Border crossings shift back to California routes

updated 11:49 a.m. ET Nov. 30, 2008

TIJUANA, Mexico - In a flash the two men were over the double fence and into the San Diego parking lot.

As a waiting pickup truck sped them away, the smuggler who boosted them over the 15-foot  walls scrambled toward Mexico.

Border Patrol agents could only tag Juan Garcia's black sweatshirt with pepper spray bullets as he escaped back over the wall to Tijuana, red-eyed and coughing but $30 richer for a few seconds of daring labor.

It's just another night along the most heavily guarded stretch of U.S.-Mexico frontier, where Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal crossers have increased 28 percent since 2005 — even as apprehensions have dropped nearly 40 percent border-wide over the same period. While illegal crossings are impossible to count, experts look to Border Patrol apprehensions as the best indicator of migrant traffic.

Booming business for daredevils
The Tijuana area's surprising increase is a booming business for cut-rate daredevils like Garcia, who are willing to try almost anything to get their clients across.

"I'll get you a bicycle, and I'll throw you over the fence with the bike," said part-time smuggler Giovanni Lopez, 28, after watching Garcia climb over. "But I'll also get you a little helmet and everything, so the Border Patrol thinks you're...what's the word in English? Exercising.

"And I cross over with you until a certain point, and I come back like this," he said, brushing away his tracks with an imaginary tree branch.

The Border Patrol's San Diego Sector — which covers 60 miles (97 kilometers) of border from the Pacific Ocean through strip malls and shanty towns into a boulder-strewn desert — is no stranger to such cat-and-mouse games. But its recent growth in traffic is driven by a curious convergence of strategies by both immigrants and the U.S. officials who chase them.

Analysts say the migrants encountering ever-increasing enforcement in the Arizona desert are bouncing back to California's traditional smuggling corridors, which offer shorter, cooler treks to cities and highways. The Border Patrol, meanwhile, takes migrants caught in Arizona to San Diego for deportation, hoping to break their ties to desert smugglers and daring them to try again against the border's toughest fences and highest concentration of agents.

"We're getting the right mix of personnel, technology and infrastructure there in San Diego, which allows us to take on that kind of surge," said Border Patrol spokesman Jason Ciliberti.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also is adding a growing number of deportees from the country's interior to the Tijuana corridor, where they quickly try to return to the lives they left up north. Immigration authorities removed a record 349,000 illegal immigrants in 2008, a 21 percent increase over last year and a 77 percent jump since 2005.

It's impossible to divine the split in Tijuana-area traffic among new arrivals choosing California over Arizona, apprehended migrants transferred between the two and deported illegal residents now trying to get back.

No specific deportation statistics
The Border Patrol declined to release numbers of migrant detainees moved from Arizona to Tijuana since it started relocating them in May, and immigration authorities do not release its deportation statistics by repatriation point.

But other indicators are much clearer. In Arizona, increased enforcement and Operation Streamline — which slaps illegal crossers with criminal charges and possible jail time — have proven to be a sharp deterrent in the Border Patrol's Tucson and Yuma Sectors.

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