[PEN-L:1833] "Corrals for Immigrants In case of Social Upheaval in Mexico" (fwd)

[D Shniad <shniad@xxxxxx>]

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From: "CECILIA RODRIGUEZ" <moonlight@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Organization:  NATIONAL CENTER FOR DEMOCRACY
To: ncdm-usa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, ncdm-ally@xxxxxxxxxxx,
        chiapas-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, reg.mexico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
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Date:          Fri, 8 Dec 1995 20:25:04 +0000
Subject:       "Corrals for Immigrants In case of Social Upheaval in Mexico"
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Title: New York Times Article, December 8,: US Tests Border Plan In
Event of Mexico Crisis


-------------- Enclosure number 1 ----------------
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.