Illegal border passage more perilous

AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — Georgina Salinas thought the smuggler would get her to California.

Her husband was in Yuba City, laid up with a broken foot after a ladder collapsed while he was harvesting olives. She needed to get north to take his place in the fields and make money.

On a February night, she and a half-dozen other migrants prepared to climb a ladder over the border fence into Arizona. As they waited for the right time, Salinas said, "One of the 'coyotes' raped a woman right in front of me, inside a car."

The woman, so desperate to reach the United States, didn't fight back.

Since the federal government brought in the National Guard to help tighten controls along the Mexican border two years ago, reports show fewer people are crossing. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says seizures of migrants dropped 20 percent at the border between 2006 and 2007, from 1,072,000 people to 858,000 last year.

Those migrants still determined to cross are increasingly vulnerable. Many of the traditional coyotes who would shepherd migrants all the way to their destination will no longer risk a crossing, and they've been replaced by a more transient, more desperate breed. Smugglers are "getting frustrated because they don't have carte blanche now," said Jesus Rodriguez, an agent based in the Border Patrol's Tucson office.

He oversees the stretch of border that cuts between Agua Prieta and Douglas, Ariz., where Salinas and her group crossed before being captured and sent back to Mexico.

In El Paso, Texas, 260 miles east of Agua Prieta, Border Patrol agent Joe Romero said fly-by-night smugglers who prey on naive migrants are flourishing.

In the past, he said, smuggling networks were more village-based, and coyotes were less likely to abuse migrants because they had reputations to maintain.

"The original guides weren't even in this for the money," Romero said. "They were doing it for their neighbors."

Salinas and several men from her town in Mexico's Veracruz state said they didn't know the smugglers who passed through their town scouting for customers. Through word of mouth, though, they heard that they were trustworthy and would charge $2,000 to get them all the way to Yuba City.

One of the traffickers told the migrants to meet him in Tulancingo in the neighboring state of Hidalgo, Salinas said. He asked each of them for hundreds of dollars' worth of pesos up front to cover bus fare and other costs of getting them to the Arizona border.

Once at the border, across from Douglas, Ariz., other smugglers took over, driving them to a border fence. The men were ordered to get out of the car, Salinas said, and one of the coyotes, who was drunk, attacked another woman in front of Salinas.

Salinas tearfully recounted how the victim had complied and how the others did nothing.

They had invested so much money by then, she said, and were so close that they stayed with the smugglers and followed their instructions to scale a ladder and jump to the other side.

Roman Garcia, who was traveling with Salinas, looked ashamed as the migrants discussed what they had witnessed.

It used to be easier, he said. He'd gotten to California once before, several years ago. Within a month of pruning grapevines in Napa, laboring in tomato fields west of Sacramento and picking melons, persimmons and other fruits and vegetables, he was able to pay off the $1,200 fee the smugglers had charged.

It wasn't long after he, Salinas and the others crossed over this time that Border Patrol agents found them and sent them back to Agua Prieta.

Like other migrants caught along that stretch of border, they gathered at a migrant shelter run by the Catholic Church.

Volunteers at the refuge, called the Center for Attention to the Migrant Exodus, say migrants' stories are getting grimmer.

Each time the United States has tightened security at the border, starting in the mid-1990s, more deaths have resulted, said volunteer Rosa Soto Moreno.

Last year, even with fewer people trying to cross the border, just as many migrants died from exposure, drownings, accidents or killings. Mexican media reported government tallies showing that about 450 Mexicans died on the border last year, compared with 425 in 2006 and 443 in 2005.

Migrants who make it over the border between Agua Prieta and Douglas often end up in Phoenix, where they are hidden in safe houses until transported to their destinations, police said.

Officers say the safehouses are providing new revenue for smugglers. Phoenix police rescued more than 550 victims last year from these drop spots. Smugglers had been holding them hostage until family members paid extra for their release.

"Some of what we're seeing is the unintended consequence of tightening the border," said Alfonso Pena, special agent in charge of investigations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Phoenix.

Rodriguez, the agent in Tucson, believes the Border Patrol has deterred some smugglers by working with Mexico in a joint program called Operation Oasis. Since 2005, U.S. officials have passed onto Mexican officials the cases of more than 600 suspected smugglers whom U.S. attorneys felt they wouldn't be able to successfully prosecute.

Mexico's justice system is flawed, some agents say, but smugglers can sit in jail so long awaiting trial that it takes them out of circulation.

Up in Yuba City, Salinas' husband said he has no more use for smugglers. After working here illegally for four years, he said he's ready to go back to his wife. And he doesn't want her to try again to cross the border.

Their grown son, also an illegal immigrant, will stay, because his wages support his brother, who attends a university in Mexico.

"He's a very good boy, very religious," Georgina Salinas said of her son in Yuba City. "He has sacrificed for his brother, to keep him in college."