Come darkness, they made their break over the hilltop, racing through a field of thick, dry scrub brush, skirting cars, ducking behind a new discount shopping mall-and then heading toward their share of the U.S. economy.
The tall, thin 18-year-old closely tailed his middle-age father, who pulled his 7-year-old son along so hard his feet barely hit the ground.
As soon as they reached the back of the mall, a U.S. Border Patrol helicopter swooped down, bathing them in brilliant white light and hovering above with a terrifying, deafening roar.
Two Border Patrol agents nabbed the startled, wide-eyed youths. But the father darted ahead, fleeing over a tall chain-link fence and toward Interstate Highway 5.
As the captives were placed in a van, a breathless alert came from a young patrol agent eyeing the growing mass of people poised yards away on a hilltop overlooking the Tijuana River.
”Hey, they`re coming this way again,” he shouted into his radio.
Another night in the war to stem illegal immigration across the Mexican border. A war which, by all accounts, the U.S. is losing badly.
Another night for an understaffed Border Patrol to seize hundreds of aliens, even as hundreds more slip by, risking their lives for a U.S. job.
Neither new searchlights nor a new 9-mile-long, 10-foot-high metal fence dubbed the ”Tortilla Curtain,” seem to hold back this human river. It swells nightly and overflows across steep mountain passes, lonely desert stretches, sewage-filled ponds and congested U.S. highways.
Along with the tide, the Border Patrol agents say, come drug traffickers and others who rob and sexually abuse the immigrants.
At first, the Immigration and Control Act of 1986, which penalizes employers of illegal immigrants, seemed to halt the flow. Not any more.
”We are trending in the wrong direction, and we recognize it,” said Duke Austin, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman.
By the end of 1992, U.S. officials expect to have stopped about 1.2 million people illegally crossing the 3,000-mile long U.S.-Mexico border, a 40 percent increase from 1989.
In the San Diego region-the Border Patrol`s smallest yet busiest area, stretching 66 miles in from the Pacific-the number of people caught trying to cross the border jumped 47 percent between 1989 and 1991. In 1992, their ranks are 7 percent higher than last year.
Among the growing wave of immigrants, nearly all of whom are from Mexico, there is change in more than the numbers.
There are many more Indians, more women and children traveling with husbands, more professionals, and more workers from Mexico City. It is no longer a tide of strictly young men from poor, rural areas.
Mexico`s troubled economy, experts say, is one reason for the change. Another, they say, is the jealousy stirred by others who have made it into, and then made it in, the U.S.
As less educated, less skilled newcomers from Mexico join the U.S. job market, they anger the old-timers. ”They are willing to work for lower wages and in worse conditions and the old-timers boycott them,” said Sergio Zendejas, an economics professor at El Colejio de Michoacan, Mexico.
California hardly seems foreign to these newcomers. Sixty percent of the 2.8 million people who received U.S. residency after the 1986 immigration law settled in California, INS officials say.
But this year is different. California`s economy is in a nosedive, its jobless rate hit 8.7 percent in May, and politicians such as Gov. Pete Wilson blame illegal immigrants for some of the state`s severe budget problems.
With jobs in great demand, there is grumbling among workers, unions and local officials about the Latino immigrants who gather on city streets and rural roads, seeking jobs.
In the Los Angeles area, where unemployment was 9.8 percent for Los Angeles County in May, the April riots added to a growing tension toward illegal immigrants. It is estimated that Los Angeles County has more than half a million illegal aliens, most of them from Mexico.
So when the Rand Corp. said nearly 50 percent of the riot`s arrestees were Latino, angry fingers were pointed at recently arrived immigrants, most of whom live near downtown Los Angeles, where some of the most serious theft and destruction occurred during the riots.
Of the 45 people killed in the April riots, 13 were Latino, according to the Los Angeles Times.
During the riots, law enforcement officials swept up illegal aliens, most of whom were Mexicans, and turned them over to the INS. The ACLU, Latino organizations and several immigrant groups protested loudly. They said illegal aliens not involved in criminal acts had been seized by the INS, stirring panic in immigrant neighborhoods.
”They were clearly taking advantage of a tense time to have a heyday in the immigrant community,” said Susan Alva, an immigrant attorney and member of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.
INS officials say the riots forced them to accelerate their efforts, which led to the seizure of 1,093 illegal immigrants and 135 others who were legally in the U.S. Of the illegal aliens, 908 agreed to leave, and the rest were challenging their deportation.
One of those is Martha C., an 18-year-old Salvadoran who was seven months pregnant and standing by a store where there had not been any rioting when arrested, according to attorney Alva.
She was held for eight days until she became sick and was rushed to a hospital for fear that she would miscarry. She was set free four days later pending her immigration hearing.
