July Arrests of Suspected Illegal Aliens Rise Sharply

Border Patrol agents at the San Clemente checkpoint arrested 720 people as suspected illegal aliens Sunday, and the patrol’s San Diego sector is almost certain to shatter last year’s record July roundup, officials said Tuesday.

They said the July total is expected to exceed June’s by nearly 20,000 and May’s by nearly 35,000.

“The borders are out of control,” said Harold Ezell, Western regional commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Surge After Decline

There has been a complete turnaround, he said, from the dramatic drop in illegal border crossings that occurred last November, when new immigration legislation was passed by Congress. Fears of mass arrests and deportations that existed at that time have been dispelled, Ezell said.

Sunday evening, a beefed-up, 25-member Border Patrol unit working out of the checkpoint sealed off Interestate 5 south of San Clemente and checked every vehicle going through, a practice normally suspended on Sundays because of heavy traffic, according to Michael Nicley, supervisor at the checkpoint.

In four hours, agents made more than 600 arrests before backed-up traffic forced them to dismantle the roadblock, he said. Another 120 suspected illegal aliens had been picked up earlier in the day.

Government statistics officially show that for every two illegal aliens caught, one gets through, Nicley said, but both he and Ezell put the actual ratio at closer to half and half.

The 820 Border Patrol officers in the San Diego sector, which includes Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties, have arrested more than 56,000 people this month, at a rate of 2,000 a day, Nicley said. If the daily arrest rate remains the same through Friday, it would push July’s total to 64,000, Nicley said, compared with last July’s record of 59,179. The 1985 total was 42,037, he said.

‘Biggest July Ever’

“This could be the biggest July ever,” he said.

But Nicley said a more significant statistic is the “skyrocketing” arrest total this month compared with recent monthly totals. Until July, monthly arrests had been declining by up to 60% from the 1986 totals since last November, INS spokesman Joe Flanders said.

The new immigration law, which went into effect July 1, makes it illegal for employers to hire anyone without proof that the person is a U.S. citizen or has government permission to work in this country.

Flanders cited the following figures:

In April, 34,961 arrests, down from 71,908 in April of 1986; in May, 29,080 arrests, down from 73,630 the previous year; in June, 44,039 arrests, down from 52,212 a year ago.

While many factors may have contributed to the July surge, INS officials agreed that the main reason may be that fears about the new legislation--that it would bring mass arrests, deportations and, most importantly, a reduction of jobs opportunities--have proved to be unfounded.

But Linda Wong, national director of the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Civil Rights Program, said INS is overestimating the immigrants’ news flow. She agreed that there was “a great deal of confusion” in the Mexican press after the new legislation was approved and that reports of impending deportations and arrests “created a lot of fear,” but she said that fear would hold back only those urban workers who would have seen the reports.

“The majority of (the mostly agricultural) immigrants have no idea what’s going on in the United States,” she declared.

She said the July increase is mainly attributable to historic migration patterns toward the summer harvests, patterns that have been around “since Mexico and the Southwest were one and the same.”

“You have to put the whole situation into perspective,” she added.

A recent study by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego found that two-thirds of the immigrants working illegally in Southern California industry did know the law.

Daniel Wolf, a researcher at the center, said that percentage is probably different for agricultural workers. Their ignorance, he said, could either make them more likely to ignore immigration laws or more likely to be scared off by inflated reports of reprisals.

He was careful to point out that most arrests are not of first-time border crossers and that many of those arrested are just returning to the United States from visits home. The lull in arrests may have been because aliens were not making those trips home and were “on hiatus until they figured out how the law would shake out,” he suggested.

Wolf and Wong agreed that no legislation would stop illegal immigration as long as jobs are available.

“There is not sufficient disincentive to change history and stop a 200-year-old migration pattern,” Wong said.

Half the people arrested have known where they were heading for work, Ezell said, and many of those had the names of employers who would take them on. The jobs have ranged from menial labor to high-level photography work. He would not release the names of the employers.

INS procedure, he said, will be to give identified employers a warning and “informational” call the first time. The next time they will be cited, with a fine ranging from $250 to $10,000, and possibly a jail term.

Ezell said that INS is taking the new sanctions very seriously and that the key to stopping the cross-border flood is to make sure that there is no economic incentive. Of the suspected illegal aliens interviewed by INS, more than half were on their way to Los Angeles, he said, but many were headed toward the San Joaquin Valley.

Nicley said reports have been spreading through the Mexican press that growers in Northern California and Oregon would ignore the sanctions.

Flanders agreed that the Mexican “grapevine” has been spreading word of labor shortages in the fields.

Sealing off the job flow alone will not seal off the flow of people across the border, Nicley said, because economic factors in Mexico and a permeable border caused by an understaffed Border Patrol would continue to entice Mexicans to California.

“You can’t get at the problem with a one-pronged approach,” he said. “All you’d be doing is poking holes in it.”