SPEAKER: PAUL K. CHARLTON, FORMER U S ATTORNEY GOR THE DISTRICT OF ARIZONA

SUBJECT: LAW ENFORCEMENT CHALLENGES REGARDING IMMIGRATION

People often think that law enforcement issues can be very simple. I think that is what happens often with immigration issues. If you listen to the national debate about immigration and what we should be doing in law enforcement, you will hear what seems like very simple solutions. We should close the borders, we should force businesses from hiring illegal aliens, and we should remove all people who are here unlawfully. Between those points of view and reality, I don’t think any of those solutions all by themselves are practical solutions. We cannot seal the borders from my experience as a prosecutor, there is no way to remove 11 million illegal immigrants from this country here lawfully; there is no way to force businesses to be our policemen. There may be some combination of all of those things that may help.

My experience as a federal prosecutor began in 1989 and I went to work in the U.S. Attorney’s office in 1991. The people you see in immigration smuggling then are not the people you see involved today. It was more of a mom and pop organizations. They would have a pickup with a cab over the back and drive from Phoenix to the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation and wait for them to cross the line at the San Miguel gate, put them in the back of the truck and drive them up to Phoenix. No guns, nobody tried to rip off the other guy. It was a money making enterprise pure and simple. For the most part, fortunately, Federal law enforcement kept a blind eye to it, because they were much more interested in other things. As the years went by you could see a slow evolution in the way it was. The reason I think this took place was that San Diego was doing much more to stop the problem; El Paso was getting much tougher in stopping the problem. So just like a balloon, when you push in on the sides it expands in the center. So when San Diego and El Paso were pushing back, we were the expansion. It didn’t occur so much in New Mexico, because Arizona has a wonderful infrastructure for support of the smuggling of human beings. If you look at all the highways that reach down through Arizona, it is like fingers on a hand that lead right down to the border. Mexican highway 2 is literally a stones throw from our border as it runs south of Yuma. So we have infrastructure to support the smuggling of humans that were receiving pressure from the other areas that were doing a better job of stopping this. So the people who were in this business came to Arizona.

At the same time in Federal law enforcement, we began ratchet up going after drug Smugglers. In fact, today, if you bring in five grams of pure meth, and were caught by law enforcement you would get 5 years in the federal prison with no early time. On the other hand, if you bring in five people, who are unauthorized in the United States, across the line, and if you got caught, you might do a matter of months. So the economics began to benefit the individuals who were thinking about bringing in people to the United States. Cartels started mixing bringing in narcotics and people into the United States. The human smugglers started to borrow the ethics of the narcotic smugglers. Killing your competitors and stealing the human beings being smuggled (the merchandise) started taking place, much like we saw in the narcotics arena. We were very familiar with the way narcotic smuggling went, but this idea of using human smugglers in the same way was novel. We didn’t have the law enforcement structure to deal with the problem well and that was in 2001. It wasn’t until 9/11 when we began to have organizations much more focused on our borders, not because people were coming in to this country unlawfully, but because they were coming into this country to do us harm. We started to do a much better job of focusing on the organizational structure of this problem. This is how we got to the point we are today with sophisticated enterprises bringing people into the country unlawfully-violent enterprises. There is a large number of people coming in through Arizona’s 370 mile border.

Between 2001 and 2004, 50 percent of all those individuals that were detained for unlawfully entering the United States, were detained here along our borders. Since 2001 we have doubled the number of border patrol agents. We now have approximately 15000 border patrol agents that patrol both the Mexican and Canadian borders. Obviously there is less of an issue on the Canadian border. We have a thousand plus between Brownsville and San Diego. That number is still increasing. Law enforcement alone can not solve the problem. It is a practical impossibility to seal the border off.

