Border Patrol targets revolving door to Mexico

A Border Patrol vehicle keeps watch beside the fence that divides the United States from Mexico in the town of Nogales, Ariz., April 22, 2010. / AFP/Getty Images

SAN DIEGO - The U.S. Border Patrol is moving to halt a revolving-door policy of sending migrants back to Mexico without any punishment.

The agency this month is overhauling its approach on migrants caught illegally crossing the 1,954-mile border that the United States shares with Mexico. Years of enormous growth at the federal agency in terms of staff and technology have helped drive down apprehensions of migrants to 40-year lows.

The number of agents since 2004 has more than doubled to 21,000. The Border Patrol has blanketed one-third of the border with fences and other physical barriers, and spent heavily on cameras, sensors and other gizmos. Major advances in fingerprinting technology have vastly improved intelligence on border-crossers. In the 2011 fiscal year, border agents made 327,577 apprehensions on the Mexican border, down 80 percent from more than 1.6 million in 2000. It was the Border Patrol's slowest year since 1971.

(Below, watch when CBS' "60 Minutes" visited the U.S.-Mexican border for a 2010 report on the high-tech project that is supposed to secure it.)

Watching the border: The virtual fence
Video: Bad for taxpayers?
Video: The virtual fence

It's a far cry from just a few years ago. Older agents remember being so overmatched that they powerlessly watched migrants cross illegally, minutes after catching them and dropping them off at the nearest border crossing. Border Patrol Chief Mike Fisher, who joined the Border Patrol in 1987, recalls apprehending the same migrant 10 times in his eight-hour shift as a young agent.

The Border Patrol now feels it has enough of a handle to begin imposing more serious consequences on almost everyone it catches, from areas including Texas' Rio Grande Valley to San Diego. The "Consequence Delivery System" — a key part of the Border Patrol's new national strategy to be announced within weeks — relies largely on tools that have been rolled out over the last decade on parts of the border and expanded. It divides border crossers into seven categories, ranging from first-time offenders to people with criminal records.

New immigration rule to help citizen relatives
Abortion, immigration among new 2012 laws
Mexico border crossing with no agents proposed

Punishments vary by region but there is a common thread: Simply turning people around after taking their fingerprints is the choice of last resort. Some, including children and the medically ill, will still get a free pass by being turned around at the nearest border crossing, but they will be few and far between.

"What we want to be able to do is make that the exception and not necessarily the norm," Fisher told The Associated Press.

Consequences can be severe for detained migrants and expensive to American taxpayers, including felony prosecution or being taken to an unfamiliar border city hundreds of miles away to be sent back to Mexico. One tool used during summers in Arizona involves flying migrants to Mexico City, where they get one-way bus tickets to their hometowns. Another releases them to Mexican authorities for prosecution south of the border. One puts them on buses to return to Mexico in another border city that may be hundreds of miles away.

In the past, migrants caught in Douglas, Ariz., were given a bologna sandwich and orange juice before being taken back to Mexico at the same location on the same afternoon, Fisher said. Now, they may spend the night at an immigration detention facility near Phoenix and eventually return to Mexico through Del Rio, Texas, more than 800 miles away.

Those migrants are effectively cut off from the smugglers who helped them cross the border, whose typical fees have skyrocketed to between $3,200 and $3,500 and are increasingly demanding payment upfront instead of after crossing, Fisher said. At minimum, they will have to wait longer to try again as they raise money to pay another smuggler.

"What used to be hours and days is now being translated into days and weeks," said Fisher.

The new strategy was first introduced a year ago in the office at Tucson, Ariz., the patrol's busiest corridor for illegal crossings. Field supervisors ranked consequences on a scale from 1 to 5 using 15 different yardsticks, including the length of time since the person was last caught and per-hour cost for processing.

The longstanding practice of turning migrants straight around without any punishment, known as "voluntary returns," ranked least expensive — and least effective.

Agents got color-coded, wallet-sized cards — also made into posters at Border Patrol stations — that tells them what to do with each category of offender. For first-time violators, prosecution is a good choice, with one-way flights to Mexico City also scoring high. For known smugglers, prosecution in Mexico is the top pick.

The Border Patrol has introduced many new tools in recent years without much consideration to whether a first-time violator merited different treatment than a repeat crosser.

"There really wasn't much thought other than, 'Hey, the bus is outside, let's put the people we just finished processing on the bus and therefore wherever that bus is going, that's where they go,'" Fisher said.

Now, a first-time offender faces different treatment than one caught two or three times. A fourth-time violator faces other consequences.

