CRIME ON BORDER CRUNCHES COURTS

Federal focus on immigration, drugs overloads justice system

EL PASO -- The federal justice system along the U.S.-Mexico border is
experiencing record criminal caseloads, with drug and immigration offenders
clogging courts and crowding prisons.

From San Diego, Calif., to Brownsville, the surging caseloads are the
result of tougher drug and immigration laws, more agents enforcing them and
perhaps more illegal activity. The government is also spending more money
than ever to prosecute offenders in federal court, a signal that drugs and
immigration are a nationwide priority.

The problem may best be illustrated in El Paso, where the more than 800
federal criminal indictments in the 12 months following Oct. 1, 1996,
comprised nearly half of those in the entire western district of Texas, an
area that includes both Austin and San Antonio.

The indictments here are expected to double in the current fiscal year,
delaying civil proceedings and forcing federal officials to rent county
jail space in faraway locales such as Groesbeck, some 650 miles to the
east.

"We're inundated," said Sam Ponder, an assistant U.S. attorney who heads
the El Paso office. "I've got five attorneys who handle the international
bridges, each with about 100 cases. They can't even remember who the
defendants are."

In tiny Pecos, whose jurisdiction is the Big Bend borderlands, the federal
criminal caseload jumped to 253 in the 12 months following Oct. 1, 1996,
from 47 the year before, an increase of more than 400 percent. The numbers
could go higher this year.

The western district of Texas, which includes the border from El Paso to
Del Rio, and the state's southern district, which includes the stretch of
international boundary from Del Rio to Brownsville, now rank second and
third respectively behind Southern California in criminal cases filed.

While the numbers of indictments along the border are unprecedented, they
have not yet reached the levels of Houston, where this year's caseload has
already topped 1,900. Still, considering that Houston dwarfs the border
cities in size, the increase in places like El Paso is astonishing.

"Border crime has always been there," said Bill Blagg, U.S. attorney for
the western district. "The difference is that now our resources are having
an impact."

Cost of crackdown debated

While the mushrooming statistics are encouraging to some, signaling success
in the war on drugs and illegal immigration, they are alarming to others.

At issue is not only whether the federal system can handle the crush, but
also the cost. The crackdown along the nation's southern flank, which
requires everything from a bigger Border Patrol to more prosecutors to more
prison space, is draining hundreds of millions dollars from federal
coffers.

Then there is the question of equity. Border cities such as El Paso say
they have more than their share of the criminal burden but not of the
resources. El Paso has far fewer U.S. attorneys and federal judges than San
Antonio, for example, a city whose criminal caseload is much lighter. (San
Antonio's civil backlog exceeds that of El Paso, however.)

The biggest question may be whether the crackdown is indeed stemming the
flow of drugs and illegal immigrants. Despite the numbers, the flow of
drugs in particular remains a pressing problem, and some at the center of
the justice system are doubting the government's strategy.

"Are we making progress?" said Harry Lee Hudspeth, one of two federal
judges in El Paso, which lies across the border from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico,
a city of more than 1.5 million.

"I'm skeptical."

Measuring the success in the drug war is not easy. But increased
interdiction along the U.S.-Mexico border does not appear to have forced
the price of narcotics up, which would likely be the case if demand
surpassed supply. Nor does America's hunger for illegal drugs seem to have
subsided.

"It's depressing all the way around," Hudspeth said. The government, the
judge said, is mistaken in thinking that more seizures and stiffer drug
penalties in federal court can address what he believes is a more
complicated problem.

The same issue is being debated on an international stage. At a United
Nations special session earlier this month, drug-producing countries
demanded that the United States address its own appetite for narcotics
rather than wage a global war on drugs. Nationally, the war on drugs is
also catching flak.

"The problem is demand," said Daniel Abrahamson, director of legal affairs
for the Lindemith [sic] Center, which advocates more liberal drug policies.
"This is a public health issue, not a criminal justice issue."

To the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the issue is one
of public health and criminal justice, with the latter getting the bulk of
the resources. Some of that money is earmarked for drug enforcement in El
Paso, one of several federally designated priority areas in Texas.

