On tighter US border with Mexico, violence rises

US law officers and illegal border-crossers are under increased attack, as beefed-up patrols cut into smugglers' illicit trade.

from the April 24, 2007 edition

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Law-enforcement officials suggest that several attacks on illegal immigrants this year were perpetrated either by drug smugglers trying to rip off their rivals or by bajadores – bandits – trying to hijack shipments of people with the intent of holding them hostage to extort money from their families. Sometimes the attacks are a botched mix of both, resulting in the deaths of apparently unsuspecting immigrants who had hoped to buy their way to a better life.

In February, for example, on at least five occasions armed men attacked vehicles along Interstate 10, the freeway leading north from Tucson, that were allegedly transporting undocumented immigrants to the Phoenix metro area. One of the most brazen occurred in Ahwatukee Foothills, a suburb south of Phoenix. Gunmen commandeered a van at a stoplight and kidnapped five passengers.

Officials and outside experts say the crime spike is part of the so-called balloon effect that occurs during border clampdowns. When the government puts the squeeze on one problem area, border-crossers and smugglers shift elsewhere – usually to desolate, unguarded places, such as the Arizona desert.

Indeed, that's how the Arizona border became the busiest illegal entry point into the United States. After Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) declared a state of emergency in border counties in 2005, the US government moved to check trafficking there. It's doubling the number of border patrol agents and is installing fences, cameras, and sensors as well as deploying helicopters and unmanned drones. Of the 6,000 National Guard troops sent to the southwest border since last summer, 2,400 are posted in Arizona.

Those efforts are paying off, say border patrol officials. They note a decrease in apprehensions of undocumented immigrants, saying stepped-up vigilance is deterring large numbers of people from trying to cross. Between October and March, border patrol agents apprehended 68 percent fewer illegal immigrants in the Yuma sector (a 125-mile-wide swath of desert stretching from just inside California to westernmost Arizona) than they did in the corresponding six-month period a year before. Those in the Tucson sector, which abuts the Yuma sector at the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and stretches 261 miles east to New Mexico, caught 14 percent fewer illegal entrants. Apprehensions were down 29 percent across the entire Southwest border for the same period.

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