I would like to tell you a story about a town called El Gato. If you go down there today, you will see that the Plaza is completely packed with people who are staging for their eventual entry into the United States. All of the businesses that surround the Plaza are focused on individuals--backpacks, water, shoes everything you would eventually need for the journey through the most periless deserts in the United States or maybe in the world. When we went down there in 2003, we had the Border Guards explain the Starlight theory to us. It is based on the idea that the light that can be seen from the stars is a million of years old, history really and it is unchangeable. When you talk to these people in El Gato in August in the middle of the day when it is 110 degrees and I would tell them that when you cross into the Arizona desert you are likely to die, maybe kidnapped and women are especially vulnerable, you could face arrest, and perhaps incarceration. The men would typically say yes, that’s no problem, but the women would cry. I would say, what if we could provide you with an opportunity to return home, what if I could find a way to work something in the system out so that your arrival here in El Gato would not be your last journey to the United States, but your last journey before a trip home--put you on a bus to go home? They would say that every single penny that my family has, has been spent on this journey. This is the Starlight theory, you can not change history. There is no turning back for the people in El Gato. The one thing you have to realize is that they are human beings. You have to realize as long as we have desperate in economic standards as we do between the United States and Latin America we are always going to have people risk their lives to enter this country. There is no way you can have enough people on the border to keep people with that kind of motivation from entering the country. It is always going to happen. There is no way we can lock the border. People will risk their lives to get what we enjoy and appreciate.

The other side of the coin is, now employers who hire people are responsible to make sure people they hire are not here illegally. There is a shift, I think, away from law enforcement to the employers. To put a greater burden on the employer to make sure we don’t have people working here unlawfully. But I think it too is fraught with problems. In my mind again, think about the motivation people have to come here and work unlawfully. Looking at this nationwide, without a national ID system you will have a lot of ID fraud. We don’t have a national ID system and that is something were far right meets far left, they don’t like that idea. For some reason we are not going to have one, where great democracies like Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany have national ID systems. Our Social Security number comes close. Perhaps if we did have a national ID system we could go a little further in making sure people are here lawfully. So what are the options left to us in law enforcement? You have to have some type of immigration reform. Why? Because there are 11 million, reported by Government statistics, here illegally. From my own personal observation, the numbers are higher than that. Assume 11 million is the accurate number; you can not get 11 million people out of this country without violating the Constitution. We have to find a way to sanction employers that makes sense and put more resources on the border. From a law enforcement perspective, you need to have multifaceted programs before you can begin to solve this program. One other point we don’t often talk about involves all the countries in Latin America, all those countries where people are willing to risk their lives to come here. Mexico does not discourage the movement of people into the United States. In ways they approve and encourage it. Recently the President of Mexico moved to make sure the people here, legally or otherwise, had the right to vote. So it is an accepted reality in Mexico. They will tell you that they need this safety net; they need the opportunity for people to leave their country, find work and provide their families in Mexico with the money they return. The remittance numbers are second only to the money Mexico makes in oil exports. An extraordinary amount of money being sent back to Mexico. Without that money there would probably be a fair amount of problems in Mexico. I mean political problems. From a law enforcement perspective, we need to be looking at what we can do to help Mexico with the problem. When Columbia had a problem with cocaine, we put in excess of one billion dollars in Columbia in a single year. We could very easily, for a long range solution; help the Mexican Government build an industry, to build kinds of business to keep people there in Mexico instead of traveling to the United States.

hen you talk to your counterparts of law enforcement in Mexico there is always a big question mark about their culture. There are a lot of people in Mexican law enforcement that will not help us, because it is not in their best interest. Mexican intelligence agencies would assist only as related to true threats, such as people from other suspect countries trying to enter the United States illegally we got very good cooperation; but as it relates to people entering the United States unlawfully, we would not get that support. In 2001 we identified the head of the Cartel that was involved in the death of 21 individuals in the Arizona desert, we informed the Mexican law enforcement who and where he was. Nothing has been done. We arrested the coyote who was bringing them into the United States and the individuals in Florida who contracted to bring these individuals in. If someone in America was responsible for the death of 14 people in Mexico, I can assure you that we would have the person. It is a different ballgame when you go across the border.

Questions:

Do you feel we have control over the criminal element? I think that there has been a disproportionate amount of attention given to criminal events involving illegal immigrants. 99 % of the people who come here want to work.

How can we separate out the people we need to worry about from the people we don’t, like a regulation type program? Sen. Kyle took a very courageous stand on this, you don’t want to say amnesty; and his bill incorporated a regulation type program that would have allowed people to adjust their status. The Bill failed.