Moves on land may push migrants into Pacific

updated 9:49 p.m. ET March 13, 2008

SAN DIEGO - The migrants board rickety boats in the dark, taking orders from inexperienced seamen. From sandy Mexican shores popular with weekend tourists, they can see downtown San Diego's lights when the sky is clear.

Smugglers who charge them about $4,000 each for the illegal crossing often use two boats with different crews for the short trip, forcing them to change at sea, authorities say. That way, the hired hands will have less to tell if they are captured.

U.S. officials and academics suspect heightened enforcement on land is pushing migrants to gamble their lives on the kind of dangerous voyages — on flimsy watercraft and with little regard for winter — more commonly associated with Cubans and Haitians braving the Florida Straits.

"Anytime you put pressure on a point along the border, the traffic moves somewhere else," said Juan Munoz Torres, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. "The only thing left is the ocean."

A spate of recent captures and discoveries of abandoned boats off California's coast climaxed shortly after sunrise Wednesday with a dramatic example of the increased risks that migrants are taking.

Spotted from cruise ship
The crew of a pleasure cruise saw people waving from a 24-foot skipjack adrift about 12 miles off the San Diego coast and 20 miles north of the Mexican border. The cruise ship called a private towing firm, which alerted authorities to the 11 men and four women aboard a boat meant to carry far fewer.

The 14 Mexicans and one Salvadoran told rescuers they had been afloat for three days without food or water. Some were dehydrated and sunburned, but no one was seriously hurt or killed. Authorities say the boat was leaking water and hardly anyone on board knew how to swim.

"They repeatedly expressed how they feared for their lives and thought nobody was going to rescue them," said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Some of the people on the boat told authorities they left Playas de Rosarito, a city of 130,000 just south of the border, and changed boats at Mexico's uninhabited Coronado Islands, according to ICE. The engine died 20 minutes into the second leg of the trip.

Three men arrested
Three Mexican men on the boat were arrested on suspicion of immigrant smuggling and were to be arraigned Friday.

Smugglers have ferried immigrants for years, often favoring summer months and daylight hours, when it's easier to blend in with fishing boats, sailboats and other recreational watercraft on San Diego's crowded waters.

Since last summer, however, U.S. authorities in San Diego have found about 20 boats apparently used for immigrant smuggling — some abandoned, some with people on board. Several boats have washed ashore in Del Mar, a small suburb of million-dollar homes, 30 miles north of the border, with expansive beaches and easy highway access.

No deaths or serious injuries have been reported in those attempts.

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