A lack of solid data on what deters illegal border crossings has been one of the biggest hang-ups as the U.S. Senate debates an immigration and border-security bill. The Department of Homeland Security can say how much it spent last year on border enforcement ($18 billion). It can say how many crossers agents apprehended at the border (364,768).
Homeland Security officials admit their data is much fuzzier, though, when it comes to how many got away and to what worked and what didn’t: More agents? More drones? More workplace enforcement?

Arizona’s economy would get a shot of adrenaline from the $4.5billion in border-security spending in the immigration bill introduced Wednesday in the Senate, state business leaders say.

At the same time, the further militarization of the border in the bill, along with what one federal public defender called a “zero-tolerance policy” against border crossers, raises red flags for civil-rights and immigrant-advocacy groups.

The bill would fund more fences, more Border Patrol agents, more drones and more surveillance technology along the whole Southwest border, but those efforts would focus on what it terms the three “high risk” sectors (out of nine) now seeing the most apprehensions of undocumented migrants: the Tucson Sector and the Rio Grande and Laredo sectors in Texas.

As a result, southeastern Arizona would see new jobs and new construction tied to tighter security.

“It’s a huge economic plus for Arizona,” said Glenn Hamer, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “How much of an effect is tough to say, but the commitments to secure the Tucson Sector come with a lot of new dollars, and those dollars will wind up in the southern Arizona economy.”

The region also could see a boost in legal cross-border trade and traffic from increased Customs and Border Protection staffing intended to speed up legal border crossings, said Erik Lee, associate director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies at Arizona State University.

“Border communities have been asking for increases in Customs and Border Protection staffing for many years,” Lee said. The bill would add 3,500 more CBP officers, who work at ports of entry, over the next four years.

“This is a good opportunity for staffing to catch up to where it needs to be to reduce the bottlenecks at the ports of entry for legitimate trade and travel,” Lee said.

The bill, The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, is a sweeping piece of legislation that would significantly beef up border security to prevent illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border, and prevent unauthorized workers from getting jobs.

It would also provide a program allowing the estimated 11million immigrants in the country illegally to gain legal status and eventually permanent residency and citizenship. The bill would also overhaul the nation’s legal immigration system to make it more responsive to economic growth and labor needs at both the high and low ends of the labor market.

It provides significant money for border enforcement. In addition to the CBP officers, the bill promises $250 million over the next five years for more federal magistrates, prosecutors, defenders and translators in Tucson. That money would support the bill’s call to more than triple prosecutions of illegal border crosses in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, to up to 210 a day.

But Heather Williams, first assistant federal public defender for the Arizona district, said she doesn’t think $50 million more a year is enough to detain and try so many people in a constitutional, fair manner, given that neither the courthouse nor the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Tucson has the capacity to hold and handle that many immigration cases a day. “We absolutely have concerns about issues with ineffective assistance of counsel,” she said.

Human-rights and migrant advocates also raised concerns about the bill’s goal of stopping or apprehending 90 percent of border crossers in the “high risk” sectors, those with more than 30,000 apprehensions a year. That effort, they say, would drive more border crossers into dangerous territories, and into the hands of the drug cartels that increasingly control crossing routes.

“More and more people are dying on the border already, even though immigration is down,” said Juanita Molina, executive director of the Tucson-based Border Action Network, an immigrant-rights advocacy group. “This is a very heavy-handed response to economic migrants, and not proportionate to the risk they pose; the risk is from drug cartels, and that’s where the focus should be.”

Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, while emphasizing he hadn’t read the bill yet, said he likes what he’s heard so far — especially about spending included to improve radio communications along the border, to improve coordination among federal, state, tribal and local law enforcement, and to help local law enforcement tackle drug and human smuggling.

Ranchers contacted largely echoed those sentiments.

“It sounds pretty darn good from my perspective,” said Jim Chilton, a southern Arizona rancher reached in Washington as he awaited a meeting with Sen. Jeff Flake, one of the four Republican sponsors of the measure.

Chilton’s grazing leases include a 51/2-mile stretch of the border. He questioned only the bill’s 90 percent goal for the busiest border sectors. To him, that isn’t ambitious enough.

“I think they could do almost 100 percent,” he said.

The bill would give the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary 180 days from the date the bill is enacted to submit a border-security strategy for achieving effective control in these high-risk sectors, and to submit a border-fencing strategy to identify where more fences, infrastructure or technology may be needed.

The bill would appropriate $3 billion for:

Surveillance and detection capacities developed or used by the Department of Defense.

