolling what once was the wildest stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, the most stubborn foe Garcia will wrestle are the undercooked potatoes she has brought for dinner.

It is, in sum, quite a successful evening for a border patrol agent. And, these days, quite typical.

Night used to drop like a curse here on the border’s westernmost five miles, turning the beaches and canyons into a pandemonium of illegal crossers, smugglers, bandits and the vastly outnumbered U.S. border agents who gave chase, mostly in vain.

No more. In the wide hollows where hundreds once gathered in preparation for the mad dash to neighborhoods and freeways on the U.S. side, it’s mainly weeds that cluster now. Where enterprising Mexican vendors dished up tacos to the hopeful hordes loom not one, but two, formidable fences and enough lights for a Padres night game. And U.S. Border Patrol agents, formerly in woeful supply, now park conspicuously in their trucks, forming a tidy string all the way to the sea, scouring the well-illuminated scrub for fence-jumpers who are now more likely to try their luck in rural regions to the east.

The strategy has led to a mounting death toll in the harsh mountain passes and searing deserts from eastern San Diego County through the Imperial Valley into Arizona. In his historic tour of California this week, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said his government will complain about the increasing migrant deaths at a high-level meeting with U.S. officials next month.

U.S. officials acknowledge the concerns, but have said the solution may lie primarily in convincing migrants to avoid dangerous crossings.

Operation Seen as a Success

From the front office to the front lines of the border agency, the San Diego effort, known as Operation Gatekeeper, is seen as a striking success.

“We have too many agents for five miles. We know what’s going on,” said Garcia, an energetic 23-year-old hired in 1995. “It’s only a matter of when you’re going to get apprehended.”

Arrests of undocumented immigrants in Imperial Beach plummeted to a daily average of about 43 last year, from more than 500 a day in 1994 when it was the most porous spot on the Southwest border. Moreover, officials figure they are arresting nearly all who try crossing now. Before, most got away.

The dramatic five-year transformation of this strip, named after the nearby beach, marks for Border Patrol officials a Herculean effort and sign of a new national prominence for an agency that turns 75 this month. The Border Patrol commanders and agents who gather in San Diego next week to celebrate the anniversary will do so at a defining juncture in the agency’s history.

An unprecedented expansion has doubled the number of agents nationwide to about 8,000 in five years, providing the troops for manpower-heavy enforcement efforts, such as Operation Gatekeeper. Federal spending for lights, underground sensors, mounted cameras and other technology has soared nationwide as many of the expensive deterrence tactics that brought calm to Imperial Beach and to El Paso are replicated at other trouble spots along the 2,000-mile border.

For the first time, officials say, they have achieved “control” over the border around San Diego, where arrests are at an 18-year low. They say the Imperial Beach experience has set a standard that others will come to demand elsewhere. Those cries have become acute in places such as rural Arizona, now overwhelmed by undocumented migrants skirting the clampdowns in San Diego and El Paso.

Agency commanders say their new largess--bestowed during a time when illegal immigration peaked as a political issue--has vaulted them into uncharted territory of gains and expectations.

“We’re working without a net. We’ve never been where we are right now,” said Michael Nicley, the Border Patrol’s deputy chief.

Critics say that besides the human toll--last year more than 140 immigrants died crossing the border into California, according to the Mexican Consulate in San Diego--the buildup has also come at the expense of adequate screening for new agents. Other skeptics point out that all the enforcement effort around San Diego has brought “control” to a mere sliver of the lengthy border.

And now continued Border Patrol expansion is in doubt.

A Shortage of Applicants Foreseen

Recruiters at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol’s parent, have suddenly run into trouble signing up new agents. Facing keen competition for applicants from a robust U.S. economy, officials predict that they will fall well short of their goal of adding 1,000 agents this year.

That does not include replacing an additional 800 or so agents expected to be lost through attrition.

There has also been noisy wrangling in Washington after the Clinton administration announced that it would seek no new agents for next year, despite a 1996 immigration law that mandated the addition of 1,000 agents yearly until 2001. Administration officials said a hiring pause would allow the Border Patrol to avoid oversaturation with inexperienced agents.

That decision has angered some in Congress representing border areas where illegal crossings are rampant and concerns about drug trafficking high. U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said his state now faces a “catastrophe” as the new hot spot for illegal entries. “That’s why we are in desperate need of more Border Patrol agents,” he told Atty. Gen. Janet Reno during a recent hearing in Washington.

Kyl has proposed legislation aimed at attracting more hires by raising pay to $41,000 from $34,000 for agents with a year’s experience.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), a former Border Patrol chief in El Paso, said the INS hiring shortfalls add fuel to his proposal to make the Border Patrol an independent agency.

Becoming ‘Human Scarecrows’

The pleas for more help are familiar memories in Imperial Beach, but grow fainter by the day. Out on the line where mayhem once reigned, the new quiet is producing an unexpected lament among border agents: The job has become dull. Some agents complain that manning the same spot all day--known as “sitting on an X”--might deter illegal crossings, but wastes investigative training that could be put to use farther away from the border.

