Smugglers

In 1986, lawmakers decided the problem of illegal immigration had to be dealt with. More than 3 million people were living in the United States after crossing the border illegally or overstaying their visas. A new law signed by President Ronald Reagan gave legal status and a path to citizenship to most of those unauthorized residents - helping many secure a slice of the American dream but also giving fuel to critics who sought to turn "amnesty" into a pejorative. Less than 30 years later, the number of immigrants living in the country illegally is thought to have nearly quadrupled, and the freighted baggage of amnesty looms over new efforts to reform the nation's immigration laws.

SAN DIEGO -- The Coast Guard recovered 3.3 tons of marijuana off Southern California when smugglers tossed 245 bales overboard after their boat was spotted, the Coast Guard said Tuesday. The 210-foot cutter Alert recovered the bales early Sunday about 90 miles west of San Nicolas Island. The smugglers' boat made a U-turn and sped back to Mexican waters, as the Coast Guard notified the Mexican navy, officials said. The Alert, from its homeport in Astoria, Ore., was on anti-smuggling duty off Southern California when the smugglers' boat was spotted about 1:30 a.m.  The smugglers had been located by a Sacramento-based Coast Guard C-130 Hercules aircraft.

The illegal immigrants donned Marine Corps camouflage uniforms and military-style buzz cuts. The license plates on their van had been switched from Mexican to U.S. government plates. If anyone asked, they were Marines traveling to March Air Reserve Base. But their ploy didn't take into account the possibility of being stopped by a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was a former Marine armed with a simple question. The agent, S. Smith, asked the driver to tell him the birthday of the Marine Corps.

ARIVACA, Ariz. - When Jim Chilton tends to the cattle on his 50,000-acre ranch in southern Arizona, he packs at least two guns and no less than 5 gallons of water. A pistol and a rifle are to ward off the drug smugglers who encroach on his land abutting the U.S.-Mexico border. Drums of water in the bed of his Ford truck are for thirsty border crossers lured by U.S. jobs. RELATED: Is the border secure? Unlike much of the heavily fortified border fence in Arizona, the only barriers separating Chilton's ranch from Mexico are four strands of rusty barbed wire, strung along steel posts.

A veteran U.S. Coast Guard chief petty officer was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers rammed his vessel near Santa Cruz Island, casting him into the ocean with a fatal head wound. Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34, of Redondo Beach was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California. Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands.

Craigslist offers an array of opportunities -- but hiring human smugglers isn't legally among them, federal authorities say. They've arrested a Mexican man who allegedly used the site to recruit staff for his Texas-based human-smuggling operation. José Gustavo Diaz-Velasquez , 29, was arrested last week in the border town of Rio Grande City, Texas, after a yearlong federal investigation. Immigration agents began investigating Diaz-Velasquez in August after they discovered nearly a dozen Craigslist posts recruiting drivers for the smuggling operation, U.S. Atty.

The rules of the smuggling game across the U.S.- Mexico border have been written unofficially for years: If a bad guy moving drugs or people encounters a border fence, you tunnel under it. But a group of enterprising - or desperate - smugglers got caught trying an alternative method. They built a flimsy makeshift ramp and tried to drive over a U.S. Border Patrol fence near the Imperial Sand Dunes in Southern California. A U.S. Border Patrol spokeswoman in Arizona told the Los Angeles Times that a pair of suspected smugglers tried to drive over a 14-foot-high fence in southeastern Arizona just after midnight Tuesday but abandoned the vehicle and fled back into Mexico as agents approached.

Iranian officials have cracked down on illegal trade by arresting thousands of smugglers and seizing products ranging from meat mincers to satellite dishes, the IRNA news agency reported Sunday. A law enforcement public relations officer from Hormozgan said that 512 automobiles, 731 boats, 12,000 household appliances, televisions, recorders and radios were confiscated during the past three months. He said items included satellite dishes, vacuum cleaners, watches and calculators.

Egyptian police said they have foiles and attempt to smuggle $2.4 million worth of jewels into the country. The jewels were found on Egyptian passengers coming from Tokyo and a Sudanese passenger arriving from Khartoum, police said Friday.

