Operation Gatekeeper

Re: "Why Violence Is Growing on the U.S.-Mexico Border," by Michael Huspek, Opinion, Aug. 24: August has been a particularly deadly month for those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, at least along the California stretch. As the planners of Operation Gatekeeper openly acknowledge, they are now betting on the Imperial Valley, where temperatures often reach 120-plus degrees for days on end, to stop would-be border crossers. From my observation during recent trips to Mexicali to interview migrants, it is not working.

As a Latino activist in California for decades, Salvador Reza witnessed a rise in illegal immigration in the 1980s and protested a plethora of harsh measures to control it in the '90s. Now, as a transplanted Arizonan, he is experiencing a deep sense of deja vu. Passage this week of a stringent Arizona bill that would require people to carry proof of legal status and mandate that police check for it is a replay of California's own turbulent history with illegal immigration.

On Oct. 1, 1994, the Clinton administration launched "Operation Gatekeeper," the enhanced border enforcement strategy of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Southern California. Six years later, it is clear that the expensive operation has accomplished little other than to create an image of boundary control and to cause large numbers of migrant deaths. Such reasons alone should lead us to put an end to the fatally flawed strategy.

Re "Death in the desert," Editorial, Oct. 27 It's not that "Mexico has failed to ... discourage migration." Mexican authorities, complicit with the corrupt oligarchies that keep them in power, have, in fact, encouraged migration north to conveniently remove a discontent-fueled revolt at home. Accepting or tolerating illegal migration will, therefore, perpetuate the status quo. The Mexican-flag-waving demonstrators we often see on newscasts ought to make their voices heard on the streets of Mexico City, not downtown L.A. The redeeming part of the editorial surfaced in the last paragraph with the observation that "Mexico must create the economic conditions for prosperity at home so that its citizens will stop risking their lives."

Karl Sanders once lived peacefully on his Sacred Mountain Ranch here, raising horses on Native American holy grounds a few hundred yards from the U.S.-Mexico border. Then came Operation Gatekeeper. Since then, Sanders said, he has seen a steady but slow trickle of undocumented immigrants turn into a flood. The other night, Sanders said, he heard voices and muffled footsteps. His rangy ranch dog began "making a big fuss, telling me there's all kinda people out there that shouldn't be."

The fields of wheat and alfalfa here are the new front in a border battle once centered comfortably far off in urban San Diego. Midnight quiet is splintered by Border Patrol helicopters spotlighting undocumented immigrants who've made a pedestrian highway of the irrigated rows below. A game of cat and mouse plays out in the tiny downtown: Crossers eye agents through the shabby border fence and dash into backyards on the U.S. side, a mere football's toss away.

In a sign that a federal border crackdown may be increasing tension at the U.S.-Mexico line, Mexican authorities alleged Tuesday that U.S. Border Patrol agents have physically and verbally abused illegal immigrants, one of whom remains hospitalized. Grupo Beta, a plainclothes Mexican border police unit, has filed complaints through diplomatic channels about three incidents that allegedly occurred Sunday, the day after the Border Patrol launched a massive deployment titled Operation Gatekeeper.

The U.S. Border Patrol on Tuesday named Johnny Williams, a 24-year veteran who now heads the agency's El Centro sector, as the new chief of the San Diego sector, the busiest and most volatile jurisdiction on the Southwest border. Williams, 48, inherits the high-profile job at a critical moment in the history of the agency, which has the daunting mission of guarding the 2,000-mile international line.

While federal officials continue to herald the success of a Border Patrol campaign to choke off the flow of illegal immigration, human rights activists say the high-profile crackdown is also having a lesser-known effect: the mistreatment of migrants awaiting deportation. In the six months since Operation Gatekeeper swung into action, activists on both sides of the border have been interviewing busloads of recently released illegal immigrants at points of entry from Tijuana to Mexicali.

Even as firefighters were dousing hot spots and soot-covered inmates were gasping for air, the political sniping had begun over the torching and melee at the privately run jail for illegal immigrants at Miramar Naval Air Station. U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-San Diego) was on radio talk shows blasting Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and U.S. Atty.

The signs are hard to miss. They are 5 feet by 7 feet and warn drivers on San Diego's busy freeways about the seemingly improbable: that pedestrians, indeed entire families, could come dashing across the lanes at any moment. But that picture is no longer accurate. A decade ago, the subject of those signs, illegal border crossers from Mexico, used to die by the dozens every year as they crisscrossed the freeways on their northbound treks to Los Angeles and elsewhere.

In reviewing my book, "Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the 'Illegal Alien' and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary" (Book Review, Jan. 13), Sam Quinones does an outstanding job of presenting his own views. But much of the little he actually writes about my book leaves me wondering if we are talking about the same work. Quinones states that my main argument is that "the enforcement of the border gave rise to the concept of the illegal alien." My actual argument is something different and far more complex.

THE OTHER FACE OF AMERICA: Chronicles of the Immigrants Shaping Our Future, By Jorge Ramos, Rayo/HarperCollins: 252 pp., $24.95 Shortly after moving to Mexico in 1993, I met a couple in a village in the west-central state of Michoacan. Their house had two stories, marble floors, a satellite dish and a large yard, but it was usually empty. The family lived most of the year in Stockton, where the man worked in a tomato-packing plant.

Arrests of illegal immigrants have fallen along every segment of the U.S.-Mexico border during the last six months--apparently a sign that fewer people are trying to enter the country illegally, U.S. officials said Tuesday. The 24% drop during the first half of the federal fiscal year is the first to occur across the entire border since the United States began cracking down on illegal entries in earnest with the launch of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994.

The cemetery worker drove a pickup truck past lanes named for the types of trees and bushes planted throughout Evergreen Cemetery--palms, junipers, oleanders. This was a week or so after Valentine's Day, and many of the grave sites still were decorated with heart-shaped balloons and red plastic roses. At the back side of the cemetery, he stopped the truck and walked over to a locked gate. "This is it," Joe Hernandez announced, swinging open the gate. "This is the county section.

Victor Nicolas Sanchez, age 30, Oaxaca, drowning . . . Santos Orosco Aguilar, 1, Michoacan, drowning . . . Francisco Segura Saldana, 15, Guanajuato, heat stress . . . Eliseo Santos Carmona, 24, Oaxaca, fell off cliff . . . --From a list of migrant deaths that have occurred since 1995 at the California-Mexico border. * The list runs for 10 pages, single-spaced, one line for each entry. It begins with David Hernandez Zuniga and ends, at least for now, with entry No.

Political pressure on both sides of the Southwest border produced an agreement last week for unprecedented U.S.-Mexican cooperation on border issues while heating up a debate about whether a Border Patrol crackdown here is working. On Wednesday, Mexico announced significant measures including expansion of the Grupo Beta border police unit, tougher action against smugglers and a joint pilot program to repatriate illegal immigrants from San Diego to the Mexican interior.

On Oct. 1, 1994, the Clinton administration launched "Operation Gatekeeper," the enhanced border enforcement strategy of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Southern California. Six years later, it is clear that the expensive operation has accomplished little other than to create an image of boundary control and to cause large numbers of migrant deaths. Such reasons alone should lead us to put an end to the fatally flawed strategy.

In an Aug. 20 article regarding the immigration checkpoints on I-5, an immigration official cites the checkpoints as being one of the primary reasons for the success of Operation Gatekeeper. In the last few years over a million people have entered the country illegally. What percentage of these are ever deported? One percent? Two percent? Operation Gatekeeper is not a success. It is simply a slight reduction in the level of incompetence at the INS. The illegal invasion continues unabated.