-Caveat Lector-
It is our right,
and it is our duty,
to remain free.
--- Alan Keyes
Vol. 15, No. 31 -- August 23, 1999
Published Date July 30, 1999, in Washington, D.C.
http://www.insightmag.com
The People Smugglers
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By Timothy W. Maier and Sean Paige
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The U.S. Border Patrol faces increased problems from rapidly growing,
sophisticated people-smuggling rings that are making huge profits from
illegal immigrants.
Undercover agents in Texas smashed a family-led smuggling ring on July 13
that for 15 years specialized in sneaking thousands of illegal aliens past
Border Patrol checkpoints in the Rio Grande Valley -- sometimes disguising
them as fans caravaning to high-school football championships.
. . . . On July 26, the U.S. Coast Guard called off the search for 40
Haitians missing when two smuggling boats went to the sharks between Florida
and the Bahamas, resulting in "the most deaths in a smuggling case that I
can remember," according to one Coast Guard officer.
. . . . On July 27, prosecutors in Florida won prison terms for six men
convicted of running a sex-slavery ring in which Mexican women were lured to
the United States with promises of opportunity and then forced to work off
their transport fees in brothels.
. . . . Each of these cases marks an unscheduled stop on an international
underground railroad -- call it the Illegal Immigrant Express -- that in
spite of such derailments still manages to deliver more than a million
riders a year to destinations in the United States with a reliability and
efficiency that puts Amtrak to shame. And all of this is pulled by an
engine, well-oiled by high demand and huge profits, that seems to pick up
steam despite the best efforts of U.S. immigration agencies to sidetrack it.
. . . . "Here the trafficking in human beings is bigger than the drug
business," says border-town mayor Ray Borane of Douglas, Ariz., whose
constituents are being overrun since crackdowns in Texas and California have
moved the action into their backyards. "It's more lucrative, there's little
risk for the smugglers and the United States keeps giving them their cargo
back."
. . . . Borane says he would like the Mexican government to intervene before
the tense situation in Douglas "gets too far out of hand" but doubts it will
happen. "There's so much money involved that nobody in Mexico wants to see
it stopped," he tells Insight.
. . . . Though it still is poor by U.S. standards and in places verges on
the squalid, a drive through Agua Prieta, Mexico, just across the fence from
Douglas, suggests the town is enjoying a boom -- one that nobody on either
side of the line credits to the North American Free Trade Agreement. New
construction is everywhere. Many homes compare favorably with those found
north of the fence. Shiny late-model cars and pickups cruise the streets.
The town's side streets bustle, especially around the hotels and guest
houses that cater to migrants awaiting their ride on the underground
railroad. During the height of smuggling season, the town's population
doubles, and that's good for the local economy. "This people-smuggling
business has surpassed narcotrafficking here," Aqua Prieta Mayor Vicente
Teran Uribe recently told the Arizona Daily Star, "and the Border Patrol
strategy is the reason."
. . . . "The more physical difficulties and Border Patrol agents there are,
the greater the need for people to resort to and rely on smugglers," says
University of Notre Dame sociology professor Jorge Bustamante, noting the
ironic symbiosis between Border Patrol agents and the smugglers they hunt.
. . . . Five years ago, immigrant smuggling along the Arizona line was an ad
hoc activity conducted by individual opportunists, costing as little as $200
for those who bothered to hire a guide, ace Daily Star border reporter
Ignacio Ibarra wrote in a recent exposé on the smuggling rings. But today
the short trip from Aqua Prieta to Phoenix can cost an illegal as much as
$1,500 --$9,000 or more if they come from Central America -- Ibarra reports,
generating big profits.
. . . . "It's becoming a numbers business, even more than it has been," a
Border Patrol source in Arizona confirms to Insight. "And down here they're
getting very violent. We've had guides kill each other over groups."
. . . . Though the evolution of alien trafficking may have been anticipated
by the Border Patrol, the speed with which the smuggling networks have grown
and their increasing technical sophistication have taken agents by surprise.
Yet, bust by bust, law-enforcement officials are piecing together a better
picture of their highly organized internal structures and the complexity of
their operations.
