US TX: Crime on Border Crunches Courts

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."