I am so angry. The sentence for the smugglers of the shahtoosh shawls ("Shawl Smugglers' Sentence Piques Antelope Protectors," March 2) is woefully inadequate to stop or deter the loss of the beautiful Tibetan antelope. JOSEPH RACANO Huntington Beach

Authorities detained 25 people early Monday riding aboard a panga boat that drifted ashore in Rancho Palos Verdes in the early morning dark in what's being investigated as a possible human smuggling operation. Two vans, one registered to a Ventura medical transportation firm, were discovered parked near a winding path leading to the Portuguese Bend shoreline. Authorities described them as possible pickup vehicles. The incident follows a fatal encounter last week off the Santa Barbara coastline in which a Coast Guardsman was killed when two men aboard a panga gunned their engines and struck the vessel he was riding in, tossing him into the ocean.

Hundreds came in uniform to Terminal Island on Saturday to say goodbye to the veteran Coast Guardsman killed last week when his boat was rammed by suspected smugglers. His shipmates called him a patriot and gave him the standard salute for a comrade killed in action. But amid the pomp and circumstance of military mourning - the flyovers and rifle salutes - another side emerged to Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34. A doting father known to do push-ups with his two young sons on his back.

The small Coast Guard inflatable vessel was 20 yards from the panga, an open fishing boat that law enforcement officers say has become the craft of choice to ferry untold numbers of marijuana bales and undocumented immigrants from Mexico to Southern California. Spotted earlier by a Coast Guard cutter, the panga was running without lights, a standard practice in the illicit trade, according to investigators. The four men on the boat dispatched from the cutter Halibut approached it cautiously, about 200 yards from the shore of Santa Cruz Island, off the Santa Barbara coast.

A veteran U.S. Coast Guard chief petty officer was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers rammed his vessel near Santa Cruz Island, casting him into the ocean with a fatal head wound. Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34, of Redondo Beach was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California. Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Seated on a muddy hill, Sulieman Masri glumly scanned the giant crater that was once a smuggling tunnel used to support his family. After the Israeli airstrikes of the last week, Thursday morning was the first safe time to venture out. He discovered his tunnel was among 140 Israel destroyed. Now it's now a massive sand pit coated with gray explosives residue. It would take two months to rebuild at the cost of $20,000. "But I've heard that they are going to open the borders, which could put the tunnels out of business," he said.

LA JOYA, Texas - Half a dozen Guatemalan men lay hidden in the back of a pickup speeding down a rural road near the border, side by side and covered with a sheet, when the truck bed was pelted with rocks. Or at least the men thought they were rocks. The truck was barreling down a dirt road and, as the men later told a consular official, they presumed the tires had kicked up rocks into the truck bed. The objects hitting the truck were bullets. A trooper with the Texas Department of Public Safety had fired from a helicopter to try to force the truck to stop.

Before dawn Tuesday, California National Guard troops spotted a suspected smuggling boat moving up the coast from San Diego. The boat had no lights and after about an hour, it headed for shore at Crystal Cove State Park, near Newport Beach in Orange County. In the rough surf, the small craft flipped, spilling its occupants into the ocean. No one was hurt. But federal customs authorities, working with the Guard troops, arrested 14 suspected illegal immigrants, all from Mexico; another immigrant escaped and remains at large.

They can spot the smile on a suspected smuggler's face from 10,000 feet in the air, record full-color video of his run for shore and simultaneously track 5,000 ships spread over hundreds of miles of ocean. Flying above the Atlantic about halfway between Florida and the Bahamas, the latest addition to the government's anti-smuggling arsenal can track the trajectory of a boat leaving Cuba and compare it -- in seconds -- to every filed course plan for vessels on the water.

The rules of the smuggling game across the U.S.- Mexico border have been written unofficially for years: If a bad guy moving drugs or people encounters a border fence, you tunnel under it. But a group of enterprising - or desperate - smugglers got caught trying an alternative method. They built a flimsy makeshift ramp and tried to drive over a U.S. Border Patrol fence near the Imperial Sand Dunes in Southern California. A U.S. Border Patrol spokeswoman in Arizona told the Los Angeles Times that a pair of suspected smugglers tried to drive over a 14-foot-high fence in southeastern Arizona just after midnight Tuesday but abandoned the vehicle and fled back into Mexico as agents approached.

SAN DIEGO - Two former U.S. Border Patrol agents who fled to Mexico while under investigation for smuggling hundreds of illegal immigrants into the country were found guilty Friday of multiple counts of conspiracy, bribery and human smuggling. The conviction ends a long-running case that became an example of the pernicious reach of corruption into Border Patrol ranks. Raul Villarreal, 42, was once the face of the agency in the San Diego area, making frequent appearances on Spanish-language television newscasts as a media liaison.