By Jacques Billeaud, The Associated Press
PHOENIX (AP) - Violence linked to illegal immigration boiled over late last year in Arizona when a group of migrant smugglers driving on an interstate fatally shot four people as retaliation against a rival gang that had stolen its customers.
The government had already realized by that point that its efforts to reduce smuggling-related murders, kidnappings and extortion around Phoenix weren’t doing the trick.
So a year ago, immigration officials developed a plan to strike back in Phoenix, the nation’s hub for transporting illegal workers throughout the United States.
Unlike past crackdowns, the new approach was to give Phoenix more permanent immigration agents and target top smuggling bosses by zeroing in on the tools of the lucrative trade.
While the sustained pressure caused many smugglers to move to other cities, it’s also credited with helping to reduce violence in Phoenix.
The heavy flow of illegal immigrants that has dogged Arizona in recent years came after the government tightened enforcement in El Paso, Texas, and San Diego during the mid-1990s, pushing border crossers to try new routes.
The U.S. Border Patrol caught about 600,000 illegal immigrants coming into Arizona in the last year, a sharp increase attributed mostly to a buildup of agents and equipment along the state’s boundary with Mexico.
Phoenix offers smugglers neighborhoods that make it easy to hide their operations and plenty of transportation routes for sending customers to other regions.
The high profits and low overhead of the illicit business were so attractive that smugglers started kidnapping rival smugglers’ customers so their families in Mexico, Central America or elsewhere could be extorted.
A major frustration for local police had been not having enough federal immigration agents to handle the immigrants who were found hidden in hundreds of homes in metropolitan Phoenix.
At times, Phoenix police said they had no choice but to release immigrants into neighborhoods, without sorting the criminals from would-be workers, because local law enforcement didn’t have the people or jurisdiction to tackle the problem.
“There were times we called for help and our calls weren’t returned,” said Phoenix Detective Tony Morales. “That’s a thing of the past.”
A more consistent response in Phoenix has led to the arrests of 282 people, many of whom were front-line workers for smuggling groups that ran such hiding places, also known as drop houses.
Authorities also are going after higher-ranking smugglers by trying to disrupt their transportation networks and monitor the huge sums of money wired to them.
Nearly two dozen used-car-lot workers were indicted recently on state charges that they helped sell vehicles to smugglers who ferried immigrants into Arizona.
In a related case, seven people identified as top managers in one of Arizona’s largest smuggling groups also were indicted on federal smuggling charges.
The crackdown in Phoenix doesn’t necessarily target people who are brought into the country, though they will still be sent back home if they are apprehended in busts, said Mike Turner, interim special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Phoenix office.
Officials hope that immigrants will have fewer smuggling options if the people who control the business are caught.
“The more impact that I can have on them - arresting them, taking them out of action - the more impact I am having as a secondary impact,” Turner said.
Some smugglers still use Phoenix as a base of operations, but the crackdown has pushed others to move elsewhere, including Los Angeles, Houston, Las Vegas and rural communities in Arizona.
Advocates for comprehensive change in American immigration policy said the new approach, while effective in Phoenix, doesn’t confront the larger problems.
“It’s going to be a short-lived celebration because you will start to see the manifestation of the broken system in other places,” said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the pro-immigrant National Immigration Forum.
The government wants to use the lessons of the Arizona crackdown in other cities.
Los Angeles and Houston, long hubs for illegal immigration, have recently experienced home invasions in which smugglers try to steal their rival’s customers.
Like Los Angeles, Houston has seen smuggling-related crime rise since the crackdown began in Arizona, but it hasn’t reached the levels found in Phoenix a year ago, said Luisa Aquino-Deason, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security’s office in Houston.
Pressure on smugglers in Phoenix appears to have eliminated the seasonal lull in immigrant traffic that Los Angeles usually enjoys, said Loraine Brown, special agent-in-charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigations in Los Angeles.
“It seems to have changed the cycle,” Brown said.
A key fault with past crackdowns in Phoenix was that the pressure on smugglers wasn’t sustained, so the criminals resumed business once the heat became less intense.
But immigration officials encouraged by the new permanent employees given to Phoenix said they are confident the government will continue applying pressure to smugglers here.