Human smuggling on the rise South of the Border - CoverUps.com

January 2008

Who’s watching our water borders with Mexico?

An alarming article in TheVoiceOfSandiego.org, claims that over the last seven months, approximately 15 boats have either washed up or been intercepted off the coast of San Diego County by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

 

• Some of those boats, which were probably launched not far south of the border fence, have been abandoned unceremoniously late at night, on well-populated beaches in neighborhoods like La Jolla and Del Mar.
• Immigration experts and security officials said the transporting of contraband humans and drugs through the currents and waves of San Diego’s coastal waters seems to have attracted a new breed of bootleggers willing to take greater risks for ever-swelling pay-outs.
• As human smuggling rings face increased security measures on dry land, more and more gangs might push their operations west, onto the ocean, immigration experts said.
• Since Operation Gatekeeper was launched in 1994, increased policing of San Diego’s borders has forced smugglers to come up with exotic methods of getting people into the United States.
• Year-round Coast Guard patrol boats join forces with Customs and Border Protection vessels to cruise the coastline between Oceanside and Tijuana, looking for suspicious craft and performing random checks. In the winter, those craft are usually few and far between.
• Though he stressed that smugglers who use boats still represent a tiny minority of people-runners, Clark-Alfaro said he’s seen a clear uptick in marine-based smuggling.
• Gordon Hanson, director of the Center on Pacific Economies at University of California, San Diego, said that bringing people across the border illegally may have become so profitable that it’s attracted drug smuggling rings into the game.

Get The Full Scoop

Human Smuggling by Sea
By Will Carless
Voice Staff Writer

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Our Take

Increased scrutiny of land border crossing can’t come at the expense of watching our waters at night. This is a no-brainer and it would only make sense that more human smugglers would move to other methods to accomplish their illegal goals. The Coast Guard should ramp up its efforts to ensure the waters don’t become the next best thing for these smugglers.