Assaults on border agents double in '05

Mike Madden

Republic Washington Bureau
Nov. 24, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Assaults on U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Tucson and Yuma sectors averaged about one a day in the past year, and the number of attacks there more than doubled compared with the previous year.

Nationwide, the number of assaults nearly doubled, with attacks on agents based in Arizona making up more than half the incidents.

From Oct. 1, 2004, to Sept. 30, the Border Patrol registered 687 assaults on its agents, up from 349 during the same period along the Southwest and Canadian borders. All but one of the attacks occurred on the Southwest border, officials said. In Tucson and Yuma, there were 365 assaults during the past fiscal year, up from 179 the year before.

The increase reflects the growing influence of organized criminal syndicates in border trafficking, officials said, and the higher profits involved in smuggling migrants across the border for as much as $2,000 per trip.

"Smuggling organizations have now shifted resources to areas that are very rural and isolated, and with that the prices that the smugglers are charging the aliens now rivals drug smuggling," said Border Patrol spokesman Mario Villarreal, based in Washington. "It's a big business."

Federal law enforcement officials told Congress last week that drug cartels from Mexico have gotten much more aggressive in smuggling drugs and people across the border, hiring local gangs on both sides of the international line and arming members with assault rifles, grenades and other weapons.

So far this fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, Arizona agents have logged 32 assaults, mostly in the Tucson sector.

For agents, the spike in violence means that their job is increasingly dangerous.

Attacks part of routine

"That's always going through the back of your mind. Even if they don't kill you with the rock, they could knock you out and take your weapon," said Jim Hawkins, a Border Patrol agent in Nogales for most of the past six years.

Hawkins said that he has had rocks thrown at him so often on patrol that it almost has become routine.

"We always knew it was a dangerous job to begin with," he said. "Every day you put that uniform on, you've really got to have it in the back of your head that you have to take care of yourself if you want to make it home."

Officials said the increased violence is a side effect of the Border Patrol's effort to curtail illegal crossings.

They said the crackdown is causing frustrated smugglers to use attacks to create diversions so they can slip across the border.

But the president of the union representing Border Patrol agents blamed the agency's tactics for the attacks and said the violence doesn't mean the government is getting better control of the border.

Violence outpaces hiring

"They have adopted a strategy of placing us in very close proximity to the border, where essentially we're sitting ducks," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents about 10,000 agents.

The agency has put more officers on the job in the past few years, though the increase in violence has outpaced hiring. At the beginning of fiscal year 2004, there were 10,675 agents. Now there are 11,200.

To deter smugglers, agents frequently are deployed right next to the border in fixed positions in some sectors.

Assaults of all kinds increased last year, both in Arizona and along the rest of the Southwest border. The attack in the last fiscal year outside the Southwest involved a shooting of an agent from the Grand Forks, N.D., sector.

Armed with rocks

Agents say they frequently are subjected to grapefruit-size rocks being thrown at their trucks from the Mexican side of the border.

Trucks carrying drugs or migrants have tried to ram Border Patrol vehicles when the agents attempt to stop the vehicles.

And shootings are becoming more frequent, with 45 in the Tucson and Yuma sectors in fiscal year 2005, up from 15 in 2004.

Two agents from Nogales were shot in an ambush as they tracked drug smugglers through the desert last on June 30 in one of the year's most serious assaults. Both survived and are recovering, but neither is back on duty.

Agents increasingly use "war wagons," heavy-duty trucks designed to protect against rocks, and carry small plastic capsules filled with pepper powder and fired from a special gun as a non-lethal alternative to shooting at people trying to attack them.