Wilson Calls for Stronger Policing on State’s Border

EL PASO —  Gov. Pete Wilson on Thursday toured a Border Patrol operation credited with stemming the flow of illegal immigration and called on federal officials to devote similar energy, if perhaps different tactics, to guard the border between Mexico and Southern California.

Wilson described the operation--a blockade along a 20-mile stretch of the border--as a historic effort that has produced a new tranquillity on both sides of the international boundary.

The Republican governor, who has made his fight against illegal immigration a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, was followed here by a California Democratic Party operative who accused him of hypocritical grandstanding and was met at one point by a small band of local demonstrators. And a Border Patrol official told him that the El Paso experiment would not work in San Diego.

But they did nothing to dampen Wilson’s enthusiasm for what he saw and heard.

“You have proved that by making the effort, if you are provided adequate resources, you can control the border,” Wilson told Silvestre Reyes, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector and the driving force behind the blockade, known as Operation Hold the Line.

The operation, which began in September, stationed agents 24 hours a day at more than 100 spots along the border. There, they sit in four-wheel-drive vehicles, passing their time reading books and listening to self-improvement tapes on headsets. Their constant presence deters immigrants who once slipped illegally past the points that now are guarded.

The number of apprehensions--considered a good indicator of the number of illegal crossings--has dropped 73% since the blockade began, according to the Border Patrol. Local police say crime also has dropped and retail business on the El Paso side, after a brief slowdown, is booming.

Wilson ended his tour on a dusty plot a stone’s throw from Colonia Anapra, a desperately poor community of about 1,000 squatters a few miles west of El Paso on the border with New Mexico. Wilson’s entourage and the horses, helicopters and trucks amassed by the Border Patrol for his visit drew a handful of Mexicans to the unmarked boundary in the sand.

One boy smiled beneath a California Angels baseball cap. Another sported a T-shirt that said “Surf’s Up.” An older man said he has lived in Anapra for a year and supports the blockade because it has decreased the movement of illegal immigrants through his neighborhood.

“The drug traffickers don’t bother us anymore,” Ramon Varela Samaniego, 63, told reporters as Wilson was hearing the same message from his official hosts. The news left the governor downright gleeful.

“This is just about as near as you can get to an unqualified success,” Wilson said. “We have to do (in California) what has been done here.”

But the chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego office, Gustavo de la Vina, was also along on the tour and seemed skeptical that the results could be duplicated in California.

In El Paso, De la Vina said, much of the border is marked by the Rio Grande, a natural obstacle that is relatively easy to guard. Immigrants seeking to evade the blockade must risk travel over a harsh desert landscape, with the nearest major cities hundreds of miles away. The level of traffic is less than half of what it is in San Diego.

“I wish I could take the same scenario and transfer it to San Diego,” De la Vina told Wilson. “I can’t do it. I wish I had a Rio Grande. But I don’t have one.”

De la Vina said his strategy in San Diego will rely more on fences, lights and technology to stop the human tide, although he anticipates adding 300 more officers to the 1,000 already stationed in his region.

De la Vina told Wilson as much at a briefing in Los Angeles on Wednesday, which led the governor’s critics to question whether Wilson’s jaunt to Texas was a fact-finding trip or a publicity stunt.

Wilson was followed here by Bob Mulholland, a California Democratic Party official.

Mulholland said Wilson’s tough stand on illegal immigration is hypocritical because as a U.S. senator he sponsored legislation to make it easier for farmers to bring migrant laborers in from Mexico to pick crops. Although Wilson says his intent was for those workers to stay only temporarily, many have remained and now use the same public services the governor says are bankrupting the state.