An unspecified number of additional Border Patrol agents (who work between legal ports of entry) and the 3,500 more CBP officers.

More surveillance, drones, aircraft and staff and equipment needed to use them.

And it would appropriate $1.5billion for more fencing, infrastructure and technology.

The DHS secretary must submit the completed strategies to Congress before any undocumented immigrants adjust their legal status to “registered provisional immigrant.” And registered provisional immigrants could not adjust to lawful-permanent-resident status until DHS certifies to the president and Congress that the strategies have been carried out and the equipment and personnel they call for deployed.

DHS would have five years to meet the 90 percent goal; otherwise, the bill would create a border-security commission. Its members would include the four border-state governors (or their appointees), and border-security experts appointed by the president and the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate. The bill would allot $2 billion for DHS to carry out the recommendations of the commission for any changes in staffing, technology or infrastructure needed to meet the goal.

The bill would authorize deploying National Guard members to the Southwest border to help build fences and checkpoints, operate ground-based and aerial surveillance systems and provide radio communication between Customs and Border Protection and state, local and tribal law-enforcement agencies.

The bill also would:

Provide funding for more Border Patrol stations and operating bases near the border.

Authorize deploying Defense Department radar equipment.

Strengthen prohibitions on inappropriate use of force and require periodic retraining of all CBP personnel on the prohibitions.

Allow DHS, CBP and Border Patrol access to all federal lands to capture drug traffickers, human smugglers and others.

That last provision concerns environmental advocates.

“The Border Patrol already has complete access to all federal lands, and is exempt from restrictions that apply to everyone else,” said Dan Millis, coordinator of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign.

All agents currently are required to do, he said, is to notify local land managers where they’ve gone off-road so plants and soils can be rehabilitated.

“Depending on how the language is interpreted, the danger is that the Border Patrol could be granted carte blanche to run roughshod over public lands without even consulting land managers such as the National Park Service or National Forest Service,” he said.

Several ranchers questioned how the 90 percent figure will be verified, saying they hope the additional surveillance capacities called for in the bill will clarify how many people are getting through. Three ranchers in the Tucson district said they’ve seen an increase in border crossers in recent months.

“These are individuals, not the usual drug traffic,” said Bill McDonald. “We’ve got people coming up to the house, asking for help, that we hadn’t seen in a while.”

Border Patrol figures for the Tucson Sector show apprehensions through March are 2 percent below a year ago.

At the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that advocates for a lower level of immigration, Steven Camarota, director of research, sees another issue.

“The border is not as big a deal as people think,” he said. “The border is only one part of one piece of a larger puzzle. We know that between 30 and 50percent of illegal immigrants are overstays, not illegal border crossers.”

Then, too, Camarota said, reflecting a common view among skeptics, “we’ve heard a lot of promises before.” He said that the bill shouldn’t allow any regularization of status until after enforcement goals are met.

“I see this compromise as quite reasoned,” said Doris Meissner, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner who now is a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

She called the emphasis on border security disproportionate, but said that “on what’s required to get immigration reform to this point and get a bipartisan group together, this border-security piece of it has been essential. And it has come out in a way that can be met, that’s not designed to frustrate the bigger enterprise. I’ll be very surprised if the administration raises any serious objections when it testifies on Friday.”

A new witness and new evidence seem to bolster the case that a Mexican teen shot to death by the Border Patrol in October in Nogales, Sonora, was walking down the street at the time he was killed — not, as the Border Patrol has maintained, throwing rocks over the fence at agents.

The new information also suggests that more than one agent may have opened fire on Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16. That information arrived as the family of the youth held a march on Wednesday in Nogales to protest what they called the FBI and Border Patrol’s “veil of silence” about the killing.

Both the bureau and the patrol have declined to comment on the boy’s death, citing an ongoing FBI investigation. They have declined to identify the agent or agents involved and have declined to release a surveillance video of the incident, shot by cameras mounted above the border fence.

Agents, along with Nogales, Ariz., police, were chasing two men they believed were fleeing back to Mexico after climbing over the fence to the U.S. side with drugs. The agents said rocks began flying over the fence at them as they tried to arrest the men climbing back over the fence.

The new witness, Isidro Alvarado, a private security guard, said on the night of Oct. 10, he was walking about 20 feet behind Elena Rodriguez down Calle Internacional, which runs parallel to the border fence, when two other youths suddenly ran past them. Then, he said, he heard gunshots from two separate places by the fence and saw Elena Rodriguez fall.

