Did find this: Smugglers use drain pipes to get migrants into U.S.
baltimoresun.com
By Richard Marosi
Originally published May 28, 2006
SAN DIEGO // Armando Reyes climbed over the border fence and prepared for the dash into San Diego. But his smuggler instead led him and four other migrants through a patch of reeds to a stinky drainage pipe and ordered them inside.
The black sludge reached Reyes' chin as he crawled through the shoulder-width tube. Rats scurried by. Terrified of losing his way in the darkness, Reyes reached for the migrant in front of him and clutched his sneaker.
The stocky 28-year-old from Oaxaca had followed the smuggler into a labyrinth of drainage pipes under Otay Mesa, the booming commercial area 15 miles southeast of downtown San Diego.
The 23-mile network leads to more than 500 manholes scattered across about two square miles. From those openings, mud-covered migrants crawl out into streets, busy intersections and parking lots, creating a dizzying guessing game for U.S. Border Patrol agents.
"They're popping up all over the place," said Joe Perez, the agent in charge of the area.
The migrant traffic below truck-clogged streets and new office parks underscores the persistence and desperation of people faced with crossing one of the most heavily fortified sections of the border.
Illegal crossings will soon become tougher. President Bush is sending 6,000 National Guard troops to the border, Congress is considering an enforcement plan, and next month this busy stretch of border at Tijuana will be monitored by remote surveillance cameras.
So the underground beckons.
The tunnels channel rainwater out of flood-prone areas, but when the waters aren't running, the waves of migrants flow, a phenomenon that has bedeviled agents for years and has gotten worse recently as aboveground routes have been more heavily patrolled.
Last month migrants surfaced outside the offices of the U.S. Border Tunnel Task Force. After that, the manhole covers - one in a secured parking lot - were welded shut, one of them also topped with three 35-pound bags of rocks and gravel.
But six more manholes, all potential escape hatches, lie within a block of the federal facility. "They're all interlinked, so you never know where they'll come up," said David Badger, a Border Patrol supervisor.
Other border cities have wrestled with similar situations, most notably Nogales, Ariz., which is linked underground to Nogales, Mexico, by two large storm-drain tunnels patrolled regularly by heavily armed agents.
Unlike in Nogales, the drainage system in the Otay Mesa area doesn't extend into Mexico. But most of the tunnel outlets are a quick run from the border. Migrants typically traverse the pipes, many of which are two to three feet in diameter, at night, sometimes crawling for hours. Vehicles waiting on deserted streets then whisk them to stash houses.
Border Patrol agents have arrested hundreds of migrants climbing out of storm drains in the past year, but they don't know how many get through. Some estimate that thousands make it.
Last year, a worker for the California Department of Transportation said he saw 200 migrants climb out of a manhole in the middle of a California 905 interchange. Last month, 17 people were captured after they jumped out of a manhole near the Drug Enforcement Administration building that houses the tunnel task force. And this month, 15 people were arrested outside a warehouse just north of the border after an agent heard the scraping sound of a manhole cover being slid open.
The problem has grown serious enough that agents are teaming up with San Diego city engineers to create a computer map of the system. And research is under way to find a way to attach sensors to manholes to alert agents when they are opened. Crews have welded shut about a dozen manholes known to be migrant funnels.
At the tunnel task force, the federal multiagency group credited with the discovery in January of the longest illegal tunnel under the border ever found, a top official said the storm drains present a unique problem.
"It's not like when you have ... a drug tunnel. We can't go in there and just fill them up with cement," said Michael Unzueta, the special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The federal task force focuses on unearthing drug tunnels built by organized-crime groups. Policing the city's storm drain system is the responsibility of the Border Patrol.
Reyes, who was headed for Los Angeles, said his smuggler told him the crawl would take five minutes, but half an hour later he was still inching along. It was cold and so dark, he said, that he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. "I didn't want to get lost. ... I just wanted to get out of there," he said.
When he surfaced, agents, who had been watching the manhole in a warehouse district a quarter-mile north of the border, arrested him and 10 others. At the processing center in Chula Vista, agents hosed off the migrants, who were covered in muck from head to toe.
Richard Marosi writes for the Los Angeles Times. The Times' H.G. Reza contributed to this article. |