. . . . Bisbee, Ariz., police have detained more than 800 vehicles carrying
some 5,000 illegal aliens this year alone, according to the Daily Star. And
documents recovered in the vehicles lend credence to the suspicion that
these are not fly-by-night operations. "There's too much of this going on
for it to be a coincidence," Bisbee Police Sgt. Bill Bagby says. "This isn't
just a few people getting together to buy a car -- this is racketeering."
U.S. attorneys agree and are employing federal money-laundering and
antiracketeering laws to go after smuggling groups.
. . . . Another telling indicator of the highly organized structure of the
smuggling rings is their increasing use of specialists to move their human
contraband. "Coyote" still remains the catchall term for smugglers along the
Mexican border, but there are subspecialists. Polleros (rough translation:
chicken wranglers) specialize in recruiting and rounding up clients.
Brincadores (rough translation: fence-hoppers) are locals who guide clients
across the border. Then there are "scouts," who monitor Border Patrol
movements from area perches, often with a slingshot handy for pelting their
passing trucks.
. . . . Because the penalties for participation are nominal and the rewards
are relatively great, it's not difficult for smuggling networks to recruit
border-area youths to abet the traffic, Ibarra reports. They easily mix in
with their own contraband, in spite of Border Patrol efforts to separate the
chicken wranglers from the chickens, though sometimes their expensive boots
and clothing give them away. The Mexican government doesn't consider these
migrations illegal, so little effort is made to enforce the country's
relatively harsh laws against trafficking in people.
. . . . Smugglers say that they are providing a valuable service. "They're
going to cross anyway," a coyote recently said of the aliens. "Imagine how
many people would get hurt or die if they couldn't count on my help."
. . . . But such altruism tends to end abruptly when things go badly.
Aliens, finding themselves abandoned by their coyotes, often turn themselves
in rather than die in the desert. But others aren't so lucky -- there were
254 alien deaths along the Mexican border last year, many of them occurring
when guides misled, abandoned or endangered their charges.
. . . . Although one wouldn't know it walking the boomtowns of the Mexican
border or talking with Border Patrol agents in Arizona who wrestle
constantly with futility, a recent study by Syracuse University nonetheless
indicates a dramatic escalation in the government's battle against illegal
immigration.
. . . . Prosecutions of illegal aliens jumped from 7,335 in 1992 to 14,616
in 1998, court records show. As a result, INS convictions were the second
highest, behind only the FBI, among all federal law-enforcement agencies.
Though the bulk of the prosecutions still occur along the U.S. border with
Mexico, San Diego no longer is the epicenter of the INS'
criminal-enforcement activities. Prosecutions there have declined 37 percent
since 1992, as the strict Operation Gatekeeper has pushed smugglers
eastward. In Arizona and San Antonio, Texas, on the other hand, prosecutions
have jumped to nearly five times what they were in 1992.
. . . . The study reports that the "sharp increase in all enforcement was
the result of decisions during the last few years by the Clinton
administration and Congress dramatically to increase the size of the INS, to
toughen selected immigration laws and push federal prosecutors to pay more
attention to the subject." INS personnel were increased from 17,368 in 1992
to 29,420 in 1998.
. . . . "Clinton deserves credit for taking the lead, but the amount of
resources allocated to programs to combat alien smuggling is woefully
inadequate," says Roy Godson, president of the National Strategy Information
Center and a professor at Georgetown University, who frequently has
testified before Congress on this issue. "Congress also bears some
responsibility. They have not adequately addressed the problem."
. . . . Most experts think the available numbers aren't necessarily a good
measure of whether administration polices are reducing the total number of
illegal aliens entering the United States. The optimistic numbers do not say
who is being busted, whether small-time border hoppers or big-time
operators. And they contradict anecdotal evidence that the underground
railroad is steaming right along.
. . . . In 1996 the INS estimated that some 5 million undocumented
immigrants were residing in the United States, with about 250,000 more added
each year. Other estimates peg the number of illegals who annually enter the
country at 1.5 million. And even though there were some 172,312 illegal
immigrants expelled in 1998, compared with just 42,471 in 1993, this barely
puts a dent in the problem.
. . . . "We mostly deal with the tail end of the problem," acknowledges
Barry Tang, assistant district director for INS in Baltimore. Though a long
way from the borderlands, even Tang's experience suggests to him that the
problem is escalating. Recently his agents arrested 19 Mexican illegals who
flew on a USAirways flight from Pittsburgh to Baltimore. A few months
earlier, 46 illegals were arrested at Chestertown Foods Inc., a
chicken-processing plant on Maryland's eastern shore.