Alvarado said his brother, a Nogales police officer, persuaded him to come forward and speak to the Sonora Attorney General’s Office. Alvarado’s statements were first reported by Nogales radio station XENY. He also spoke at a news conference Wednesday in Nogales, Sonora.

Luis Parra, a Nogales, Ariz., attorney representing the Elena Rodriguez family, said he recently interviewed Alvarado and then confirmed with an attorney from the Sonora Attorney General’s Office that the first call to Nogales police reporting the shooting, immediately after it happened, came from Alvarado’s cellphone.

“But what has made the family even more distraught,” he said, “are the indications that two agents were involved in the shooting and that he (Elena Rodriguez) had to have been lying on the ground when five bullets penetrated his back.”

In a forensic scene-analysis report, investigators for the Sonora Attorney General’s Office concluded that at least five shots into Elena Rodriguez’s back must have hit him while he was lying on the sidewalk. This jibes with findings in an autopsy, previously reported byThe Arizona Republic, that all but one of the bullets that hit the boy entered from behind and most at an angle suggesting he was prone when hit.

In their forensic report, investigators also describe how they climbed the story-and-a-half-high bluff on which the border fence sits and looked through the fence as Border Patrol agents and Nogales, Ariz., police conducted their investigation on the U.S. side of the fence.

They describe an area next to the fence, cordoned off with police tape, where they counted 11 shell casings, and another taped-off area, about 28 feet away, where they could see three more casings. This seems to suggest, Parra said, that agents fired from two different spots along the fence.

A Sonora ballistics report, meanwhile, describes the nine bullets recovered by Mexican police — six from the boy’s body, and three from the street — as hollow-point, .40-caliber slugs fired from one or more polygonal-rifled guns.

Michael Haag, a forensic scientist and ballistics expert based in Albuquerque, reviewed the report. He said this is a relatively uncommon type of rifling, a type used in the Heckler & Koch P2000 handgun, among others.

That is the standard-issue Border Patrol sidearm, a spokesman confirmed.

The ballistics report said polygonal rifling, which leaves a much smoother barrel than conventional rifling, makes it harder to distinguish whether all the bullets were fired by the same gun or different guns.

“Because it leaves no good marks on the bullets, it’s very rare by forensic science to identify the bullets back to a specific gun,” Haag agreed. He added, “You can ID it sometimes, so it should be attempted.”

He also noted that each Border Patrol agent should have told the FBI whether he or she fired shots that night.

The Sonora ballistics report identified the bullets as Starfire hollow points, but Haag said the poor-quality photocopies of the bullets show cannelures — a ring that runs around the circumference of the bullet — that are not found on Starfire rounds but are consistent with the similar Federal Premium HST .40-caliber rounds.

Those are standard-issue ammunition for the H&K P2000 handgun, a Border Patrol spokesman confirmed.

The Department of Homeland Security expects shortly to complete a review of the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policy, which allows agents to fire at rock-throwers, Secretary Janet Napolitano said in an interview with The Republic last week.

There have been eight incidents in the past three years in which agents have shot and killed alleged rock-throwers, among 20 deaths caused by agents since the beginning of 2010. In all but three of those cases, the FBI investigations remain open and the Border Patrol and the DHS have declined to release any information, including the names of the agents involved.

There is a wooden bench, in Nogales, Sonora. There, migrants trying to cross north meet recent deportees, as both await aid from a local humanitarian agency. Their stories – some rueful, some desperate – share a common thread: If you can’t go legally, getting to and staying in the United States is tougher than ever.
Migrants like Manuel Gonzales, 24, say they’re looking for work, or trying to get back to what they consider their home. Gonzales was deported last year after Mesa police stopped him for driving without a license.

There is a wooden bench, in Nogales, Sonora. There, migrants trying to cross north meet recent deportees, as both await aid from a local humanitarian agency. Their stories – some rueful, some desperate – share a common thread: If you can’t go legally, getting to and staying in the United States is tougher than ever.
Migrants like Manuel Gonzales, 24, say they’re looking for work, or trying to get back to what they consider their home. Gonzales was deported last year after Mesa police stopped him for driving without a license.

U.S. southwestern border-security strategies — such as building bigger fences, imposing tougher penalties and deporting immigrants far from where they came across — are meant to discourage illegal crossings.
Instead, however, these strategies have wound up encouraging those who do cross to stay here for good, concludes a sweeping report on migration and border security released Thursday by the University of Arizona’s Center for Latin American Studies.