U.S. suspends immigrant flights back to Mexico
Written by Bob Ortega
The Arizona Republic
8:46 AM; September 11, 2012
PHOENIX —The U.S. government has temporarily stopped a
voluntary repatriation program to fly home undocumented Mexican immigrants
caught trying to enter Arizona during the summer because there aren’t enough illegal
border crossers to fill daily flights.
There have been no flights this year under the 8-year-old
program designed to reduce immigrant deaths by dissuading Mexicans caught
crossing the Arizona border from trying again in the fierce heat of summer.
Attempts to keep them going and justify the costs of the $100
million program by filling planes with deported criminals have apparently been
blocked by the Mexican government, which didn’t want violent male offenders
mixed in with women and children.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials said they are
still negotiating with the Mexican government to resume the program, though any
agreement will likely be too late for any flights this year.
The U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement have gone back to the practice of returning most immigrants
directly across the Arizona-Mexico border.
The Mexican Interior Repatriation Program had operated each
summer since 2004 under an agreement between Homeland Security and the Mexican
government aimed at reducing deaths in Arizona’s harsh deserts by deterring
apprehended immigrants from immediately crossing again.
By flying undocumented Mexican immigrants from Tucson more
than 1,100 miles south to Mexico City, rather than simply forcing them to walk
back across the border, it was believed fewer would make the trek back north
and seek out smugglers to try to lead them across again. But, as The Arizona
Republic reported last year, there have been questions about the program’s
effectiveness.
From 2004 to 2011, the government spent $90 million to $100
million to fly 125,164 undocumented immigrants back to Mexico from Tucson. The
program peaked in the summer of 2010, when 23,384 immigrants were flown back,
according to the DHS.
But last summer, with a plunge in migration that officials
attributed to the weak economy and tougher immigration enforcement, only 8,893
immigrants were repatriated. Flights carrying up to 146 people were cut to once
from twice daily last year.
With the numbers dropping, the DHS and the Mexican government
earlier this year began renegotiating the terms. Under the original deal, only
first-time crossers and families from Mexico’s interior states were eligible
for the voluntary flights.
On arrival in Mexico City, they were given bus tickets to
their hometowns. The United States paid the full cost of the program. The
Mexican Consulate in Tucson interviewed each person to make sure the return was
voluntary.
But this year, according to an Associated Press report on
Monday, Mexican officials balked at a plan by the DHS to add immigrants with
criminal convictions to the planes to make the flights more cost-effective. DHS
officials would not confirm that account.
Mexican diplomatic officials in Tucson, Phoenix and
Washington, D.C., declined to answer questions about the disagreement. In a
written statement, a spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington said the
Mexican government continues to work with the U.S. government on “measures to
prevent the loss of human life at our common border.”
Both governments have agreed to a separate program starting
next month, called the Interior Removal Initiative, under which undocumented
Mexican immigrants from across the U.S. could be flown back to Mexico. That
program would not be voluntary.
More than 1,500 border crossers have died in Arizona’s desert
over the past decade, with most of the deaths during the summer. Before the
flight program, most undocumented immigrants caught in Arizona would simply be
returned to the border, where officials would watch them cross back into
Mexico, and where, officials acknowledged, most immediately sought the help of
smugglers to try to cross again.
Critics have questioned the effectiveness of the flight
program in reducing repeated crossing attempts by immigrants.
As The Republic previously reported, Customs and Border
Protection records showed that, within months, hundreds of migrants flown south
had been caught trying to cross illegally again.
Although it appeared that the rate at which migrants tried to
cross did drop significantly, it was impossible to be certain because the
Border Patrol would not provide complete recidivism data. From 2008 to 2010, 6
to 12percent of those flown home were rearrested that summer.
A 2010 review by the Government Accounting Office concluded
that ICE failed to track data in a way that allowed it to accurately measure
how well the repatriation program worked.
From 2004 to 2010, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which
accounts for most of Arizona’s border with Mexico, tallied 1,362 migrant
deaths. The numbers peaked in 2010, with 249 deaths, but have dropped the past
two years.
Through the end of August this year, there have been 150
deaths. However, immigrant groups argue that the numbers are still high given
the huge drops in estimated immigration over the past couple of years.
“The people dying on the border, we’re seeing, are mostly
people who are very poor. There’s many indigenous people who are walking over
with ‘coyotes,’” said Juanita Molina, executive director of Border Action
Network, a Tucson human-rights group focused on migrant issues.
Although she sees some potential issues with the flights,
Molina said that simply dropping people off at the border, as is now happening
again, “makes them extremely vulnerable to being victimized.”