. . . . In most of the Maryland cases, organized crime does not seem to have
been involved, Tang says. Mostly the rings are run by labor contractors
looking to profit by supplying U.S. companies with the low-wage workers they
crave. The area companies that benefit usually are mom-and-pop shops, Tang
says.
. . . . Providing a revealing glimpse inside the murky underworld of
immigrant smuggling is Operation Figaro, in which agents of the INS
infiltrated a Central American alien-smuggling ring, resulting in the May
indictments of 17 individuals in Phoenix. With the cooperation of suspects
snared in a bust of Phoenix stash houses (where aliens are held pending
their next move through the pipeline), INS agents for several months set
themselves up in the smuggling business, culling a windfall of intelligence
about how such organizations conduct business.
. . . . According to Jack Weaver, supervisory special agent with the INS in
Phoenix, the process begins with the recruitment of prospects in the cities
of Central America. After paying half of the base fee of around $5,000, with
the balance due upon delivery in the United States, the groups are escorted
north through Mexico, bribing their way past police and military checkpoints
along the way.
. . . . The human cargo is guided over the border at Douglas -- crossing
repeatedly if necessary -- before being driven by back roads to Phoenix,
which "has got to be the people-smuggling capital of the world," according
to Weaver. There the aliens are held, sometimes for long periods of time,
and occasionally in a hostagelike situation, until family or contacts in the
United States pay the balance owed. In one episode observed by INS, two
aliens were held by smugglers for 30 days while their families scrambled to
scrape together enough to free them. This resulted in charges of
hostage-taking being brought against smugglers in a unique application of
federal antiterrorism statutes.
. . . . Depending on their final destination, the aliens then are driven
typically to Las Vegas or Los Angeles, again staying clear of interstates,
where they are provided (for an extra charge) with counterfeit documentation
and put on outbound flights. Acting on occasional tips from airline ticket
agents, such flights sometimes are boarded by INS agents at their final
destinations.
. . . . At the height of Operation Figaro, 50 to 100 Central Americans a
week were passing through the three INS stash houses, according to Weaver --
a mill kept grinding by the steady stream of people moving through the
pipeline and the string of contractual obligations and bribes that bind
network conspirators together. And although this particular smuggling ring
was relatively humane in treatment of its charges, says Weaver, "we've had
cases of people holding guns to children in front of their parents to get
their money."
. . . . As with their drug-running counterparts, violence sometimes flares
between rival gangs of alien traffickers due to double-crosses, "load
stealing" and territorial disputes. "There's been some shooting here in
Phoenix, when smuggling groups are fighting to get control of the pipeline
or stealing aliens from each other," Weaver tells Insight.
. . . . "Certainly the level of violence has grown here in Phoenix among
smugglers in the last two or three years," Weaver says. "We had one instance
not too long ago when two people were shot up outside a drop house," using
the smuggler's weapon of choice, a Chinese-made SKS. "And just the other
night the police here arrested some guys with an SKS getting ready to go and
hit a house. Some of it is, 'You didn't pay me.' Some of it is to rub out
the competition."
. . . . Guide-on-guide violence also occasionally occurs. At the Aqua Prieta
headquarters of Grupo Beta, a Mexican police force charged with protecting
immigrants from being victimized by smugglers, Insight was shown photos of
one guide believed to have been shot in the face by a rival.
. . . . Despite the intelligence learned during Operation Figaro, much of
the alien-trafficking world remains terra incognito even to those who study
it closely. But an academic who requests anonymity due to his ongoing work
in the field says that while it's definitely a huge, profitable,
transnational industry, he has "not seen evidence that there's some Mr. Big
behind it." Of course you have to distinguish, he adds, between those rings
that traffic in Mexicans and those that smuggle non-Mexicans, because the
latter group is by necessity more sophisticated and well-organized.
. . . . Mexicans still make up the vast majority of apprehensions along the
southern border, but in recent years agents have noted an upswing in the
number of OTMs, or "Other-Than-Mexicans," who get reeled in with the catch.
