Criminal deportations fuel border crime wave...Part 3 of 3...

Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Criminal deportations fuel border crime wave
Part 3: Dumped in border cities with little money and few connections, desperate deportees sometimes turn to crime.
By NORBERTO SANTANA JR.
The Orange County Register

TIJUANA, Mexico – The two men are led out from cells deep inside the basement of "La Comandancia," the city's aging police headquarters.

They have shaven heads and a shaken look. Police officers order them to lift their shirts and show off their gang tattoos, which indicate they're from San Jose, Calif. Both had just been deported from the United States, dropped off a few weeks earlier at the public gates of Tijuana.

On an old wooden table in front of them is a display of their loot, the result of a string of petty thefts victimizing Tijuana street vendors: a backpack, two makeshift knives, some coins along with a few packets of mints, gum and a bottle of perfume.

Law enforcement officials on both sides of the border are seeing a crime wave fueled by U.S. deportation policies, which dump busloads of criminal immigrants in large groups at border cities like Tijuana.

"Nobody saw this coming," said Tijuana's Mayor Kurt Honald, who has protested the dumping of criminals at the Tijuana gates. He says deportees have triggered a 300 percent rise in petty crime during the last year, as criminals raise money for a return to the U.S. Others join narcotics cartels and smuggling organizations to pay for their return.

"They just go right back to the United States. It's a vicious cycle," Honald warns.

U.S. Border Patrol agents don't disagree. They say that apprehensions along the canyons that dot San Diego's border backcountry are increasingly turning into confrontations, since criminals know their fingerprints will be run through a U.S. database.

"The criminals are the most determined to get back in," said Border Patrol spokesman James Jacques, who works in the San Diego sector. "And once they realize that the cuffs are going on, then the fight's on."

An Orange County investigation has found that:

•Deporting criminals to Tijuana encourages their speedy return because they are dropped off close to the border, in a strange city that is closer to their adopted home than their birthplace.

•There is virtually no communication between U.S. officials deporting criminals and local law enforcement in Tijuana, who receive them. Mexican police say they seldom know whether the deportees ushered through the border gate were arrested for driving while intoxicated or served a prison term for rape or murder.

•Dumping criminals back into cities unable to absorb so many homeless, jobless new residents fuels a crime wave on both sides of the border, provides soldiers for criminal gangs and internationalizes criminal syndicates. Some deportees with no history of violent crime turn to it out of desperation.

Criminal deportees represent about one-third – 84,652 in the year ended Sept. 30 – of ICE formal deportations across the United States. And they are quickly becoming the leading category of deportee being processed by ICE. Under pressure from Congress to step up immigration enforcement, the Bush administration has expanded funding for a series of programs that seek to deport illegal immigrants out of a myriad of federal, state and local jails.

A BUS TO THE BORDER

The bus trip to Tijuana starts on most mornings at the federal building in Santa Ana, where a large tour bus with shiny metal siding and Department of Homeland Security logos picks up deportees from across Southern California.

By the late afternoon, sometimes as late as midnight, the DHS bus pulls up near the noisy revolving metal gates used by tourists walking into Tijuana.

As the public gate clangs away – creating a sound so deafening that U.S. and Mexican officials can barely hear each other – deportees are led off the bus and lined up against the border fence. After the Mexican border guard verifies their citizenship – mostly through a set of basic questions about their home state – deportees walk through the gate.

This is where ICE deportation statistics transform into human beings.

Irvin DeLeon, 22, was dropped off at the Tijuana gate on a cold day in March after being arrested for driving without a license near the intersection of Edinger and Main in Santa Ana.

DeLeon was brought to the United States at the age of 2 by his parents and grew up in Santa Ana. After finishing high school, he started working construction jobs. He also had a minor brush with law enforcement, getting arrested as a juvenile for stealing a car.

DeLeon had been arrested seven times for driving without a license between 2002 and 2006. Without documents, he can't legally obtain one. Most times, he would pay bail and be released.

Even though he speaks some Spanish, he's never thought of himself as a Mexican national. Recently married, DeLeon works as an electrician's apprentice in Orange County. Except for the juvenile case and the license problems, DeLeon had stayed out of trouble.

But this time, deputies identified DeLeon as undocumented and he found himself being deported.

In Tijuana, outside the border station, DeLeon stared at his cell phone, trying to figure out how to dial inside a foreign country. He was hoping to reach a distant aunt that had agreed to take him into her house.

"My whole life is over there," he said, gesturing toward the United States. "I don't even have a Mexican ID."

Just beyond the border gate, as tourists and others walk by, groups of criminal deportees are putting the laces back onto their shoes. Most quickly start emptying the plastic bags that contain their possessions.

Those who have been deported before say the plastic bags and deportation papers are a dead give-away to the Tijuana police, who many deportees and human rights activists accuse of harassing and robbing deportees.

Tijuana Police Subcommander Blanca Torres Gallego, 45, said instances of harassment and robbery are known to occur. But she said most police check on the deportees because they have become part of a petty crime wave in Tijuana.

The human rights activists working with deportees at the gate advise them to go to the shelters mainly because they issue an ID card, which will help them avoid jail if stopped by local police. Well-behaved deportees can stay up to two weeks.

But because many of the shelters are run by church groups – meaning no alcohol, tobacco, drugs or sex – many criminal deportees end up renting motel rooms in the city's roughest neighborhood. Those that can't afford a cheap motel room end up living on the street or along Tijuana's riverbed.

Torres Gallego heads a task force that raids neighborhoods where criminal deportees are involved in crime. She said because of their criminal records, these migrants now aren't wanted by anyone. They have no ID in the United States. No ID in Mexico. So they get shuffled from one place to another.

