- Smuggling season is in
full swing in southern Colorado. Almost every day, San Luis
Valley law enforcement officers are stopping vans packed with
undocumented immigrants heading for the East Coast.
The annual flow began last fall as a trickle, but it
recently turned into a torrent for Immigration and
Naturalization Service officers based in Alamosa. INS officers
have processed more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants from
Mexico and Central America, and confiscated more than 50
vehicles since late October.
"We have the busiest Quick Response Team office in the
United States," said Don Buechner, INS supervisor in Alamosa.
"We processed seven vehicles and nearly 200 people last week."
The Alamosa County jail is often filled with detained
immigrants, and a county storage lot is jammed with 20
confiscated vans. The INS is even paying local junkyards to
store the overflow of vehicles.
Just last weekend, two "smuggle vans," as officers call
them, crammed with young men and boys, were impounded after
one of them slid off icy U.S. 160 and into a Wolf Creek Pass
snowbank. Nobody was hurt, but last month three Mexican
nationals were killed and 15 were injured in an accident east
of Walsenburg.
The smugglers' pipeline begins in Phoenix and follows U.S.
160 from Tuba City to Cortez, over Wolf Creek Pass and through
the San Luis Valley to Walsenburg, where they continue
eastbound on Colorado 10.
Smugglers often follow state highways to avoid the more
closely watched interstate highways.
In recent years, smugglers packed dozens of people into
unheated rental trucks and travelled during the day - until
law enforcement caught on. Now, they buy used vans, take out
the seats, fill them with up to 20 men, women and even
children, and travel at night to avoid detection.
"They remind me of slave ships,"
Buechner said. "They jam people into them just like the
holds of slave ships. They are being exploited." Most of the
vans aren't even roadworthy, Buechner said. Often the
headlights don't work, the vans weave from the excess weight,
and some don't even display a license plate, an omission that
always alerts police.
"The officers are sympathetic, but they realize they can't
let an overloaded van carrying 20 people go on down the road,"
Buechner said. "It's unsafe for them and the general public."
The drivers hardly ever stop, Buechner said. Often when the
vans are searched they are cluttered with food wrappers and
reek of body odor, buckets of human waste and jugs of urine.
No illegal drugs have been found, so far.
"About 70 percent of them are going to Florida, North
Carolina and South Carolina to work in agriculture," Buechner
said. "Some are going to Washington, D.C., and New York City."
One recent load was headed to a chicken processor near
Minneapolis.
"One load last week was really sad," Buechner said. "There
were several 14- to 16-year-old boys who should have been in
school, but instead they come to the United States to be
exploited and get paid under the table."
The INS is cracking down on employers who hire undocumented
workers, Buechner said. Several people arrested recently told
him about their future employers as well as their "coyotes,"
or smugglers, who charge from $500 to $1,000 per person.
Detained immigrants are fingerprinted for future
identification then bused to Denver or Albuquerque and
returned to the border at El Paso, Texas. Repeat offenders and
drivers are jailed until they see an INS judge.
The INS plans to double the number of agents in Colorado,
Wyoming and Utah, and open "Quick Response" offices in
Carbondale, Durango, Craig, Alamosa and Brush. Some Carbondale
and Durango residents oppose the INS plans, but the San Luis
Valley has welcomed the Alamosa office that is now under
construction and slated for completion later this spring.
