INS Announces Airport Crackdown to Curb Smuggling

PHOENIX — Immigration agents from across the country began round-the-clock surveillance at the Phoenix and Las Vegas airports Wednesday in an attempt to dismantle migrant smuggling networks used to dispatch immigrants to the East and Midwest.

About 100 Immigration and Naturalization Service agents are working under Operation Denial and are targeting “ruthless and unscrupulous” migrant smugglers who move paying illegal immigrants through the nation’s airports and hold them in unsanitary and dangerous “drop houses” until payment has been made, said INS Commissioner Doris Meissner.

“We are seeing increased instances of violence from alien smugglers who are putting migrants and the public at risk,” Meissner said in Phoenix.

Phoenix and Las Vegas are two top smuggling transit hubs, she said. Operation Denial took effect Wednesday morning and by midday, 67 illegal migrants had been arrested at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said Roseanne Sonchik, district director of the INS in Phoenix. Since January, 1,500 illegal entrants have been confiscated at the airport.

Meissner would not say how long Operation Denial was expected to remain in place, but said it will continue until smuggling operations are “disrupted and dismantled to the degree that INS staff can stay on top of it.”

But some human rights groups say Operation Denial will not solve the problem and will only cause increased racial profiling of innocent travelers.

“Who do you think is going to be targeted in the airports?” said Isabel Garcia, founder of Coalicion de Derechos Humanos in Tucson. “It’s going to be brown-skinned people who can’t speak English very well. There’s just no way they can tell who’s undocumented and who’s not.”

INS officials said Operation Denial will not affect legal travelers and will focus on patterns of behavior often associated with migrant smuggling such as last-minute purchases of a large number of tickets, late-night flights and boarding flights at the last minute.

About 24 INS agents have been assigned to patrol Sky Harbor and INS staff at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas has been doubled to 18, Sonchik said.

“We’re not after the victims, we’re after the smugglers,” said Karen Dorman, officer in charge at the Las Vegas INS office. “Victims have been charged a horrendous price for something they might not actually get.”

The remaining INS agents in Operation Denial will use tips from local police to concentrate on breaking up drop houses.

Smugglers, sometimes called coyotes, charge illegal immigrants about $1,500 for their services, and sometimes detain them in drop houses with boarded-up windows and no electricity or running water, Meissner said. Victims may be held there, and are sometimes abused, until relatives make further payments, she said.

The INS is also working with Mexican consular officials who will interview arrested smugglers at the Border Patrol station in Casa Grande to create a complete picture of how smuggling operations work and prosecute smugglers on both sides of the border, Meissner said.

But Garcia doubts the program will work, calling it a waste of money.

“I think anyone who is trying to make a profit will find ways around it,” Garcia said. “Whether it’s moving toward another area of the border or to other airports, they’ll find it. There’s just no way to stop this.”