Migrant activists deplore U.S. policy
Stevenson Jacobs, The News Staff - 7/27/2001
A coalition of California migrants' rights groups on Thursday warned that recent migrant rescue efforts along the Mexico-U.S. border had done little to improve safety and could endanger more lives.
In a joint press communique to local media, the coalition said the recent deployment of more U.S. Border Patrol agents, surveillance helicopters and lighting equipment had made already perilous treks for migrants even more dangerous by driving them to the scorched and largely unsupervised deserts of California, Arizona and Texas.
The groups called on President Vicente Fox to push for an immediate end to the U.S. efforts to prevent more deaths like those that occurred in May when 14 undocumented Mexican migrants died in the Arizona desert.
"Of course any initiative to rescue undocumented migrants is well received, but there needs to be a change in the operations that oblige migrants to cross through extremely high risk zones," California Rural League Assistance Director Claudia Smith told government news agency Notimex.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on Wednesday ended his three-day tour of the border region, telling local media that efforts to ensure migrants' safety remained a top priority for U.S. President George W. Bush and would continue.
But several activists called Ashcroft's overtures insincere ploys meant to woo Latino voters away from their traditionally Democratic stronghold and bolster Bush's 2004 re-election bid.
They also criticized Fox for backing a U.S. immigration policy they said bore a scary resemblance to the containment strategies employed during the last seven years through Operation Gatekeeper, a 50 million-dollar drive to sever traditional migration routes in the San Diego area with high fences and beefed-up security.
"It's disappointing that the Mexican government now agrees with the Border Patrol operations that have contributed to the deaths of 1,700 undocumented migrants," said Roberto Martinez, the director of the San Diego-based American Friends Service Committee and a 20-year Chicano and migrants' right activist.