Pen of mules, few kingpins

Likewise, Congress is opening up its pocketbook for border enforcement,
authorizing a 118 percent jump in the Border Patrol's $818 million
operating budget since 1994. In El Paso, that means nearly 1,000 agents
policing the international boundary, compared with some 600 four years ago.

Seizures are up, as are arrests along the border. The problem is that most
of these drug and immigration offenders are bit players. This is especially
true in narcotics trafficking, with so-called mules hired to carry drugs
clogging the courts and the kingpins carrying on.

Some prosecutors say they are so consumed with routine drug and immigration
cases that they lack the time to build more comprehensive cases that
presumably could strike closer to the heart of the problem.

A typical defendant, "plain vanilla," in the words of an El Paso federal
public defender, was Ricardo Ruvalcaba Vera, a college-bound 19-year-old
from Juarez who was offered $500 to drive a 1982 Chrysler Le Baron through
the Ysleta port of entry and leave it, keys and all, at a nearby
convenience store.

From there, prosecutors presume, the car was to be driven to an El Paso
warehouse where the drugs would be stored.

But the car was searched at the bridge last January and, with the help of
drug-sniffing dogs, U.S. agents recovered 70 pounds of marijuana. As for
Ruvalcaba, he was sentenced last week in Hudspeth's courtroom to about a
year in prison.

"It was foolish," said Ruvalcaba, a polite, somewhat shy young man who
lately has been shuttling back and forth between El Paso and Kermit, some
250 miles away, where some of the 500 or so overflow El Paso federal
prisoners are held during their court proceedings. If convicted, they are
sent to a federal prison.

"I've never before had a problem with the police," he said. "It's been
quite an experience."

Ruvalcaba will probably be of little help to U.S. officials wanting to
break Mexican smuggling rings. He knows the man who made the $500 offer one
night at the ElectriQ nightclub only as "Lalo." U.S. officials say that's
the way the Mexican traffickers operate -- no questions asked.

Small steps lead to strides

While Judge Hudspeth sees little benefit in jamming the federal justice
system with prisoners like this, U.S. Attorney Blagg says they can lead to
good tips. Last month, he said, prosecutors used information gleaned from
drug haulers to return indictments on two sizable rings operating near
Pecos.

What's more, law enforcement agents say, every ounce of narcotics and every
laundered dollar seized is a skirmish won in the war on drugs. Last year,
U.S. Customs agents at El Paso's Bridge of the Americas confiscated $5.6
million in a tractor-trailer headed south, thought to be a drug payoff.

Law enforcement agents say such seizures can put drug traffickers on the
run. While the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency does not take credit for the
fall of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the infamous Juarez kingpin who died last
year while apparently trying to disguise himself with plastic surgery,
agents say they played a role.

"Would Amado Carrillo have tried to change his looks if we weren't making a
difference?" said Thomas Kennedy, assistant special agent in charge for the
DEA office in El Paso. "Obviously we were having some impact if he was
trying to hide from us."

U.S. officials hope the same sort of incremental strategy will turn the
illegal immigration tide. Armed with technology that allows them to
identify deportees trying to return and call up their criminal history,
officials are prosecuting immigrants who before simply would have been
bused back to Mexico.

One is Javier de la Torre Reyes, who last week appeared before a federal
magistrate in El Paso. Having been previously deported after serving time
for shoplifting, he was nabbed at a port of entry when he tried to pass
himself off as a U.S. citizen. Now the 32-year-old Juarez man faces up to
eight months in prison.

Immigration law is especially harsh on felons, who can get up to 20 years
for trying to enter the United States illegally, even after they have
served their time in U.S. prisons. Federal public defenders say this is
excessive, particularly in a community like El Paso, where the
back-and-forth from Mexico is part of daily life.

But Blagg said the harsh immigration laws, and the federal drug statutes,
have prompted a decrease in theft and violent crime along the border -- at
least on the U.S. side.

"If we target the right people, if we prosecute them, if we put them in
jail for a significant time," he said, "we can have an impact."

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)