They should fly them further south, say to Mexico City.
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washingtonpost.com
Texans Assail Repatriation Flights
Illegal Immigrants Being Returned From Arizona to Mexico Via Lone Star State
By Karin Brulliard
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, September 30, 2003; Page A17
AUSTIN -- Texas officials have joined the Mexican government in protesting a new U.S. program that each week packs thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants onto chartered planes in Arizona, flies them up to 850 miles to Texas and shuffles them across the border there.
Politicians in Texas say the program is ill-conceived and is likely to cause problems in their back yards if the immigrants, penniless and far from home, keep trying to cross the border -- now into Texas.
"They say they're not criminals," Laredo Mayor Elizabeth G. Flores said of the immigrants. "But they're hungry, and hungry people and desperate people do desperate things."
A. D'Wayne Jernigan, sheriff of Val Verde County, which includes Laredo and 125 miles of the border, said his department has received more than 100 phone calls about the program from locals, many concerned their cars will be stolen if immigrants make their way back into Texas and are "desperate to get to their final destination."
"Once they're returned to Mexico, they're going to come right back into this area and we're going to have to deal with them locally," Jernigan said.
Crossing the empty, scorching desert of the Arizona border can take several days on foot. A trip across the Texas border is still risky, but conditions are less severe and the area more populated.
The Border Patrol insists the program will reduce the number of immigrants who die from heat and dehydration while trying to make the five-day trek across the Sonoran Desert into Arizona. The desert's solitude makes it the favorite crossing point for those who smuggle immigrants, and it is by far the Border Patrol's busiest sector. In the fiscal year ending last September, about 330,000 migrants were arrested there, and 134 died, nearly all of them Mexicans. In June, the Border Patrol launched tough new measures to cut the flow of migrants crossing the desert, adding 150 agents to the 1,700 already deployed, as well as surveillance flights and rescue beacons. Now they are experimenting with a more radical plan. Instead of being sent back across the Arizona border, since Sept. 8 the detainees have been flown to Texas and returned to Mexico from there.
The airborne Texas two-step works like this: Every day, about 300 illegal immigrants are packed aboard two chartered Boeing 727-200s in Arizona and flown to Air Force bases and airports in the Texas towns of El Paso, Del Rio, McAllen and Laredo. The men -- but not the women and children -- are handcuffed and accompanied by armed Border Patrol agents.
On arrival in Texas, buses whisk the migrants from the tarmac to border bridges, where they are given hamburgers and a drink and sent packing across the Rio Grande River into Mexico.
Each flight costs the government $28,000, not including fuel, buses and other administrative expenses.
"This is a terrible idea," said Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Tex.), whose district includes an 800-mile stretch of the Texas-Mexico frontier as well as three of the cities through which the migrants are now being sent back. "In many cases, [migrants will] have no place to go except to run back into the United States."
Bonilla has introduced legislation that would forbid further such migrant flights into Texas or any other domestic destination.
The new program, called "lateral repatriation," will save lives, said Mario Villarreal, a spokesman for the Border Patrol. By flying the immigrants as far as 850 miles away, they won't be able to reconnect with the same smugglers who would just send them back across the Arizona desert, he said. The program is a pilot project that ends today, but initial indicators are encouraging, according to the government, and the flights could well be resumed when temperatures start to rise next spring.
In the first three weeks, three migrant deaths were reported in the Sonoran Desert. In the same period last year, 10 died, Villarreal said.
The Department of Homeland Security has been meeting with officials in Texas border cities, who say they were never informed that hundreds of illegal migrants would be descending on their towns.
Del Rio Mayor Dora G. Alcala said she was assured that the deportees would not become next-day illegal immigrants into her city, west of San Antonio. Nevertheless, she said, "Arizona should be able to come up with their own solutions."
Immigrant rights groups in Texas have denounced the program as a publicity stunt that is unlikely to save lives. Ouisa D. Davis, executive director of Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso, said the only way to curb dangerous border crossings is to legalize Mexican workers in the United States, a position similar to the Mexican government's.
"If they're determined to come to the U.S. and work . . . then people are going to get back in touch with the smugglers and try to cross in the exact same place," Davis said. "Or they'll try to cross here [in El Paso] and they'll end up dead in the canal."
Border Patrol officials rejected the criticism. In the first three weeks following the Texas transfer, just 1 percent of the deportees had been rearrested in Texas. "At this point we're extremely happy in the positive results," Villarreal said.
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