"It's very sad," Torres said. "They're stuck here and no society accepts them. So, many end up working with existing criminal gangs."

In some cases, the deportees end up creating their own small gangs while bonding with the bus passengers they met on the ride from Santa Ana.

Santa Ana resident Luis Aguilar, 20, got deported after he was arrested on a probation violation for possession of methamphetamine, and ended up at the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange. Aguilar arrived with $5 in his pocket and a dead cell phone. He borrowed another phone to call his mother.

"Ma, estoy aqui en Tijuana," he tells her, announcing his arrival in Mexico. She can be heard shouting instructions on the phone and Aguilar replies that he's going to find a motel room with some friends he just made. "Don't worry," he tells his mother.

But after hanging up the phone, Aguilar admits, "I don't know. I'm on my own. I've got no money."

He looks over to his new friends and begins walking toward the streets of Tijuana.

His new friends are Frank Rodriguez, 30, and Oscar Martinez, 27, both from East Los Angeles.

Rodriguez said he had just finished a five-year stint at Chino State Prison for armed robbery. Martinez said he had spent 14 months in prison for possession of a firearm.

All three walk off into the night.

GOOD PEOPLE GONE BAD?

One Wednesday afternoon in June, more than two dozen Tijuana officers descend on the dark, soot-filled tunnels that are part of the river's aqueduct. The tunnels are a quick getaway from police and provide free housing for deportees with no money or prospects.

The tunnel dwellers – with filthy faces resembling those of coal miners – see the police raid coming and quickly crawl underneath a small opening in the massive steel doors that close off the channels. It takes a dozen police officers to budge the door far enough for others to enter.

On this raid, police find a small cache of coins – most likely the yield from small holdups near the tourist section of Avenida de la Revolucion. They also find flashlights run on potatoes, mattress beds and pin-up pictures of women.

Tijuana Police Subcommander Torres Gallego said deportees also hide out in abandoned buildings and crawl spaces inside bridges and highway overpasses.

Tijuana's Minister of Public Security Luis Javier Algorry said crime in Tijuana keeps rising and getting more violent. He said many of the petty criminals tell the local beat cops they were deported from U.S. jails.

Algorry and Tijuana's Mayor Honald are demanding that both the Mexican and U.S. governments come up with a better system. They want local police to interview criminal deportees before they walk off into the streets of Tijuana. They want to check them for prior offenses in Mexico. They also want deportees to be sent all the way back to their native states of origin, instead of being set loose on the border.

"You've left them too close to the temptation," Algorry said. "If you leave them in Tijuana, they're only going to seek quick money to get back across."

"They're mostly good, honest people who were going to seek the American dream," Honald said.

But once they're dropped off in a strange city with no money or place to stay, many turn to crime.

"It's turning good people into bad ones," Algorry said.

El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Baja Mexico think tank specializing in border issues, has been polling deportees since the early 1990s. Their research points to one constant: Virtually all deportees say they plan to return to the United States.

Maria Eugenia Angian, a social science researcher at the Colegio, said her polling indicates that in the early 1990s, it took three attempts for a migrant to make it past the U.S. Border Patrol. That went up to five tries as border enforcement toughened, and today it stands at eight.

"It's made it tougher but it hasn't stopped it. It's just re-oriented the flow. It's all very organized," Angian said, referring to local smuggling networks. "And those with coyotes usually make it."

According to Angian and Border Patrol officials, migrants pay $1,500 to cross through the canyons with a coyote. The price for being smuggled through a border checkpoint in a vehicle is as much as $3,000.

In some cases, deportees are talking to coyotes – human smugglers – as soon as they reach the taxi stand, a few hundred yards from the gate where the DHS bus dropped them off. In others, they wind up working in Tijuana as day laborers trying to save enough money to return, either with the help of a coyote or on their own.

The U.S. Border Patrol's Jacques said some deportees go to work for the coyotes as guides or drivers. "They'll try to work off their debt to cross later," he said.

Harry Pachon, who studies immigration at the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at USC, said the growth of the coyote industry – and the criminal gangs who support it – is an outgrowth of the tougher border enforcement.

"The more successful we are in border enforcement, the more we incentivize organized crime to move in because we're creating a higher profit margin in smuggling," Pachon said.

CROSSING THROUGH EL CERRO

On a hot day in October, Jacques is patrolling the dirt roads carved through San Diego's backcountry canyons by Border Patrol plows. As he steers his Dodge, Jacques keeps an eye out for telltale signs of immigrants: empty plastic bottles, discarded clothes.

He notices a blue cap bouncing up and down below the road, in one of the deep crevices.

This is the area immigrants call El Cerro, Spanish for forest, an area near the eastern outskirts of Tijuana near the town of Tecate. It's a backcountry dominated by thick native forest, steep canyons and streams that blur border lines on maps.

Jacques stops his sport utility vehicle and sprints into the canyon after a couple trying to scurry up the rocks. He catches and handcuffs them. As he waits for another Border Patrol vehicle to pick up his catch, he interviews them and suspects they have criminal backgrounds.

Border Patrol agents run their prints and confirm it: The woman has been convicted of forgery; the man has four different drunk-driving offenses and has been formally deported once before. Both were headed for San Francisco.

On any given day, Jacques said, more than 20 percent of the illegal immigrants being caught at the Barrett Junction checkpoint in San Diego's backcountry have criminal records in the United States.

"They keep coming back," Jacques said. "You see the flavors of these people," he said, noting things like the tattoos, the shaved heads, the attitude. "And you know you're going to be seeing them later. It's a matter of when."

"We've got to find better ways of managing this," said Victor Manuel Zatarain, Tijuana's top police commander. "Until we do, we're just recycling these types of criminals."

Contact the writer: 714-796-2221 or nsantana@ocregister.com
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