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Sunday, July 27, 1997

INS to begin Texas border crackdown, add 270 agents

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) - A new crackdown on illegal immigration will funnel hundreds of new agents and high-tech equipment to the Texas-Mexico border, federal officials announced Saturday.

Under Operation Rio Grande, the Immigration and Naturalization Service will dispatch 69 agents to Brownsville from other parts of the country by Aug. 25, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner announced.

By January, more than 100 agents will be in place in Brownsville, with a total of 270 new agents in the McAllen sector of the Border Patrol.

Illegal immigrant captures along the 280-mile stretch of border from Padre Island west to the small Starr County town of Roma has increased 21 percent in the past six months.

Meissner said Operation Rio Grande is starting in the lower Rio Grande Valley because "this is the part of Texas most heavily pressured right now by both illegal immigration and illegal drug crossings. As we get control in this area, we'll then begin to spread toward Laredo and further west."

By the end of this fiscal year, INS will have increased the agent strength in Texas by 53 percent over the past four years from 1,756 to 2,693, Meissner said.

And more agents might be on the way in 1998. Legislation that would authorize another 1,000 new Border Patrol agents, more than half of whom would be stationed in Texas, is pending in Congress.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, hailed Saturday's announcement as "a solid down payment" on plans to beef up the Border Patrol in Texas.

"Washington has a clear duty to strengthen law enforcement efforts here," she said. "We have to keep the pressure on."

In addition to more manpower, Operation Rio Grande will enhance technology already in place along the Texas-Mexico border, providing additional night scopes, electronic fingerprinting equipment and additional lighting, particularly in downtown areas along the Rio Grande.

Operation Rio Grande continues the mission of Operation Hold the Line, initiated four years ago in San Diego and El Paso. At the time, those areas were the two most popular border crossing points for illegal immigrants.

But since then, the McAllen sector has seen its illegal immigrant apprehensions skyrocket. Agents now handle 20 percent of the immigrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border, second only to San Diego, and 24 percent of border drug seizures.

"We now have the critical mass of resources that we need here in order to put tactics into place that have proven to be effective elsewhere," Ms. Meissner said.

With the crackdown in the Rio Grande Valley, there is a concern that undocumented immigrants will move northwest. Dan Kane, INS spokesman in El Paso, said his agency would be monitoring the El Paso border in the next few months and would dispatch more agents to those ports of entry if certain "triggers" occur.

The triggers include a dramatic increase in any of the following: fraudulent documents or people falsely claiming U.S. citizenship, immigrant or drug smuggling, pedestrians or vehicles running through ports of entry, officer assaults, undocumented street beggars or vendors, citizen complaints, protests, bridge blockades, damage to border barricades, or a significant change in the political or economic situation in Mexico.

"These are the key triggers we will be looking at," Kane said. Send a Letter to the Editor about This Story | Start or Join A Discussion about This Story
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