Title: New York Times Article, December 8
US Tests Border Plan In Event of Mexico Crisis
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US Tests Border Plan In Event of Mexico Crisis, New York
Times, December 8, 1995
By Sam Dillon, Nogales, Arizona, December 7
Suddenly a vast flood of illegal immigrants--Mexicans driven to desperation
by some unspeakable and unspecified social catastrophe--surges across the
Southwest border, inundating entire communities as it washes north up the
American heartland.
That was the scenario driving three days of field exercises here this week,
in which the Clinton Administration's top immigration policy-makers tested
new plans to control the border in case Mexico's financial and political
problems worsen dramatically. Their field radios crackling through a border
canyon here, cores of Border Control agents practiced erecting cyclone-fence
corrals, herding immigrants through them for emergency processing, and
loading them onto bus convoys for travel to mass detention centers.
The Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Doris
Meissner, who is here overseeing the exercises, said that although last
year's mass migrations of Cubans and Haitians demonstrated anew how foreign
events can trigger sudden immigration emergencies, the chances that a
breakdown in Mexico's social order could unleash an immigrant stampede
remained distant.
"I think it's remote, " she said in an interview. "But this is part of our
world. We must be certain we can handle emergencies if they arrive".
Just as schoolhouse nuclear drills projected, and at times aggravated
American terrors during the cold war, the "enhanced border control plan"
practiced here this week underlined the fears currently associated with
uncontrolled immigration in the American imagination.
Ms. Meissner said the exercise was not intended to send threatening messages
to Mexico City. And a Mexican official who asked not to be identified
characterized relations between the Clinton Administration and the
Government of President Ernesto Zedillo as cordial. But the official said of
the exercise, "WE don't see this as appropriate or prudent."
For his part, Juan Bebolledo, Mexico's under-secretary of foreign affairs,
speaking in a telephone interview from Mexico City, said that the cyclical
flow of migrants into the United States in search of work has become a
permanent conditions of the North American labor market.
"Conditions in Mexico, with all its problems, are stable", he said. "So I
view an invasion of thousands of Mexicans across the border to be, as you
Americans say, far-fetched."
Several Border Patrol agents participating here said that they could not
remember their agency carrying out any similar exercises for at least two
decades, perhaps ever. But the Arizona exercise was the third this year;
the Immigration and Naturalization Service walked through similar practice
emergencies in June in Orlando and las month in McAllen, Texas.
Dutch Steenbakker, an assistant chief Border Patrol agent, said there were
no specific scenarios for Mexican catastrophe written in the exercise.
"We decided it would be a mistake to start tailoring it around a particular
situation", Mr. Steenbakker said in a briefing for reporters at a
barbed-wire corral erected in a scrub oak campground in the Coronado
National Forest six miles from Nogales on Arizona's southern border. "It
could be a natural disaster, or the economy collapses, or the military
attacks the Government, or any number of other situations".
Mr. Steenbakker called the corral, bathed in floodlights and equipped with
five olive-drab army campaign tents, water tanks, and portable toilets, a
"temporary collection point." During a border emergency, agents would ferry
in immigrants, read them their rights, which include seeing a lawyer and
appearing before an immigration judge, and separate them according to their
next destination: immediate voluntary deportation back at the border; or an
emergency detention center set up about 60 miles north in Tucson. There,
immigrants might be held for 30 days or more, transferred to prisons,
country jails or military bases and if all of those facilities were
overwhelmed , held semi-permanently in "soft- cover detention" --tent
villages like those established last year in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Intelligence agents would participate in the interviewing of immigrants
during an emergency in an effort to establish the cause of the immigrant
invasion, Mr. Studbakker said.
"If its all of a sudden we're get inundated, we want to find out what is
causing it and maybe the U.S. Government can help solve it", he said.
In one of the tents Kevin W. O, a Border Patrol supervisor, gestures toward
a bank of telephones, machines, computers and two-way radios. "This is the
command transportation center", Mr. O said. "We'd be shifting around tons
of vehicle assets, maybe we' d have 15 vans moving masses of people to the
detention centers".
If so many immigrants crossed the border that the Nogales border station ran
out of busses, more could brought down from Tucson or Phoenix or even from
neighboring states, he said.
"Say we're tapped out of people," Mr. Steenbakker said. "We could call in
other resources, the sheriff's department or the national guard."
If these exercises had a certain military air to them, it was because the
Immigration and Naturalization Service requested military help in its
preparation, Ms. Meissner said. "They're very good at formal contingency
planning and we wanted to tap some expertise," she said. The help came, she
said, in the form of Army Col. Richard Coffin, whom the Pentagon had lent to
immigration office.
Part of the exercise involved role-playing, in which Washington-based
officials pretended to be law-enforcement officers recruited from afar to
serve during the hypothetical emergency. Ms. Meissner, who during the
exercise acted the role of an out-of-state FBI agent detailed to coordinate
transportation, said she had learned during a string of immigration
emergencies since the 1980 Martel exodus from Cuba that careful planning was
essential.
"Planning makes the difference between an effective response and just
dissembling," Ms. Meissner said.