Letter From Eagle Pass
Walled Off
Along one stretch of the border, the flow of illegal immigrants has nearly stopped. But it didn’t require concrete and razor wire—just a plan that officials had thought was impossible.
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To prove it, he shows me a sheet of numbers comparing apprehensions by the Eagle Pass station from the first two months of 2005 with the first two months of 2006. The results are astounding: Arrests are down by 42 percent, and apprehensions of OTMs are off a whopping 72 percent. Brazilians, who were crossing in droves last summer, have disappeared. Just as interesting, narcotics seizures over that same period went from $1.9 million in 2005 to $3.9 million in 2006, a 105 percent increase. That is also because of OS II. “When you had catch and release, it would take agents as much as two hours to process each alien,” Clark says. “They had to fill out thirty to forty pages of forms. You had to transport them, babysit them, feed them nine hundred meals a day. Who does that best serve? The narcotics smuggler, because there is less manpower on patrol.” Under the new program, illegals are arrested and taken immediately to jail, then to the courthouse, which shifts most of the paperwork and babysitting away from the field agents.
As I drive with Clark along dirt roads and canebrake near the riverbanks south of town, it does seem as though the border is under control. That is a far cry from the year 2000, when illegals were running loose in the streets of Eagle Pass and 81,000 people were apprehended (this year that number will be considerably less than 30,000). Just last year, when OTMs crossed the river by the hundreds daily, they happily surrendered to the Border Patrol because they knew they would be released. Some even clamored to be the first to get into the Suburbans to catch a ride to the station. Now there is not only the tough prosecution policy but also an enormous technological investment in pole-mounted cameras, sensors, and other surveillance equipment, which allow the Border Patrol to identify practically all river crossers.
In addition to the drop in apprehensions (the main measure of how many people are actually crossing the Rio Grande), both Clark and his superiors report a noticeable boost in morale for the Border Patrol, with no increase in manpower. “Our agents have a mandate to secure the border, and this is allowing them to do that,” says Michael DeBruhl, an assistant chief patrol agent in the Del Rio sector. “The situation we had before has completely ceased to exist.” Still, there is no proof that they can make it work on a large scale, with all of the bureaucratic collaboration that implies and all of the money it will require. As with other successful local border initiatives in the past decade, tightening in one sector means failure in another, and the Yuma, Arizona, area of the border is now experiencing a major surge in illegal border crossings. But there is reason to believe that prosecution works. A second offense may result in a felony—meaning up to twenty years in prison—and for Mexicans looking to support their families with periodic work in the United States, that is a long time with no earnings. For residents of Central and South America who have spent thousands of dollars getting to the country, it is an economic disaster.
OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS, no resident of Eagle Pass has been more affected by the flood of immigrants than Father Jim Loiacono, the pastor of a tidy, brown-brick Catholic church near the border called Our Lady of Refuge. Known to everyone as Father Jim, he is short, bespectacled, passionate, and unconventional. He is also famous as the priest who shelters illegals and as the keeper of a now-celebrated fiberglass statue of the crucified Jesus that was found in the Rio Grande last year. Because the statue was, in Father Jim’s words, “wet, homeless, and without papers,” he named it Cristo Indocumentado—the Undocumented Christ. The story was covered by Telemundo, appeared in media all over Latin America, and is seen as a minor miracle by many Catholics, who visit the church by the thousands. In the past few years, Father Jim’s church has been full of illegals, often arriving shivering and hungry and sleeping in his pews and church hall. There were so many of them, he said, “that we had to limit the time they could stay to three days.” But those days are gone. Since the start of OS II, hardly any immigrants land on his doorstep. “The dropoff has been amazing,” Father Jim said. “Very dramatic. To give you an example, on New Year’s Day 2005, we had twenty-four undocumented people here. On January 1, 2006, we had nobody. Now we are getting just a trickle.”
Most of the people who showed up at his door were OTMs who had been caught by the Border Patrol and then released pending a future hearing. Father Jim and his nuns and several parishioners provided clothing, food, free telephone calls, and help getting money from relatives through Western Union. “People were so desperate and so needy,” he said. “They would arrive frozen or with cactus needles in them. We couldn’t just sit here and do nothing.” Eagle Pass, as it turned out, had become known all over Latin America as a place that more or less automatically released OTMs. The numbers of such people hit record levels in 2005. Known criminals would be held and prosecuted, as would people who had been caught one too many times crossing the border. Almost everyone else went free.
But OS II means that such people are no longer being released. Instead, they are being hauled in handcuffs to Del Rio, fifty miles upstream, where they are swept up into the mass arraignments that have become commonplace at the federal courthouse. The few stragglers Father Jim now sees are mostly people from Central America who somehow made it through the formidable riverbank dragnets. On the day I went to his church, he was harboring two such people, a Honduran woman named Maria and her seven-year-old son. Her husband, a legal immigrant working in Florida, had paid a coyote $6,000 to get the two of them through Mexico and across the U.S. border. She and her son nearly suffocated in a trailer in southern Mexico and were later abandoned by the coyote in Piedras Negras, the pleasant Mexican town of more than 200,000 across the river from Eagle Pass. They crossed the river at midday and were given a ride to Our Lady of Refuge by a Good Samaritan. Under the new rules, the two would not be prosecuted or thrown into jail (because of the child) but would be detained for two to three weeks under another tough new policy, known as “expedited removal.” Then they would be flown back to Honduras, $6,000 lighter and no closer to reuniting with Maria’s husband. “We are really flummoxed about what to do at this point,” said Father Jim, who had not told the Border Patrol about his guests. “We just don’t know.”
For now, one of Our Lady of Refuge’s most important missions has become suddenly irrelevant, and Father Jim confessed to mixed emotions on the subject. “The new policy has made life quieter, in a certain sense,” he said. “I do think it is right to control the border, but we also have to be conscious of our duty as Christians.” Unless something changes, he said he may have to consider what to do with money he has received to provide food and clothing for illegals, much of it through a collection box next to the statue of the Cristo Indocumentado. If the Border Patrol has its way, that day may come very soon.
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