A crackdown along the US-Mexico border designed to prevent terrorists from entering the US hasn't stopped even one known militant from slipping into America since Sept. 11, an investigation has found.
Instead, the tightening net of Border Patrol and Immigration agents has slowed trade, snarled traffic and cost American taxpayers millions, perhaps billions, of dollars, while hundreds of migrants have died trying to evade the growing army of border authorities.
``If there are concerns about the border in national security terms, they are misplaced,'' said Claudia Smith, a migration activist who directs the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.
Sept. 11, 2001, was a defining moment in the politics of illegal immigration. The terrorist attacks abruptly halted major reforms designed to legalize much of the flow of workers heading north from Mexico. The reforms had won support from President George W. Bush -- a former Texas governor -- and members of the US Congress.
After more than 3,000 people died in the al-Qaeda strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration told Mexican officials they were concerned that easing migration restrictions could lead to another terrorist attack.
Instead of opening the border, the US closed it further. Bush invested heavily in border protection, budgeting US$9 billion for the fiscal year that began this Oct. 1, a US$400 million increase over the previous year. The government was unable to provide budget figures for earlier years.
The number of Border Patrol agents assigned to the southern border rose from 8,500 in 2000 to at least 9,500 today. Staffing along the Mexican border for the immigration, customs and agriculture departments, which monitor legal crossing points, grew from 4,371 in fiscal 2001 to 4,873 in the fiscal year that just ended.
New technology gives Border Patrol agents state-of-the-art helicopters to search for migrants from the air and a new generation of ground sensors and remote video systems to track them on the ground.
``We have become much more vigilant than we were just a couple of years ago, without a doubt,'' said Border Patrol spokesman Mario Villarreal. Despite the crackdown, an AP investigation involving interviews with dozens of officials, immigration activists and migrants in Mexico, California, Arizona and Washington, turned up no evidence that any suspected terrorist has been prevented from getting in to America.
Mauricio Juarez, a spokesman for the Mexican government's National Migration Institute, said that Mexico hasn't arrested a single terrorist suspect headed north. And he said the US hasn't informed Mexico of any arrested on the US side -- something it presumably would do.
Spokesmen for the US Border Patrol, the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement say national security guidelines prevent them from saying whether any suspected terrorists have been arrested trying to cross the border from Mexico.
Robert Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, said ``hundreds of people per year from ... high interest countries, such as Pakistan'' are turned back at legal border crossings from Mexico, but he didn't give any indication any of them were terrorists.
Several Border Patrol agents along the Arizona-Mexico line said that although they have become increasingly vigilant toward the possibility of terrorists using established people-smuggling routes, they have found none.
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