In addition to many Central and South Americans, the Border Patrol's Tucson
and Yuma sectors have in the last two years also apprehended 119 mainland
Chinese, 31 Bulgarians, 15 Cubans, 10 Lebanese, 10 Poles, nine Filipinos,
nine Indians, seven Iranians, six Romanians and six Russians. And other
stations along the border have apprehended Canadians, Yugoslavs, Vietnamese,
Egyptians, Czechs, Lithuanians, Iraqis, Israelis, Syrians, Laotians and one
unlucky chap from Burkina Fasso.
. . . . Baltimore's Tang says that to be smuggled from Asian countries such
as China can cost $20,000 to $30,000 for illegal passage. In some cases,
aliens must pay off the fees at such a high interest rate that they become
virtual slaves to their smugglers.
. . . . Though some law-enforcement officials stubbornly view immigrant
smuggling as a victimless crime, "Unfortunately, the reality is that
migrants are often subjected to inhumane or dangerous treatment and, in the
case of Chinese, to extreme forms of violence," according to Jonathan Winer,
deputy assistant secretary of state for narcotics matters and law
enforcement. In 1996 smugglers in Seattle kidnapped three children they had
transported to the United States, demanding money from their parents in
China. Before the three were freed, one of the girls repeatedly was raped.
The same smuggling group kidnapped a Chinese businessman and two women in
New York. The case ended with the businessman shot in the head but alive. A
finger of one of the women was cut off and the other was assaulted sexually
and lost several fingers.
. . . . Chinese smuggling rings earn as much as $3.5 billion annually,
according to U.N. estimates. Between 1993 to 1996, the Coast Guard recovered
2,100 Chinese smuggled aboard 11 ships. They were lucky. Sometimes smugglers
have been known to toss their human cargo to the sharks, destroying evidence
of illegal activity, Winer notes.
. . . . But the INS is fighting back and has had its victories against the
networks. More recently those efforts have been bolstered by the FBI, which
didn't involve itself in alien-smuggling cases before 1997, when a
memorandum of understanding between the Border Patrol and FBI inaugurated a
new era of cooperation.
. . . . One result of the teaming has been Rio Stop, a two-year undercover
operation that busted 12 members of a family-led ring involved in
alien-trafficking for 15 years. The family owned two apartment complexes, a
motel and a house that provided squalid staging grounds for transporting
people past INS checkpoints in the Rio Grande Valley. Authorities began to
investigate the Contreras family in January 1997, when more than 350
undocumented immigrants were found, packed like sardines, into a
Raymondville, Texas, apartment complex.
. . . . Other notable successes include:
In May 1995, federal agents charged five people running three houses of
prostitution in the Los Angeles area. The prostitutes were Mexican women who
had been recruited by the smuggling organization in Acapulco, Mexico. As in
the recent Florida case, the women were promised jobs as housekeepers but
were made to engage in prostitution to pay off their smuggling fees.
In August 1995, INS agents charged nine members of a smuggling ring that
transported Mexicans across the border to a drop house in San Diego.
Vehicles disguised as plant-nursery delivery trucks hid cages in which
aliens were transported, generating weekly profits of about $100,000.
In March 1996, a three-month INS probe in Mexico City, Houston and the
McAllen, Texas, resulted in the breakup of the Global Smuggling Ring. The
mission ended in arrests of 15 smugglers, including the ringleader, who
remains in federal custody. The gang had operated for seven years and
specialized in smuggling Chinese, Indian and Pakistani nationals who paid as
much as $28,000. They used air, bus and van transportation to move the
illegals through Russia, where entry visas for Nicaragua were obtained.
. . . . There is little doubt that the smuggling organizations involved are
huge. "You can't repeatedly beat the Border Patrol and U.S. Customs Service
without a sophisticated organization; you're talking about a
multibillion-dollar-a-year industry here," says Godson. He estimates that
"well over half of illegal immigration or alien smuggling involves organized
crime."
. . . . For now, few solutions are on the table. Godson laments, "The
Clinton administration and Congress have not requested anything more to be
done. And that's a shame, because the illegal migration affects the quality
of life in the United States."
http://www.insightmag.com/articles/story2.html
Bard
Visit me at:
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http://www.xld.com/public/center/center.htm
Federal Government defined:
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