• no previous page
• next

1/2

[ahman63132]

First, it is a horrible tragedy that our Mexican BROTHERS AND SISTERS are goingh through right now. In an attempt to stop the ongoing flow of illegal drugs into this country, innocent people are suffering. This issue of citizenship didnt become top priority until the Mexican cartels started using SOME of these people as mules. To be insensitive to our fellow human beings is so tragic, it screams why our country if failing to stop the flow of drugs.

[diamruby]

A very tall electric charged fence, anyone making it over should be put in a fenced compound with nothing until their country retrieves them. They are all criminals, as are the people hiring them to work & anyone aiding in their ability to stay. All illegal pregnant women should be driven to the border during labor & dumped on the Mexican side, end of all anchor children. Put our military on the border, they are here to protect us & that is our greatest need right now. Also stop allowing illegal criminals to join our military, how in the world did that ever make sense to anyone. I am sick to death of all the illegal Mexicans using my tax dollars to live & breed illegally in my town, while our government denies legal tax payers the right to affordable health care, lower taxes, free education for our children from pre-school through college, help with child care, on the job training to ensure all can have a career to support themselves & family. Help us have food & homes even if we don't make alot of money, we need more free mental health care & homeless shelters to all in need. All persons on government aid should be limited to 1 year, while being educated & helped to become self-sufficient so they can work. No more life time users of welfare. We need factories & other large industries in our towns instead of in foreign countries. We do not need nor do we want illegal, uneducated people in the USA.

[expatriate2]

What is really needed is less people like you. If there hadn't been the excessive greed expressed through labor unions, your factories would still be in the U.S. There is a 20 percent chance that you live in one of the states your government stole from Mexico while those like you believe it is ancient history and of no consequence. If you don't live in one of those states, then the chances are greater that you live in one of the states stolen from Spain or France. If not, surely you live on land stolen from their native owners. The shoddy history of conquest, bullying and conspiracies has created generations of people so bankrupt of logic and feeling that they would drop a woman in labor at a border.

[ahman63132]

To say that all of any one race of people are criminals is an extremely strong point of view. You must not know that the same military you are asking to protect this border is highly populated with law abiding hispanics. Hispanics that have fought in protection of this nation like all other races of this country. Human beings like us all, there would be no long term welfare if all corporations in this great nation were to employ their staff from top to bottom equally. Any company accepting any type of federal taxes or funding should accept federally reflective staff. That way, if you ever took the time to get to know the very same people you are so critical of. You would find they are just like us all, trying to provided a better life for their children. Hate only begets more hate. Only through love can we as nation become one.

[expatriate2]

Let me first qualify that I am against Mexicans illegally entering the United States. But I see a vast area of hypocricy when Cubans cross the waters into Mexico and then enter the U.S. by land and are given a brief interview before being permitted to enter and live there. I see hypocricy with the fact that more than 60% of all Americans living in Mexico are there illegally with no immigration documents to legalize their residence. I see hypocricy in the flood of gringos that entered Baja California and so disrupted the economy that Mexican citizens could no longer afford to live there. I need not mention the hypocricy of permitting thousands of weapons to reach the hands of the cartels in Mexico or the flood of drug dollars that moves freely across the border. I cannot help but ask how 100 tons of marijuana could cross the Tijuana border or how the Colombian cartel sent 30 tons of cocaine in the past eight years.
The truth is that the number of illegals entering the U.S. from Mexico has dropped dramatically in past months due to the economic crises and harsh laws in places like Arizona and Alabama. But nothing has diminished the flow of drugs, money or arms going south of the border.

[TOPDOG11111]

By the time guliable Americans realize the border patrols and massive security is there to keep them held inside, it is far, far too late.

[PourpaixPourpaix]

Nothing is ever simple. Seems our military would be more effective in foxholes in the Texas range, not off murdering folks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps that would free up immigration agents to investigate employers who insist on hiring illegals. I9 laws have been on the books long enough so there's no excuse for violations. America is not such a good place if you're broke and cannot work.

I hate to see honest folks lose even more civil liberties, but maybe it's necessary. I can barely afford to live as it is, much less support illegal immigrants. We all help make this country stronger with our program of legal immigration, but a hole in the fence is a horrible policy to find good citizens. Before you can go to school, immigration check. Go to hospital, get treated, but also get immigration checked. I lived in Ukraine for a year, and my passport was checked constantly. Forgot it a couple times, but no electrodes or rubber hoses. It wasn't so bad. Few guns outside the military, and I was quite safe in a big city. If the Ukrainians can figure it out, why can't the Americans?