Yet the reality of the border war and the waves of immigrants is not isolated in Los Angeles or San Diego. It reaches small communities like Temecula, a California town 100 miles from Mexico.
This month, two Border Patrol agents were chasing a stolen 1991 Chevrolet Suburban driven by a Mexican smuggler who was taking 11 illegal immigrants north.
The stolen vehicle raced through a red light, hitting a car and killing three of its passengers. Then it plowed into a group of youngsters outside Temecula Valley High School, killing two. One of the immigrants was killed and all of the others suffered some injuries.
The INS cleared the patrol agents of any improper behavior, but Temecula officials are unhappy that a high-speed chase took place in their community.
”It`s one thing to have a pursuit in the desert, but it is different when you have a chase right in the middle of an urban area,” said David Dixon, city manager.
The problems are different at the border, where citizens groups angrily urge tougher patrolling to keep the immigrants out while immigrant groups tell of violence by right-wing extremists and allege a long-term pattern of abuse by the Border Patrol.
”Right now, we are fighting the whole world. We are fighting the law enforcement agencies, the coyotes (smugglers) and the hate groups,” said Roberto Martinez, who runs an immigrant protection program for the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego.
An INS official in Washington flatly dismissed the claim, saying the San Diego group ”has never said one positive thing about the Border Patrol.”
The arrest of a Border Patrol agent in Nogales, Ariz., on charges of murdering a 28-year-old Mexican who was crossing the border doesn`t help the agency`s image. Officials say it appears to be the first time murder charges were placed against a Border Patrol agent.
It is easy to see the Border Patrol`s job-carrying out an immigration policy that doesn`t work-as difficult and thankless.
”There isn`t a satisfaction factor,” conceded Chuck Sears, a nine-year- veteran, as he began his 3 to 11 p.m. shift on a recent Saturday, the busiest day of the week for him and the immigrants.
In the crowded 12-mile stretch along Tijuana where Sears mostly works, there are typically 15 agents per shift to face hundreds of immigrants. When the 1986 immigration reform law was passed, new agents were supposed to be added. None have been, though the Bush administration promises to put on 300 more by next year.
Often one of their vehicles will break down and someone will be forced to patrol on foot. And often, when hundreds of immigrants stage banzai attacks, the agents` only hope is to snatch a handful and push back the crowd until their shift is over.
”Working the aliens,” they call it.
”The majority (of immigrants) are just good family people trying to make a living for themselves,” said Sears.
The night before, he had come upon an illegal immigrant wandering in the mountains. The man had been robbed by bandits on the U.S. side of the border. Sears once found a 12-year-old Mexican girl who had been attacked and raped by smugglers.
As Sears began work that afternoon, the immigrants were not waiting until sundown and the cool, shielding darkness, as they usually do.
Some were walking along I-5, which has large yellow signs showing a father, mother and child running, not unlike a deer crossing sign. By the Border Patrol`s count, 137 illegal immigrants have been killed crossing local highways since 1987.
The immigrants flock to the highway`s median, because they know they will not be hunted down there, for their own and for motorists` safety. About 650 immigrants are spotted daily walking on San Diego-area highways.
At the huge Tijuana border crossing that afternoon some immigrants had charged past the cars lined up at U.S. Customs and onto I-5, a new tactic.
After several widely publicized charges this year, the Border Patrol was beefed up, but the human waves at the crossing have started again. Some say that`s due to the new wall, which is harder for women, children and the elderly to climb.
Sears, who works by himself, as do most agents, could see that the night was going to be hectic.
Several hundred people were waiting at an open spot along the border fence known as ”the soccer field,” where merchants sold food and clothes. Smoke filled the air and music from a makeshift cantina blared.
Hundreds also were milling around at the Tijuana River hilltop in San Ysidro. They were mostly young men, but there were several women and children. They said they were headed for jobs as farm workers in Salinas, waiters in San Diego or gardeners in San Francisco.
They didn`t consider the better-paying jobs in the foreign-owned factories in Mexico`s maquiladora zone; why work there, they ask, when they could make $10 an hour in the U.S.?
They scattered when a Mexican police patrol car passed, but quickly returned.
They grew brave in the darkness, surging forward in groups, and the agents chased them back or seized them. Some fled back toward the border, stumbling and limping like wounded animals and trying desparately to outrace the Border Patrol`s four-wheel-drive vehicles.
”This is a cat-and-mouse game,” said Rudolfo, a short, thin 24-year-old man wearing an L.A. Lakers jacket. He was headed for a $12-an-hour gardening job in Sacramento, where his wife and three children awaited him.
Poised by a gaping hole in a chain-link fence, he nervously eyed it and a nearby Border Patrol agent.
”I am not afraid. I have time,” he said.
”I have to run. I have to work.”