The stationary work has given rise to an acerbic job description: “human scarecrow.”

Agents, parked in trucks a quarter-mile apart, can spend up to eight hours or more keeping watch. With few migrants to chase, some pass the time scanning the newspaper, tapping out reports on laptop computers, jotting to-do lists, even boning up for after-work classes. “A lot of the guys look at it as an eight-hour mobile office,” said one agent.

The agents union in San Diego asserts that boredom is a key factor--behind insufficient pay--pushing agents in search of other work. Union leaders argue that the emphasis on front-line visibility ignores undocumented crossers who are able to make their way north to San Diego and beyond. “It’s like playing football with only a defensive line and no secondary,” said William Suddeth, an Imperial Beach agent and spokesman for Local 1613 of the National Border Patrol Council.

Supervisors acknowledge the tedium, but shrug off most of the complaints as agent frustration with having to do their job in a new way. “It was entry, chase, arrest,” said Johnny Williams, a former San Diego Border Patrol chief who now oversees the INS for the Western states. “That changed to a strategy of deterrence.”

Williams said the so-called Xs denote areas of patrol responsibility that vary in size across the border--some spanning several miles--depending on terrain. “You don’t get Superglued” to a spot, he said.

“If boring and uneventful equal what we’re seeing today,” Williams added, “I hope we have more of that.”

Once Unimagined, Now Reality

The very idea of ennui in the Imperial Beach section, which extends from the San Ysidro port of entry to the ocean, would have been unthinkable not long ago. By the 1990s, Imperial Beach had become the immigration equivalent of Three Mile Island, a disaster zone of lawlessness and a handy rhetorical backdrop for Republicans and Democrats to decry a border out of control. Robberies and rapes of migrants were common in the ravines. Illegal border crossers overran the horse ranches of the rustic Tijuana River Valley and residential streets in the city of Imperial Beach. Some migrants died crossing the two freeways that lead north from the San Ysidro port of entry.

The White House and Congress, inspired by Reyes’ bold move in 1993 to seal the El Paso border by posting agents side by side, jockeyed for advantage on the issue.

Fences made of surplus military steel mats went up along 14 miles between San Diego and Tijuana, including a portion jutting the length of a football field into the ocean at Imperial Beach to discourage swimmers. The number of agents assigned to Imperial Beach grew to about 400 agents, up from 250 in 1994.

One of the new hires was Garcia, who grew up in Artesia and was working as a manager in a discount clothing store.

On a tour of the Imperial Beach region at the start of a recent shift, Garcia checks canyons, washes and culverts that have been favored crossing points for migrants. All are deserted today. She wheels onto the beach at Border Field State Park--also empty--and points out the very spot where her mother sneaked into the country illegally from Mexico 27 years ago. (Her mother is now a U.S. citizen).

The border fence is labeled in orange with the names of nearby landmarks--a lighthouse, a yogurt shop on the Tijuana side--so U.S. agents can guide Mexican authorities when crowds gather or troublemakers heave rocks at them over the fence. Such cooperation is among the reasons officials in both countries say crime on the border has dropped in recent years. Garcia spent her Thanksgiving painting the labels.

Up on Spooner’s Mesa, a broad field of daisies overlooks the ocean surf and the lowering sun. A mile-long row of border lights, mounted on poles, extends to canyons on both sides. A vast wetlands stretches north toward San Diego, about 15 miles in the distance.

In the brushy reaches below, Garcia scans sandy paths for footprints using a cobalt-blue penlight. There are only squiggly snake trails and rabbit tracks, though a cluster of plastic water jugs shows that people have passed through sometime recently. In a sobering reminder that serious trouble has not deserted this area altogether, Garcia also gestures toward the spot where an agent last year fatally shot a migrant during an alleged rock-throwing attack. No charges were filed in the case.

The radio brings word from the station’s control room that someone has tripped a nearby motion sensor--one of dozens in the area. Garcia zooms off to check. It’s a false alarm, the first of several this evening that are apparently set off by sunset strollers or kids on bikes near their San Ysidro neighborhood. The only radio call approaching urgency is a query from an agent who has come upon a child locked in a parked car.

By 9:30 p.m., Garcia begins the last of three one-hour stints on border watch. This X is the worst of the bunch--a sewage-caked gully that carries overflow waste from a Tijuana pumping station and smells accordingly. Beyond reports of some rock-throwers farther up the fence, radio chatter has been spare. Signs of illegal crossers are scarcer still. Night closes as gently as the soft rock playing in Garcia’s cab. By shift’s end, the 45 or so Imperial Beach agents on duty will have made 24 arrests, a little more than half of the day’s total.

It is hardly the adrenaline-stoked image of the recruiting brochures, but Garcia says you have to stay alert to stay safe. Stationary agents are sitting ducks and have been targets of cross-border shootings. The fence on the Tijuana side is a common hangout for drug addicts and gang members.

Garcia gauges her success out here tonight in what you can’t see--in the stillness that seemed inconceivable to her predecessors.

“They thought they had no hope,” she said. “They thought they’d never see the day. And the day is here.”