Federal program sends thousands of immigrants packing
BY SARA INÉS CALDERÓN
The Brownsville Herald

Despite billions of dollars spent and thousands of people working, undocumented immigrants are still able to cross the border into the United States.

Despite checkpoints and interior enforcement, they make their lives here, mostly undetected and undisturbed.

It’s often when they break the law and land in jail that federal agents step in. The Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) use the Border Patrol Criminal Alien Apprehension Program, or BORCAP, to detain undocumented immigrants accused of crimes, other than entering the country illegally.

In 2005, the BORCAP unit of Cameron County interviewed more than 12,700 prisoners at local jails and found almost 600 were undocumented immigrants classified as felons or criminals.

_____

Despite so much attention, border remains a death trap

S.A. writer Robert Flynn spent six days on the Arizona-Mexico border, one of the battlefields of the immigration struggle. This is what he saw.
San Antonio Express-News

Senior Border Patrol agent Jim Hawkins and I sat on a low hill south of Tucson overlooking thick brush surrounded by distant mountains.

Three groups of eight people had been seen in the brush, and agents on horseback were looking for them. A local woman stopped her car to tell Hawkins that she had seen two suspicious cars near where the groups had been spotted.

Hawkins waited to intercept the cars, monitoring the radio. A helicopter was coming to help locate the fragmenting groups.